Histories of Israelis and Palestinians
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Excerpted from Death the Universe and Everything
A quick overview of the history that led us to today:
Rough Transcript:
It's possible to see this as a conflict between neighbors, as a conflict over land, as a conflict over terrorism, as a conflict over religion. It's possible to see it as something that started on October 7th, or as something that started decades ago, or centuries ago, or millennia ago.
Both Jewish people and Palestinian people have a very long history in that land. I won't go all the way back, but let's go back 2,000 years ago, to the time of a particular Jewish person who's pretty famous. Around New Testament times that area was ruled by the Romans. And that was where most Jewish people lived. A lot lived elsewhere, but most lived there. They rebelled against the Romans three times, with the first and third rebellions being brutally crushed in 70 CE and 135 CE. The Romans killed a bunch of people and a bunch of people left. And so after 135 CE there's a pretty small Jewish community there. Notable, but way smaller, and most Jews lived outside of Israel. That smaller but still substantial presence there continued as the Roman Empire split, and that was then part of the Byzantine Empire. And then as that was conquered by the Arab Muslim conquest.
Then the Christian Crusaders from Europe arrived in 1099 CE, and they killed a whole bunch of Jewish people, and more fled, so there was just a very small Jewish
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community, and the vast majority of Jewish people living elsewhere. So from 1099 that was the situation all the way up through 1917.
From 1517 to 1917, 400 years, that was the Ottoman Empire. A Muslim empire, but with a lot of diversity. There's a lot of Jews and a lot of Christians. The Romans had renamed that area Palestine, and I'll be probably using both terms. And under Ottoman rule from 1517 to 1917 the religious communities got along pretty well. I’m not saying it was kumbaya all day, but it was livable, it was decent. Well until the end. The last few years of the Ottoman Empire there were
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major persecutions and genocides going on in different places. The Armenian genocide happened during that time. So then World War I went down and the Ottoman Empire came to an end. And the winning side included the British and the French, and the Brits had made few different promises. During World War I they had made a promise to Arab people within the Ottoman Empire. Hey, rebel against the Ottomans, help us, and we will give you an Arab state. And then there's also something called the Balfour Declaration. A short note, one page, to the relatively recent Zionist movement of Jewish people in Europe, thinking of wanting to create a Jewish state there. Just a say short thing saying yeah, we like that idea, we're in favor of it, provided, of course
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you do not harm any of the communities currently in Palestine. So and then after World War I, without any Arabs or Jews or Ottomans present, the Brits and the French just took out a sharpie like Donald Trump and then drew lines on a map and decided, alright, we're gonna cut it up this way. And that is how we have the borders we have today. So that promise of an Arab state was completely discarded.
Palestine was ruled by the British mandate from 1917 to 1948. And in that period the Jewish population really shot up. A lot of Jews moving there, from Europe primarily, but also from other places. And so as of 1947 they owned 6% of the land. And that
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massive, quick immigration had caused some friction between the Jewish and and Arab communities, and there had been some different violence.
From ‘47 to ‘49 those recent Jewish immigrants who owned six percent of the land went to war. They destroyed five hundred Palestinian towns and cities and killed fifteen thousand Palestinians. Um, and during the course of that, the Brits left. And their Arab neighbors attacked, and they won that war.
And then at the end of that war in 1949 they had all of the land of the current state of Israel [Israel claims and controls additional land that it took in 1967 but this is not internationally recognized], and the Palestinians were mostly refugees, in Gaza or in the West Bank or in neighboring countries. And there was a UN declaration, Y'all won this war, now those Palestinians who were expelled, during and before the war gotta be allowed to return home. And as they
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tried, Israelis killed several thousand more people, like three to five thousand more. And those refugees have pretty much state refugees. And there are some Palestinians in Israel proper, not in Gaza or the West Bank. But none of those Palestinians, And their descendants up to now, have gotten an especially easy ride.
Don't have equal treatment within the state of Israel. They don't have their own state. So many are just still refugees from the time that their grandparents or great grandparents were violently forced out in ‘47, ‘48, ‘49; ‘48 especially. That's known as the Nakba, the catastrophe. And, yeah, so that period and and the time since has come to be viewed differently by Israelis and others, with the Nakba, the catastrophe, being central to Palestinian memory and identity and to the whole region’s sense of things there.
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Whereas in Israel, there's some sort of law against mentioning it. They tend to tell the story about their past that's a bit rosier. That that land was just empty. And they moved into that empty land, and then out of nowhere, their neighbors attacked them, and they won, so they got more land, um, and that's how it goes.
There's even a saying of, a land without a people for a people without a land. Um, so, then up to the present. So you've got Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza and some in Israel proper. And, before this all went down, I was somewhat familiar with the West Bank, how that's Palestinian land, but it's occupied by Israel. So Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war.
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They've occupied the West Bank ever since. So there's heavy military rule there. A ton of checkpoints. To go anywhere. Palestinians are dealing with soldiers, and there's segregated courts and roads and all sorts of things. So it's, what you call apartheid.
That's a big sort of daily factor in life. And people die, steadily. Sometimes it's some type of confrontation, like throwing rocks and then getting shot. Other times, no, it's a child or a journalist or somebody else.
There's also settlements. We'll come back to those in a moment. But I'd sort of thought that things were similar in Gaza, it turns out no. Gaza is actually quite different. So since two thousand seven, Israel is not in Gaza, but Gaza is fenced
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in, walled in, complete blockade. There's two thousand children that have died in Gaza. They were born in Gaza, and they died in Gaza, and they never left. The Israelis and their, you know, American funders and backers, have that fence built and and defended and dropped those bombs that killed them. So I am one of the people who caused this.
These kids were born inside a what's, you know, folks will call an open air prison. It's not, you know, the same conditions as a prison prison. People aren't in cells, but it's a prison or a concentration camp. We'll talk about that term in a moment. I was helping to keep them there, to wall them in and then, a bomb that my government bought or sent for free dropped down and blew them apart.
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When we say concentration camp, we generally think of the Holocaust in Europe, this horrendous thing that we'll maybe talk about next. That actually wasn't the the source of that term. The source is the Anglo Boer War, a war in South Africa between Brits and the Boer people there, Dutch and German people who had been there for a while.
And, the Brits forced all the Boers into these camps to concentrate them there so that they could then wipe out the fighters. And so Gaza is in a sense some sort of concentration camp. Maybe it's better not to use that term when you're talking about Israelis on the other side. We can, you know, try to wade into that debate, when I talk antisemitism. But the situation in the West Bank, yeah, you got those checkpoints, that occupation, And then there's also
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settlements. So this is something that's illegal under international law. There's a firm principle of, hey. When you're occupying somebody's land, you can't settle there. But the Israelis occupy the West Bank, and also settle there.
So they've just been steadily sort of chipping away and then building different settlements, either they build a new development there and then defend it or actually just, taking, houses that Palestinians currently have. So things are not great for Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza or elsewhere. That's the sketch of the history.
Thank you for your interest friends and enemies and internet strangers.