Dave Smith launches "A Brief History of Israel: Part 1," tracing Zionism's rise from late-19th-century Eastern European pogroms to British imperial maneuvering via the Balfour Declaration and King Crane Commission warnings. He details how restricted immigration during the Holocaust fueled resentment, leading to a 1947 UN partition plan granting Jews 56% of land despite their 10% ownership. Following Israel's 1948 independence, well-armed forces defeated Arab nations, displacing 750,000 Arabs and securing 80% of the territory, setting the stage for a conflict rooted in colonial promises and displacement rather than ancient religious disputes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Setting The Historical Stage00:14:28
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Steer your host.
What's up, guys?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
I am rolling solo for this episode.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein is out doing some live stand-up comedy shows.
And so he couldn't be here for this one.
By the way, before we get started, I do want to remind everybody that November 25th, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein, along with Chris Fega, aka BK Chris, we will be doing one night only live stand-up comedy shows in Poughkeepsie, New York at Laugh It Up.
We did these last year and all the shows sold out.
So I have a feeling they're going to again.
If you want to come, there are still some tickets available.
Go grab them right now, comicdave Smith.com.
You can go there and get the ticket links.
And a bunch of new stuff for the next year is about to be posted.
December, I think I'm going to lay low a little bit because I've had such a busy November.
And, you know, December, there's the holidays and everything.
So I'm going to spend some time with the family.
All right.
So for today's episode, I was thinking that I was going to do something a little bit different.
So as many of you guys know, I've over the last few weeks, I've done, well, I've done a couple debates about Israel and Palestine and the current war going on there.
And I've, and then I did Tim Poole's show, and then I got the big one coming up in a few days here.
So I've been really going over the history of Israel and Palestine.
And I will say this is a topic that I kind of, I felt like I knew pretty well, but I've really been immersed in it over the last few weeks.
I debated Austin Peterson and then I debated Laura Loomer.
Also, Scott Horton just recently did a debate on, not on Tim Poole's show, but on the culture war show that they do that's associated with that network.
He debated Will Chamberlain and there's just this is kind of obviously the hot topic right now.
I've been really immersing myself in it.
I already felt like this was something I kind of knew a lot about.
I will say that in all of these debates that libertarians have been doing with people who are more on the pro-Israeli side, it's been pretty, they've been pretty one-sided and dominant debates.
And I will give Will Chamberlain credit.
He was the best that I've seen at arguing the opposition side.
But still, I mean, Scott Horton just really was, it was a dominant victory for him, in my humble opinion.
And my two debates were, well, I'm not trying to sit here and say about myself that I was the dominant victor, but that is the general consensus, let's just say.
So I thought, even though we've done several episodes on this podcast where I've talked about a lot of things with the history of Israel and Palestine, I thought maybe today I would just do one episode on it because we've kind of done it where I've talked about maybe in response to like a Ben Shapiro video or in response to whatever the latest news is.
I've talked a little bit about the history, but I haven't really done like one episode where I'm kind of going through all of it.
So that's what I want to do today.
And let me preface this by saying that although I do feel like I know this stuff pretty well, I am far from the expert on the subject.
This is what's true about everything, every inch of my, you know, ideology and philosophical beliefs and understanding of history.
As you guys know who listened to this show, I never claim one ounce of originality with any of this.
I have just read all of the right people and I just happen to be good at knowing who the right people are to read.
And that's why I'm right about everything.
It's not because I am some genius or anything like that.
And I'm being a little bit facetious when I say that, but I am right about just about everything.
But just as a disclaimer before I start this, there are people who know this stuff far better than me.
There are, if you really want to understand the history of this conflict, I'd highly recommend checking out Norman Finkelstein or Scott Horton or, you know, there's lots of other people who really get this stuff and really know the history of it.
I would highly recommend if you're interested in this topic and you want to really do a deep dive in this and you're like a podcast listener, Daryl Cooper.
His Twitter handle is MartyrMaid on Twitter.
He's the co-host of a podcast with Jaco Willix.
He on his solo podcast did a crazy deep dive on this stuff.
The series was called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.
And then that basically takes you from the late 1800s up to, I believe, like 1940s.
And then he had a follow-up to that that takes you from the 40s up to the 1980s.
It's incredibly in-depth and very long.
It is a serious time commitment.
I think it's something in the neighborhood of 30 hours to get through both of them.
But if you really want to do a deep dive, I could not recommend it with the highest possible recommendation that I could give to you.
It's just incredible.
And he, so anyway, I'm going to do one episode on this.
So I'm just starting with the kind of disclaimer or the caveat that obviously I'm not going to get as deep into it as a 30-hour in-depth thing would be.
But if you do want to do that, I would highly recommend checking out checking out Martyrmaid's series on this, which is just incredible.
And it's just, his series is just, I won't say it's completely removed of his own personal take, but it is damn close to that.
It's just the history of the conflict.
If anything, his own personal, like, his own personal opinion, all he seems to really do throughout it is kind of ask yourself.
He does this several times is he kind of, I'd say more than ask.
