Critiquing Palestinian Historiography
or, The Tragedy of Darryl Cooper's Palestinian Wineskins
Introduction: The Vintner of Vignettes
Daryl Cooper of the Martyr Made podcast has a lot going for him in terms of how he communicates historical narratives. He has a deep understanding of World War 1, which makes sense given his obvious interest in how societal dynamics change in response to modernization, and the whole story of that conflict is how empires began dissolving into nation-states. In his series on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem,” Cooper has a shop-talk episode in which he explores how tribal and national societies differ, highlighting how the state apparatus replaces traditional family roles in interfacing with different aspects of life. That episode was a standout for me personally because of its clarity and breadth.
He also has the powerful ability to command pathos with his vignettes of individual actors, such as the legend of Faisal al-Hashemi. Cooper breathlessly tells us about this extraordinary man who strictly abided by traditional Arab hosting customs, honorably protecting the Pasha generals within in his lands despite the tremendous military advantage that would have arisen from slitting their throats as they slept.
His account of what it would have been like to be a Jew in an eastern European pogrom, watching your neighbors suddenly turn on your friends and family—or an Arab during the Kafno famine, going to bed hearing the moans of starving people in the street through the open window—immediately places the listener in a trance-like state. When you listen to Cooper speak, you hover in a space between life and death as you contemplate existence from the point of view of people who had, only moments before he began speaking, been nothing more than distant historical abstractions.
Altogether, then, Darryl Cooper distills this fantastic vintage of historical narrative and deep sociological musing—a new and exciting wine for those of us who are curious about the past—and he proceeds to pour it all into the old wineskin of traditional Palestinian historiography. The result is predictable and tragic: the wineskin splits. And that is the underlying theme of the critique that follows.
The Imitator of Innovation
Let’s begin by considering this word, “historiography.” We all know that history is not a list of events that happened and the order in which they occurred; that’s mere chronology. History is the narrative you create by considering a representative subset of the evidence pertaining to those events, and inferring causal relations to tell a story about what happened.
Because of the politically fraught nature of such an enterprise, it’s possible to tell a multitude of competing stories that each reflect the political agendas of whoever tells the story. To a cynical postmodernist, the story that wins out is a reflection of the agenda of whoever has the power to enforce their story. To an optimistic empiricist, there exist objective standards that all parties can agree to in the course of adjudicating competing narratives. To some degree, both perspectives have their strengths.
For now, what’s important to consider is the historiographic landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The historiography presented by Cooper reflects the Palestinian point-of-view; not a Palestinian point of view, but the Palestinian point of view.
In contrast to Western (including Israeli) historiographies, which are distinguished by their pluralism, the Palestinian historiography is characterized by its rigidity and stagnancy. This is as true for historians living in Palestine as it is for those living in its diaspora, like Rashid Khalidi or Nur Masalha. Insular, totalitarian societies like Palestine have an unfortunate tendency to violently penalize deviation from orthodoxy. If you’re a Palestinian, and you publicly question the basic assumptions of your society’s historiography—like the idea that Zionism was a colonial enterprise, or that the conflict originated with the Balfour declaration and that previously, Jews and Arabs lived together in peace—you run the risk of contracting an acute case of lead poisoning. If you’re living in New York City, and you’ve got people in Nablus or East Jerusalem, you need to be equally careful about what you write down in your books, lest you receive a phone call informing you about some very regrettable developments concerning your “Zionist collaborator” family.
In contrast, Western historiographies are dynamic and varied. Israeli scholarship encompasses views ranging from pro-Palestinian, settler-colonial narratives offered by the likes of Ilan Pappe, to pro-Zionist tales of treacle heroism championed by Netanel Lorch, to everything in between—be it Benny Morris’ unflinching New Historiographic examinations of archival documents showcasing Israeli war crimes, Efraim Karsh’s impassioned defenses of the “Old Historiographic Guard,” or Anita Shapira’s thirty-thousand foot narrative.
Regardless of whose historiography you like best, you run the risk of being called a racist apologist for violence of some stripe or other. That’s pretty much inevitable when discussing this conflict. But when browsing Western historiography, you can at least enjoy the benefits of cognitive flexibility and creative energy of the sort in which Palestinian historiography, with its stifled and static intellectual environment, is found lacking.
The upshot is that when Western narratives are challenged by new information, they can adapt and revise, growing stronger than before. For example, there is little doubt that by incorporating the harsh realities of Israel’s past, which Old Historians like Lorch have traditionally omitted, New Historians like Benny Morris and revisionary traditionalists like Anita Shapira have strengthened the Zionist side of the argument.
This stands in contrast to the Palestinian narrative, which remains mired, decade after decade, in harshly enforced orthodoxy. Consequently, it suffers from the limitations of all stagnant narratives: it cannot adapt, cannot respond effectively to facts that challenge its basic assumptions.
And this is the trap that Cooper falls into. By adopting the standard Palestinian assumptions and narrative, he unwittingly inherits all of its defects, which even his immersive style and sociological depth cannot fix. Ironically, despite enjoying the reputation of a history enthusiast who challenges established narratives (at least, in other contexts), Cooper here becomes yet another reciter of an orthodoxy whose contradiction will get you in trouble in certain parts of the world. Those who have only ever heard Western historiographies to the exclusion of the Palestinian one might therefore mistake him for a maverick (at least on this topic), oblivious to the fact that Cooper is recycling a story as old as it is flawed—albeit in his own unique style.
The Wears in the Wineskin
The key assumptions behind Palestinian historiography are as follows:
Jews and Muslims lived together in peace before Zionists migrated to Palestine.
The incoming Zionists were colonial invaders with no connection to their presumed homeland.
Palestinian Arabs were nationally differentiated from the Arabs of the surrounding region; the Arabs of Palestine were in some fundamental sense distinct, as a political unit, from the Arabs of Syria-Lebanon, the Arabs of Transjordan, and the Arabs of Egypt.
The Palestinians were the unwitting victims of British and Zionist machinations, understandably defending themselves from colonial imposition by alien forces. Their actions and shortcomings fundamentally came down to the fact that they were honest to a fault, the victims of both tragic circumstances and colonial scheming. Had they only been more shrewd, had they only possessed the worldly resources necessary to direct their confusion and pain towards more productive means of resistance, they would not have ended up in their deplorable position today.
This last one is for an English-speaking audience only. For an Arab-speaking audience, the Jews are evil and everything written about them in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is true. But when addressing an English-speaking audience, like Daryl Cooper—and through him, the audience of his podcast—the Jews are painted in a more humane light. This serves the function of not immediately disqualifying the Palestinian narrative in the eyes of the Western world. However, it carries over that most essential feature of the Palestinian version of events: it ultimately regards Jews as bearing the brunt of responsibility for Palestinian suffering. The summary of this final assumption that they generally opt for is that “the Zionists punished Palestinians for the crimes of Europe.” In this formulation (at least, for English-speaking audiences), the Holocaust did happen, it was bad, and the pogroms and mass killings endured by the Jews were undeserved. But it also didn’t justify the colonization of Palestine.
Taken together, these are the fundamental assumptions of all Palestinian historiography. They form the stagnant wineskin of the story that Daryl Cooper goes on to fill with a delightful new vintage that incorporates his particular strengths as storyteller and amateur sociologist. Let’s tackle each of these assumptions to get a sense of where exactly Palestinian historiography goes wrong, and how Cooper’s presentation of that narrative exacerbates its weaknesses.
Assumption #1: The Peaceful Muslim Locals
Perhaps the most foundational myth of Palestinian historiography is the notion that prior to the arrival of the Zionists, Jews and Muslims lived together in peace. This myth is essential to their version of the story because it establishes the innocence of the Arab Muslim population from the outset, putting to rest any foolish and naive notion that religiously motivated hatred might be implicated in the violence of the Arabs of Palestine.
Indeed, Cooper himself castigates anyone who might suspect that Islamically motivated bigotry might have had anything at all to do with motivating the conflict in the early days of Zionism. He assures us that such views are naive and misinformed. By his account, the nature of Palestinian Arab resistance was fundamentally of an anti-colonial character, and religion served only to bolster and unify the disparate tribes of the region (at least, to some extent.) Islamic religion, in his view, played only an incidental role in the conflict rather than a fundamental one.
But that doesn’t stop Cooper from talking about religious extremism and its role in igniting the conflict; it only stops him from talking about Islamic religious extremism specifically. He refers to the ominous Old Testament texts alluded to by certain Zionist actors during times of heated conflict with the Arabs, which recalled genocides of Canaanite groups like the Amalekites in the same land that the Jews were once again trying to win.
Cooper also belabors the apocalyptic theology of at least two different Christian Zionists: one who served in an administrative capacity, and another who assisted the British in brutally suppressing the Arab Revolts of the 30s. He emphasizes at length that people like this have no moral compunctions about inflicting atrocities against the local Arabs in the name of the Zionist cause, owing to their conviction that by fulfilling the prophecies of the New Testament, they were inaugurating the end of the world.
And yet, in this land which is so holy to the three great world religions, Cooper sees fit not only to uniquely neglect any causal role played by the one representing the side whose historiography he’s repeating, but outright dismisses any such suggestion as baseless. He has time to tell us about religious extremism with scriptural basis in Jewish and Christian theology, but has no time whatsoever to talk about their Islamic counterpart.
This omission is not unique to Cooper—he’s just doing what Palestinian historiography has always done—but the absence of any mention of Islamic fundamentalism is felt even more acutely by his choice to describe, at length, the role of Jewish and (especially) Christian religious fundamentalism. This feature of his unique historical vintage thus reacts violently to the tattered old historiographic wineskin meant to contain it.
Not once do the words “dhimmi” or “jizya” appear in the entirety of his series, and that silence is deafening. It continues the time-honored Palestinian tradition of negating, denying, and erasing the long and painful history of institutionalized Muslim violence against the Jews over the course of 1400 years. So let’s take a moment to rectify that.
The Origins of Dhimmitude
In Islamic societies, Christian and Jewish “People of the Book” are permitted to remain in the territories conquered by the armies of the Prophet Muhammed and his followers under certain theologically motivated conditions. It pays to momentarily elucidate what exactly those motivations were.
The foundational texts of Islam clearly state that the Jews are a cursed people. When the Prophet first encountered them in the 7th century CE, they had already been exiled from the Land of Israel for hundreds of years. By Muhammad’s reckoning, this was proof that they were being punished for something. And that “something” turned out to be the central thesis of the religion he developed: the Jews had corrupted monotheism. Their false theology had led them into disaster, and it was now up to Muhammad to correct the record with Islam—that version of monotheism which, according to him, was the original version of Judaism before the Jews corrupted it.
Early on in his career, the Prophet Muhammad apparently felt spurned by the Jewish theologians who’d dismissed him as yet another illiterate know-nothing when he showed up to enthusiastically discuss his theological musings with them. One suspects that his feelings of anger and rejection might have played some role in his decision to compare Jews to dirty animals in the new religion that he went on to found and spread by word and sword; it comes out in prophecies like the one assuring Muslims that on the day that they’ll defeat the Jews, every stone will cry out, “there is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him!”
It is open to speculation whether those feelings had any purchase in his decision to lead his armies in a raid of the Jewish settlement of Khaybar, whose inhabitants went on to be raped, murdered, and enslaved. It is likely that their violation of treaties, among other political considerations, accounted for the lion’s share of what influenced this (and many other) acts of wanton violence against the Jews. Among his many victims was a Jewish woman named Safiyya bint Huyayy, who was forced to watch Muhammed’s men destroy her home and behead her husband. She was abducted as a sex slave and made to convert to Islam in exchange for the privilege of becoming the Prophet’s tenth wife (Islamic tradition assures us that she fell in love with him on the horse ride away from the community he’d just finished slaughtering).
Regardless of his intentions, his words and actions are a matter of historical record, and they would set the tone for how Jews were to be regarded in the societies inspired by his revelations. In clarifying Muhammad’s attitudes towards Jews, which seem to reflect a character torn between longing for Jewish approval and raging at Jewish rejection, these details help us contextualize the reason for the not-so-peaceful treatment of Jews at the hands of Muslims, who throughout history revered the Prophet as the highest exemplar of virtuous behavior. They help us understand how the Islamic attitude towards Jews has been shaped by theological and sociological considerations.
The Jews were (are) an ancient people with over 1000 years of history preceding the creation of Islam. From a theological point of view, this fact alone makes Judaism an inherent threat to the legitimacy of Islam. And Jews are still around, even after the Prophet Muhammed shared his revelations with the world, then it can only mean one of two things: either the Jews are every bit as wicked as Muhammad claimed, or the Prophet was a hateful, raving, murderous lunatic.
And in a society where the behavior of a hateful, raving, murderous lunatic is sanctified as the highest standard of morality, second-class citizenship functions as a mechanism of legitimation. If the Jews (and Christians) are kept in a subordinated and humiliating role by their Muslim overlords, then this must surely weigh in favor of the claim that Muhammad was right all along; the wicked unbelievers are receiving their just fruits. And those who cave under the pressure to assimilate and convert, thereby earning first-class citizenship among the sons of Ishmael, must surely have been swayed by the obvious truth and morality of Islam.
