A couple of weeks ago, I had occasion to deliver two remote presentations to a group of professionals in the United States who sought to understand better the deeper meaning of what happened on October 7 and what has unfolded since, in the light of what Zionism was, was meant to be, and what it has promised to the Jewish people.
Today’s post includes the first of those two presentations (edited for length and to mask the identities of participants), which we’re making available to all our readers, including a transcript below (which we usually do only for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside).
It runs just shy of 50 minutes, and is a brief history of the Zionist movement, its fundamental commitments and promises, and serves as a way of setting up that second segment on “How October 7 broke the promise that Zionism had made to the Jewish people,” which we will run tomorrow. We will post a very brief excerpt for all of our listeners, while the full episode will be available, also tomorrow, to exclusively to paid subscribers.
I just want to try to help us get into the head space of the Jews who started the political movement called Zionism, which we'll come back to in a second, where they were coming from. The Bible tells a story in which at the beginning of chapter twelve in Genesis, God says to Abraham, he's called Abraham then, but doesn't matter. God says to Abraham, get up and leave the place where you are, which is somewhere in Mesopotamia, which is Iraq, Iran of today, and go to the place that I will show you. The place that I will show you being then Canaan, then Palestine, now Israel, et cetera, et cetera. And most of the story of the Bible actually is the story of those people entering the land, leaving the land, entering the land, leaving the land. Right? They go down because, you know, Joseph goes down to Egypt because there's a famine. And then there's the whole thing of Joseph and his brothers. If you haven't read the biblical one, you've probably seen the Broadway one. And then they come back and then they have prophets, they have kings, they get exiled, they come back, et cetera, et cetera.
But that Hebrew Bible, the Jewish people saw it as their diary, again, not as their history book and not as their Wikipedia to kind of look up what happened when, but it was the book that shaped their souls. And the most central character in the Hebrew Bible, I think, is not God and not Moses. The most central character in the Hebrew Bible is the land of Israel. And the Hebrew Bible can really be read, I'm being a slightly bit poetic here, but I think that the Hebrew Bible can really be read as a love story between a people and a land. And being banished from the land was a sign of punishment and thriving in the land was a sign of God's favor. The place became, in Jewish sense of the world, the place where you are when the world is whole, the place where you thrive when life is as it should be, and so on and so forth. And anything other than that was seen to be an aberration.
Now the irony is that the 4,000 years that the Jews have been a people, more or less, we've actually lived in the land of Israel for a very short portion of it. The vast majority of it we've lived outside. So again, this is not to say that the default norm historically was that we were there, but it's how again, to try to get into the notion of a people. And once the Jews are exiled permanently until 1948, in the year 72 CE by the Romans. They're exiled in 586. This is at the very beginning of the book, but they're exiled in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and then they are destroyed again. Then they come back, and they rebuild 70 years later. And they are partly exiled, but certainly destroyed in 72 CE or 70 CE by the Romans. Many are exiled, but some are not.
From that point, from 70 CE till 1948, so almost 2,000 years. How did they keep this dream alive? They kept it alive through religion. It doesn't mean that every single person was deeply observant, or every single person was deeply theologically committed, but it meant that just like it's impossible to imagine going to church and not hear the word Jesus or Christ, because that's just simply so central to the Christian way of understanding the world. It was impossible to imagine being at a Jewish anything in which the land of Israel didn't figure. So, they could be living in Poland and eating bread that was made from wheat that came from the Ukraine, but in the grace after meals that they said, they only mentioned one city and that was Jerusalem. So, when they prayed three times a day, they faced Jerusalem. The ark in the synagogue was supposed to be on the eastern wall. In other words, there were these things that we do, you know, we all do them in our own lives. If there's somebody that we love or somebody that we miss or something that's important to us, we do personal, often very private, and intimate things to keep those things very center in our soul. And that's what they did. They made Israel and Jerusalem be kind of, it became a kind of an idealized one day, when things are better, that's where we're going to be. It was almost a kind of a world to come, kind of a vision. But it wasn't meant to be in the world to come. It was meant to be very much in the world that we live in. But the land of Israel became synonymous with we're going to be healed as a people.
