The Creation of Israel | Welcome to Season Eight
Eight seasons later and I’m still just as excited to be back with you here on 15-Minute History. The topics these last two years have been emotional rollercoasters, and this year promises to be just as exciting. Joe and I are calling season eight “Good Idea, Bad Idea.” We are going to look at our topics through the lens of both their positive and negative long-term results. There will be controversy at times, and Joe and I won’t always agree on each other’s conclusions. But our promise to you remains the same: we will approach each subject honestly, bring you the facts and our own views, and then invite you to draw your own conclusions. If we are wrong or miss something, we will admit it. And we invite you to help us in that—message us on Facebook or X, send us emails, or put comments on Spotify if you think we got something wrong or just have a question. We’re only human, but we promise to use our episodes and discussions to both ask questions and give context to find some answers.
With all that said, I thought we’d start with an uncontroversial subject. Let’s talk about Israel. One year ago, Hamas terrorists attacked Israel and killed or kidnapped well over a thousand of its citizens. Many hostages have since lost their lives. In response, the Israeli government launched its largest military campaign since 1973 and killed thousands in the Gaza Strip, and the war has expanded very recently into Leba-non with attacks on the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. On two occasions, the Iranians have launched hundreds of missiles, rockets, and drones at Israel—with limited success. Both the terrorist attacks of October 7th and Israel’s military response in Gaza have drawn worldwide condemnation—though one side has gotten far more criticism than the other. A podcast titled “15-Hour History” might be able to cover every detail of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so I can barely scratch the surface with you today. But we might just discover some important moments in this long struggle that puts the current war into perspective.
The “Promised Land”
The Hebrew Torah describes how God promised to make their patriarch, Abraham, into a great nation and give his children a homeland. Religious history and secular archaeology record the Jews’ struggles to win that land, only to then suffer occupation by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Macedonians, followed by their expulsion from the Promised Land by the Romans. The Arabs’ claim to the land begins with their ancestry back to Ishmael, eldest son of Abraham. But it is rooted in the Prophet Muhammad divine journey to Jerusalem, where he landed on the site once occupied by the Jewish Temple and where his followers built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Muslims drove the Byzantine Empire’s armies out of the Levant in 636 AD and took control of the Holy Land. The various caliphates, most importantly the Otto-mans, then held the region for the next twelve centuries—with the brief exception of the Christian Crusades. Arabs made up the vast majority of the population during the Muslim era, though Jews could live in the Holy Land if they paid their taxes and followed Islamic civil law. (There are Islamic records dating to the 12th century that refer to Jews living in the Holy Land as “Palestinians.”) Late in their rule, the Ottomans neglected their Jewish and Arab subjects in the Levant in equal measure; several European and American visitors in the 18th and 19th centuries noted the horrific living conditions and desperate poverty in and around Jerusalem. In all that time, parts of the worldwide Jewish community, often targeted by antisemitic pogroms, longed to return to the Promised Land.
Zionism and Arab Nationalism
During the late Ottoman period, some Jewish leaders organized groups to emigrate to the Holy Land; they referred to this process as “Aliyah,” the Hebrew word for “rise.” Though reform Jews rejected the idea of returning to the Holy Land, the clamor for Ali-yah grew within orthodox communities, and political institutions soon sprang up in Europe and the United States to push for more Jewish emigration. The largest of these was the Zionist Organization, founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau in Basel, Switzerland. The term “Zionism” refers to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, an image often symbolizing the historic land of Israel. Herzl’s group and others received funding from both wealthy Jews and Western governments, and they used this money for three purposes. First, they spread their message of “political Zionism” to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Second, they subsidized the costs of emigration. And third, they bought equipment—including weapons—for Jewish militias in the Holy Land to protect those people who had already made Aliyah.
The Ottoman Turks showed little interest in this early Zionist movement, and local government officials actually welcomed the influx of people and cash. But a rising wave of Arab nationalism against Turkish rule led to mounting resistance to Zionism. For most of their history, Arab identity had been based around one’s tribe and family rather than ethnicity. As nationalism spread across Europe, its tenets also took root in the Arab world, largely as a way to encourage resistance to both Ottoman and white colonial rule.
By the turn of the century, Arabs living in the Holy Land were enjoying a minor—and brief—cultural and economic renaissance after centuries of poverty and stagnation. (Ironically, this was due in part to the money spent by Jewish groups making Ali-yah). Another cause of this revival was a renewed interest among Christians in visiting sites mentioned in the Bible. By 1914, a turning point in this history, the Holy Land’s population was rising and its people growing wealthier. But economic prosperity masked a serious and multi-faceted social crisis. The Ottoman government in Istanbul and its officials in the Levant chafed at Westerners interfering in internal affairs. Arab Muslims, as well as the small Christian community, wanted autonomy or outright independence from the Turks. Both Arab Christians and Jewish Zionists were demanding relief from the extra taxes they paid to practice their faiths. And the Zionists started to speak openly of creating a Jewish homeland in what was once the biblical Kingdom of Israel.
The Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War One swept all these concerns off the table for about eighteen months. But as Joe and I discussed in an episode on the Arab Revolt of 1917 in season six, Anglo-French efforts to destabilize the Ottoman regime led to revolutionary changes in the Holy Land. The British High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry MacMahon, promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca that the Arabs would receive independence and full sovereignty over their lands—including Palestine—if they rose against the Ottomans. Simultaneously, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made a public statement to the Zionists that Great Britain would support the creation of an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land. Arabs and Jews alike pointed to the Mac-Mahon-Hussein letters and the Balfour Declaration, respectively, in the interwar years as they demanded the British fulfill their promises.
When the war ended, the League of Nations granted Britain control of a “colonial mandate” in Palestine. Despite the peace in Europe, the situation in the Holy Land grew more tense. Aliyah movements increased exponentially in the 1920s and 1930s, thanks largely to the antisemitic pogroms taking place in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Arabs watching new Zionist communities spring up and grow felt betrayed by their new British colonial overlords. Both sides took up arms to defend themselves—there were plenty of weapons lying around from the war and veterans in both camps who knew how to use them. Historians argue on who started the violence, with Israelis pointing to anti-Zionist riots and the Arab Revolt of 1937, and Arabs countering with examples of Jewish paramilitary groups like the “Haganah” attacking Arab towns and killing innocent civilians. The 1937 revolt, meant to unite the Arabs in Palestine against the Zionists, instead destroyed any political support they once had in the British Foreign Office. London sent in troops to restore order, and both the Zionist political leader David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah militias cooperated with the British to put down the rebellion.
The Holocaust and Israel’s Creation
Whatever later historians might say, the establishment of a Jewish homeland was not certain until the 1940s. During the Second World War, Great Britain tried to slow Jewish emigration to Mandatory Palestine and keep the region peaceful. The Arabs largely cooperated, though Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti, Amin al-Hussein, spewed his antisemitic bile in concert with his proclaimed friend Adolf Hitler. As the front lines receded from the Holy Land in 1942-43, the Zionist Organization renewed its calls for a Jewish homeland. This received a more favorable reception in the United States than in Great Britain. An extremist Jewish militia, the Irgun led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, began attacking British forces in Palestine. They even murdered the British Minister of State, Lord Moyne, while he was visiting Cairo in 1944. Support for a Jewish homeland among the British plummeted—but only temporarily.
As the Allied and Soviet armies swept across Europe into Germany, the utter horror that greeted them in Auschwitz and the other Nazi camps shifted the balance of Western public opinion inexorably toward the Zionists. Shortly after the war’s end in Europe, President Harry Truman brought the United States into Holy Land affairs for the first time when he asked the British to resettle Holocaust survivors in Palestine immediately. The independent Arab states took an active role in the issue as well. The first meeting of Arab heads of state in late 1944 resulted in a statement that the evils perpetuated by European tyrants could not be solved by more injustice in Arab Pales-tine.
Violence in the Holy Land continued even as a second peace settled over Europe. Jews made Aliyah by the tens of thousands, Arabs demanded they be expelled to protect their own homes and businesses, and both sides attacked each other and the British mandate government, which was just trying to keep people from getting killed. Both sides pushed the outside forces working to find a settlement too far in 1946. In June, Arab leaders met in Syria to agree on British and American targets if the West did not back an independent Arab state in Palestine. A month later, Menachem Begin’s Irgun blew up part of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel and killed 91 British soldiers and government officials.
The British, now deep in negotiations to give India its independence, chose to simply hand over the entire Jewish-Arab conflict to the newly created United Nations. The General Assembly recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states with the holy city of Jerusalem under U.N. supervision. The United States and the Soviet Union backed partition, as did their respective client states. The Muslim world rejected the resolution, but it passed in the General Assembly over their objections.
Rather than leading to a peaceful settlement, the partition resolution sparked a full-scale civil war in the Holy Land. Jewish and Arab militias battled each other across the mandate while the Americans tried to negotiate Arab support for the resolution and peacekeeping troops in Jerusalem. (These efforts failed, and the two sides soon fought each other for control of the city.) The British, meanwhile, just tried to keep their heads intact as the clock wound down to the mandate’s end. The last British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, departed the Holy Land on May 14, 1948. Hours later, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of the State of Israel, and five Arab countries invaded the new Jewish nation early the next morning.