The status of “People of the Book” as second-class citizens, to be abused, extorted, and—whenever they forget their proper place beneath the heels of Muslims—pogromed, serves a societal function. The wretched condition of the Jews assures the Muslim polity of the truth of their own doctrine. It assures them that the scales of cosmic justice are balanced by the divinely inspired words of the Quran.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the treatment of Jews under the various Islamic Empires is only ever referenced in a positive fashion when contrasted with European Christians, who until modern times had mistreated their Jews for parallel reasons (albeit to a harsher degree.) Whenever I hear someone claim that the Jews had it better under Islam than Christianity, I cannot help but be reminded of the old American slavers’ insistence that their treatment of blacks was less severe than that of Arabs, who had been known to castrate and murder their slaves en masse. The purpose of such whataboutism is never to insist upon historical accuracy, but rather to abrogate responsibility. And in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this remark—“Muslims treated Jews better than Christians did”—is little more than a cynical attempt at an alibi.
We can dismiss it by considering some features of the second-class citizenship that Muslim societies inflicted upon their Jews. I have already mentioned the two terms of central importance: dhimmi and jizya. Let’s take a moment to examine what these things are and how they shaped the cultural landscape of the pre-1948 conflict in Palestine.
The Wages of Dhimmitude
Dhimmi is the name given to the “People of the Book,” whose status as second-class members of Islamic empires was enshrined in law. The degree of humiliation varied across time and place. It was better, by and large, to be a Jew in the Abbasid Empire than the Mamluk Empire, or a Jew in the final years of Ottoman Jerusalem than in the first years of Ottoman Jerusalem. Regardless, the message sent to the Jews was always clear: you are an inferior people and you need to know your place.
Whether by limiting access to institutions, mandating deference to Muslims, suppressing expressions of non-Islamic religious practice, forbidding residence in houses higher than those of Muslims, or making it illegal to ride a horse, societies that institutionalized the practice of distinguishing dhimmi from Muslims ensured the perpetual humiliation of the Jews. They made Jews identify themselves by wearing yellow badges on their clothes centuries before Hitler got the idea.
Signor Pananti, a 19th century traveler across the Ottoman Empire, aptly summarized the condition of dhimmitude:
There is no species of outrage or vexation to which the Jews are not exposed. The indolent moor with a pipe in his mouth and his legs crossed, calls any Jew who is passing and makes him perform the offices of a servant. Even fountains were happier, at least they were allowed to murmur.
Of the many symbols of submission that were inflicted upon dhimmis, the one which stands out most is the jizya. As with the word “dhimmi,” which euphemistically translates to “protected person,” jizya translates to “poll tax.” This tax was not issued in exchange for any kind of political representation; dhimmitude precluded any such possibility. The “poll tax” was issued in exchange for the “protection” of “protected people,” in more or less the same way a “fee” is paid out by a business owner in exchange for a mob boss’ “protection.” And in the subsistence-level living conditions that characterized Jewish life under Islamic rule, the extortionate jizya could mean the difference between eating and starving. Perhaps no other instrument–not even the slings and arrows of Islamic conquest–proved so effective at persuading Jews to convert to the faith that preaches “no compulsion in religion” than the jizya.
Even the famed theologian and physician, Maimonides—often touted as a shining example of a Jew who had thrived under “tolerant” Islamic rule—had some choice words for those who had imposed dhimmitude and the jizya upon him. Writing in The Epistle to Yemen in 1172, Maimonides remarks:
God has entangled us with this people, the nation of Ishmael, who treat us so prejudicially and who legislate our harm and hatred…. No nation has ever arisen more harmful than they, nor has anyone done more to humiliate us, degrade us, and consolidate hatred against us.
He continues:
We bear the inhumane burden of their humiliation, lies and absurdities, being as the prophet said, ‘like a deaf man who does not hear or a dumb man who does not open his mouth’.... Our sages disciplined us to bear Ishmael’s lies and absurdities, listening in silence, and we have trained ourselves, old and young, to endure their humiliation, as Isaiah said, ‘I have given my back to the smiters, and my cheek to the beard pullers.’
Four centuries later, another Jewish scholar and physician, Solomon ibn Verga, authored the Shevet Yehudah, in which he recounted an incident where the Jews had foolishly forgotten that their proper place was beneath the boot heel of the Prophet’s loyal followers. According to him, a sultan had been blessed with a highly trusted and influential Jewish advisor, and the regional Muslim population held him in high esteem. But when he died, instead of appointing a Muslim to the role, the sultan appointed the Jew’s son. This led to widespread anger and, ultimately, a pogrom against the local Jewish population. Such stories were by no means uncommon in the Arab Muslim world. Whenever the Jews had the temerity to forget their proper place, the local Muslim population was reliably on hand to remind them.
Jews were not the only dhimmi to be issued periodic reminders of this sort. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman Empire attempted to modernize with a series of reforms called the Tanzimat, which aimed at granting more rights to dhimmi. By 1850, these reforms had noticeably eased commercial restrictions upon Christian merchants in Aleppo. This sparked discontent among the local Muslims, who perceived their neighbors’ burgeoning equality under the law as a threat to the divinely sanctioned economic advantages conferred to them by the Quran’s policy of extorting non-Muslims. The resulting riots left dozens of Christians dead in their homes and churches.
Thirteen years later, in a non-Muslim society on the opposite side of the Atlantic, another reform would be issued. That Proclamation similarly elevated the legal status of a different subjugated minority.
And as it was in the Levant, so it was in Dixie; even relatively modest attempts at legislating equality under the law soon yielded bounties of strange fruit, with blood on the leaves and blood on the root. There seems to be something cross-cultural about the phenomenon where the political elevation of a formerly abused and humiliated people towards a state of political equality is soon followed by the frenzied bloodlust of their former tormentors. Whether that murderous rage is found among the broken stainglass in Aleppo, the burning crosses in Dixie, or the raped and murdered throngs of Jews in 1920 Nebi Musa, 1921 Jaffa, and 1929 Hebron, it seems to materialize wherever and whenever a formerly subjugated people refuses to accept their proper place.
In the case of the American South, the peculiar institution that was overthrown had principally rested upon a couple centuries of tradition. But in the case of 20th century Palestine, the institution in question had persisted for 1300 years, its authority divinely ordained. As the Arabs of Palestine enthusiastically chanted during protests in 1920, “This is our land! The Jews are our dogs!” Take note of the phrasing. They did not say, “The Jews are dogs!” They said, “The Jews are our dogs!”
There is much more to say about the role Islam played in fostering the virulent hatred that Palestinian Muslims held for the Jews who refused to accept their proper place, but the fact that Palestinian historiography refuses to acknowledge the matter—much less honestly engage with it—is damning. In choosing to adopt that historiography, Cooper has not only inherited this crippling defect of the Palestinian wineskin, but has amplified its weakness by imbuing his narrative vintage with outsized attention to the worst elements of Jewish and Christian theology whilst remaining silent about Islam. These selective omissions and distortions, which Cooper has inherited from the historiography he recites, are consistent with the ongoing campaign of denial, erasure, and historical negation that characterizes the Palestinian side’s plea of innocence.
The myth of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Jews prior to the commencement of the Zionist enterprise plays a central role in Palestinian historiography, and will be revisited repeatedly as we make our way through the other assumptions. For now, let’s proceed to the second foundational assumption of that historiography.
Assumption #2: The Rootless Cosmopolitan Invaders
Palestinian historiography has always been burdened by bitter and perverse ironies, and few things make this more clear than its characterization of Zionist migrants to the land. Perhaps the chief irony of the Palestinian denial of continuous Jewish connection to the land throughout history, both in spiritual and material terms, is that the Jewish claim to the land would have been weaker if not for the existence of the aforementioned jizya. Had the Arabs of Palestine not enacted extortionate taxes upon the Jews following their conquest over Jerusalem in 638 C.E., thereby forcing native Jews to either convert or flee to another territory to avoid the jizya, the diasporic Jews scattered throughout the world would not have been as incented to send money to support their dhimmified brethren, thereby maintaining both an ongoing political and economic connection to the land over the course of 1300 years.
If not for the dhimmitude forced upon the Jews of Palestine, this ongoing material connection to the land by Jews in the European, Arabic, and African diasporas might never have been needed to help sustain a continuous Jewish presence in the region. In this counterfactual, Zionists would only have been able to point to the ideological component of Jewish connection to the land, which is characterized by the national character of the Jewish identity. Let’s take a moment to examine that character.
The Story of the Jews (Abridged)
The word “Islam” is Arabic for “submission,” referring to the defining spiritual ethos of that faith: submission to the will of God. The word “Christianity” is derived from the Greek “Christos,” the literal meaning of which—“anointed one”—refers to the central subject of worship within that faith.
In contrast, the word “Judaism” is not derived from abstract spiritual concepts, but from the Kingdom of Judah, which has a particular place and time in history. To be a Jew is to be “of Judah.” True enough, that kingdom was named after one of the twelve original tribes of Israel, whose name could in turn be interpreted as something spiritual like “Thank God,” but this was just a matter of historical happenstance. Had one of the other tribes—say, Naphalti, whose name means “twisting”—been the one to develop a Kingdom at that time, then the Jews would instead have been called “Naphaltists.” (In retrospect, it is fortunate that this did not happen. The name “twisted people” would have given antisemites throughout history that much more material to rationalize their hate, but I digress.)
The point is, Jewish national identity traces its origins to a specific place and time in history, beginning approximately 930 B.C.E in the Judean Mountains of the Southern Levant. The naming convention of Judaism alone—the fact that it has a territorial rather than spiritual basis—should give pause to those who deny the authenticity of Jewish national identity. To Cooper’s credit, he doesn’t explicitly support the common Palestinian talking point that “Jews are a religion and not an ethnicity,” but the point is still worth making because it helps to develop context that undercuts much of the historiography that he repeats.
By his account, the Jews of Europe had no connection to their ancient homeland. The metaphor he uses in the podcast series invites you to imagine that you’re living in a house, only to find an intruder barge in. The intruder claims a portion of the house for himself on the grounds he used to own it and that he really needs a place to stay right now. Even if you initially consent, he proceeds to invite all his new friends, who then proceed to antagonize and provoke you. After being a bad and invasive new tenant, he ultimately throws you out and claims the whole property for himself, leaving you homeless.
Let’s modify this metaphor to make it more closely resemble reality. The “intruder” in question has, over the course of his entire absence, contributed to the mortgage; the Jews living in diaspora economically supported the Jews living in the Land of Israel by sending money to their subjugated brethren for the purpose of maintaining a continuous Jewish presence in the homeland. Why? Because the “intruder” never lost his sentimental connection to that property after being thrown out.
Every day, three times a day, diasporic Jews around the world would turn in the direction of Jerusalem and recite a series of prayers called the Amidah, one of which begged God to let them someday return to their homeland. This activity occurred continuously over the course of two millennia in exile, alongside pilgrimages to the Holy Land and diasporic charities in the form of halukka, which contributed to the region’s economy.
The Jewish holidays all make reference to events that have happened to the Jewish nation, from mythologized accounts of how the national identity formed through the Exodus (Passover), to the event symbolizing the successful revolt of the Maccabees–the original Zionists–against the occupying Seleucid Empire, thereby restoring national independence (Hanukkah). They encompass both apocryphal stories, like the time a sexy Jewish lady saved the entire nation by winning the heart of a Persian king (Purim), to historically verifiable events, like the assassination of the last governor of Judah (commemorated as a national day of mourning with the Fast of Gedaliah). The Passover Seder concludes with the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem,” symbolizing both the historical connection to the land and the enduring hope of return.
Even Rosh Hashanah, the new year of the Jewish lunar calendar, was initially calibrated with respect to Jerusalem. Prior to the adoption of a mathematical convention, time was marked by the appearance of the new moon. Since this can vary from location to location (a new moon seen in Beijing might not be visible over Jerusalem), even time is kept by the Jews with reference to the harvest cycle of their homeland.
Given that the Jewish national identity formed in premodern times, a mystical and religious superstructure was overlaid atop its secular basis. And though these spiritual elements persisted over the millenia spent in exile, they effectively functioned to maintain the Jewish national identity over the generations by theologizing its national characteristics. Cooper himself discusses, at some length, how rituals like circumcision functioned to differentiate the group from the nations it found itself dispersed among, and correctly characterizes much of the Old Testament as an instruction manual for the preservation of identity while in exile.
And that preservation of Jewish identity was maintained even in the face of immense pressure to assimilate. The burnings, Inquisitions, pogroms, and second-class citizenship that have characterized Jewish life in exile could all have been avoided, had the Jews only abandoned their national identity through conversion to the dominant faiths, which unlike Judaism are international in character. Unlike Christianity or Islam, which spread across many nations, Judaism’s identity has always been tied to the land of Israel, even while in exile.
And during that time, the Jews held on to who they were. Subordinated as they were, they still retained their material connection to the Land of Israel by sending money to the Jews still living in the conquered homeland. This connection was maintained throughout the ages; the diasporic Jews continued clinging to their identity. They endured humiliation and mass slaughter for countless generations, holding on to the hope that someday, somehow, God would deliver them to the promised land once more.
But as the centuries stretched onwards into millennia, and the diaspora grew ever more scattered to the corners of the earth, that day never came. God remained silent.
The Jewish National Identity Modernizes
Enter the Enlightenment, which took Europe by storm. The Jews living in exile had, by and large, split into the religious and the atheistic; those who had abandoned their national identity through conversion were no longer Jews. (An argument can be made—though I won’t press it here—that those who’d abandoned their national identity through the adoption of anti-nationalist ideologies like communism also ceased to be Jews.)