Now, why do we have to be healed as a people? What's wrong? And that is the second question that one has to come to if you want to understand sort of the Zionist way of looking at the world. And in order to understand also, by the way, why October 7th had the impact on Israelis that it did. I mean, killing 1,400 people is a pretty horrible thing, and gang raping dozens of women is a pretty horrible thing, and we're going to come back to all of that. But this had an impact much, much, much bigger than all of that human horror, which is basically indescribable. Because why did they have to heal? Because wherever they went, wherever they went, the Jews were singled out. And if we were having this conversation three months ago, I would have said to you, it's a little hard for you to imagine, but imagine that in Germany, between the wars, Germany got badly beaten in World War I. World War I had nothing to do with the Jews. But Germany has a horrible economy after the war, the second world war is basically act two of the same war, more or less. And then they need a scapegoat, and we all know who the scapegoat was. But when things went bad in Christendom, in medieval Europe, there were crusades. And along the way, as they were marching on their horses and whatever, from England, France, whatever, and they marched across Europe on the way to the holy land, and they would come across Jewish communities. You know exactly what they did. They raped, they pillaged, they killed, they murdered. What did their wanting to go to the land of Israel have anything to do with the Jew who was living in Italy or Germany or Poland or Russia? Absolutely nothing. But you killed Jews on the way because that's simply what you did.
And I know it sounds ludicrous, I know it sounds crazy. But ask yourself, by the way, how did it come to be that it's now all of a sudden dangerous to go to a synagogue in the United States of America in the year 2023? How is it that I, who wear this all the time when I'm awake [kippah], I don't think I would wear it in a New York subway right now. I don't think I would. And how did that come to be? Because what you're seeing in America now, and again, this has got nothing to do with whether Israel's right or wrong. Let's assume that Israel's wrong in every single possible way. That's a reason to attack Jews on the New York subway? That's a reason to make it dangerous to go to synagogues? I mean, I don't think Israel's obviously wrong in every way. It goes without saying, but even if it was, why should American Jews be afraid?
I don't know if you saw the interview. It was covered on some of the English press also. The deputy mayor of Paris. France, a pretty modern country. It's a nuclear power. It's got some very nice museums, some very good food and the occasional nice person, though not nearly as common as one wishes. But in any event, the deputy mayor of Paris was interviewed two days ago by some Israeli reporter about what was going on, all this anti- Semitism in Europe and specifically in France. And then the reporter asked her, the deputy mayor, do you think the Jews have a future in France? And she was quiet for a minute, and she said, “I don't know how to answer that.”
Not like, well, of course we're going to make sure. We're going to bring in the army, we're going to do whatever. No. She goes, I don't really know. And that notion that we might not have a future here might sound crazy to modern young American professionals, but it was the default assumption of the Jews for 2,000 years. The question was, how long are we going to be here until we get thrown out. Now, why would anybody think they were going to get thrown out? Because they always did. They always, always did. In 1290, England kicked out every single Jew. Now, what does it mean, by the way, to be kicked out of England in 1290? You buy an air, I don't know, a British Airways ticket to the next best place to go. You don't buy anything. You take your spouse, you take your children, you take your cart or your mule or whatever you have, you pack up as much as you can carry, and you head out not knowing where you're going to end up and what percentage of you are going to make it to wherever you're going. And why do you assume that the next country over is going to want you? They're also busy throwing their people out. After England threw out everybody in 1290, Spain did it, as you well know in 1492, because of the theories about Columbus perhaps having been Jewish and left because of that, who knows? Portugal followed; France followed. There's the famous Dreyfus trial in the 1800s, about a perfectly innocent French officer who is just accused of treason for no reason whatsoever, and obviously convicted. And Emile Zola, who was a very important social critic at the time, wrote a book called “J'Accuse”, which means I accuse. The blatant antisemitism was obvious.
So, it doesn't really matter if you're talking about England in 1290 or you're talking about France in the 1800s, or you're talking about Germany in 1933, or you're talking about Poland throughout the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The assumption of the Jew always was, we're going to get thrown out of here. And when we do, well, we're either going to get thrown out or we're going to get slaughtered. And often it was a combination of the two. So, right, in Spain in 1492, they either burnt you at the stake or forced you to convert or threw you out. Sometimes they gave you a choice, sometimes they didn't. It really depended on the local Christian authority of the local church and all of that kind of stuff.
But what you need to kind of understand, and again, this has got nothing to do with politics. Got nothing to do with whether Israel's right, Israel's wrong. The war is just, the war is…. forget all of that. Leave that completely out. Pretend you're living in 1920 or 1925, after the first world war, before the second world War, there's no Israel, there's no Jewish state. There's just Jews. There's Christians, there's Muslims, there's Jews, there's Buddhists. There are all different kinds of people. Some of them are Jews, a lot more of them, by the way, back then than there are now. I don't know how many of you are aware that there's still fewer Jews in the world now than there were before the second world war, because we have not made up the 6 million who were slaughtered. But imagine you're living back then. Every Jew had a sense that wherever we live, it's tentative. It depends on the goodwill of the local ruler or the goodwill of the local priest or the local cardinal. It depends on a whole array of things. And all you need is one little thing to go wrong and we're going to be either dead or exiled. And exiled often meant dead at the same time.
