Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Causa Media.

**Robert** (0:05)
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 returning to Netanyahu well was kind of the show does best covering things that are currently happening and like breaking news. That's kind of why we started It Could Happen Here. 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 El-Kurd to help us report on and 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.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:08)
Dennis, should we call you Dr. El-Kurd the whole episode?

**Dana al-Kurd** (1:12)
No, please don't do that. That would be super awkward.

**Robert** (1:15)
It is cool.
But first off, how have you been? Plugables and stuff?

**Dana al-Kurd** (1:22)
Yeah. No, I'm existing. 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.
That has been a shining thing for me right now.

**Robert** (1:42)
That's awesome.

**Dana al-Kurd** (1:43)
Thanks for asking.

**Robert** (1:44)
That sounds great. I can't wait to read that.
For one of the things I read for this book, which is about the birth of terrorism in Palestine, the Holy Land, prior to the Nakba, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. This episode, if you have an education like me, because I remember as a kid, most of what I was told about the series of conflicts there was that, number one, it's been going on for thousands of years. It's always been happening. Number two, that it's primarily religious, and always has been primarily religious in dimension, that those are the two truths about it. When people are saying that one thing they're tacitly saying, I think, is that Muslims and Jews can't live together.
They don't tend to directly say that, but that's what you're meant to believe if those two first things are true. That they're both crazy. None of this is news to you. That they're both right.

**Dana al-Kurd** (2:33)
They can't live together, but they're also both crazy.

**Robert** (2:36)
None of that's true to the conflict, right? For one thing, obviously, stuff that happened in ancient times is relevant for a variety of reasons, just because history is never discreet, right? But if you go back to 1880, you can get a really good grounding and everything that's really relevant to the conflict today, right? Maybe you disagree with that, if so, I yield to your experience, but that's been what I've come to feel, kind of reading into it, that's a really good grounding and kind of everything relevant to the day starts in the late 1800s. Like it's not that ancient, right?

**Dana al-Kurd** (3:12)
No, no, absolutely. 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 really boils down to that.

**Robert** (3:28)
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 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, for not, you know, never, like 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?
So I wanted to talk about like that, how we got to kind of the point of no return before the establishment, before, you know, 1948 and before the Nakba, right? Like how did things and how did the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate kind of help push things along to the point of no return, right? So that's, I think, what we're going to talk about this week. Because, yeah, that's just, I was initially planning to do episodes a little bit different, probably on Menachem Begin or on Vladimir Yabotinsky. But it just, it seemed to make more sense to cover it this way. In part because I actually didn't feel like just focusing on like one guy and trying to like sort out, like how things went so wrong through a single, I just didn't seem like the right way to do this.