In the Age of Enlightenment, the separability of church and state became an essential feature of modern national identities. This has remained a fixture of the (then-new) ideology of nationalism, as well as its associated concept of the nation-state. Many former monarchies and theocracies witnessed their transformation into modern, secular nation-states, reflecting the ongoing evolution of national identity through the ages.
The Jewish national identity had already undergone a number of changes in its own history, from its monolatric origins in Canaanite religion to its monotheistic innovation under King Josiah during the 7th century C.E.; from its Hellenization circa 400 B.C.E, to its rabbinization circa 200 C.E. As with other nations of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jewish national identity would ultimately undergo a parallel form of modernization, aligning it with the conceptions put forth by nationalist ideology. The name of the movement that was ultimately responsible for modernizing the Jewish national identity is Zionism.
It should come as no surprise that the initial Zionists were atheists. Many supported socialism, and nearly all were romantic idealists. Unlike their religious counterparts, who took seriously the rabbinic injunction not to reestablish a Jewish nation in the Holy Land until the arrival of the messiah, the Zionists grew tired of the silence of God and decided to take matters into their own hands. Their arguments for the establishment of a modern nation-state rested not on theological reference to “the Chosen People” trope—an innuendo that Cooper bizarrely slips into his series early on—but rather upon secular, Enlightenment notions of national revival.
The material and ideological connection to the historic homeland, maintained over two millennia, was the justification for the Zionist enterprise. And thus the program proceeded in earnest; Jews from around the world, from Yemen to Europe, mass migrated from 1882 to 1948.
They departed for the territory that their ancestors had prayed for a return to, and whose holidays and traditions they had maintained across countless generations. They ascended to that place which their families had, even in the destitute and miserable conditions inflicted upon them in foreign lands that distrusted and despised them, materially contributed to via what meager charity their ghettoed communities could scrounge. They returned to that home which their national identity was tied to, and which their ancestors never gave up, even though doing so would have spared them and their descendants from bottomless depths of humiliation and torment, from pogroms and genocide.
And upon arriving at the promised house, these “intruders,” who had never lost their spiritual or material connection to it, got to work rebuilding it. But even if this part of Cooper’s analogy was wrong, what about the rest? Should we just ignore the fact that the house was already occupied? How could the original inhabitants—who we will no longer call “intruders”—justify their seizure of a property that now belonged to somebody else? Well, that’s the third assumption of Palestinian Historiography. Let’s proceed to address it.
Assumption #3: “The Palestinian People” were Already Here
One of the more jarring junctures where the wineskin splits is at the subject of Palestinian national identity. Cooper assures us in the first episode that Zionists came in with the presumptuous colonial assumption that the Palestinian Arabs were ethnically undifferentiated from the other Arabs, and he suggests that this assumption was wrong. But strangely, when he later delves into the differences between the social dynamics of tribal societies and societies with strong state institutions, he lends support to the claim that the Palestinian national identity did not exist until after the Zionists arrived.
Indeed, he talks at length about their national aspirations to join Greater Syria, as well as the notable Nashashibi clan’s attempts to absorb the region into Jordanian territory. Other Arabs held a vote in 1920, the outcome of which reflected the widely held view that Palestinian Arabs should be absorbed into Syria. You don’t have a Palestinian national identity if you’re trying to get absorbed into Jordan. You don’t have a Palestinian national identity if you’re trying to get absorbed into Syria. Something about this story isn’t adding up. And even though some people, particularly those engaged in organized insurgencies against both Jews and Brits, may have been thinking along the lines of Palestinian national identity, there’s no good reason to believe that such views were widespread among the Arabs.
Cooper seems to oscillate between critiquing Zionist assumptions and agreeing with them. He wants to condemn them for failing to acknowledge the national characteristics of the people they’re ostensibly colonizing, yet also wants to explore the sociological dynamics of the pre-national identity of these people when explaining their failure to develop state institutions during the Mandate period–one essential area where the Jews were successful.
Cooper's storytelling, vivid and immersive, bursts open when confronted with the contradictory realities of Palestinian national identity. By trying to contain this complex, evolving identity within the rigid framework of Palestinian historiography, which insists upon a colonial relation between Zionists and Arabs, the narrative structure collapses under the pressure of its own contradictions.
Palestine: 2000 Years of Imperialism and Colonialism
As I’ve mentioned earlier, Palestinian historiography is burdened with bottomless ironies. But this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the name they chose for themselves: “Palestinians.”
The name “Palestine” first appears in the historical record in the 5th century BCE when Herodotus wrote of it as “a district of Syria” in The Histories. He was apparently under the impression that the Philistines, who we now know to have emigrated from Crete circa 1175 BCE, was the dominant political unit conquered by the Assyrians when they captured the southern Levant.
In reality, the region was populated by all manner of peoples, including the Israelites. Of these, the most enduring were the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Sometimes these kingdoms were independent and free. Other times, they were a district within a greater imperial power.
Ancient religious tradition characterizes the Philistines as the enemies of the Jews, and their numbers dwindled as the region changed hands from empire to empire. By the time the Romans conquered the region and renamed it Judaea (a derivative of “Judah”), the Philistines had long since ceased to exist as any kind of political unit.
But the memory of their role as the nemeses of the Jews lived on, and in an act of imperialistic cruelty, Rome renamed the province “Syria Palaestina” upon suppressing the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 CE. The spirit in which they chose this name is akin to that which might motivate modern-day Israel’s enemies to call the region “Hitlerland;” The purpose of this name was to humiliate the Jews and crush their national spirit.
That cruelty was promptly compounded by the expulsion of the majority of Jews from their homeland, kicking off the 2,000 year ordeal that would come to define most of Jewish history. Thus did the Roman Empire, seeking to destroy the Jews as a political unit, inflict the second exile in an attempt to erase all memory of Jewish connection to the homeland.
But the Jews did not forget. After two thousand years in exile, the Jews retained their national identity–updated it, even, along with all the other nations that had been touched by the Enlightenment.
Meanwhile, the region changed hands many more times. The Byzantines, Egyptians, and Turks were only some of the many foreign powers that would come to occupy the land. Consequently, its name and borders constantly changed.
The name “Palestine” remained in use along the same lines as the names “Dixie” and “Scandinavia.” Dixie and Scandinavia are not, and never have been, the names of sovereign political entities; these have only ever been the names for certain regions. Similarly, Palestine, also known as “The Holy Land” and other such names, was never sovereign; it was only ever a region under the jurisdiction of foreign powers.
Indeed, the lines on the map often cut right through the land. The border between the Jerusalem and Beirut districts of the Ottoman Empire split the region into multiple sanjuks, which were subdivisions of administrative districts called vilayets. By the time the first Zionists arrived, the land had been split into two vilayets, and incorporated territories not traditionally associated with Palestine.
The last time a sovereign political unit existed in the region, prior to the creation of the state of Israel, was in the 6th century BCE. The name of that state was the Kingdom of Judah.
With this information in hand, we can continue to modify Cooper’s analogy of the Jews who returned to the occupied house. The house is not owned by the Palestinian Arab inhabitants that the Jews find upon their return; it is owned by the Ottoman Empire. Prior to that, it was owned by the Mamluk Empire. And so on, and so on, until we get to the owners who most recently lived inside the house: the Jews. By 1920, the ownership changes hands again, this time to the British Empire. At no point in history do the Arab Palestinians own the house.
At some point in this whole conversation, it becomes natural to wonder: who exactly are the Palestinian people? And why do so many of them have names like al-Masri (literally, “the clan from Egypt”), al-Baghdadi (“the clan from Baghdad”), and al-Farisi (“the clan from Persia”)? Most importantly, why is there no record of anyone with the name “Al-Filistini” (“the clan from Palestine”) prior to the formation of Israel in 1948? Shouldn't we expect to find lots of people in Palestine with the name al-Filistini? Where are they?
I won’t keep you in suspense. The modern-day Palestinian people are the descendants of Muslims and Christians who conquered and subsequently flocked to the region, though some are descendants of Jews who succumbed to the pressure of conversion. None of them possess a national identity continuous with the ancient Philistines. They celebrate no holidays, observe no traditions, and maintain no cultural continuity indicative of any solidarity with that ancient sovereign entity. This raises the question of why they call themselves “Palestinians,” and the answer cuts to the heart of the irony I’ve been alluding to.
They only call themselves Palestinians because this was the name given to the region by the last foreign power to conquer the land. When the British Empire established the colonial entity known as the Mandate of Palestine in 1920, they did so with the understanding that this would be a temporary arrangement. As part of the Mandate system, they would colonize the labor and resources of different regions under the pretext that they were helping the locals establish state institutions, after which they would depart and leave the newly formed states to their own devices.
In the case of Palestine, colonization proceeded mainly through the development of a pipeline running from Mosul to Haifa. It also proceeded, rather substantially, through the procurement of money from Jews who were desperate to return to their homeland. If a Jew wanted to set up a farm on a plot of untouched land, they would not be able to do so for free; they had to pay the colonial power in the region, which extracted this wealth from them to enrich the British Empire.
The local Arabs, however, did not take kindly to the resulting influx of European Jews. By 1948, a nascent Palestinian national identity was forming.
But it was no match for the Jewish national identity, which had withstood two millennia of persecution under exile. This is why, by the time the British left in 1948, the Jews had developed state institutions and cohesive military apparatuses, while the local Arabs had not. The former could unite as a cohesive political unit despite barriers in both language and proximate diasporic history, while the latter could not even agree whether they wanted to be absorbed into Syria, Jordan, or become an independent political unit, despite having a common language and history. The only thing they agreed upon was that the Jews must not have sovereignty anywhere in the land.
Following their defeat in the 1948 war, their resentment and trauma crystallized into what we today recognize as the Palestinian national identity. The story that defines this identity is one which casts Israel as a colonial project of an imperial power, and the Palestinians as a colonized people.
And therein lies the central irony of Palestinian historiography. The name that they chose for themselves–Palestinians–is the name given to the region by the Roman empire to humiliate the Jews. It is the name that condemned the Jews to two thousand years of exile and persecution under Christian and Muslim rule. It is the name given to the region once more by the British colonial power that extorted the wealth of Jews desperate to return home, and which, as we shall see, closed the gates of the homeland just when the Jews needed it most.
This name, Palestine, carries two thousand years of imperial and colonial aggression against the Jewish people. And this is the identity embraced by the side of the conflict presuming to be on the side of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. The gods of heavy-handed irony wept.
Assumption #4: The Understandable Resistance of the Colonized
Palestinian historiography insists that the lack of a national identity among the Arabs of the region does not preclude the possibility that they were nevertheless the victims of colonization. After all, Native Americans tribes never had a state of their own, yet who could claim that the European colonists had not colonized them? It’s literally in the name: colonists.
Let’s put to one side the fact that, unlike with Jews and the Holy Land, the European colonists did not have national identities which had formed in the New World, and maintained neither material nor ideological connections to the land in their absence. There is a crucial point that consistently gets overlooked in attempts at characterizing Zionism as a colonial project, and that is the role of exploitation.
“Colonialism” as Euphemism
The dictionary definition of colonialism is “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.” I emphasize the conjunctive article, “and,” to highlight the fact that ALL of these criteria need to be satisfied for something to qualify as colonialism.
The “exploiting it economically” part is significant. It represents the entire purpose of a colonial enterprise: to siphon away resources from a colonial outpost to the colonizing motherland. That is the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and that nature is conspicuously absent from the history of Zionism. The Jews did not siphon away Palestine’s (non-existent) resources to a distant motherland; they were in the motherland, and they invested everything into developing it.
Britain builds a pipeline from Mosul to Haifa to control the region’s oil and enrich the motherland? That’s textbook colonialism. France takes over Morocco and uproots its male population to serve as cannon fodder for the glory of the motherland in the first world war? Again, textbook.
But what are the Jews doing? Throughout the podcast, Cooper uses phrases like “the Zionists were freaking everyone out, kicking down doors and making a big mess,” or, “the Zionists were colonizing the region.” But what was the actual reality on the ground? What happens when we speak clearly in place of these meaningless euphemisms? Truly, I have no idea what “doors” the Zionists kept kicking down, but I’m sure the carpenters in the region are happy with all the business the Jews must be bringing them, what with all these broken doors everywhere.
As it turns out, when we cut the BS and stop using euphemisms, the complaint comes down to the fact that the Jews were moving in and buying private property from Arabs, no longer abiding by the jizya and dhimmitude that the Arabs had grown so accustomed to over the centuries. The Jews were not exploiting the labor or resources of the locals; they were moving in and buying private property, exercising the same property rights that everyone else in the region enjoyed.
And the European Jews that were moving in had, unlike their cousins who’d remained in the Middle East over the centuries, developed an appetite for the Enlightenment. They brought with them such radical notions as equality under the law and freedom of religion–things which had formerly unheard of in the Middle East. These were not the servile, dhimmified Jews that the local Arabs had come to know and expect subordination from. These Jews were free, and the British colonizers who took over the region in 1920 shared these sentiments.