And this begins to lead to a movement which says, no normal people lives this way. What other people in the world lives not knowing what's going to be home in the next generation? You may choose to stay in Boston. You may not choose to stay in Boston, but you have no sense that you won't be able to stay in Boston. You have no sense that if you find a partner and want to raise children that your children won't be able to be in Boston. That's ludicrous. Why would you possibly think that? But everybody then assumed, yeah, I guess maybe we'll be here, but who knows? Maybe we won't. Maybe we won't be able to. And in the middle of the 1800s, don't forget that nationalism is sweeping across Europe. Right? I mean, Europe the great empires are breaking up and the modern nation state is beginning to emerge. There's Spain and there's Portugal and there's France and there's Germany and there's Italy and there's a whole bunch.
And the Jews are kind of watching this and they're looking at the French speaking their own language, ruled by a democracy, basically after the French revolution, obviously, in 1789. And they say, wow, look at that. They make their own culture; they write their own books. They live unmolested by anybody else. And if you're a French person and you're in France, you're at home. And if you're a German person and you're living in Germany, your language, your culture, your tradition, your religion, your whatever, and you're at home and on and on and on. Not us. We're not at home. And they know we're not at home. And we're only waiting to see when something bad goes here, the economy, or God only knows what, or some made up or real murder of a child that then gets blamed on the Jews. That was a very common meme that went around back then. And you begin to, and I'm not going to go into names, they're all in the book, but you begin to get the early thinkers who became the progenitors of a movement that would fundamentally be called Zionism, which says, we can't live like this anymore.
It's got to be over. 2,000 years of this is just more than enough. We got to be normal like everybody else. A place of our own, a language of our own. We're going to protect ourselves. People will leave us alone. And comes along a guy named Theodore Herzl, who's considered to be kind of the originator of the idea of the Jewish state, and he writes a book in 1896. It's a little pamphlet. If he was alive today, it would come out as an online PDF and nothing more. And he writes a book called “The Jewish State”. And he has this ridiculous, crazy idea, let's make a state. Let's make a state where we actually run it. And we're going to elect our own leaders, and we'll have our own this and we'll have our own that. And then he writes, by the way, he writes a novel. He dies very young at the age of 40. He dies in 1904, but before he dies, he writes one more book. The first one comes out in 1896. So, we're not talking about a lot of years between that book and his death. Why does he die, by the way? Because he basically runs himself ragged trying to make this crazy dream a reality. He knows he's got a heart condition and he's told, just take it easy and you'll be okay. But he does everything but take it easy. His marriage dissolves, one of his children commits suicide, the other child dies. He lives a pretty tragic life, and at the end of the day, he has a heart attack in his early 40s, having given every single ounce of his energy and of his soul to try to make this thing happen.
The other book that he writes, though, is called Altneuland, old new land. And he describes what he thinks that future state is going to look like that future. State does not have an army. Why would it possibly have an army? We're going to bring progress and everything to the land of Israel, Palestine, Canaan, call it what you want to call it. And people are going to love us. And he talks about, we have all these research institutes, and Jews and Muslims and Christians get together and they study together, they work together, they do scientific progress together.
Now, a lot of that has actually come to be, this notion that Israel would be a scientific whatever, what he would call today kind of a startup hub or a high-tech resource. It sounded crazy back then when he wrote it in 1899 or 1901, whenever the book came out, but he really believed it. But he got wrong a few things. Number one, the two major things that Herzl got wrong was there's no army in that book, because he says, well, of course they're going to welcome us, I mean, why wouldn't they welcome us? We're going to bring progress, we're going to bring hygiene, we're going to bring medicine, we're going to bring technology. Of course, they're going to welcome us. The other thing that he says, and he says this explicitly, is once we have a country of our own, the people in the rest of the world are going to stop hating us. Oops. That was wrong. That was wrong. And we can talk about why he got it wrong or why it's proven to be wrong.
But in order to understand Zionism, what you need to understand is that in the eyes of the Jewish people, and certainly in the eyes of the Zionists and in many Jewish people today, and I think the idea is having a bit of a resurgence now because of what's happened in the last eight weeks. But Zionism was simple. It was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Try to leave aside all of the garbage and all of the chat noise and all of the TikTok garbage and all of the social media stuff. I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong. Just try to leave it aside for a second. And just in its basic, basic sense. What was Zionism? Zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Now, we could have a conversation about America. America has a little bit of a race problem. America has a little bit of a gender problem. America has a little bit of a gun problem. America has a little bit of an immigration problem. All of those things are very real. Not a single person on this screen is going to live to see those things solved. I don't care how much you work out and how many statins you take when you get older, you're not going to live to see it worked out. But what is America out of an ideal? The idea of America was, give me your tired, you're poor, teeming masses yearning to breathe free. We're going to try a new way of governing ourselves.