He almost demands you to put yourself in this side's shoes and then put yourself in this side's shoes, which I really like because I think that's been at the very core of my message about everything that I talk about with foreign policy.
And of course, that's, again, not claiming any originality.
That's because that was at the core of Ron Paul's message, who is my mentor, who was always just basically saying, look, put yourself in their shoes.
Try to imagine if we were in their situation, how we would feel.
I think that should be, if you want to understand any conflict throughout history, that should almost be the first demand is that it should be insisted that you try to put yourself in the other side's shoes and then put yourself in the other side's shoes.
Or if you are one of the sides, then probably that's not too much work.
But anyway, so let me just get those disclaimers out of the way and say that this is not, I'm not the expert on this.
This is not going to be the most in-depth recounting of the history that you can possibly find.
But I do think it's worth it for people who listen to this show, who are interested in this conflict that's going on right now to lay out a bit of the history and at least the things that I think are important.
Now, of course, if you're ever going to do an episode like this, especially when I'm doing an hour podcast or whatever this ends up being, somewhere around that, it's easy to say that you're cherry picking or you're, you know, you're leaving certain things out.
And of course, look, even for someone like Daryl Cooper or even for someone who else, Noam Chomsky is one of the best guys to read on this history of this or Norman Finkelstein or anybody like that.
But even Daryl Cooper, who did like a 30-hour or whatever it was podcast on it, you could still accuse him of leaving certain things out.
The truth is that this is a very long history and you're never going to be able to cover everything.
So there's always some discretion involved where you're deciding what to talk about and what not to talk about.
And of course, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know everything about the conflict, but I think a lot of these things are very important.
And I would highly recommend if people are very interested in this to go read other sources and do more in-depth, you know, adventuring into this conflict.
So that's one disclaimer.
The other disclaimer I'll make before I get into this is that I think a lot of times what one of the major issues whenever you're talking about a conflict that has a long history is where do you start?
Where do you start telling the story?
And this is something that can be weaponized for purposes of making one side seem better than the other.
And I certainly think that that is true on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And the most obvious and most egregious version of this would be the pro-Israeli side who is saying, well, let's start on October 7th.
That's when this conflict begins.
And then we'll roll forward from there.
And, but likewise, I'm sure there's people on the pro-Palestinian side who would like to start at a particular time that best suits their interests.
One of the things, and okay, and this is the last disclaimer, and then I'll get into what I see as what's important about the history of this.
The last disclaimer is that obviously, as everyone knows, I am biased.
I am a huge critic of the government that I live under, which is the United States of America, which is the global empire.
And of course, Israel is one of the satellites of the U.S. Empire.
And so, of course, I do have a bias against the state aggression by Israel.
I'll just be very upfront with that.
And I would say that also, on the other hand, I'm Jewish and I love liberty and I love civilization.
So there's a bias also in favor of Israel compared to the, say, the broader Muslim world.
So I think I have all of that, but I think it's just fair to disclaim that.
So one of the things that you'll notice a lot, and this is what I've come across when it comes to engaging with people who are on the pro-Israeli side of this conflict is that when they decide where the story should start,
it's almost always like it's it's always like, okay, we could either start this at October 7th or we could start this at 40 AD.
You know, like that's basically like the story could either be started when Hamas launched this terrorist attack or it could be started back when the Jews had a right to this land, you know, thousands of years ago.
I think those are ridiculous starting points.
Now, I understand that it's a little bit subjective exactly where you start this, but I don't think it makes any sense to start.
First off, if you start at October 7th, well, then obviously you're missing all of the context of what's really going on between these two groups and the history of it.
And if you start at 40 AD, then, well, look, you could start there and say, and look, the Muslims are being terrible or something like that or whatever, you know, 500 AD, whatever you want.
But okay, fine, but everybody's being terrible at that point.
And it's a totally barbaric world and there's none of the norms of modern civilization.
So that doesn't make sense to me either.
So where I'm going to start this story at is with what I, where I think is appropriate, which is the beginning of Zionism.
Zionism is, for those who don't know, it is the ideological belief that Jews ought to have a homeland in what was then Palestine, what has now become Israel.
So it's the beginning of the push toward a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel.
The reason why I think that's the appropriate place to start this is because I think that there's a lot of people who will say that it's, and I get this very much,
Beyond Religious Disputes00:02:41
but there's, and I used to feel this way to some degree, but many people will feel that, well, look, this is just, this is a religious dispute and the entire dispute is over whose holy book tells them that they have a right to this land and they've been fighting for thousands of years.
And, you know, I don't think any of that's exactly right.
I think that this is a much, much more of a political dispute and it's much more involved in the recent past, relatively speaking, than that.
And I think that one of the reasons why people, I'm not saying, let me be clear about this.
A lot of people probably believe that.
And I understand why they believe that this is a religious dispute, whose holy book says what, and it's been going on for thousands of years.
But the reason why, say, a lot of powerful people try to push that is because that leads you to what conclusion?
Well, throw your hands up in the air and don't care about it.
You know, it's the same exact thing as we were just talking about on the last episode when they say the terrorists hate us because we're free.
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda hate us because we're free.