If “colonization” means “de facto overthrowing Islamic traditions of dhimmitude and jizya, and replacing them with western norms of equality under the law,” then sure, colonization proceeded in earnest. By this logic, the American South was “colonized” by the Yankees when they came in and forced a change in the labor laws. Certainly, that’s how the KKK saw it when they subsequently went around, butchering uppity blacks who were exercising their newfound rights; and that’s how the local Arabs saw it when they also went around, killing westernized Jews who had the temerity not to bow to their Muslim masters when they passed them in the streets.
When you say it clearly, without euphemism, the historiography of the Palestinian side gets its door kicked down.
But Cooper is unlikely to be satisfied with this rejoinder. He repeatedly emphasizes that religion is not implicated on the Arab side of the conflict’s origins, and that the fundamental cause of consternation was mass migration from Europe. The problem, Cooper is likely to argue, isn’t that the migrants were Jews; it’s that they were seen as European. We can infer from this that, had mass migration occurred from regions with which the Palestinian Arabs personally identified—say, Arabs migrating from other parts of the Arab World, like modern-day Iraq or Syria—then there wouldn’t have been a problem.
It just so happens that I agree with this last claim. Had Arabs flocked into Mandatory Palestine with the intention of creating their own state from other parts of the Arab-speaking world, then I am certain that there would not have been a century-long conflict between the Old Arabs and the New Arabs. How could there be conflict with migrating Arabs from Iraq, when Palestine was already replete with people whose names literally mean “clan from Baghdad?” How could there be conflict with migrating Arabs from Syria, when Palestine was already replete with people who wanted the region to be absorbed into Syria?
On the surface, this thought experiment might appear to support the claim that the problem was the perception of colonization, not religiously motivated bigotry against Jews. And yet. Consider the following:
Suppose that, instead of Arabs from other parts of the Middle East, it had been Jews from other parts of the Arabian peninsula. Jews from Yemen, Jews from Iraq, Jews from Afghanistan and Libya, all pouring into Palestine, rather than European Jews. All united in their Zionist dream to reestablish their national homeland. What then? Would Cooper expect us to believe that the Palestinians would have been alright with this? That they would have been fine with Jews from other parts of the Arab-speaking world establishing national sovereignty in lands formerly conquered by Muslims?
There is an unambiguously correct answer to this question. It’s the answer that screams out to us when we study the histories of other ethnic minorities within lands conquered by Muslims, from Druze in Syria to Maronites in Lebanon, from Bahai in Iran to Kurds in Iraq. It’s the answer that screams out to us when we examine the Palestinian attitude towards Israel after the surrounding Muslim countries applied intimidation, political violence, and in several cases, bloody pogroms, to ethnically cleanse themselves of 900,000 Jews, most of whom fled to Israel; to this day, Israel enjoys a majority population of Jews descended from the Arabic (as opposed to European) diaspora, but this fact has done nothing to assuage Palestinian hatred.
The answer to our thought experiment continues screaming out to us when we read their slogans (“The Jews are our dogs!”), their picket signs (“Water to water, Palestine is Arab!”), and even their creative works. Here is a poem authored by Sheikh Sulayman al-Taji (al-Faruqi) in a November 1913 issue of the Jaffa Arab daily Filastin, summarizing the widespread attitude of Jewish land purchases from the local Arabs:
Jews, sons of clinking gold, stop your deceit; We shall not be cheated into bartering away our country! . . . The Jews, the weakest of all peoples and the least of them, Are haggling us for our land; how can we slumber on?
Keep in mind, this was November 1913. British colonization of the region would not take place for another seven years, and Israeli independence would not be declared for another thirty-five. They are not confused about who the migrants are. They are not complaining about European aliens. They are complaining about Jews.
The results of our thought experiment suggest that the conflict is not simply about European colonization but about Jewish sovereignty itself, which would have been resisted regardless of the Jews’ geographic origin. Islamic traditions of dominance over non-Muslim minorities played a significant role in shaping the Arab response to Jewish sovereignty, and the efforts of Palestinian historiographers (and, by extension, Cooper) to downplay this fact is revealing.
What’s the Evidence for Colonialism?
The accusation of Jewish colonization over the region is restricted to two lines of evidence: written records by important Zionist figures and institutions, and the presence of a European colonial power that facilitated Zionist migration. Neither of these survive scrutiny.
The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, is cited by Palestinian historiography as having introduced colonialism into the Zionist project from the outset. Evidence supporting this claim is derived principally from passages of the movement’s foundational text, The Jewish State, as well as unsent personal correspondences to colonial figures like Cecil Rhodes.
Derivatives of the word “colony” appear eight times in The Jewish State, and in no instance does it entail the forceful removal or exploitation of the land’s current inhabitants. A characteristic passage reads:
Should the Powers declare themselves willing to admit our sovereignty over a neutral piece of land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentine. In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.
The Society of Jews will treat with the present masters of the land, putting itself under the protectorate of the European Powers, if they prove friendly to the plan. We could offer the present possessors of the land enormous advantages, assume part of the public debt, build new roads for traffic, which our presence in the country would render necessary, and do many other things. The creation of our State would be beneficial to adjacent countries, because the cultivation of a strip of land increases the value of its surrounding districts in innumerable ways.
In this context, Herzl’s use of the term “colonization” refers not to the formal practice of colonialism, in which invaders subjugate and exploit a land and its people, but to the innocent practice of establishing a community. The Oxford English Dictionary records the following definitions of the word “colony”:
a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country.
a group of people of one nationality or ethnic group living in a foreign city or country.
In the parlance of the late 1800s, when Herzl was writing his document, one could sensibly refer to today’s community of ethnic Iranians living in Los Angeles as “the Persian colony” without implying anything sinister about their intentions. What Palestinian historiographers have effectively done with such passages is to equivocate between the innocent sense of the term that Herzl was using with the sinister meaning associated with characters like Cecil Rhodes.
Speaking of which, Herzl’s unsent correspondences with Rhodes does not provide evidence of colonization in the latter sense of the term. The invocation of Rhodes in these discussions seems to function as little more than an attempt at establishing guilt by association. Nowhere in Herzl’s drafted correspondences is there any talk of establishing an operation aimed at extracting wealth from the land, as Rhodes had done with the diamond fields of South Africa. Upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that the use of the term “colony” and its derivatives in Herzl’s written works, correspondences with Rhodes, and organizations like the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, does not provide evidence of plans to exploit or subjugate the Arabs of Palestine.
Neither does the fact that Zionists tried to work with the Mandate system from 1920 onwards to facilitate their project. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British Empire declared its intention to establish “a national homeland for the Jewish people,” does not reflect any desire on the part of Jews to economically exploit Palestine to enrich some distant motherland.
The fact that Great Britain intended this for itself is immaterial to the accusation being directed at Israel. In any complex act of statecraft, many people with different motivations will be involved, and people out of power—like persecuted Jews fleeing Europe—will be forced to do business with whoever happens to be in power.
From 1882 to 1920, the Zionists did business with the Ottoman Empire. It doesn’t follow from this that Zionism was therefore an imperial enterprise. Similarly, the presence of Brits in Palestine who wanted Jews to leave Europe out of feelings of antisemitism, or who wanted Jews to establish their state out of apocalyptic theological convictions, does not imply that the Zionist project was predicated upon the hatred of Jews or the desire for Jesus to return. And likewise, the presence of Brits who imposed a colonial enterprise over the land does not imply that the people who were forced to do business with them–including both Jews and Arabs–were themselves engaging in colonialism.
The Role of Eviction and Radicalization
None of this should be taken to imply that the Jews acted like saints. As Herzl himself wrote in his diary:
We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
The way it went down was like this. Zionist organizations would coordinate the financial, logistical, and political resources necessary to move Jews from Europe to Palestine. Funding was procured through philanthropic and lobbying efforts with various governmental agencies, and upon arrival, newly emigrated Jews would be provided training and housing to help build the country.
Land for businesses and farms was purchased either directly from the landowners, or indirectly from the empire in charge if there were no private owners. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but according to the Peel Commission of 1937,
The shortage of land is due less to purchase by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population. The Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought… The shortage of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.
Of the land that had been peopled, the majority of tenants were subsequently evicted. There were exactly zero cases of land being forcibly seized from the original Arab landlords.
Most of this business took place from 1901 to 1925 with the Sursock Purchases, which according to a 1946 memorandum published by the Arab Higher Committee accounted for around 60% of the subset of land purchases in which prior tenants were evicted. According to the Shaw Commission, this purchase reflected an eviction of around 1800 families.
The total number of Arabs evicted from Zionist land purchases can be estimated after granting generous assumptions that inflate the true figure. Rounding the number of families evicted in the Sursock Purchases up to 2000, and estimating an average of ten family members per household, we arrive at a figure of twenty-thousand evictees. Double that to account for the remaining 40% not accounted for by this specific set of purchases, and you get a total figure of no more than forty-thousand Arab Palestinians who were evicted due to Zionist land purchases. This accounts for 3% of the Arab population in Palestine in 1946.
I don’t deny unpleasantness of forced eviction, especially in cases where evictees had been tied to the land for multiple generations. But I do deny that, accumulated over 3% of the population and over the course of sixty years, this constitutes such a serious breach of the social contract as to warrant the immense violence that the Palestinian Arabs unleashed upon the Jews from 1920 onwards.
I will have much more to say on this subject in the next section, but beginning in 1920, the Arabs of Palestine enacted escalating acts of mass rape and murder. This culminated in a pogrom in the city of Hebron, which ultimately resulted in the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population—a population consisting principally of families that had resided there for eight centuries.
These escalating acts of violence, which continued into the thirties through the Arab Revolts, had the effect of increasingly radicalizing the Jewish population. Contrary to Cooper’s suggestion that it had been the Zionist firebrand, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who’d radicalized the Jews, every indication is that it was the violence of the Arabs themselves that led to the increasing militancy of the Zionists.
The most moderate of the self-defense organizations formed by Zionists in response to the escalating violence of Arab Palestinians, the Haganah, was formed in 1920 after the Nebi Musa riots, of which more will be said later. This force consisted mainly of untrained Jewish farmers who took turns defending their settlements, but became more centralized and professional in response to the ethnic cleansing of Hebron in 1929.
In 1931, a paramilitary organization called the Irgun was created. It was rooted in the more radical ideology expressed by Jabotinsky, which vascillated between endorsements for colonialism (by which I mean the actual kind), and appeals to more liberal solutions to Zionist problems; the attitude he endorsed varied largely as a function of his mood at the time of writing.
It will come as little surprise that Palestinian historiographers love to quote the things that Jabotinsky wrote in his more fiery moods as evidence that Zionism was an inherently aggressive enterprise. Cooper himself quotes Jabotinsky extensively in his podcast in support of this thesis. But it is important to remember that Jabotinsky’s ideology was accepted by only about 1% of the Zionists when he first came onto the scene, and never entered the double digits until after the Palestinian Arabs had ethnically cleansed Hebron. Regardless, it never enjoyed anything close to majority support from Zionists; the overwhelming majority adhered to more moderate variants of the ideology.
To Cooper’s credit, he does at some point acknowledge that Jabotinsky was much less extreme and much more liberal than his opponents give him credit for, but we’re never presented any evidence to support this. We are only ever treated quotes about his expansionist and colonial dreams, and never quotes like the following:
I never said that [Zionists ought to expel Arabs from Palestine], or anything that could be interpreted in this sense. My position is, on the contrary, that no one will expel from the Land of Israel its Arab inhabitants, either all or a portion of them—this is, first of all, immoral, and secondly, impossible.
Even “radical” Jabotinsky had maintained repeatedly that Arabs living inside of the Jewish state ought to be granted equal rights under the law. And this remained his position, as well as nearly everyone else’s, throughout the episodes of violence and mass murder that repeatedly plagued Jews in Mandatory Palestine. True enough, the Zionists had increasingly developed an appetite for Arab expulsion as the Yishuv (the Jewish community in the Land of Israel) was treated to pogrom after pogrom, but it never became an officially endorsed feature of state policy. There will be much more to say about the mechanics of the Nakba later on in this essay, but suffice it to say that the mass expulsion of Arabs from Palestine was ultimately carried out not as a matter of express Zionist principle, but as an inconsistently applied military directive during a defensive war, and almost exclusively in response to evolving situations on the ground.
Returning to the subject at hand, the true radicals of the Zionist movement emerged in 1940 with the formation of the terrorist organization, Lehi. It was a deeply unpopular group that attempted to form an alliance with Nazi Germany, was roundly condemned by nearly all the Jews in Mandatory Palestine, and never numbered greater than one thousand. More will be said about their role in the conflict in the next section.
For now, let us close with a summary of this fourth and most crucial of assumptions advanced by Palestinian historiography. By casting Zionists and colonizers and the Arabs of Palestine as colonized, Cooper dutifully recites the framework that sanitizes Palestinian violence against the Jews as a form of understandable (if not necessarily justifiable) resistance.
The characterization of Zionism as a colonial enterprise fails to hold up under scrutiny when the actual definitions and historical practices of colonialism are considered. Unlike colonists of the sort alluded to by those who charge Zionism with this term, the Jews did not arrive in Palestine to exploit its resources and send wealth back to a distant motherland. Instead, they invested in developing the land they viewed as their ancestral home. The practices of economic exploitation and forced displacement that are central to actual colonial endeavors are not reflected in the actions of Zionist settlers who purchased land and sought to integrate—albeit contentiously—into the region.