Now, you might be cynical and say, well, yeah, but it didn't include blacks and it didn't include women, and they didn't even know what gays and lesbians were. That's all true, but America was still a great idea. And in order to understand America first, before we start criticizing everything about it, let's just understand what those founding fathers, and they were fathers because they were almost exclusively men. Not all, but the vast majority, Hamilton, Jefferson, the whole gang. They had an amazing idea. And whether America's lived up to its ideal or not is not an unimportant question. But it doesn't help us answer the question of what's the idea? So, I'm not getting into Israel's right or wrong, but what's the idea of Zionism? The idea of Zionism was, we can't live like this anymore. We want to be normal. We want to have our own borders, our own leaders, our own language. We want people to leave us alone. We don't want to live anyplace wondering if our grandchildren will still be able to be here. We want to set down roots, and we want to be like the French, the Germans, Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese. We want to have our own place.
Now, in 1896, when Herzl wrote this book, it was literally laughed at. I mean, there were people who literally thought the guy had lost his mind. In 1897, though, he convenes a congress which, if you got a chance to look at the book a tiny bit, you may have seen, called the First Zionist Congress in Basel in Switzerland, and it brings together about 200 delegates from around the world. And it's the first time in 2,000 years that Jews from around the world did anything together ever. There were Jews from America, and there were Jews from Yemen, and there were Jews from France, and there were Jews from Russia. Before Herzl what did a Jew from Yemen ever do with a Jew from America? I mean, TikTok? What did they ever do? They didn't do anything. And Herzl, really, just by virtue of bringing together these 200 people who have this idea of a joint project, he actually, at that moment, even changes the face of Jewish life in the world, and the movement, as crazy as it sounds what, you're going to build a state out of nothing? Whoever did such a thing? He's crazy. And he says it can get done. And a lot of crazy people followed him, and their names appear throughout the book. And if you read it, you'll read it, and if you don't, you won't.
But the story of Zionism and the story of Israel until 1948, in other words, the pre- independence part of Israel, is the story of a major revolution. And just like the American Revolution, which was unbelievably literate, Thomas Payne and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as much as they were leaders, they were also authors. The same thing is true in Zionist history also. It's not true of all revolutions. To my knowledge, for example, the Chinese revolution did not leave an enormous literature. Not the Hungarian revolution did not leave an enormous literature. The American revolution did. The Zionist revolution did. The French Revolution did, to a certain extent, also very philosophically oriented. But that's the idea. The Jews just want to be normal. The Jews just want to be in a place where they can live and be unmolested and build something. Now, historically, very quickly, this thing actually gets a lot more traction, much more quickly than anybody would have imagined.
So, in 1917, the British issue a Balfour declaration, which says that his Majesty's government looks with favor upon the creation of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Doesn't say nobody else can live there, doesn't say the word state, but it talks about the idea of a national home for the Jewish people when the Balfour declaration comes out Britain doesn't even own Palestine yet. It's still owned by the Turks, the Ottomans. But they are clearly losing the war. The Ottomans, the first World War. And so, it's pretty clear that the British are going to have Palestine very soon. And sure enough, they do. And from 1917 till 1948, about 31 years, the British run Palestine. They bring a lot of progress, by the way. They bring electricity and they bring railroads, and they bring all kinds of things. They don't allow a lot of Jews in for reasons that we won't go into now. But they get a lot of pushback from the local Arabs.
How did the Jews begin to build stuff there? This is also very important. If you've heard this thing called the Jewish National Fund. If you were my generation, then you grew up on your kitchen windowsill. There was little blue and white metal box, and you put little coins in it before Shabbat or when you got your allowance, then you would take, your parents would give you twenty-five cents and you had to put $0.05 in this little box. Every Jewish kid I knew grew up that way in the 1950s and so on and so forth. This thing called the Jewish National Fund had one purpose and one purpose only. Now people think it's where you send your money to buy somebody a tree for their bar mitzvah. But that's actually not what the business, they were not in putting a plaque on a tree business back then, they were in the business of buying land. Almost all the land in Palestine was owned by absentee landowners who lived in the Ottoman Empire, lived in Istanbul, they lived elsewhere. They just had land. They'd owned it for generations, but they didn't live there, and they were more than happy to sell it. And the Jews bought whatever land they could. And until 1948, it's very important to understand that every single square inch of land on which the Jews built anything, and we built lots of cities and all that sort of stuff, Tel Aviv was founded, modern Jerusalem was founded. Petah Tikvah. I mean, you can go on and on and on. Every single little bit of that land, every single square inch, was bought from a landowner who wanted to sell. That's a part of the story that nobody talks about when they talk about colonialism.