So what are you, what are you left to do with that information?
Well, all you can do is throw your hands up and go, well, I guess we got to go to war wherever you say we got to go to war.
Because if that's why they hate us, well, what are we going to do?
Stop being free.
And likewise, if the dispute is over whose holy book says this land belongs to them, then what are you going to do?
Start arguing with religious people about why their religion is wrong?
No, you just throw your hands up and go, whoever wins wins, I guess, you know?
But none of that's right.
Okay.
They don't hate us because we're free.
And this isn't just a religious war over whose holy book says they are entitled to this land.
That's not the truth.
All right.
So let me now with all of that being disclaimed, let me try to start telling this story as best as I can and hitting just some of the points that I think are important.
And again, if you're interested in this stuff after listening to this episode, I highly, highly recommend that you go check out those people who are way smarter than me, who have done way more in-depth dives into all of this.
And just to name a few, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and Daryl Cooper.
I'll just throw you those.
And there's many others.
But I think that's a good place to start.
Oh, and I should also say, Sheldon Richmond, he wrote a book called Coming to Palestine.
Growing Wealth With Gold00:02:21
Incredible.
Highly recommend you go read that.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay.
So the beginning of Zionism starts in the late 1800s.
And the first Zionist was this guy named Theodore Herzl.
Early Zionist Attitudes00:11:09
And he's kind of like considered the godfather of Zionism.
He kind of comes up with the ideas.
And then in the late 1800s, this becomes a tiny movement, a very tiny movement.
But, you know, it starts with some Jewish thinkers who are basically, and I think it's important to understand that this is a reaction to the situations that they're living in.
So in the same way that I always go, I always say, and I've been saying for years, just repeating the Ron Paul idea of, you know, when you think about, say, however evil people are, even someone like Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaeda terrorists, you go, look, imagine we were in their situation.
How would we feel?
So I think this is important to do with the early Zionists, and by the way, who are not nearly as evil as Osama bin Laden or members of Al-Qaeda.
In fact, I don't really think they were that evil at all.
I think that they were a reaction to the world they were living in.
One other thing I'll say is that try to imagine that while the late 1800s might seem like such a long time ago, put it in perspective.
How old is the oldest person you know?
So the oldest person I know is 99 years old.
So let's just, for the sake of easy math, let's make it 100.
That's the oldest person I know is 100.
I am 40.
Okay.
So the late 1800s, well, 100 years ago was 1923.
And 40 years before that were in the late 1800s.
So just to be clear, I'm not saying it's yesterday, but it's the oldest person I know plus me.
And we're back in that time.
It's not that long ago.
Okay.
So anyway, so the early Zionists arise as a reaction against the not just anti-Semitism.
It's hard to even describe it as the same word that people will call today.
You know, some of these words like if you criticize Israel today, that will often be called anti-Semitism.
If you rip down a poster of some Israeli hostages, that will certainly be called anti-Semitism.
Rashida Talib and AOC are called anti-Semites.
I've been called an anti-Semite, you know, even though I'm Jewish and my whole family is.
But so to say that they're a reaction to anti-Semitism would not exactly express it in today's vernacular.
The original Zionists were a reaction to the pogroms.
These were almost exclusively Eastern Europeans.
And The pogroms in Eastern Europe, in the territories held by the Russian Empire at the time, you, you just cannot, you cannot put into words how evil they were.
They were, they happened over and over and over again.
And if you want to really not be able to sleep at night, go read about the history of the pogroms.
Just horrific shit.
Horrific.
You know, I've done, I've read a lot about pogroms.
I've read a lot about the Holocaust.
I'll tell you, the pogroms are more disturbing.
Even though the Holocaust, it's like people died on a much larger scale.
Nothing's as disturbing as reading about the pogroms because it's not, it's just not as centralized and systematized.
It's not like, oh, these people in uniform gave you orders to do this and we figured out the most efficient way to kill people.
The pogroms were just like these acts of spontaneous, heinous violence.
And it was just like the whatever, when things were going bad, people would blame the Jews.
You know, you might see today, and I should say, as we're talking about all of this, even though I am a pretty fierce critic of Israel, that I just, I absolutely loathe and detest and look down on the kind of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that you see online and the anti-Jewish, like, I don't know, you know what you see today on the internet where there's just like people like blaming the Jews for everything.
I find it all to just be ugly and wrong and stupid.
I feel like all forms of tribalism and collectivism all just, they just make you dumb.
I hate them.
But this is nothing like that.
This is like, if you think that shit's dumb, or even if you don't think it's dumb, fine, you've concocted some rationalization in your mind where all those Jewish conspiracies are okay.
But go look into what the conspiracies were that led to the pogroms.
And it was things like a virus would be sweeping through a city and they would blame the Jews for practicing black magic.
And that's why the virus was there.
It's shit on that level.
So just imagine trying to argue your way out of that if you're a Jewish person being like, I swear, I swear I'm not practicing black magic, right?
Okay.
So that's like what it was.
And as a result of that, because they accused you of practicing black magic and making everybody else sick, a whole bunch of people from your town or the surrounding towns would storm your community.