Furthermore, the assertion that Zionism was merely a form of European colonialism overlooks the complex religious and national dynamics at play, revealing a deeper conflict rooted in identity and sovereignty rather than simple colonial ambition. Upon scrutinizing the terms and historical context, it becomes clear that the shoe of colonialism will not fit the foot of Zionism, no matter how much twisting of the original definition or cherry-picking of nonrepresentative quotes one engages in.
Assumption #5: The Jewish Question
“What did the Jews do to earn the violent treatment that they suffer, and have long suffered, at the hands of the Palestinians?”
This is the principal question that Palestinian historiography builds towards in its quest to legitimize the long-doomed project of undoing Israel’s existence. In the Arab-speaking context, it has a simple answer.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was translated into Arabic in 1920, which incidentally was the year that Arab violence against the Jews escalated in the aforementioned Nebi Musa riots. Its influence on the closest thing the Palestinians had at the time to a leader of a national movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was profound. He was the leader of the notable al-Husseini clan, the head of the Arab Higher Committee, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Today, he is largely remembered for his activities during the years of World War 2: living in Berlin, befriending Hitler and Himmler, recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the SS to enthusiastically enact the Final Solution, and transmitting Hitlerian bile over the radio to Arabs back home. He also supported the 1941 Axis-backed coup in Iraq, instigating a pogrom in the process against the ancient Jewish community that resided there. 180 Jews were murdered in what came to be known as the Farhud (“violent dispossession.”)
This is an abridged history of how Islamic antisemitism, previously restricted to a theological character of the sort already discussed, took on the worst aspects of its European counterparts. The result today is a shocking degree of dehumanization and paranoia about Jews in the Arab-speaking world, normalized to the point where antisemitic tropes are widely internalized and casually repeated by enormous swathes of Arab-speaking populations.
This makes for ineffective propaganda when targeting Western populations, which are far less receptive to such rhetoric. It would not be until the 1960s when, with the aid of Soviet institutions wielding ready-made templates for postcolonial historical revisionism, Palestinian leaders and intellectuals would present a historiography more palatable to the West. That historiography, which Cooper has enthusiastically recited on his podcast, has been the subject of this essay.
And it is on the subject of the Jewish Question that Cooper’s distortions of the historical record, inherited from the Palestinian historiography that he uncritically parrots, are so vast in their number and severity as to warrant a harsher tone in the course of correcting them. The answer to the Jewish Question in the English-speaking world is: “The Jews punished Palestine for the sins of Europe.” And this is the answer that Cooper embraces.
The Roaring 20s
The years leading up to 1920, from 1882 onwards, had not been as peaceful as Palestinian historiography often suggests. The violence began as early as the mid-1880s, and broke out intermittently thereafter. In every instance, the instigators were the Arabs. By April 1914, the British consul in Jerusalem was reporting that the assaults upon Jews in the outlying districts were becoming increasingly frequent. The reason Palestinian historiographers remain silent on these early skirmishes is because their narrative claims that the conflict began in 1917 with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration. Starting the clock any earlier runs the risk of suggesting that the conflict began prior to the involvement of a colonial power, and such an admission threatens Assumption #4. What is all sides do agree on, however, is that the violence radically escalated from 1920 onwards.
By 1920, according to Cooper, the Jews have done much to invite a violent response.“Completely unjustifiable of course,” he maintains with a clear of his throat, before proceeding to explain why the rapes and murders that followed are “nevertheless understandable.” After euphemistically referring to Jewish land purchases and evictions with that omnipresent phrase, “they were kicking the door down all over the place,” he finally explains what happened.
An annual festival marking the traditional Islamic pilgrimage to the shrine of Nabi Musa, purportedly the tomb of Moses, took place in the spring of 1920. As the procession of devout Muslims made its way through the Old City of Jerusalem, the atmosphere became charged with conflict.
The previous month, an Arab militia had attacked and destroyed the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai, which they’d initially expected to be harboring enemy troops in the ongoing Franco-Syrian war. Following a misunderstanding, a firefight broke out, and eight Jews and five Arabs were killed. When it was done, the Arabs burned Tel Hai to the ground. It wasn’t the first Jewish settlement to have been attacked and destroyed by local Arabs since the Zionists started arriving, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Now, a month later, tensions soared between the local Arabs and Jews. Zionist authorities had noted the lack of armed British police and soldiers, raising concerns about their ability to maintain order in the upcoming festival. Requests for additional law enforcement were denied. Consequently, a group of volunteers, consisting largely of local sports clubs and a handful of veterans, came together to train in calisthenics, practice hand-to-hand combat with sticks, and marched in formations to coordinate defense in case the need arose.
It was wholly inadequate. Tens of thousands of Muslims flooded into the Old City on the morning of April the 4th. By 10:00 in the morning, there were already attacks on Jews in the alleyways of the city. The aforementioned Grand Mufti–the one who ended up befriending Hitler–delivered a fiery speech to the crowd, which was already agitated by the defiant posture of the European Jews who were not conducting themselves in the servile manner befitting a dhimmi. His uncle, the mayor of Jerusalem, stoked the flames of Jew-hatred with a speech of his own.
It was at this time that the crowd began chanting, "Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs!" When Arab police joined in on the applause, the riot broke out. A pogrom followed.
Jewish shops, homes, and individuals–regardless of whether they had been around for centuries, or days–were targeted by the mob. The looting, burglary, arson, and murder continued for five days. The diary of a Palestinian teacher, who had witnessed the events firsthand, recounted how the mob had shouted, “Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword!” Several Jewish women were raped in the streets of Jerusalem.
By the time the British finally restored order, a handful of people had been killed, but over two hundred Jews had been injured. In contrast, only a couple dozen Arabs experienced injuries.
Perversely, Cooper suggests that the fault of the Nebi Musa riots ultimately rests with vaguely worded “Zionist provocation.” He alludes to the marches undertaken by the volunteer defense force, Zionist slogans declaring their intention to establish a national homeland, and the ongoing land purchases (“kicking down the door,” in his parlance) that were evicting an underwhelming minority of the local Arabs. These, he insists, were the root causes of the violence. In so doing, Cooper maintains that time-honored tradition of Palestinian historiography in which Arab responsibility is downplayed through vague gestures towards Jewish “misbehavior.”
Please try to understand what Cooper is attempting to convince us of. Religious Muslims, many of whom were pilgrims to the region with little knowledge of the conflict, who listened to inflammatory speeches given by their spiritual leader in the Old City, who chanted religiously-motivated expressions of Jew-hatred and violence, and who targeted Jews irrespective of their affiliation with the Zionist movement—these people, Cooper insists, were not principally motivated by theological considerations. They were just resisting colonization in the only confused, angry, and misguided way they knew how.
This narrative taxes the credulity of the credulous. And it’s only made worse by the fact that Cooper can’t seem to make up his mind about whether the Zionists are being loud and provocative in declaring their intentions to take over the land, or whether they’re being sneaky and duplicitous by pretending that this wasn’t what they were after. Multiple times throughout the series, he claims that the British soldiers despised the duplicity and underhandedness of the Zionists, who by his account pretended not to interpret the Balfour declaration’s use of the term “national home” to mean “a state for the Jews.” It therefore comes as a bit of a shock when he also remarks that the Zionists were provoking the local Arabs with demonstrations of their intent to seize the land for themselves.
Well, which one was it? Were the Jews being too sneaky, and therefore earning the well-deserved hatred of the British? Or were they being too provocative, and therefore earning the well-deserved hatred of the Arabs? Perhaps the answer varies depending on who is in the scene being narrated by Cooper. If the British are in the scene, then the Zionists are being sneaky and duplicitous. If the Arabs are in the scene, then the Zionists are being loud and provocative. And if both the British and the Arabs are in the scene, then both groups are in an impossible situation where they all lack agency and their hands are tied; the British have to follow the orders of the clueless government being manipulated by sneaky Zionists, and the Arabs have to desperately watch their own country slip away from them while the Zionists taunt and provoke them. Both are at the mercy of the Zionists, who are the only people in this story who have any agency.
Let’s return to the history. The year after the Nebi Musa riots shook the Yishuv to its core, a fistfight broke out between communists and Zionists during a May Day parade through the cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. As the disturbance spread, Arab men took advantage of the British police’s distraction to break into Jewish buildings and murder their inhabitants. Arab women followed to loot the residences that were now occupied only by the stabbed, beaten, and shot corpses of Jewish men, women, and children. An Arab police officer cornered two Jewish women with a gun and tried, thankfully without success, to rape them. They were the lucky ones.
The disturbance did not abate for an entire week. And during that time, a dark, new development materialized: Zionist reprisal. For the first of many times, in the aftermath of Arab attacks on Jews, revenge killings took place. By the time the dust had settled, both sides had lost around fifty people, with most of the Arab casualties being the result of actions on the part of British police. But for the first time in the now forty-year conflict, innocent Arab blood had been spilt by vengeful Zionists.
This pattern would become a fixture of the conflict, which persists to this day: Arabs attack Jews, Jews respond by attacking Arabs, and people like Darryl Cooper condemn the violence on all sides, assuring us that while such actions are never justifiable, they are nevertheless ultimately the fault of Zionists for “kicking down all the doors.” There is something depraved about this logic, in which Palestinians can seemingly never be responsible for any of the bad things they do.
I have heard of many Israelis who accept national responsibility for things like Deir Yassin, of which I’ll have more to say shortly. There is no shortage of Israelis who express remorse for military actions resulting in things widely viewed as grim necessities, like the unintended crossfire deaths of civilians during wars with Hamas. But I have never heard of Palestinians, in any significant number, expressing both responsibility and remorse (sometimes, they’ll express only the former) for any of the bad things they have done. And people like Darryl Cooper encourage this habit with their rhetoric. From Nebi Musa and Jaffa to the present day, the Palestinian people are never responsible for any of the bad things they do.
The ethnic cleansing of Hebron in 1929 was a turning point in the conflict. The Grand Mufti spread a rumor that the Jews were planning to attack Al-Aqsa, the mosque that previous Muslim empires had erected atop the Temple Mount, the most holy Jewish site in the world, in a demonstration of Islamic dominance. In reality, the Jews had no such intention, and it had been al-Husseini who’d raised tensions with provocations. For example, he ordered construction to be performed above the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, causing bricks and mule feces to fall onto the praying Jews below.
A libelous campaign accusing the Jews of attacking Arabs and cursing the Prophet Muhammad proceeded in earnest. As preachers publicly urged their congregations to fight the Jews to the last drop of blood, al-Husseini’s activists were busy distributing fliers calling on Muslims to “avenge the honor of Islam.” The rumors spiraled out of control, and within hours, the Jewish Quarter was filled with burning shops and dead Jews. Before long, the libel reached Hebron.
On August 23, 1929, 700 Muslims assembled at Hebron’s central bus station to lend additional strength to the mobs in Jerusalem. Their efforts were frustrated by the British authorities, who recalled the buses in a bid to contain the violence. Refusing to be denied a part in the slaughter, the aspiring pogromists agreed to settle for the Jews in the city, indifferent to the fact that they had lived there for eight centuries and had nothing to do with Zionism. They also conferred on the pressing matter of how the Jewish women were to be divvied up. By nightfall, the first murder had already occurred in Hebron.
The following morning, the pogrom of Hebron was in full swing. It was an attack of unparalleled savagery. Within desecrated houses of worship and the ruins of people’s residences lay the mutilated corpses of men, women, and children. They had mostly been murdered with edged and blunt instruments, but not before being forced through unspeakable ordeals.
Fingers, hands, and eyes were cut from the victims. Students had their throats slit in front of their teachers. A rabbi, immobilized by the carnage unfolding before him, tearfully commended the souls of his Jews to God before being scalped by the mob. Girls as young as thirteen, along with their mothers and grandmothers, were shoved into the pools of blood that were spreading from the bodies of their friends and families, to be raped in unison by the mob. As before, Arab police participated in the carnage.
When it was finally over, around 65 Jews were dead. The same number died in other incidents that spread throughout Palestine, from Jerusalem to Safed. And in the years that followed, the Jewish community of Hebron declined and dwindled to nothing. It would not be until many years later, with the rise of the settlement movement in modern-day Israel, that Jews would finally return to the city.
Cooper repeats the oft-reported claim that most of the surviving Jews had been saved by Arab families. In reality, only a few families had been saved by some Arab neighbors; the majority were saved either by the British authorities or through their own efforts.
A similarly barbaric incident, though greater in scale, took place many years later. It had also been justified on the libelous grounds that the Jews planned to defile Al-Aqsa. That event took place on October 7, 2023.
Darryl Cooper Becomes a Propagandist
Cooper’s pretense to historical accuracy grinds to a screeching halt in his discussion of the events leading up to the Israeli War of Independence. His least pungent offenses cover the decade of the 1930s, and include his omission of the Jewish death toll (several hundreds) from the 1936-1939 Arab revolts. To his credit, his microscopic focus on the treatment of Arab insurgents at the hands of the British provides valuable, if incomplete, insights into their motivations and circumstances.
It therefore immediately raises suspicions when he describes the casualties on the Arab side of the conflict, not in the characteristically precise terms that he uses to meticulously describe every sordid detail of their suppression at the hands of the British, but in the misleading terms expressed by Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi. He reports that by the end of the revolt, ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population had been killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The presence of the disjunctive operator “or” indicates that this shocking figure is a misleading inflation of the actual human cost of the revolt, and his omission of the number of casualties in real terms suggests that this is deliberate.
