Two Israel-Palestine Historians Explain: How Did We Get Here? And What Happens Next?
Two historians share their thoughts on Israel’s military response, the future of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and the “missing moderate middle” on both sides
How did we get here? The eminent Israeli historian Benny Morris walks us through the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from antiquity to October 7. And the excellent historian of Palestine Zachary Foster digs into the often misunderstood history of the rise of Hamas. Finally, both share their thoughts on Israel’s military response, the future of the conflict, and the “missing moderate middle” on both sides.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
In the following excerpt, Benny Morris talks to Derek about the history of Israel and Palestine and Jewish settlement in the area.
Derek Thompson: I want to talk to you about history, and I want to talk to you about the news, and I want to do it in some kind of chronological order. Let’s go way back, to the late 19th century, and do the story chronologically as you see it. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, what was happening in the region we now call Israel and Palestine? What were relations between Jews and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire like? How did they treat each other?
Benny Morris: You want to go back to the 19th century; I’d like to go back 2,000 years, just very briefly. The Jews, or the Hebrews, as they were called at the time, reached Palestine, or the land of Israel, as they called it, and they basically conquered it, or much of it, about 3,000 years ago. And then they set up kingdoms, David, Solomon, et cetera, Judea. And then sort of lived here and ruled over the place intermittently for about 1,000 years, until they were thrown out by the Romans. The Arabs came here. The Muslims arrived here, Arabs, Arab Muslims, arrived here in the seventh century A.D., about 1,400 years ago, conquered the land, and gradually Arabized and Muslimized the area, which was basically Christian, pagan, and Jewish.
And they ruled here on and off for the next 1,000 years. There was a crusader kingdom in the middle, but they ruled here more or less continuously until the late 19th century, and the Turks conquered the land in the 16th century. They were Muslims also. They weren’t Arabs, but they ruled here until the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century.
In the 1880s, Jews started coming to Palestine, basically driven by pogroms in eastern Europe, in the Czarist Empire, anti-Jewish pogroms, in which hundreds of them, eventually even tens of thousands, were killed by the early 20th century. And most Jews, incidentally, fled from the Czarist Empire, fled this antisemitism in the pogroms, and went to America. About 2 million ended up going to America or North America and the British Commonwealth countries. But the very small minority came to Palestine, immigrated here, established settlements here. The Turks weren’t that happy about it, the Ottoman Empire, but they were bribable, and so Jews managed to stay here and established settlements, and gradually these settlements expanded. And Arabs, the local population here, didn’t like it. And then there was friction between the new arrivals, the new settlers, and the indigenous population, all ruled under the Ottoman Empire until 1917, 1918.
Thompson: And while the history of Jews in the region is very old, Zionism, as I understand it, is a relatively new idea, if we take the perspective of the late 19th century. So tell me a little bit about the origins of Zionism. I think it’s just kind of interesting because we Jews have been saying, “Next year in Jerusalem” for many centuries, but the literalization of next year in Jerusalem through the ideology of Zionism is much younger. So tell us about how Zionism first emerged.
Morris: In the 19th century, with the rise of modern nationalism across Europe, basically Italy, Germany, these states just came into being, Poland, Czechoslovakia. These peoples demanded independence from the Czarist Empire or from other conquerors, and there was a wave of nationalism in Europe. And the Jews who lived in their communities among these peoples were touched by this wave of nationalism, by this idea of nationalism, and said, “Maybe we should also do it.” And when the pogrom struck in the beginning of the 1880s, they said, “Well, we must also adopt nationalism and try and found or refound our state” where it had originally been in the land of Israel in Palestine. And so as I mentioned, in small numbers, they began to immigrate to Palestine. Very small numbers. About 30,000 came between 1882 and 1905, another 30,000, maybe, 1905 to 1915. Very small numbers. But sure, it turned out that this kernel of immigration was sufficient to start a Zionist enterprise in Palestine, based mainly on agricultural settlement.
Thompson: Let’s bring this story to the end of World War I. There are maybe 50, 70, 80,000 Jews in the area we now call Israel and Palestine. The Jews are a small minority in this area in the 1910s. What are relations like between Jews and Muslims in this period? And how does the project of Zionism pull us a little bit further toward what ultimately happens after World War II?
Morris: Relations between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine from the beginning of the Zionist immigration in the 1880s until World War I are mixed. Jews purchase things from Arabs, Arabs purchase from Jews. Jews hire Arabs to do some of the labor on their farms, and so on. There is also friction. The Jews buy land. The Arabs willingly sell land, the Jews buy it, and then the Arabs turn around and say, “Well, this wasn’t exactly the plot we sold you. We sold you something smaller. You’re now irrigating or moving your sheep about on our land.” So there’s friction in terms of boundaries of lots, of agricultural lots.
I think in general that the Arabs began to feel that the Jews were strangers, they were aliens, and they were infidels. The Jews didn’t speak Arabic. They didn’t try to learn Arabic, except for a very odd one or two. But they didn’t learn the language. And they basically weren’t Muslims. This is what Muslims felt. They were strangers. So the Jews, when they came, there was a natural inbuilt friction there. Though it wasn’t in a sense nationalist. It was proto-nationalist. It was religious. It was even class based, in the sense the Jews were understood to be wealthier, the incoming Jews, than the local natives.
But in the intelligentsia among the Arabs—and there weren’t many there; the Arabs were basically 90 percent illiterate at the time, a small percent were literate and understood and read newspapers or whatever, sent their children sometimes even to study in France or Britain—they began to feel nationalism also because they were infected by nationalism via Europe and the traders and missionaries and others who came to Palestine, the Christians. So they began to think in terms of nationalism also, and they began to understand that the Jews were coming here in some way, and that’s what they felt, to displace them or, certainly, to set up their own sovereignty or to displace them. All of this occurred under the Turks, who were the owners of the land or the sovereigns of the land, but this was in a backwater. It wasn’t very important to the Turks, this area.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests; Benny Morris & Zachary Foster
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