The people that were sent by Spain to South America did not go there and then offer to buy the land. Right? The people who came to North America did not sit down with Native Americans, say, oh, we'd like to negotiate with you. Everybody said they bought, they got Manhattan for $12, whatever, but by and large, they didn't get North America by buying it. They slaughtered the people. The conflict in Palestine, the armed conflict in Palestine emerges decades after the Jews start going to Palestine and start buying land because the local Palestinians understand, wow, something is changing here very rapidly. There's this other population coming in and they're buying up land and we're going to get squeezed out of here.
Now, inside the Jewish community, there's a whole literature about what's going to happen with these Arabs. And there's a movement called bi-nationalism, which says exactly what you'd think it said. We're both going to live here. There's going to be two states. That movement dies primarily as a result of the beginning of the armed conflict. When there is an assault in the summer of 1929 is the first one. Get this. They go into the Jewish community of Hevron. Hebron, which had been in existence for about 600 or 700 years, and they storm their houses, they rape the women, they behead some people, they murder dozens of people. They kill children in front of their mothers. Does this sound familiar to you?
Part of what you need to understand to get the sense of horror that Israelis are living with now is we've seen this movie before. We saw it in Europe, and we saw it here, and we vowed that we were going to create a state and build an army so nobody would ever, ever be able to do that to us again. And on October 7, they came, and they beheaded, and they raped, and they murdered and they shot children in front of their parents. And they shot parents in front of their children.
We had dinner Friday night, this past Friday night, what three days ago, whatever it is, with friends who had like an in law who were on Kibbutz Holit one of the kibbutzim that were attacked. And they told the story that this 16-year-old kid, who apparently is a bit of a tough teenager, not a bad kid, just not every 16-year-old is a delight to be with, texted his two adult sisters, who were married, also living on the kibbutz, but elsewhere on the kibbutz. And they all heard that there was shooting and there was stuff in the air, and everybody was hiding in their houses. And he texted his sisters and he said, they just shot mom and killed her. And they just shot dad and killed him. I'm next to their bodies, and they shot me in the stomach. And his sister texted him back, you know, something's wrong with you. That's a disgusting thing even to joke about. But it was true. In other words, it was so unbelievably unimaginable that this kind of thing could happen in a modern, sovereign state that prides itself on its military and its security. People didn't even believe what was happening in their own kibbutz. And you've seen the news. You've seen the stories, and we'll come back to some of that in the second piece of this.
So, the first point of all of this is that Zionism was meant to change the existential condition of the Jewish people. That's what it was about. It was not meant to have an army. It was not meant to have a symphony orchestra. It was not meant to be a high-tech hub. It was not meant to have a thriving stock exchange or to any of the things that people think about when they think about Israel. It was meant to change the existential condition of the Jewish people. And until October 7, everybody here thought it had. And by the time we went to sleep on October 7 night, we were forced to acknowledge that we'd fundamentally failed. The idea of the state had been fundamentally upended. And you can't understand the massive military response unless you understand that this was not a bad day. This was a day that fundamentally Israelis went to sleep thinking the state just failed. The whole Zionist enterprise that started in 1897 with that Zionist Congress, it just got washed away. And you just need to understand that not, to justify anything, not to say what Israel is doing, whatever, just get in the headspace. That's all. Just get in the headspace.
Now, very quickly, the Israeli- Arab conflict, obviously, the conflict gets worse and worse long before Israel becomes a state. There's a huge major Arab revolt. There's a new book, an excellent book by a guy named Oren Kessler. I actually did a podcast with him. And so, if you want to go on to the Substack that I do. But he discusses the great Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, which he argues both is really the real beginning of the armed conflict and he argues the beginning of all the mistakes that the local Palestinian population made in terms of how to deal with this. But the Palestinians suffered terribly during those decades. They make a lot of really bad mistakes. They have no international support, and the Jews have a lot of international support, mostly from other Jews. We keep buying land. They keep resorting to violence. Because they resort to violence, we begin to build defense operations also, which will eventually morph over a very long, complicated history and will become, in 1948, the IDF. But when they talk about a Nakba, a disaster. They're actually right. They're right at the beginning of the war, well, at the end of the war, some two thirds of the Palestinians who lived in the land of Israel at the beginning of the war of independence no longer lived in their homes. How can you possibly not think of that as a disaster?
My belief in and my passion for and my love for this country in no way comes at the expense of understanding the trauma, the hardship, the devastation, the tragedy of Palestinian life over the last eight decades. I don't have to hate them in order to love what we've built. I hate what they did on October 7, that's to be sure. And I hate the people who did it, and I hate the people who support them. And there's a lot more of them than you might think. But the fundamental enterprise of Palestinian nationalism is not an enemy to my vision of what I want the world here to be. And I was for a very long time, a two stater, meaning I would like there to be two states, Jewish and Palestinian, living side by side. I still am in theory, but I don't really think I'm going to live to see it. But anyway, there's a war of independence in 1948. Israel wins. It's able to expand its borders beyond what the United Nations had voted to give it in November 1947.