Census data shows that the number of Arabs living in Palestine in 1939 was approximately one million. The number killed and wounded during the revolts was, respectively, five thousand and fifteen thousand. That means that the actual number of deaths constituted 0.5% of the population, with total casualties (deaths plus injuries) of 2%. If the census data does not take into account the exiles, and their number is as substantial as Cooper implies, then these figures become much smaller.
More suspicious irregularities abound. Cooper repeatedly insists that Jewish mass migration consisted principally of fighting-age men “cut from the same cloth as the Bolsheviks” (who, he takes pains to remind us, overthrew the Russian empire and violently murdered the czar with his family). Had he restricted this characterization to the third major wave of Jewish migrations (the “third aliyah”) between 1919 and 1923, then he might have had something resembling a point. Only 36% of that wave consisted of women, and communist sympathies ran disproportionately high relative to other migration waves. But of the 550,000 Jewish migrants that came to Palestine between 1882 and 1947, only 40,000 belonged to that third wave.
For the other aliyahs, and the fourth and fifth especially (1924 to 1939), the migrants consisted largely of middle-class families fleeing persecution. Their number accounts for 330,000 of the incoming migrants, dwarving the 40,000 of the third Aliyah, which Cooper bizarrely insists to have skewed the demographics of the nation towards youthful, volatile men “cut from the same cloth as the Bolsheviks.”
Perhaps Cooper hopes that by associating Zionist demography with the violent revolutionary zeal of Lenin’s and Stalin’s forces, he can paint a portrait of Jews in Palestine as a subversive and violent force that the locals could justifiably fear, given their ominous association with the Soviet Union. If that is indeed Cooper’s intention, then it falls flat in the face of empirical data.
Another area where Cooper’s framing keels under the propagandistic weight of the Palestinian historiography that has governed his approach to events is with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Palestinian historiography always attempts to downplay his role in the Nazi regime, which is understandable given his leadership position in the earliest days of the Palestinian national movement.
Cooper faithfully adheres to this tradition. He characterizes al-Husseini’s alliance with Hitler as one that was fundamentally nationalistic in character, rather than antisemitic. To maintain this frame, it was necessary for Cooper to omit any mention of the Mufti’s role in the Final Solution, in which he actively recruited Bosnian Muslims to SS death squads. He also had to omit the fact that the Grand Mufti expressed aspirations to eventually build a concentration camp in Palestine.
The only thing stopping al-Husseini was not his lack of will, but rather his very limited means of ever fully realizing his exterminationist ambitions. His attempts to gain a foothold in the region with the botched Operation Atlas, a top secret collaboration between the Nazis and the Mufti’s men within Mandatory Palestine, went nowhere. Even so, the significance of his association with the regime should not be understressed; it indicates that the ethos that would eventually come to define Palestinian national identity has always been, at least on some level, continuous with Nazism.
Where Cooper’s framing starts to become truly unforgivable is in his characterization of the rise of Zionist insurgency operations against the British during the 1940s. From the way he describes the situation, it sounds as though the Jews found themselves in an inexplicably ungrateful mood, leading them to betray the very same British officials who, in Cooper’s words, had made it possible for the Zionist project to get off the ground in the first place. The Zionists stabbed Britain in the back because they didn’t give the Jews everything they wanted.
Putting off to one side the fact that Zionist mass migration began long before the British took over Palestine, I have to ask: is Cooper truly this blind to why the Jews were so angry with the Brits? When the White Paper Declaration was issued in 1939, severely curtailing Jewish immigration to their region just when they needed it most, the Zionists ceased to regard the British as anything but yet another in a long string of imperial powers that had taken over their homeland. Jews had already started to become disillusioned from 1920 onwards, when it appeared that the British were much more interested in developing their pipeline and extorting desperate Jews for land than in protecting them from murderous Palestinian mobs.
Worse, with the issuance of the 1939 White Paper, it became clear to the Zionists that Britain was more interested in playing politics with the local Arabs than in protecting the lives of European Jews. And as the horrors of the Holocaust grew increasingly evident, the mood of the Zionist community turned decisively against the British. From the perspective of many Zionists, the refusal of the British to accept Jewish refugees into their homeland made them complicit in the Holocaust. So when the war ended, and the full scale of what had transpired in Europe became clear, terror organizations like the Irgun and Lehi engaged in acts of escalating horror against the British.
I do not dispute the immorality of the bombing of the King David Hotel, which the British had been using as a base; neither do I make excuses for or any other such action. What I object to is Cooper’s calculated omission of the Zionists’ moral reasoning, flawed as it was, for their acts of terror against the British in Palestine. And his decision to ignore this context is calculated, because it facilitates his claim that the Jews carried out these insurgencies out of cynical opportunism. By his reckoning, they were eager to kick out the British so that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians could begin without interference. This distortion of events, which neglects the way Zionist attitudes were shaped by Great Britain’s unwitting facilitation of the Holocaust in violation of their Mandate, exudes vileness to a degree that language hardly has the power to adequately portray.
Ultimately, the British relented to the pressure built up by insurgency and the international community. It had already been clear since the failure of the Peel commission in 1937 that the British, for all their bluster about partitions and binational arrangements, had no solution to the problem of Mandatory Palestine.
The true nature of the problem was marvelously articulated in 1947 by the British secretary of state for foreign affairs (and fervent anti-Zionist), Ernest Bevin. In February of that year, Bevin delivered an address to the parliamentary House of Commons to explain why Britain had failed in its efforts to transition Palestine from its Mandatory condition to an independent state. According to him,
His Majesty's Government have…been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.
And this, in a nutshell, encapsulates the entire conflict. The Jews wanted a state, and the Arabs wanted Jews not to have a state more than they themselves wanted a state. That was the situation in 1920, it was the situation in 1947, and it continues to be the situation today.
The intransigence of the Arabs, combined with the evident desire of the British to abandon their Mandate, made it clear to the Zionists that unless drastic action was taken, they would soon be out of time. If the British were to leave, and the Arabs of Palestine declared national sovereignty over the entire land, then the Jews would surely be driven out. Moreover, there was no democratic solution to the problem; if the Jews and Arabs were to form a representative system, then it would cease to be democratic after the very first vote because the substantial Arab majority would inevitably call for the confiscation of Jewish property and the implementation of dhimmitude. Bevin was quite right: there was an irreconcilable conflict of principles between a group of people who wanted sovereignty, and a group of people who didn’t want the other group to have sovereignty.
Darryl Cooper Forfeits any Remaining Claim to Historical Accuracy
The way Cooper depicts the events of 1947-1949 is easily the worst part of his podcast series. After all of the manipulations of fact that had characterized his presentation up until this point, I was still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the omissions and distortions characterizing his account of this period are so egregious that this section single-handedly caused me to lose any remaining trust in Cooper. There is simply no excuse for what he does from this point forward.
In November of 1947, the United Nations conferred to vote on General Assembly Resolution 181 to decide on the issue of Palestine. Mandatory Palestine had already been split into the Arab Kingdom of Transjordan, and the remaining fraction of the original Mandate was now under review by the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine.
They put forward a partition plan that afforded Jews some of the coastal regions and most of the barren Negev desert while allowing the Arabs the best coastal areas, the strategically important Golan Heights, and the Judean Mountain region which contained all the holy sites. The Zionists thought that this was a raw deal, but grudgingly accepted; in the aftermath of the Holocaust, they had a nation to rebuild, and even this would have to do. The Arab states, however, assured the world that they would never accept partition, and that the moment the British Mandate expired, they would militarily overwhelm any Jewish resistance to the establishment of an Arab state over all of Palestine.
Cooper repeats unsubstantiated propaganda released by the Arab states at the time that the Jews had cheated in the resulting vote. According to him, the only reason the partition plan passed in a 33-13 vote was because the Zionists had bribed and threatened the members of multiple delegations, and because the Zionists had aggressively lobbied the United States and Soviet Union to throw their diplomatic weight behind partition. This last part is probably correct, and reflects much of how international politics is practiced by all states; the former accusations, however, are entirely speculative.
Characteristically, Cooper omits the role that the Arabs’ threats of war and oil embargos played in their own lobbying efforts—to speak nothing of the widely reported allegation that the Arab Higher Committee official, Waisif Kamal, attempted to bribe a delegate to vote with the Arabs. The way he contrasts the lobbying efforts of each side is telling. He characterizes the Zionists as engaging in heavy-handed realpolitik, and the Arabs as helplessly appealing to international standards of fairness and democratic integrity. He does not utter one single word about the Arabs’ application of realpolitik, or of the Zionists’ own appeals to fairness.
The Grand Mufti’s cousin, Jamal al-Husseini, was an unofficial delegate at the proceedings. He opposed the partition plan on the grounds that a Jewish state would threaten the racial homogeneity of Arab lands, but you wouldn’t know this just from listening to Cooper’s podcast. All you would hear is that the Palestinian case to the international community rested solely upon appeals to democracy and fairness.
As with so many other aspects of this conflict, Cooper seems content with denying any agency on the Arab side of the conflict, relying instead on lopsided standards of evidence to cast aspersions against the side he pretends not to be biased against. His sanitization of the Arab side’s well-documented efforts, in conjunction with his speculative demonization of the Jewish side, speaks volumes about his storytelling priorities.
But the most egregious thing that Cooper does comes when he talks about what happened between November 30, 1947 and the spring of May, 1948. It is within this critical window of time that the outrageous depths of Cooper’s bias are fully exposed. This is the section that irrevocably cemented my view of Darryl Cooper as a shameless propagandist. Let’s begin with a broad overview of the actual sequence of events following the UN partition vote.
The day after the result of the vote was announced, Arab gunmen began firing into traffic near the town of Fajja, murdering seven Jewish bus passengers. Historians disagree about the motives the gunmen, with some speculating that this attack was a reprisal for the assassination of an Arab family by the Lehi ten days earlier. The family had been targeted on suspicion of collaborating with the British.
In a now-inconceivable display of solidarity between Zionists and Palestinians against a greater threat, the Lehi had called upon their “Arab brothers” (their own words) to recognize that the attack was meant to hurt Britain and not the Arab people. They even went so far to publicly name and threaten Jewish collaborators in their announcement. But if the gunmen at Fajj were indeed responding to this assassination, then it would seem that they were not placated by the Lehi’s fraternal gesture.
Regardless of their intentions, historians on both sides of the conflict agree that the Fajja bus attacks, along with other Arab attacks taking place in other parts of the country, represented the opening salvo of the Arab-Israeli war. The war of 1948-1949 thus began in 1947.
This attack was answered a month later by the Irgun, whose operatives threw grenades into a crowd of Arab workers at the Haifa Oil Refinery, killing six. The workers immediately retaliated by massacring their unsuspecting Jewish colleagues at the factory; approximately forty Jews were killed.
The reprisals and counter-reprisals continued to escalate. The Haganah carried out a massacre on New Year’s Day 1948 at Balad al-Shaykh, killing up to seventy Arab villagers. Of those, two were women and five were children.
Confusion occasionally surrounds the historical characterization of these events as part of a “civil war.” But it is important to remember that because the British had not yet evacuated, and because the Mandate still remained in effect, the Arab and Jewish sides of this conflict were therefore technically under the jurisdiction of the same political unit, albeit one that was reviled by the both of them. Consequently, this phase of the 1948 war is commonly known as the Civil War in Mandatory Palestine.
The violence soon spiraled out of control. The Arab side imposed a siege over the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, which would not be broken until later in the year. Up to six hundred Jewish civilians perished in the ordeal.
Massacres abounded throughout the country. In mid-February, the Zionist side massacred 60 Arab villagers in Sa’sa’. The Arab side carried out the Ben Yehuda Street Bombing a few days later, killing around 50 Jewish civilians. A couple months later, in April, the Zionist side carried out the infamous Deir Yassin massacre. According to Cooper, the number of dead Palestinians was around 245; in reality, it was closer to 100. The Arab side retaliated a few days later with the Hadassah Medical Convoy Massacre, in which around 80 Jews, mostly medical personnel, were slaughtered. The following month, in May, Ein-al Zeitun was targeted by the Zionist side. Over 70 Arabs were slaughtered. On May 13, two days before the British Mandate expired and one day before Israel declared independence, the Arab side answered Ein-al Zeitun with the Kfar Etzion massacre. Around 140 Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors, were killed; at least 15 were shot upon trying to surrender, with an unknown additional number having been noncombatants.
This first, civil phase of the war came to an end when the British Mandate expired and Israel declared independence. At that point, the neighboring Arab states declared war on Israel, and the civil conflict turned into an international one. Thus began the second phase of the war.
From the description I’ve given of the first phase, it is clear that what happened was a bloody civil conflict between two rival ethnic groups consisting of reprisals, counter-reprisals, and counter-counter-reprisals. But you wouldn’t know this just from listening to Cooper’s podcast. From the way he describes it, at the prospect of British evacuation from Mandatory Palestine, the Jews began engaging in a campaign of wanton violence against the Arabs. According to him, the impending departure of the British gave the Zionists carte blanche to enact massacres against Palestinians with impunity.