And I mean, no exaggeration, come in and just rip your children apart in front of you, murder your babies and make you watch, have their way with their wife and make you watch, and then beat you to death afterward.
And this happened over and over and over again.
It came in waves and then things would calm down for a little bit and then there'd be another wave, but go look into the history of it.
It happened over and over and over again.
And so Theodore Herschel, who initially was a Jewish guy who was promoting assimilation.
He was like, we should all, Jews should basically just try to be a part of whatever society they're in.
He eventually got turned by this.
And he was the first Zionist.
And he was like, look, we can't live like this anymore.
This can't be our existence, just waiting for the next round of them coming in to tear us apart.
I'll say, as somebody who has a wife and kids, I can understand this.
And I can understand where the conclusion was, look, we're never going to be accepted.
We're always going to live in this state of like this precarious.
This could happen at any time.
And so here's my plan.
We need to go form our own state.
We need to find our own homeland away from these people who don't want us here.
And we want to build our own thing.
And that is the initial feeling of the early Zionists.
And from my perspective, I think this is totally understandable.
Totally understandable where they would reach that conclusion.
Okay.
So here's an interesting thing.
And this is totally backed up if you go and read into it.
If you go and read any of the early Zionists, this is something that might jump out at you considering the current conflict.
Okay.
The early Zionists don't talk much about Arabs.
It's rarely brought up.
And when it is brought up, it's they're not mad at them.
They never considered them to be the enemy.
This was for the Jews liked the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire ruled the Arab nation, the Arab nations at this point, or the Arab territories at this point.
And the Ottomans were actually pretty cool to Jewish people, relatively speaking for the time.
I mean, they weren't like, they were kind of second class citizens, but they were allowed to practice their religion and work and stuff like that.
And that was not who the Jews considered to be the enemy.
The enemy were the Europeans.
Those were the enemies.
This is very clear in all of the early Zionist writings.
The enemy is the Europeans.
We can't live amongst them anymore.
So we have to go where?
And what they concluded was that they should go back to what, you know, what their holy book told them was the original promised land, right?
Where they're originally from.
And you can understand that.
You can understand where that would be like, yeah, let's go back to where we're from.
That's where we can be ourselves.
The Arabs were almost an afterthought.
It's almost like, yeah, whatever.
And then even when they're thought about, it was kind of like, I don't know.
Nah, they'll just kind of let us come, you know?
And they're Arabs, you know, they've got this huge Arab land.
As Darrell Cooper says in his, in his very extended long podcast that I mentioned was like 30 hours long.
But at one point, he said, and by the way, it's worth every minute of it.
But at one point, he says that it's kind of like they were like, I don't know.
I mean, they could just, maybe the Arabs could just go live in one of these other Arab countries.
They got so many Arab countries.
But it's that would almost be on the same level as, you know, if you were just like, hey, look, I want to go take over a little strip in Amsterdam.
And yeah, the Dutch people there might be a little bit annoyed, but I'll just be like, go live in London.
Like, come on.
Like, you're all Europeans, you know, and you're like, yeah, but there's a pretty big difference between Dutch and Brits.
I mean, we know that.
But, you know, some outsider would be like, you're all Europeans.
I don't know.
Painting Life Gifts00:02:44
You all look the same.
You all have the same religion, whatever.
Who cares?
But those Dutch might be like, no, this is my home.
I'm not leaving.
Anyway, but this was kind of the attitude originally.
And so, by the way, it should also be pointed out that all of these early Zionists had never been to Palestine.
They were just picking that because it's the place in their holy book.
They'd never been there.
They didn't know the people.
They didn't know anything about it.
These were people who had grown up and, you know, these were Eastern Europeans.
These were Polaks and Ukrainians and Russians and, you know, that didn't know anything about this.
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Extortion Deals And Promises00:13:48
All right, let's get back into the show.
So, but the movement actually takes off.
Now, it's also worth noting that in the early days and still to this day, but particularly in the early days, the biggest critics of Zionism were Jews.
Now, that's true in the early days because no one else really knew about Zionism.
It was just this little radical movement.
And a lot of Jewish people were getting drawn into radical political movements.
Again, very understandably, considering the stuff that I just laid out.
So in the, this is in the late 1800s, in the early 1900s, a lot of people start to get on board with this.
Not a ton of people, but like this starts to gain some traction and some people start to move, move into what is now Israel at the time was called Palestine.
And so this continues and some people go there and they're kind of trying to buy up land and they have a hope of like one day creating a Jewish homeland there, but the numbers are so small.
You know, it's so small.
They're less than 1% of the population there at this point.
And so there's really no problem.
And there's really relatively very little problem as Jews start moving in there.
to kind of live alongside Arab Muslims and Christians in what at the time was called Palestine.
So as the 1900s roll along, this movement continues to grow and they get some backing from like international Jewish financiers and stuff.
And so it picks up a bit.
Leading up in the 19 teens.
And again, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but of course, this is, I'm not going to cover everything.
And like I said, I recommend these other sources that cover more of the whole thing, but I just think it's, you know, I can only cover so much in one podcast episode, but I'm going to try to hit the things that I think are the most important.