What I was describing for you in Europe is all the pogroms, all of the exiles, all of the murder, all of the unmentionable stuff that went on for centuries and centuries and centuries, obviously comes to a crescendo in the Holocaust. Hitler writes this book called “Mein Kampf”. If you know German, you know that means my battle or my war. He writes it in 1921 and 22. He becomes a multimillionaire by the way, the book sold like hotcakes. And he says explicitly in the book, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to get elected, and we're going to kill all the Jews. And he gets elected in the 30s, a decade after he'd written the book, a decade after he'd become very wealthy, by writing a book that says, we're going to kill all the Jews, they elect him. And sure enough, they basically do that. There were 18 million Jews before the war. There were 12 million Jews after the war. They killed a third. Now, you might say, okay, well, that's good. Two thirds didn't get killed. First of all, imagine that 120,000,000 Americans got killed, right?
Not just a third, quote, unquote, but much more importantly, the crown jewel of Jewish life in Europe was Poland, where Jews had lived for 600 or 700 years, and there were about 3 million Jews in Poland before the war. It was the intellectual hub, the religious hub. It was the center of Jewish life. Everything was a concentric circle away from Poland. All of the rest of Europe was. At the end of the war in Poland, there were 300,000 Jews left. They had killed 90% of them, the vast majority of whom, of course, have no graves because they were burnt in crematoria and spewed up in smoke. 90% of Polish Jewry was destroyed by Hitler. He would have gotten further if the allies hadn't eventually won. But European Jewry was Polish Jewry, for all intents and purposes. And from the point of view of Polish Jews, it's not like the Nazis almost won. The Nazis won. The Nazis completely succeeded. They eradicated. They just made vanish 90% of the Jews of Poland. Today, there's 30,000 Jews in Poland. So, he went from 3 million to 300,000 at the end of the war to 30,000. Hitler won.
The story we tell those Americans is that Hitler was a really bad guy, but the allies got together and prevented the victory. That's true in terms of the spread of fascism as a political entity across the world. It's not true in terms of the Jews.
Now, Zionism, by 1941, 1942, 1945, as you know, was well underway. Jews were coming to Palestine. Although the British stopped Jewish immigration, the Jews tried to get in illegally, and they were able to, to a certain extent. But the tragedy of the Holocaust changes the world's view. And for a very brief window few months, there is a feeling among in the world like, wow, okay, we screwed up. And this people actually has always been in danger of being annihilated wherever it lives. This Zionist idea actually deserves a chance. And that's why on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly votes 33 to 13 to 1, which is basically the slimmest majority that it could have gotten because it needed a two thirds majority to pass to create this state. War immediately breaks out. I mean, I'm obviously doing the Holocaust ridiculously short trip. I mean, ridiculous, but get on a train, go to Washington, DC, go see the Holocaust memorial, and you'll never be the same, but you'll understand it a lot better.
And I'm not doing any of this, obviously cavalierly, but very, very briefly, there's a war of independence. Israel captures territories that were not allocated to it. It's attacked on May 14, 1948, the day that we declare independence by five armies, just go in order-- Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt, five armies attacked Israel. The CIA predicted that Israel would hold out two years. They called them the Jews. But in all these internal CIA members say the Jews are going to hold out for two years and then it's going to be over. Well, we held out for a little bit longer than two years and we were able to expand our territory. But the main players, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, all said that was just round one. We will be back. We will be back, and we will destroy you the next time. And 19 years later, in 1967, they're getting ready. Everybody knows it's happening. The Americans are busy, involved in all kinds of international diplomacy, trying to prevent the war. Israel decides not to wait and see what happens. It preempts the attack and it destroys the Egyptian air force on the ground. It mops up very quickly in six days, and we triple our size in six days.
Israel offers all of the territory that was captured in exchange for peace. And there's a very famous Arab conference that takes place in September of that year in Khartoum, which is in Sudan, if I’m not mistaken. And they come out and they say, no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. That was round two. We'll be back. And sure enough, they were back in 1973. And once again, Israel, although it was taken very much by surprise in ‘73 and the war was a disaster, it did manage to claw its way back to the original lines. It was about to march to Damascus and to Cairo when a guy named Henry Kissinger, who you may have heard of this week, stepped in to make sure that did not happen. He had been responsible for blocking American arms exports to Israel at the beginning of the war and then allowed them to go through and took credit for Israel surviving the war or whatever. That's Henry. A complicated guy, but a brilliant guy, and in a lot of ways did a lot of amazing things. He had a much more checkered history with Israel, and Israelis did not uniformly mourn his past. First of all, Israelis have no share of mind this week to think about Henry Kissinger, but I mean, zero, because we have much bigger fish to fry right now. But he has a very complicated legacy here in Israel.