Please take a moment to understand just how shockingly mendacious Cooper’s narrative is. According to him, after the partition plan was accepted, the Jews just went around randomly massacring Arabs. He extensively narrates the events of the infamous Deir Yassin Massacre, belaboring all of its lurid details—indeed, he goes so far as to more than double the true casualty figure—yet he has no time to mention the Kfar Etzion massacre, or the Hadassah Convoy massacre, or even the seige of Jerusalem. He says nothing about the Arab side’s atrocities against the Jewish side, leaving the listener with an extremely lopsided impression of events. Cooper’s entire account of the Arab side’s activities during this side of the war is limited to the following quote:
Arab resistance was disorganized and ineffective, mostly limited to snipers taking potshots with old rifles, raids on traffic convoys, and street violence.
The depopulation of Kfar Etzion, replete with rape, looting, and murder, was “disorganized and ineffective.” The slaughter of scores of doctors and nurses on the road to Hadassah was “snipers taking potshots with old rifles.” The mass starvation of beseiged Jewish civilians in Jerusalem, hundreds of whom would be dead by summertime, was “street violence.”
Please understand that this is not merely a matter of difference in emphasis between Cooper and myself. Darryl Cooper has deliberately and purposefully sanitized the Palestinian side of the conflict, depriving them of agency or having any role in the escalation of violence, to advance the narrative that the Jews were jumping at the chance to slaughter the Palestinians the moment the British had gone, and that this was the true reason that the neighboring Arab states had intervened. What Cooper has done here is inexcusable and pathetic. But it doesn’t stop there.
The Haganah high command first devised Plan A in February 1945, when the Zionists still hoped that the British were gonna respond to the Holocaust by throwing out all their promises to the Arabs and just open up Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration. Plan A included operations designed to suppress any Palestinian Arab resistance, but since it assumed total British cooperation and support, Plan A didn’t mention anything about the surrounding countries. Plans B and C eventually replaced Plan A as circumstances changed and then in March 1948, two months before the Mandate ended, Plan D was drawn up. Plan D was designed with the intention of not allowing the British to stop them from carrying it out. Plan D would strike out into Arab territory and seize land where Jews lived and where positional weaknesses might allow Arabs to counter-attack.
This is how Cooper introduces the oft-discussed Plan Dalet (Plan D), which is frequently characterized by Palestinian historiography as a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the region. Because of Cooper’s omission of the fact that there was a Civil War in Mandatory Palestine by this point, and that the “changing circumstances” he’s alluding to refer to ongoing hostilities between the Zionists and Arabs, the listener is left with the misleading impression that the Jews have been waiting for the British to depart so as to seize their chance to expel the Palestinians.
In his quest to assert Palestinian innocence in the face of overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, Cooper suggests that the world has been deceived by Zionist propaganda into thinking that the nascent state of Israel was attacked, without provocation, by the neighboring Arab states because of “dirty Jews.” But Cooper, you see, knows better—and now that you’ve listened to his podcast, you do too. Because the truth, according to him, is that the surrounding Arab states were just trying to stop the Jews from massacring all the Palestinians. He makes it sound as though the Arab Nations gave no indication that they would invade Palestine until ethnically cleansed refugees came pouring across the borders with horror stories about Jewish atrocities, at which point they desperately mounted a defensive war to rescue their Arab brothers.
This is nonsense. The historical record is replete with quotes from Arab leaders, both civil and religious, expressing their intent to wage war on the Jews if the partition plan went through. The Arab Higher Committee, led by Grand Mufti al-Husseini, declared that all the Jews would be massacred. On October 11, 1947, an article titled "A War of Extermination" was published in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom. In it, the Secretary General of the Arab League, Azam Pasha, is quoted as saying:
Personally, I hope the Jews do not force us into this war, because it would be a war of extermination and momentous massacre.
This was issued a full month-and-a-half before the UN partition vote.
Three days after the vote went through, and before a single Jewish reprisal for the Fajja bus massacre had materialized, additional gasoline was poured onto the flames by Islamic religious authorities. The ulama (chief scholars of theology) at the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo—perhaps the most important religious authorities in the Sunni Muslim world—declared jihad against the Jews of Palestine, calling for Muslims around the world to mobilize for war.
In January, Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women’s Organization, told an interviewer:
The UN [partition] decision [of 29 November 1947] has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders… [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘holy war’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.
Take note that she doesn’t cite the Jewish reprisal killings that had taken place up to that point as the motivation for Arab violence against the Jews. Her objection is to the international community’s will for Jewish sovereignty in the region.
And the Arab armies did not, contra Cooper, reluctantly invade upon hearing about Jewish atrocities in Palestine. They all simultaneously declared war on May 15, 1948—the same day the British Mandate expired. Cooper’s accusation that it had been the Zionists who’d seen the departure of the British as their opportunity to engage in “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” is therefore revealed to be completely inverted. This is what the Arab side of the conflict did!
It is difficult to restrain my anger with Cooper for pretending that the six months of escalating violence that preceded Israel’s declaration of independence didn’t happen, or that Arab leaders throughout the Muslim world hadn’t sworn that they would destroy all traces of Jewish sovereignty the moment the British left. The picture he paints is so unforgivably distorted, so shockingly one-sided in its depiction of the months leading up to the Arab-Israeli war, that any pretense Cooper makes to being anything other than a smooth-talking propagandist permanently vanishes. This entire section of his podcast is a disgrace.
Bad Historiography
There comes a section, past the midpoint of the podcast series, where Cooper complains about the historiography of this conflict. He asserts that historians’ reliance on Jewish and British sources to a substantially greater degree than Arab ones is reflective of their bias. Indeed, Cooper goes so far as to suggest that historians specifically avoid consulting Arab sources out of fear that doing so might discredit them. Presumably, this perspective is off-limits.
How Cooper squares these speculations with the long shadow cast over academia by Palestinian figures like Edward Said and the Khalidi clan (one of whom just retired from his prestigious position at Columbia University) is anyone’s guess. What is not up for debate, however, is the actual reason why Arab sources have not been consulted as frequently as their Jewish and British counterparts. And that’s because the historical archives are replete with Jewish and British records, and Arab records are sparse.
The reasons for this are fairly straightforward: unlike the Arabs of Palestine, the Jews and Brits who operated there before and during the Mandate period were largely literate. The Jews in particular were beholden to an idealistic zeal that convinced them (with some justification) that they were making history with every step they took, so they wrote everything down.
In contrast, the literacy rate among the Arabs of Palestine was almost zero when the Mandate took effect in 1920, and remained uncommon even by the time the 1948 war broke out. The world of the typical Palestinian Arab was agrarian, restricted to the local villages, and hardly involved contact with any urban centers. Only 30% of them inhabited the cities. And within each village, no more than one or two generally took much interest in regional affairs.
Moreover, the dictatorships presiding over the neighboring Arab states have sealed their archives. Historical documentation from these regimes is, for the foreseeable future, unavailable to inquiring minds who’d like to learn more about the Arab perspective on this conflict. Perhaps the Arab states had engaged in private meetings and correspondences, whose minutes and letters implicate the narrative of Palestinian historiography in unflattering ways. Or perhaps they hadn’t written anything down, and the state archives are bereft of any documentation from that period. We might never know.
Whatever the case may be, this confluence of circumstances has made it so that the Arab side of the 1948 war is lacking in primary, contemporaneous sources. Consequently, a disproportionate share of the documentation used by Palestinian historiography consists not of archival records, but of post hoc reflections and hearsay. This is especially true for the “connective tissue” of the narrative.
These types of “oral history” are placed strategically between sections relaying events that indisputably occurred. The oral historian weaves in unverified and unverifiable material between events of indisputable veracity to guide the reader/listener towards certain preferred conclusions—conclusions which might not have otherwise been reached, had the historian restricted himself to archival material.
For example, when attempting to explain the reason that the British supported Zionism in the aftermath of World War 1, Cooper claims that a key Zionist figure, Chaim Weizmann, leveraged antisemitic tropes to win over high-ranking British officials. He lingers especially on the British diplomats, Mark Sykes and Arthur Balfour, as examples of men who fell under this spell, apparently imagining that supporting the national revival of the Jewish homeland would somehow prove favorable in the war. Through cunning sleights-of-hand, Cooper peppers Sykes’ conspiratorial ramblings about the Jews of Europe in between unsourced accounts of Weizmann supposedly encouraging this line of thinking. The result is intended to produce the impression that Britain’s decision not to make peace with the Ottoman Empire, and to subsequently issue the Balfour Declaration, was motivated by antisemitic fears stoked by the Zionists themselves.
In reality, Great Britain had independently sufficient reasons to seek the destruction of the Ottoman Empire for its own colonial projects without us having to posit fantastical accounts of Zionists leveraging antisemitism to their own advantage. It seems perfectly sensible to suppose that Sykes was eager to see the Jews flee Europe and cause revolutionary discord in the Middle East without having to posit that Weizmann or any other Zionist had a hand in encouraging this view. Indeed, Lord Balfour himself later wrote that his motive for issuing the declaration bearing his name was principally done out of a sense of justice, seeking to correct the ancient dispossession of the Jewish homeland through a profound act of Christian charity.
As an aside, it strikes me as bizarre that Cooper seemingly cannot conceive of any morally resonant reason why anyone might be willing to support the right of Jews to reestablish sovereignty in their homeland. His only explanations for why any non-Jew might have supported Zionism come down to corruption, religious extremism, or paranoid antisemitic sentiment. Not once in his podcast series does he suggest that any of the non-Jews involved in this project might have had wholesome intentions. Not once does it seem to occur to him that lots of people supported the Jews because they sympathized with their plight.
Worse Historiography
Another example of the role played by oral history in Palestinian historiography comes from Rashid Khalidi, perhaps the most eminent among living Palestinian scholars. In his most recently published book, he claims that King Abdullah of Transjordan had offered military protection to Palestinian Arabs in November 1947, only to be rebuffed on account of their alleged desire to assert their own national independence. Khalidi’s claim is meant to support the narrative that the Arabs of Palestinian had already achieved a national consciousness by this time and were ethnically differentiated from the Arabs of neighboring Transjordan, which had achieved independence the year prior.
This claim functions to preempt the common Zionist argument that Mandatory Palestine, which initially consisted of both regions, had already granted Arab independence to the majority of the territory in the form of Transjordan. By demonstrating that the Palestinians were so thoroughly differentiated from their Transjordianian neighbors that they refused military assistance in a bid to maintain independence, Khalidi seeks to undercut that Zionist argument. After all, if Palestinian Arabs would rather take on heavy military losses than risk subjugation under Transjordanian rule, then that must indicate that their national identity was quite robust indeed, and that the Zionist argument about Transjordan being the Palestinian state has no leg to stand on.
But what evidence does Khalidi provide to support this extraordinary claim? The answer: his father told him, decades after the fact, on his deathbed. Khalidi’s father had allegedly been sent as an emissary to deliver the message that the Palestinian people did not want Transjordan’s military assistance, to which King Abdullah allegedly retorted with a cold tone, “You people deserve what will happen to you.” And Khalidi’s father, we are invited to believe, saw fit not to share this information with anyone for two full decades. Moreover, he only confided the story to this particular son, who (after a prolonged stint as a spokesperson for the PLO) would go on to build his academic career by extending the provenance of Palestinian national identity as far back in time as possible.
Perhaps, then, we ought not be too harsh on Cooper for his promiscuous reliance on oral history. Even esteemed Palestinian historians at Columbia are not above dotting their bibliographies with “my dad told me so.”
Good Historiography
Unlike oral history, archival history consists of documentation taken contemporaneously with the events being discussed. Such documents can include diary entries, shipping manifests, meeting minutes, and timesheets, among many other things. Anything that has left a direct mark on events and actors in the form of written records taken at the relevant times constitutes an archival document.
There are several advantages to archival documentation relative to oral history. For starters, it is far less prone to ideologically motivated embellishment. An IDF officer who issues a written directive for the mass expulsion of a given village cannot, many years later, credibly claim to have found the village abandoned in a bid to offer an innocent explanation for its lack of Arabs after the war. Not when you can just pick up a copy of the memorandum, date and signature intact, and wave it in his face.
Another advantage to archival history is that it isn’t prone to the corrosive effects of time and suggestion, both of which can easily wreak havoc on memory. A Palestinian Arab who hears the approaching sounds of battle may flee his village with the aid of an accommodating IDF soldier, to whom he initially feels grateful. But that same Arab may, upon hearing embittered tales from the other residents of the squalid refugee camp he’s been confined to for decades, end up recalling the incident differently. He might believe, without conscious knowledge of any editorialization on his part, that the soldier who helped evacuate him had in fact forcibly expelled him, forbidding him on threat of death from ever returning home.
I don’t want to sound entirely dismissive of oral history, but when dealing with such contentious issues, it seems reckless to rely so heavily upon it. I realize that the Arab side of the conflict is limited in its archival documentation–owing, in no small part, to the fact that Arab nations are almost exclusively dictatorial and therefore don’t open their archives to historians–but that doesn’t excuse its predilection for gonzo history. Fortunately for all parties–Palestinians, Israelis, Cooper, and myself–Benny Morris exists.