So in the 19 teens, World War I starts.
And so at this point, the Ottoman Empire has been ruling the area that is Palestine, as well as Syria and much of the Arab world.
And the Ottoman Empire goes to war with the British and the French Empire.
And World War I is, at the time, the biggest war in the history of the world.
There has never been anything like this before.
There has never been a world war, but this is the first one.
And during the First World War, the British Empire is pretty desperate.
Now, at this point, we're talking about maybe 30 plus years since where I was starting with the very beginning of Zionism.
And the Zionists have raised some, you know, they have the Rothschilds are behind them and some very powerful international banking interests are behind them.
So in 1917, the king of England, or not the king of England, but on behalf of the king of England, the Balfour Declaration is released.
And this is a big starting point for where everything goes very wrong.
Okay.
So the Balfour Declaration, now, if you guys remember, there was several episodes back where I responded to a Ben Shapiro video.
And I just bring that up because this is something that still to this day, it's so disputed by every different faction in this group.
But Ben Shapiro said in his video that we responded to that he goes, with the Balfour Declaration, Ben Shapiro said, the British Empire promised all of the land to the Jews.
Go look up the video Ben Shapiro said, but I'm almost sure that's exactly what his words were.
They promised all of the land to the Jews.
Now, that's not exactly true.
That's not exactly true.
And if you follow this, if you listen to Daryl Cooper's extended podcast on this, and if you go really read the history, what you'll realize is that the Balfour Declaration is, it is disputed by both many British people, many Jewish people, and many Arab people about what it actually says and what it actually means.
So it's not accurate.
What Ben Shapiro said, where he goes, they promised all of Israel and what is today Jordan, you know, at the time, all of Palestine, they say at the time, to the Jews.
That's not actually true.
What it said was more or less something like, and you can go read the whole thing, but it was like, it pleases the king that the Jews have a homeland in Palestine as long as it doesn't violate any of the political or civil rights of the non-Jewish people who are there.
Now, the early Zionist settlers took that as they just said it's all ours, you know, like, but that's not exactly what it says.
So just to be very clear, it doesn't promise a Jewish state.
It said it pleases the king that there's a Jewish homeland as long as you don't violate anybody else's rights who are already there.
Do you get the difference between those two?
Like there's a really important, not that subtle difference, because promising a Jewish state is different than promising a Jewish homeland.
Like a Jewish homeland might be like, hey, you can go live there.
If you want to make that your home, you should be able to go and live there and make that your home.
But promising a Jewish state would be like, you know, the government is behind this project, that the government itself is Jewish.
So those are different things.
And then it also very specifically says that you can't violate the rights of the other people who are there.
And so this immediately starts leading to like major conflicts.
And it also should be pointed out that during this time, even though this is well before the creation of the state of Israel, and we're talking at least like 28 years before that point.
But the process of Jewish people buying up land in Palestine is not, it's not like buying up land the way me or you might think about it.
So the Ottoman Empire collapses after World War I.
They are defeated and they no longer exist.
And then the British Empire, who defeated the Ottoman Empire, they end up taking over Palestine.
By the way, it should be mentioned that the British were desperate during World War I.
The reason why they made the Balfour Declaration is because they wanted international Jewish bankers to donate to their cause.
They also at the same time promised the Arabs in Syria that if they rose up and fought the Ottoman Empire, who was in control of their land, that they would give Arab independence.
And they also at the same time promised the French that the French could have control of Syria if they fought with them in the war.
So the British were basically just promising everybody everything as long as they fought on their side of the war.
And, you know, they were in the middle of a world war.
They were just trying to win the war.
It was kind of like, we'll figure this shit out once we get done with the war.
Let's win and then we'll figure it out.
So then as the war ends, everybody's like, hey, I have a claim to this.
And they all kind of did, but to different degrees.
But anyway, so the process, the Zionist process of Jews buying up land in the region is not, let's say from a libertarian perspective, not perfect.
And I'm not blaming the Zionists for this.
I mean, I don't know.
It was the time and it was the circumstances, but let's just say if you could imagine under the Ottoman Empire, under Turkish, you know, domination of the Arab world, we were not living under Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist model.
Property was not acquired the way John Locke would like it to be acquired.
This was not a capitalist system.
And in fact, it's much more akin to a feudalist system.
So essentially what would happen was the Ottoman Empire would decide who owned what property.
And most of the time, they would buy off tribal leaders with property deeds.
So if there was a tribal leader with any amount of power, this is kind of how, by the way, these colonial empires existed.
If there was a tribal leader with any power, they'd go, hey, you own this little area of land.
And then they'd go, okay, here's a piece of paper and you have a deed to that.
You own that now.
And they'd go to that piece of land and there'd be people who lived there.
There'd be people who had probably been, you know, farming that land for decades.
And they'd go, hey, I own this land, not you.
And typically what would happen in these type of situations is it was just an extortion deal, like feudalism type shit.
You know, like they'd go there and they'd be like, hey, you know, I own this land and I have the Ottoman Empire behind me.
So what do you want to do?
And they're like, what?