But after 1973, and I'll do this super, super quick, I got my eye on the clock here. After 1973, actually, Israel is battered enough that Israelis are open for the first time to maybe if the right deal comes across, we're going to actually get some peace. And Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, announces in 1977, I'm willing to go to Jerusalem and tell the Israelis no more blood, blah, blah, blah. He comes to Jerusalem. Over two years, Menachem Begin, who was the first right wing prime minister that Israel ever had. Menachem Begin the right-wing prime minister, former terrorist, people called him somewhat fairly, somewhat unfairly, he and Sadat negotiate a deal, and by 1979, Israel has a peace treaty with Egypt. It's held ever since then. 1994 Jordan follows. 2020, the Abraham Accords follow. And we get peace with the Emirates and with Bahrain. And then there is also a little bit more peace with Morocco, sort of, and other North African countries. And three months ago, you may recall, it's hard to remember this, but actually the main news on the front page of the New York Times was that Israel and Saudi Arabia were inching towards a deal where they were going to normalize relationships, recognize us, peace, whatever you want to call it. We're not really at war with Saudi Arabia. There's no peace really to sign, but we're allowed to fly over their territory already now. When I went to the UAE, I guess about a year ago, whenever it was, and flew to Dubai for a conference, you're looking at that little map on the seat in front of you, I'm like, oh, my God, we're over Saudi Arabia. You can't understand. It'd be like for you, like, oh, my God, we're flying over North Korea. Just you can't even imagine that you would possibly do that. But there we were, flew over Saudi Arabia, landed in Dubai. Everything was changing. And part of the reason that things were stopped in their tracks was because although the Arab world gives a tremendous amount of lip service to the Palestinians, the Arab world has gotten sick and tired of waiting for the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel's permanence and Israel's right to exist.
So, Mahmud Abbas, who is the president of the Palestinian Authority, which Kamala Harris just said the other day in Dubai, is going to be the organization or the entity that's going to take over in the Gaza Strip. Well, Israelis say that's interesting because Mahmud Abbas, who's the president in, I think, the 15th year of a four-year term, denies the Holocaust and has never said in Arabic once that Israel has a right to exist. There's this huge disconnect between how Israelis look at the world and how the western world looks at the world. We can talk about that more later.
But Egypt made a deal and got nothing for the Palestinians. Jordan made a deal and got nothing for the Palestinians. The Arab Emirates and Bahrain got a deal, and the only thing they got from the Palestinians was an agreement by Israel not to annex any territories. Nothing changed. Just they said nothing could change, so they got that, but nothing changed on the ground for the Palestinians at all. And Morocco was making a deal. And others were making deals. And now Saudi Arabia was coming along, and it was saying the same thing. We're not going to do it if you don't make some change for the Palestinians. But the Palestinians had seen their movie, too, and they know that every single Arab country makes a deal with the Israelis and leaves the Palestinians behind because the rest of the Arab world has understood that Israel's not going anywhere. They're all scared of Iran. They want another nuclear power on their side. They know that Israel's got an amazing relationship with the United States. Never as amazing as it's been under Joe Biden, which you may either like or not like, but from our point of view, he's a hero. At this particular moment in Israel, there's huge signs thanking him. I took my car in like two weeks ago to the Toyota dealership here, the annual service, and in the showroom where all the little brand-new fancy cars are, there's an Israeli flag standing next to an American flag. I was like, whoa, okay. Something's really changing in this country. So, this country is very grateful to American support right now. It's fully, people here don't live in the boonies. And we understand what's happening to his support in the Democratic Party. We get all of that. We know how complicated this is. But right now, the two aircraft carriers out there are probably the reason that we're not at war with Lebanon right now and Hezbollah, whatever.
Just want to say that the other major thing that I'll point out and then I'll stop, is that there have been all sorts of attempts to create peace between Israel and Palestinians. The major one was the Oslo Accords in the 1980s, which created the Palestinian Authority, of which Abbas is now the president, or the prime minister, or whatever he is. I forget his exact title. The Oslo Accords, which many Israelis on the right were totally opposed to because they didn't trust the Arabs. They said, you're nuts. The Palestinians are never going to accommodate themselves to this idea, and they're just going to get the land and then they're going to fight us again. But Rabin, who was the prime minister then went ahead and had them signed anyway and started to implement them. He was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli. But the Oslo accords fell apart before Rabin was assassinated. And they fell apart not because of right wing Israelis. They fell apart because as soon as the Oslo accords were signed, radical Palestinian terrorism went through the ceiling. Buses were blowing up left and right. Israelis were dying by the dozens. And very quickly, Israelis realized that the problem is not the right-wing Israelis who are opposed to it. The problem is the radical Palestinians who are opposed to it and who are not under being controlled by anybody, not the international community, not the more moderate Palestinians and so on. And so, you know, Clinton tried, and Obama tried, and Trump tried. Remember the Trump deal that everybody was talking about for five minutes? A lot of presidents, left and right, smart, and not Republican and Democrat, all tried, and every single one failed at the end of the day, because to this very day, the Palestinian Authority says, and Hamas, obviously, and I'm going to come back to one last word about Hamas, says, Jews have no right to be here. This is Muslim land. Jews cannot have an entity here. And we're done. And people in the west say yeah, that's how they talk. Just whatever, that's how they talk. But let's be serious. It's a modern world.