Benny Morris is in many ways the great unifier of competing historiographies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For starters, everyone hates him. He went to jail for refusing to take part in the IDF’s first invasion of Lebanon and became a New Historian who challenged Israel’s traditionally treacle accounts of its modern origins. These things have earned him many enemies on the Israeli side. He also went on to slaughter, in his rigorous archival studies of Israeli war crimes, some very sacred cows on the Palestinian side of the argument, and doubled down on his agreement with the Zionist side upon living through the second intifada. These have earned him may enemies on the Palestinian side.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that a conflict this contentious can win its historians respect across both sides of the conflict only when they are simultaneously the most rigorous among their peers and the most universally reviled. In both respects, Morris meets the occasion beautifully.
Here is a map found in his book, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited. Those hundreds of numbered little dots across Israel represent the cities and settlements formerly inhabited by Palestinian Arabs prior to the 1948 war. What Morris did was to comb through the Israeli archives and meticulously document what happened at each of those dots according to primary archival sources. Who lived there, and under what circumstances were they abandoned? When and how did these villages lose their Arabs? Who was involved, and what role did they play? He answered all of these questions for each of those dots, then wrote down the order in which it all happened in a 600-page book. And by the end of it, a clear picture emerges:
The first Arab–Israeli war, of 1948, was launched by the Palestinian Arabs, who rejected the UN partition resolution and embarked on hostilities aimed at preventing the birth of Israel. That war and not design, Jewish or Arab, gave birth to the Palestinian refugee problem.
But the displacement of Arabs from Palestine or from the areas of Palestine that would become the Jewish State was inherent in Zionist ideology and, in microcosm, in Zionist praxis from the start of the enterprise. The piecemeal eviction of tenant farmers, albeit in relatively small numbers, during the first five decades of Zionist land purchase and settlement naturally stemmed from, and in a sense hinted at, the underlying thrust of the ideology, which was to turn an Arab-populated land into a State with an overwhelming Jewish majority. And the Zionist leaders’ thinking about, and periodic endorsement of, ‘transfer’ during those decades–voluntary and agreed, if possible, but coerced if not–readied hearts and minds for the denouement of 1948 and its immediate aftermath, in which some 700,000 Arabs were displaced from their homes (though the majority remained in Palestine).
But there was no pre-war Zionist plan to expel ‘the Arabs’ from Palestine or the areas of the emergent Jewish State; and the Yishuv did not enter the war with a plan or policy of expulsion. Nor was the pre-war ‘transfer’ thinking ever translated, in the course of the war, into an agreed, systematic policy of expulsion. Hence, in the war’s first four months, between the end of November 1947 and the end of March 1948, there were no preparations for mass expulsion and there were almost no cases of expulsion or the leveling of villages; hence, during the following ten months, Haganah and IDF units acted inconsistently, most units driving out Arab communities as a matter of course while others left (Muslim as well as Christian and Druse) villages and townspeople in place; and hence, at war’s end, Israel emerged with a substantial Arab minority, of 150,000. At the same time, largely as a result of Arab belligerence and the Yishuv’s sense of siege, fragility and isolation, from early April 1948 on, ‘transfer’ was in the air and the departure of the Arabs was deeply desired on the local and national levels by the majority in the Yishuv, from Ben-Gurion down. And while this general will was never translated into systematic policy, a large number of Arabs were expelled, the frequency of expulsions and the expulsive resolve of the troops increasing following the pan-Arab invasion of mid-May 1948 that threatened the Yishuv with extinction. Yet, still, in July and again in October–November 1948, IDF troops continued to leave Arab communities in place; much depended on local circumstances and on the individual Israeli company, battalion and brigade commanders.
Morris also has much to say on the subject of wartime atrocities. It is true that during the war of 1948, the non-adjusted figure for Zionist atrocities was greater than that of Arab atrocities. Morris estimates that over the course of the entire war, 800-900 Arabs were massacred in atrocities like Deir Yassin, and 200-300 Jews were slaughtered similarly.
There are two important observations to be made about these figures. The first is that, for a civil conflict, these are remarkably low numbers. To put it into perspective, during the Bosnian war in the 90s, 8,000 to 9,000 Muslims were slaughtered at Srebrenica over a two-day period. That two-day casualty figure is an order of magnitude greater than the total number of Arabs massacred over the entire course of the 1948 war.
The second, more suggestive observation appears when we take into consideration the number of villages, towns, and settlements conquered by each side. The Zionists captured over 400 villages and towns, whereas the Arabs took over only a dozen or so. So even though the Arab side slaughtered 3-4 times fewer Jewish civilians and POWs in atrocity killings than the Jews did with Arabs, this was not for lack of trying; the number of settlements they’d conquered was lower than that of their opponents by a factor of 30. From these figures, it seems entirely plausible that the difference in atrocity figures came merely because of a lack of opportunity on the Arab side of the conflict.
Morris’ written works go into great depth explaining how Arab villages came to be depopulated. The Nakba did not begin with the commencement of Plan Dalet, or the declaration of Israeli independence; it began as soon as the UN partition vote was announced, with wealthy Arabs fleeing Palestine for the hotels of Beirut and Cairo as the winds of war swept through the land.
Most of the 700,000 Palestinian refugees were not chased out of their homes. They fled because war had arrived at their doorstep and disrupted their daily lives. The policy of Plan Dalet explicitly stated that communities which surrendered were not to be harmed or expelled. This policy wasn’t always adhered to, and so one could justifiably characterize the expulsions of the Arab communities from Lydda and Ramle in July of 1948 as limited instances of ethnic cleansing. Taken together, Benny Morris estimates no more than 150,000 of the refugees to have been forcibly expelled from Palestine; sometimes with justification, as when a village attacked the IDF, but sometimes without.
Wartime atrocities against Arabs played an outsized role in both sides of the propaganda war. Upon learning of the Deir Yassin massacre, the Jerusalem spokesman for the Arab Higher Committee, Dr. Hussein al-Khalidi, issued orders for news the event to be broadcast and event exaggerated. He hoped to galvanize the neighboring Arab states into action against Israel, and even succeeded to a degree, but it came at a cost. News of the incident spurned Palestinian Arabs to flee in even greater numbers than before, such that many of the villages subsequently visited by the IDF were found empty.
Demoralization propaganda belaboring the futility of resistance, broadcast by the Israelis, also did its part. In some limited instances, most notably in Haifa, Arab leaders called for their non-Jewish residents to temporarily flee. They were assured that after the Jews had been mopped up by the incoming forces, the residents could return without fear of inconveniencing their fellow Arabs in battle. Cases of this sort were more rare, but Zionist propaganda would later overstate their role in the Nakba.
In truth, the majority of the refugees of Palestine fled due to a combination of society’s breakdown during wartime, an outsized fear of victimization in Zionist atrocities (encouraged unwittingly by the Arab side and provoked deliberately by the Jewish one), and in much more limited cases, expulsions at the hands of Zionists and instructions from Arab leadership to clear the battlefield. Most would never be allowed to return. Their resettlement within the borders of Israel was prohibited on the grounds that they could function as a fifth column. And for all practical purposes, there was no way to differentiate refugees who had fled for reasons bearing upon their own innocence (e.g., unwarranted expulsion, fleeing the warzone, etc.) and those who had fled for more nefarious purposes (e.g., retreating after taking part in combat, clearing the battlefield under the direction of Arab leaders, etc.)
Despite favorably citing Benny Morris in this section of this podcast, Cooper gives no indication that he has read his archival-based history. He opts instead to tell his lopsided narrative, gratuitously omitting crucial context and belaboring the most lurid details of wartime horrors–at least, to the extent that they happened to the Arabs of Palestine. As far as Cooper is concerned, everything bad that happened in the 1948 war was done by the Jews to the Arabs. This is how he is able to conclude that the Jews punished Palestine for the sins of Europe.
Conclusion
The takeaway from Darryl Cooper’s podcast series, “Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem,” is that Palestinians were ultimately the passive victims of Zionist aggression, the “understandability” of which he delicately pays lip service to whenever he risks appearing too overt in his hostility towards Israel. The episode in which he emotionally shares three stories from the Holocaust is the same in which he subsequently paints the 1948 war as one initiated by genocidal Jewish violence. Cooper may not be much of an historian, but he certainly excels in the fine art of smoothtalking.
Because Cooper’s series contains 23 hours of material, not including the bonus episode skimming over the history from 1948 to the 1980s, this review could not possibly be exhaustive. There are too many errors and distortions to cover—the myth that the “land without a people for a people without a land” slogan had ever been uttered by the Zionists, the idea that Jewish national aspirations were somehow inherently incompatible with Arab rights (or, as he puts it at the end of Episode 2, “Jewish survival was contingent on Palestinian oppression”), the suggestion that the purchase of private property by the Jews was somehow akin to the acquisition of pieces of state (as if the land was not under the jurisdiction of the Ottomans and the British!), the claim that Zionists embraced a racial definition of Jewry, the complaint that the Zionists took more land than the partition plan vote granted them (despite the fact that it was rendered moot the moment the Arab side rejected it and declared war), and a whole host of others.
But there is also a lot to praise. As harsh as this review might sound, I remain sincere in my earlier compliments. He really does demonstrate depth in his understanding of how the interactions between institutions and individuals change over time, and his recitation of the (English-speaking) Palestinian point of view is as faithful a reproduction of their historiography as one can hope to experience. It also doesn’t hurt that he delivers this material in an unassuming, conversational tone. Darryl Cooper is many things, but incapable of maintaining listener engagement for 23 hours isn’t one of them.
And yet, it is precisely his strength as an orator that serves to undercut Palestinian historiography. When everything is laid as bare as Cooper has done, the contradictions and unsatisfying explanations practically scream out to the listener for resolution.
His asymmetric focus on the religious extremism of Jews and Christians, to the exclusion of Muslims, produces a dissonance which, upon being explored more carefully, reveals that most fundamental assumption of Palestinian historiography–that the Jews and Muslims lived together in peace before Zionism disturbed the land–is total bunk. His silence on the connection of Jews to the land of Israel similarly reveals, upon closer inspection, that the justification for Zionism rests upon something far more powerful and far more ancient than the vicissitudes of European antisemitism. His examination of inter-tribal dynamics and how they differ from national ones lays bare the contradiction lying at the heart of Palestinian national identity: that despite claiming to have pre-modern provenance, the Palestinian nation is in fact a recent invention. His preoccupation with land purchases and unspecified Zionist “provocations” makes for an unconvincing explanation of why the Arabs of Palestine had a habit of massacring Jews every few years, inviting scrutiny that ultimately absolves the Zionists of the charge of colonialism. And his distortions of the lead-up and (especially) the events of the 1948 war, in service of plausibly answering the Jewish Question, are revealed by a more complete consideration of the facts to be shameless propaganda. The clarity and detail of his engaging narration is precisely what undoes his recitation of Palestinian historiography; Cooper’s new wine has split the old wineskin.
Perhaps the best way to conclude this critique by completing our modification of Cooper’s metaphor of the Jewish invaders of the Palestinian house. Recall his original metaphor: Palestinians live in a house, but then generously invite a beknighted Jew to the residence. The ungrateful Jew, having once lived there long ago, intrudes upon his hosts’ welcome and invites a bunch of rowdy friends over. They behave poorly, abuse the resident, and ultimately force him out.
Cute story. Here’s what actually happened:
The Arabs of Palestine rented units of an apartment complex from their Ottoman landlord. Prior to the Ottoman, the house was owned by the Mamluks. And prior to the Mamluks, the building had changed hands many times. The most recent owners to have actually lived inside the building were the Jews.
The Arabs of Palestine lived in different apartment units; they did not regard themselves as members of a single political unit. They were instead differentiated by things like clan and village. This floor is the Nashishibi floor, containing the apartments of Jericho, Jaffa, and Lydda; that floor is the al-Husseini floor, containing the apartments of Jerusalem, Hebron, and Rafah.
Eventually, the Jews started leasing and subleasing apartment units within the building. Though a small number had always maintained a presence in the building, they began arriving in larger numbers while the complex was under Ottoman ownership. They continued and even accelerated their purchases when the Brits became the new owners.
Unfortunately, the Arab tenants didn’t take well to this development. Many of them were subleasing from the actual lease holders, who often lived in distant places like Beirut or Cairo, and when the Jews purchased these leases, they usually evicted the Arab tenants. This forced many Arabs to move to other units within the building, or perhaps even sleep in the halls. The Arabs might have been able to tolerate this sort of thing from other Muslims, but they certainly wouldn’t tolerate it from Jews. No—these kinds of people needed to be reminded of their divinely-ordained place as inferiors. So the Arabs enacted campaigns of violence against their Jewish neighbors, including ones who had lived in the building for a very long time, and the British owner of the building ultimately ended up appeasing them by restricting the issuance of new subleases to Jews.
The Jews, enraged by this betrayal from the landlord, raised mayhem in the apartment complex. The British landlord threw his hands up in the air and made to depart, but not before handing the problem off to the city council, who were tasked with partitioning the apartment complex into units inhabited by Jews and units inhabited by Arabs.
The Arabs rejected the partition plan and immediately began attacking their Jewish neighbors, who responded in an escalating spiral of reprisals and counter-reprisals. Soon, the whole building was on fire, and despite calling up their friends from neighboring apartment complexes, the Arabs lost the fight. They got evicted to the smelly basement while the Jews got the rest of the apartment complex to themselves.
And that’s the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell. It’s not a simple narrative, but if simple’s what you’re looking for, then you’re studying the wrong conflict.
This is the piece I've been looking for ever since finishing "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem" a few years ago. Thank you for writing it.
well written and goes into the weeds