Good Idea, Bad Idea
Let me get this out of the way first: it’s not for me to say whether Israel’s creation was a good idea or a bad idea. That’s not what this season is about. Rather, I want to spend our remaining few minutes looking at the positive and negative results of how the Zionist project reached its fulfillment. You get to decide if it was worth the cost.
Israel’s founders, men like Ben-Gurion and Begin, and the thousands of militia fighters who won its independence, had a lofty and perhaps laudable goal of creating a place Jews could always call home. Likewise, many Arabs wanted only to rule themselves instead of living under a foreign government; this, too, might have been a praiseworthy goal. How did this turn out on the ground? In Israel today, its citizens of every race and religion enjoy more political, economic, and social freedom than those of any other Middle Eastern country. Its government is elected in a democratic process that, though often as vitriolic as those in the West, remains free and open to every voter. Sadly, the same is not true in the Arab areas of Palestine. The Palestinian National Authority suspended democratic elections in the West Bank in 2009, and President Mahmoud Abbas has remained in power more than fourteen years after his term ended. In Gaza, Hamas won a popular vote in 2006 and then immediately murdered their political rivals.
Israel today is an economic powerhouse in the region as well as a center of culture and the arts. But it must also be said that those who live in the occupied zones of the West Bank, not to mention the innocent souls in the Gaza Strip, face privation and—sometimes—the threat of death. Supporters of Israel will insist that this is due to the long history of violence and terror coming from Arab Palestinians, who themselves cite the fact that Israelis took land from their parents and grandparents as they won their independence and expanded their rule across the Holy Land. Both claims are correct. Both sides have historic grievances stretching back decades and even centuries. Does Israel live under threat? Without question—October 7th proved that in gruesome detail. Do Arab Palestinians suffer poverty and the chance of death? Absolutely—the footage from Gaza since October 7th is utterly heartbreaking. Who is to blame? Who started this conflict? Historians and pundits will probably debate this long after you and I have departed this life.
I’d like to close with a personal reflection that may shed some light on how I approach this topic. I tend to approach the issue of Israel-Palestine by distinguishing the people who live in both communities from their leaders. This comes from an experience I had in 2014 during my only trip to the Holy Land. I’ll never forget standing at places like Tel Megiddo, Masada, and the shores of the Sea of Galilee, but by far the most memorable moment was at my hotel in Jerusalem. I was sitting on the terrance reading and reflecting on the day’s visit to the Old City when a group of college and graduate students gathered in the far corner. They came from Israel, Palestine, and several Euro-pean countries but all were ethnically Jewish or Arab. They asked if I wanted to join them and switched from Hebrew and Arabic to English with enviable ease.
For nearly four hours, these kids in my eyes recited and dissected each sides’ history from memory with the depth of trained academics. I mostly listened, and they seemed to forget I was even there—which was fine, since I just wanted to learn. But the discussion ended around three in the morning after lots of coffee and other ablutions with two friends, an Israeli man named Levi and Arab woman named Amira, making what ended up being a worldview-defining point to me.
What follows are from the notes I was writing really fast. “Look at us,” Amira said, pointing to Levi. “The world says we are different, but we are friends. Our parents are friends. We love each other. We both want to live our lives, make beautiful families, and serve God.” Levi nodded over and over—I think he was a bit smitten by her—and then jumped in.
“It is our leaders who are the problem. They tell us to hate the Palestinians. They tell us they are all terrorists.” Amira nodded. “Why do they do this? So they can stay in power.” There was general agreement among all the students. “They get elected when we fear the Palestinians.”
Amira spoke again, agreeing with Levi’s point and then going further, “They get money from other countries when they tell us to blow our children up and murder Jews.”
I then started to ask some kind of wide-angled political question about finding peace that probably reflected my American attitude. Levi put up his hand. “None of that matters. What matters is this.” And he took Amira’s hand. “What matters is that we are friends. One day, when our leaders are all gone—“ I think he meant when their generation had retired or died “—then we will make a new world here in Israel.”
I have no idea where Amira and Levi are today, but I pray they are safe. And I am eternally grateful for their words that showed such wisdom. Governments can declare war, terrorist groups can rape and murder. But the pages of history tell us that people who are united in a common cause, if they are willing to stand up and say no to their leaders, will outlast even the most dangerous regimes. That conversation ten years ago showed me, as perhaps the video footage of October 7th and the war that has resulted has shown you, that the real tragedy in Israel and Palestine today are the innocent lives cut short or changed forever on both sides. A path toward peace must address the history of both Israel and the Palestinians, but perhaps it starts with the next generation of men and women in that stricken part of the world. It starts with people talking to each other in good faith, and those conversations might just produce lasting chan