The Hamas charter says that no Jews can live between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. And any Jew who tries to live between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea has to be slaughtered, not forced out, slaughtered. And for a decade and a half, even Bibi Netanyahu is perceived by the world as being a right-wing hawk. He's actually not in his… I'm not a fan at all, but my beef with him is not that he's right wing, it's that he's corrupt and megalomaniacal and incompetent. But other than that, he's excellent. But he was considered by the international community to be a right winger. Bibi Netanyahu, has said he's been prime minister for twelve of the last 14 years, Hamas is containable. They're fundamentally, they're pragmatists. They want to stay in power. They want a better life for their civilians. Yes, we know they take a lot of the money that's supposed to go for schools and clinics, and they build tunnels, we know that. But we're finding the tunnels, and we'll destroy them when we have to. And if we give them enough money, every now and then they'll lob some rockets at us, and we'll have to go bomb them. And it's really horrible, but we can live next door to them.
And that was the idea with Hezbollah, also in the north, in the south of Lebanon, which has 150,000 rockets, many of them are pinpoint accuracy, so they can figure out which airport, which power grid, which school, which hospital, and not miss. And not miss. And we've said to ourselves, for a very long time, you know what? We kind of have to have this bunker mentality. As long as we're strong enough to deter them, we can live by this, and we can make a go of it. And one day they're going to come around and they're going to want a better future for their children or their grandchildren, and they'll eventually realize that every single Arab entity in the world has made peace with us. Now, Saudi Arabia also. One day they're going to come around, they're going to make peace. And that also collapsed on October 7.
Israelis say, you can't live next to Hamas anymore because they can't be contained. Because when they say they want to slaughter every single one of us, no matter what the cost, they actually believe that. And because we were so self-confident and stupid, they were able to do it. And there's a guy in my shul, my synagogue, who's a doctor, but in the army, he's part of this unit that identifies bodies. And I spoke to him on Shabbat, and I don't want to get too… whatever, but he said a lot of the bodies, they took him out of the body bags. They couldn't tell what gender they were. They didn't know if they were looking at a man or a woman. They'd been so hacked up to pieces that what's the point? They were already dead. Why behead the Thai workers who were working on our farms, who are citizens of Thailand? Why behead them? Why do we have to see videos of Hamas people fighting with each other over the privilege of hacking off the guy's head with a hoe?
In other words, what Israel realizes, it confronted on October 7 is an evil unlike anything you in your wildest, sickest, most perverse imagination can begin to conjure up. And that's why there is no disagreement in Israel. Israel has a very strong left. Remember all those protests against the judicial reform stuff? The hundreds of thousands of people, and I was part of them, who were out there every Saturday night protesting for 40 weeks against moving the country to the right and changing the judiciary? Those are our progressives. Those are people in favor of gay and lesbian marriage. And those are people who are in favor of all the stuff that many of you who are progressives probably are in favor of. They're in favor of it, too. And you know where they are right now as we're speaking? They are the pilots of the planes bombing Gaza, and they are the officers in Gaza commanding soldiers trying to take out Hamas. There's no difference right now between left and right in this country, because the progressives also want their grandchildren to be able to grow up here without being beheaded or gang raped or mutilated. And they know that the only way that they can be sure that that's going to happen is if Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north and ultimately Iran get eliminated as threats. And that brings us to where we are now. That's why this war is being fought the way it's being fought.
If you’re just joining us, Israel from the Inside typically posts a written column on Mondays and a podcast on Wednesdays. That is obviously irrelevant for the time being.
We’ve delayed all the podcasts that were ready to go, because the people whose stories they tell deserve to tell them when we all have the bandwidth to hear. Hopefully, that will return some day.
For the next three weeks, beginning Sunday, December 17th, we will be posting a bit less, as people in the United States will be on vacation, traveling and the like, and here in Israel, as some reservists are being rotated out of units, those of us who could not leave while our kids were/are at the front, will be using the time to visit kids and grandchildren abroad.
Impossible Takes Longer is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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