Well, this is my house.
My father built this house and I've been, this is all I've been doing my whole life is farming this land.
And they go, okay, well, listen, you're going to pay me 10% of your, you know, your yearly crops, whatever, your yearly income, 10% of that goes to me and you can keep the land.
And they'd say, all right, because otherwise, you know, you're going to get killed.
So it was kind of like an extortion deal.
So that's kind of how it went for a long time.
And then Jewish Israeli Zionist, no, sorry, I shouldn't say Israeli because it's before Israel, but Zionist settlers would kind of come in and buy these property deeds.
But oftentimes they'd buy them from people.
And this is even after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
They'd buy them from people who were holding pieces of paper from the Ottoman Empire.
Many of them lived in Lebanon or Syria or other areas.
They weren't even there, but they'd buy them from them.
And the Jewish fund was a huge factor in this, right?
And what the Jewish fund said was that they would basically, they were raising money for Jews who wanted to go settle because they were pushing the Zionist project.
They were raising money for Jews who wanted to go settle in Palestine.
And they'd pay, you know, or split or pay in full for you to buy some land there if you were willing to go move there and be a part of this new project.
And so they'd be buying this piece of paper from people in Lebanon or Syria or whatever.
And then you'd go there and then they would show up.
But they wouldn't show up like these tribal leaders and say, hey, you got to give me 10% or else.
They'd show up and say, I own this.
Get out.
You got to leave.
And the Jewish fund had this stipulation where if you took the money and went and bought the land, you could not, you were forbidden to have Arabs on your land, not just to live there, but even to work there.
If you did it, you had to kick them out.
And so this started happening over and over and over again.
And this started building up a lot of tension.
So anyway, at the end of World War I, there was a, you know, this is pretty crazy.
The biggest war in the history of the world had just ended.
And people were trying to figure out what happened.
The Ottoman Empire collapses.
They had the Paris peace conference and they're trying to figure out what are we going to do with all these Arab countries at this point.
And there was a lot of debate about this.
So there was what's known as the King Crane Commission.
And the King Crane Commission, I believe, if I'm not mistaken on this, they tried to get the British and the French to be a part of it.
And they ultimately ended up bailing on it.
And just the Americans were behind it, which is really a shame because maybe it would have made more of a difference if the British and the French were a part of it.
Try to also imagine that this is this is World War I. America is not just like the dominant empire in the world at all.
The British are the dominant empire in the world.
The French are probably a close second.
Crowdfunding Healthcare Costs00:02:16
America is still kind of this city on a hill, you know, like this new experiment in liberty and stuff.
Like it's not, it's not the world of today.
And so only the Americans get behind it.
But anyway, they, they, they send this King Crane Commission to go into the Muslim world and try to figure out what we should do with these Arab countries and what, you know what I mean?
Like what would be the best path forward.
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Forcing Partition On Arabs00:15:12
All right, let's get back into the show.
So the King Crane Commission is very, very interesting, by the way.
I highly recommend.
Again, if people want to do a deep dive, go read into this stuff because it's really fascinating.
All right.
So this is the, I'm pulling this up now because this is a quote.
This is what the King Crane Commission determined when they went to Palestine.
And they wrote this back to Woodrow Wilson, who was at the time the president of the United States of America.
For those of you guys who don't know, the worst president in our history.
Okay, so let me let me quote one part of it because they're talking about the Jews and their Zionist project.
And the King Crane Commission said, nor can the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
So the first thing they're saying there is that, look, the Balfour Declaration, this idea that like, well, the Jews can have a homeland here, but also they won't violate the rights of these Arabs.
This is just impossible.
And they realize this from talking to a lot of the Zionists on the ground, talking to the Arabs on the ground.
I mean, they interviewed thousands of people and they're realizing that, and they say that it would take a 50, it would take an army of at least 50,000 people, which I believe, again, you're going to have to double check me on this.
I believe was somewhat close to the total amount of Jewish settlers who were there at the time.
They were like, you're going to need an army of 50,000 people to establish any type of Jewish homeland here.
And this is another quote from the King Crane Commission.
They said, not only you as president, but the American people as a whole should realize that if the American government decides to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area.
Since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.
Now, I think that's like, I think that's such an interesting statement because it's not just that they say establish or maintained is such a key phrase.
Because basically what they're saying is that America, this is the advice to Woodrow Wilson.
They say, not just you, Mr. President, but all of America, if you're going to back Israel here, then you are committed to the use of force against these Arabs for this state to be created and maintained.
In other words, in perpetuity, forever.
You're going to have to force it on these people.
Okay.
So this is the late 19 teens.
The World War ends and the British Empire is in control of Israel now.
Now, into the 1920s, things start to get more and more hostile between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine.
And look, I'm not saying one side is completely right or the other side's completely right, but a lot of this is as I said, that the Jews are showing up, claiming they have some piece of paper and saying, hey, Muslim Arab, you got to get the hell out of here.
And I just try to imagine that, right?
Like you'd be on some piece of land, you're constantly getting bullied.
There's constantly someone else showing up telling you you owe them 10% of everything you have.
