Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst, or everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. It's kind of the initial point, but we also go back to our name when looking at kind of the remit of this show, and one of the things we try to do is get, like, behind... The bastards, including like the very worst people in the world today. And we've already done an episode on Benjamin Netanyahu prior to October 7th and kind of this most recent escalation into genocide in Gaza. And I didn't really feel like, you know, returning to Netanyahu well was kind of the show does best covering like things that are currently happening and like breaking news. That's kind of why we started.
It could happen here. Yeah. Yeah. And among other things in the last year or so, one of the best things we've done there is bring on Dr. Donna Al-Kurd to help us report on and, you know, not just stuff in Palestine, but you've done a lot of really good work for us, Donna. And so I wanted to bring you on as a guest and talk about a subject that I think is in your wheelhouse and also really important today. But thank you for coming back.
Should we call you Dr. Al-Kurd the whole episode?
Yeah. No, no, please don't do that. That would be super awkward.
It is cool. I mean, yeah. But first off, how have you been? And yeah, pluggables and stuff.
Yeah, no, I'm doing... I'm existing, you know, as many Palestinians are right now. But I'm happy that I edited this handbook called The Handbook on Arab Authoritarianism that just came out and it's open access. And so that has been a shining thing for me right now. So, yeah, thanks for asking.
Oh, that sounds great. I can't wait to read that. Number one, it's been going on for thousands of years. It's always been happening. And number two, that it's like primarily religious and always has been primarily religious in dimension that like those are the two truths about it. And kind of when people are saying that one thing they're kind of tacitly saying, I think, is that like Muslims and Jews can't live together. Right. Like that is they don't tend to directly say that, but that's what you're meant to believe if those two first things are true. Right. Right. And that they're both crazy. None of this is news to you.
And that they're both – They can't live together, but they're also both crazy. Exactly.
Right, right. And none of that's true to the conflict, right? For one thing, this – I mean, yeah, obviously stuff that happened in ancient times is relevant for a variety of reasons just because history is never – you know, discreet, right? But if you go back to like 1880, you can get a really good grounding and everything that's really relevant to the conflict today, right? I mean, maybe you disagree with that. If so, I yield to your experience. But that's kind of been sort of what I've come to feel like kind of reading into it that that's you really, that's a really good grounding and kind of everything relevant to the day to the day starts in the late 1800s. Like it's not that ancient, right?
No, no, absolutely. Like if I'm always anytime I talk about this or anytime I teach about this, like my main takeaway is like this is a very recent conflict and recent in the grand scheme of human history. And it's about nationalism. It's about it really boils down.
It's about nationalism. And yeah. And one of the important things to understand is that prior to the outbreak, I mean, prior to a lot of things, I mean, Zionism being one of them, but nationalism because it's I mean, Arab nationalism and also European nationalism are deeply tied to all of this. Among other things, Jews and Muslims and Christians got along reasonably well in Palestine. No multicultural society is ever completely devoid of conflict, right? But there's a lot of – I mean one of our sources for this is a book called Lives in Common that really goes into how different things used to be there and how the fundamental conflict has nothing to do with faith, right?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–31:31
2
How did Palestine's social landscape look under Ottoman rule around 1880?
31:31–49:26
3
What were everyday relationships between Arab, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi communities?
49:26–1:09:34
4
Why did Jewish immigration (the First and Second Aliyah) begin in the 1880s–1914?
1:09:34–1:15:21
5
How did European pogroms and antisemitism fuel Zionist nationalism?
1:15:21–1:18:17