You've been paying them off forever.
But now this is something different.
This is a group of people showing up saying, get out of here.
That's not yours.
The house that your grandfather built, the bed you've been sleeping in your entire life, beat it.
I'm sleeping in that bed tonight.
This was something far different.
And also, it probably doesn't help that the person is a European and not just like some tribal leader who at least has some connection to your area.
That's not what this is at all.
So the tensions are building more and more and more.
And the Zionists are trying to sell their project more and more and more to European Jews.
And at this point, even American Jews.
And this is now, like, say, the 1920s.
And they're finding it to be a very tough sell for lots of reasons.
But so Jewish people in, let's say, okay.
So in Eastern Europe, there's been a major event post-World War I where there's been a communist revolution in Russia.
And the many Jewish people were very influential in that Bolshevik revolution.
And Jews are being treated pretty good at this point.
I mean, Stalin later turns on the Jews, but at this point, the Jews are being treated very good.
And they're very involved with that government.
So it's no longer the Russian empire where, you know, the Jews are dealing with pogroms all the time.
Now the Jews are, the Jews are involved in the pogroms, not pogroms, but, you know, in the brutality.
The Jews are in with Stalin's government.
And then, say, even over in the Western part of the world, in England and in the United States of America, this is the roaring 20s.
Everybody's doing really well.
And so the Zionists are sitting there going, well, come on, you have to escape anti-Semitism.
And it's like, I don't know, if you were like a member of Stalin's secret police, you're like, what?
I have status and I'm doing well.
And if you were like a merchant in England, or if you were a stockbroker in New York City or something like that, it's like, I'm picking up and leaving right now.
Things are going great.
But the Zionists are kind of going like, no, look, dude, you're a fool because you think things are going great, but that's always how it is.
It's always like, yeah, things go good for a while and then they go fucking bad and they'll always blame the Jews after.
So there's this argument within the Jewish like world where the Zionists are going, no, you fools.
You think because it's good times now, you shouldn't move, but now is exactly when you should move.
Now's when you have the means to move and you won't have these means soon.
Like this is your opportunity.
And this goes on through the 20s and then through the depression and starts going on into the 1930s.
And you got to understand this because if you don't understand this, you won't get it.
But the Zionists are so proven right by history in this little window, at least, because what happens?
And I'm sure you all know what happens, right?
In the 20s, all of the, even in, let's say, the Weimar Republic, the Jews are doing really well.
And so they're like, so what are you talking about, you Zionists?
I want to move to that.
And they're like, no, something bad's going to happen.
Watch out.
And then what happens?
The rise of the Nazis.
And so this thing that the Zionists had been predicting does happen.
Anti-Semitism rises up again.
And this time, the absolute worst form of it that was imaginable.
And even though I said earlier that the pogroms are more depressing to read about than the Holocaust, I mean, believe me, the lead up to the Holocaust and the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews.
And so this happens.
The Zionists had been predicting this happens.
Now, it's also worth mentioning that Because tensions had been getting so bad between the Arabs and the Jews in Israel, the British Empire, who's kind of been struggling this whole time to figure out what the hell to do with Palestine, they ultimately, after a lot of violence, after siding with one side or the other,
probably more with the Zionists than the Arabs, but they do eventually agree to limit Jewish migration into Palestine at the time.
And they limit Jewish immigration during the rise of the Nazis.
And the Jews are like begging them.
Like they see the writing on the wall.
They're like, please just let these people come here.
And they won't.
I mean, they'll let them come, but in small numbers.
And so even when Adolf Hitler is like very willing to just say, get the Jews out of my territory, they won't take them.
And so this builds tremendous resentment toward the British, particularly as things get worse and worse in Nazi Germany.
And anyway, that's how it keeps going.
We all know the history of this, right?
There's World War II, the Holocaust.
And so after the Holocaust, after World War II, the British Empire collapses.
They're just, they've taken major hits.
And they're just, it's, the writing is on the wall that they're not going to be an empire anymore.
They hang on for a little bit, but it's just not going to happen.
And the Zionist settlers are just furious with them at this point.
And look, understandably so.
Again, like I always say, I'm not saying Bin Laden's right, but I'm saying if you put yourself in his shoes or in his followers' shoes, you can understand why they're furious and you can understand why the Zionists are furious at this point.
And so they've picked up a lot of steam, right?
Like they were telling Jews that they should leave Europe and come to Israel or sorry, there's no Israel yet, but come to Palestine.
And they were like, no, things are good.
And they told them things are going to get bad again.
And man, they have the biggest, I told you so in the history of the world to throw at these people.
So they, and they throw it at them.
And then a lot of people want to come over.
So in 1947, the British dying empire, they throw, so the war ends in 45, 46.
They throw in 1947 this problem over to the brand new United Nations.
And they go, we can't deal anymore with this problem with the Jews and the Arabs.
You deal with it.
And they throw it over to the United Nations.
And the United Nations is trying to figure it out, you know, and they're like, I don't know.
What do they know?
They go, so they come up with the partition plan, as we've talked about before on the show.
And the partition recommendation, the UN, by the way, has no authority to decide who's what, but they recommend, they go, how about we do this?
And they draw up on the map how they're going to split it up.
And they go, you know, how about we divide up these two things into a Jewish and an Arab state?
That's their recommendation.
Now, again, if you go back and look at it, at the time, Jews owned approximately 10% of the land.
And the UN partition recommendation gave the Jews 56% and the Arabs 44%.
So imagine that the Jews own 10% of the land and this recommendation says they get 56% of the land.
So immediately the Jews accept.
They go, yes, we agree.
And of course, the Arabs say no, we don't agree to that at all.
And as soon as this happens, the early Zionist settlers, they start moving to implement this plan.
They're like, hey, this is what the new UN said.
This is our land.
You got to get out of here.
And there's resistance and a civil war breaks out.
This is in 1947.
In 1948, this is still going on.
And other surrounding Arab nations invade and they try to put this down.
They are just not going to allow all of these Arabs to get kicked off of their land.
But the Jews fight back.
And the Jews were at this point.
Again, I'm skipping over a lot of history, but they were a well-trained, well, you know, like armed and well-financed force.
And they fuck up all the Arabs who are invading.
And in this process, they also drive all of these Arabs out of their land.
Now, they drive a lot of them out of their land and they some others flee their homes.
Many of the Palestinian villages are just destroyed.
But in total, 750,000 Arabs are driven out of Palestine.
They're driven out from what is today Israel to Gaza and the West Bank.
And then many of them go to other surrounding Arab countries.
And look, again, however you feel about like there's arguments in the historical record about how many of them were forced out versus how many of them fled, but there's so much evidence.
Like again, this is 1948.
This is what I said at the beginning of the show when I talked about the oldest person I know plus me, and that takes you to the beginning of Zionism.
This is 1948.
This is my grandpa, who had a hand in raising me, has already fought in World War II and returned home.
Like this is not, you know, he was already an adult.
Now, okay, he raised me as a man in his 60s, but like when I was a little kid, he was in his 60s.
He was an adult already by this point.
There are people today who were still alive during that time.
This is not that long ago.
As I told you, the oldest person I know, they were like middle-aged already, or maybe not middle-aged, but they were already pretty, you know, they were already 30 at this point.
Witnessing History Firsthand00:04:32
So they all get driven out and they're just not allowed to return.
Now, this is not what the even the UN partition recommendation said was their recommendation, which the Arabs had every right to say, no, you own 10% of the land.
You're not getting 56% of it.
Well, this war breaks out.
The Zionists win it and they take 70% of the land.
Well more than they were promised, maybe even more than that, but well more than they were, not promised, but even like recommended to them.
And they just take it.
That's how they got it.
They took it.
And all the other people are driven out.
Now, it is, again, like I said, it's not that long ago.
And there are firsthand accounts that we have, right?
Because today, most of them are dead.
Just like my grandfather, who's who's passed away, most people involved in this 1948 struggle are dead.
We also have videotape from the 80s and the 90s, the 70s even.
And there's tons of firsthand accounts from both the Arab side and the Jewish side talking about the atrocities that were committed, even from the Jewish side admitting what happened.
It was horrible.
And look, you can kind of understand.
This is another thing that Daryl Cooper mentions in his series that I think is really worth understanding.
You can understand.
Again, like Ron Paul's message always was, and like I always try to, you know, repeat, try to put yourself in these people's shoes.
These were Jews who had just witnessed, you know, Nazi Germany.
And they had also just witnessed World War II.
They had also just witnessed the carpet bombing of Germany, the nuking of Japan.
And when I say witnessed, I mean just they had been around for all of this stuff.
Many of them were actual Holocaust survivors at this point.
And they were just kind of like, yeah, I don't know.
Shit happens during war.
Sorry, that's what happens.
And so anyway, that's that's essentially, you know, where we're at here.
So they were not now.
Hold on, there was something else that I, all right, let me jump around a little bit here.
So this is what happens.
They take, I think it was closer to 80% of the land.
At this point, the Palestinians are driven into, you know, parts of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
And, but the Jews don't have control over all of it.
You know, I think Jordan has control of the West Bank and Egypt has control of Gaza at this point.
So this is, that's after 1948.
Now, after 1948, there's in 1948, sorry, at the end of this, the Israel declares independence.
They declare themselves an official state and they're recognized by the international community.
And that is the creation of Israel.
So basically, I thought I was going to get through the whole thing I wanted to talk about in an hour, but that is just the creation of Israel.
So I'm debating now whether I should do more on this podcast or if I should just, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to stop there.
I'm going to make this a two-part episode.
It won't be crazy like Daryl Cooper's episode.
I'm not going to keep you here for 30 hours, although my God, I recommend you stay there for the whole 30 hours.
But I'm going to leave it with that and record a second part to this.
Okay.
So I'll do, I'll do two hours to try to bring us up to the conflict that we're at today.
Again, I'm fully admitting here that I am omitting things, that you can claim that I'm cherry-picking certain details and leaving out others.
I'm just trying to explain what I think are some of the really important things to remember here.
So this is going to be, let's call this the brief history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.