Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that people fight against the
Speaker 1: bad things sometimes. I'm your host, murder Kiljoy. Am, I
Speaker 1: guess this week is Matt Leeb.
Speaker 2: I'mt leb Hi. I'm sorry. I'm just finishing a quick snack.
Speaker 2: I had some Trader Joe's hummus, and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: in celebration of US talking about Palestine, I had some
Speaker 2: traditional Trader Joe's Mediterranean style hummus.
Speaker 1: I am, you're not a tomato joke or anything like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, Israel invented the cherry tomato and Trader
Speaker 2: Joe's Mediterranean style hummus.
Speaker 1: Well, Trader Joe's invented hummus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. They were the first ones to do it. Yes,
Speaker 2: very delicious. People talk a lot of shit on Trader Joe's.
Speaker 2: You know, well, I guess I don't know if people
Speaker 2: talk shit about Trader Joe's. I feel like someone would.
Speaker 1: It's the cheap food that still tastes good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, ignore all those recalls, Yeah, exactly, it's fine.
Speaker 2: The recalls are just you know what that is, that's
Speaker 2: just haters hating.
Speaker 1: See I used to get excited about the recalls because
Speaker 1: I lived off of dumpster food, and so whenever there
Speaker 1: was a recall, I was like. I'd always be like,
Speaker 1: why are there so why is there so much lettuce
Speaker 1: in the trash this week? And you're like, oh, because
Speaker 1: there's a recall because there's abreak kill whatever put that
Speaker 1: had irregular lettuce in my mouth. Yeah, That's what I
Speaker 1: did and I survived. So therefore it is a good
Speaker 1: and healthy idea to eat only trash for you out
Speaker 1: the trash. Yeah, Well to do the rest of the
Speaker 1: introductions that I didn't do last time. Our producer is
Speaker 1: Sophie Lichtermann Hy Sophie. Our editor is Daniel Hi Daniel
Speaker 1: dan All. Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman.
Speaker 1: This is part two and a two parter about early
Speaker 1: Palestinian resistance, Palestinian resistance to pre Israel, Palestinian resistance to
Speaker 1: the Ottoman Empire, which we talked about last time, and
Speaker 1: did the British Mandate and the Zionist Project, which is
Speaker 1: what we were talking about this time. Hell yeah, and
Speaker 1: where we last left. The Palestinian resistance had a pretty
Speaker 1: lackluster nineteen twenties. The powers that be within Palestine were like, oh,
Speaker 1: what if we asked the British nicely, that works for people, right,
Speaker 1: And everyone was like, I don't think it works, but
Speaker 1: we're also really worn down and poor, so we don't
Speaker 1: have any better ideas until nineteen twenty nine when you
Speaker 1: run into the single event. I have had the hardest
Speaker 1: time finding what feels like objective sources about Oh. Ever,
Speaker 1: in my research for this show, yeah you heard the
Speaker 1: Eid Albarock uprising.
Speaker 2: You know, I feel like I probably heard it in
Speaker 2: an audio book once, fair enough, but I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't think I know much about it.
Speaker 1: So by some sources you could say some mean old
Speaker 1: Muslims were mad that Jews were praying, so they tried
Speaker 1: to program them and then the Jews fought back with
Speaker 1: the help of the British.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that sounds like the correct source. Go on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there's this holy place in Jerusalem called Albarock,
Speaker 1: which is with the Jews called the Western Wall, and
Speaker 1: it was traditionally is the Muslim holy place that Jews
Speaker 1: were specifically allowed to pray at. Like historically, there's a
Speaker 1: long standing tradition Jews are allowed to come prey here,
Speaker 1: but it is a Muslim thing set up into this
Speaker 1: like Muslim infrastructure, so you can't set up any furniture here,
Speaker 1: can't make this place your place. So the Zionist Jews
Speaker 1: started setting up furniture and this is outside and they're
Speaker 1: setting it up and maybe it's temporary, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the Muslims are like, I think you're trying to
Speaker 1: occupy the place, and so they were like, could you
Speaker 1: please take it down? And they went to the British
Speaker 1: and they were like, hey, help us sort this out.
Speaker 1: And the British took ten months to rule on this,
Speaker 1: and finally they were like, yeah, sorry Zionists, we hate
Speaker 1: saying anything bad about you, but this really is a
Speaker 1: Muslim place of prayer. You probably shouldn't set up permanent
Speaker 1: thing or like, you know, put your stuff here. You
Speaker 1: got to take your stuff down. But the British didn't
Speaker 1: enforce their own ruling. Zionist Jews held a big protest
Speaker 1: about it. Muslim folks did two and then things got
Speaker 1: really violent and it wasn't really about the specific prayer wall,
Speaker 1: not for either side. As best as I can tell,
Speaker 1: this was an explosion of anger at the Zionist project
Speaker 1: that was displacing Arabs across the country, and it was
Speaker 1: a reflection of the growing awareness that the Zionist plan
Speaker 1: was to conquer the entire country, and it was that
Speaker 1: was the Zionist plan. It's still the Zionist plan.
Speaker 2: What. Yeah, I don't know where you're getting your information,
Speaker 2: but I was from the Zionists. Yeah, I was told specifically.
Speaker 2: I don't know what Zionists you're reading, but the all
Speaker 2: Desionists I know say that the whole point of the
Speaker 2: Zionist's plan is peace. So oh, okay, sounds so yeah,
Speaker 2: sounds like you're wrong and lying.
Speaker 1: However, I understand why you can perceive what happened as
Speaker 1: a program because there was a lot of violence directed
Speaker 1: at the Zionist settlers and killed a fuck ton of people.
Speaker 1: And so for the Zionist Jews, this uprising was a
Speaker 1: little bit less about the prayer and more about self
Speaker 1: defense because many of them are being killed. It's about
Speaker 1: a week long. About one hundred and thirty three Jews
Speaker 1: were killed during the uprising, while one hundred and sixteen
Speaker 1: Arabs were killed. The Jews were mostly killed by Arab
Speaker 1: groups and the latter were mostly killed by British security
Speaker 1: forces or depending on what I'm reading, a lot of
Speaker 1: the Arabs were killed by Jewish settlers, and sometimes I
Speaker 1: think the sources that claim that are actually the Zionis sources,
Speaker 1: because I think it's about trying to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: we fought back successfully, right, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell. It
Speaker 2: depends who you're reading, it depends who the intended audience is.
Speaker 1: And yeah, after a week long uprising, the British arrested
Speaker 1: and punished mostly Palestinians. Everything I've read about this feels biased,
Speaker 1: is fuck in one direction to the other. And I
Speaker 1: have not personally found a source about this particular thing
Speaker 1: that feels trustworthy, which is not to say the historians
Speaker 1: kind of biases. I absolutely biases right, and still write
Speaker 1: well about a subject. But this particular event wasn't covered
Speaker 1: in detail by either of the Palestinian storians I read
Speaker 1: in depth. So I just read a fuck ton of
Speaker 1: different essays because all of the books were like because
Speaker 1: actually what's interesting for Palestinian resistance point of view is
Speaker 1: actually what comes in the wake of this, or people
Speaker 1: didn't want to talk about that part because it sounds
Speaker 1: bad when you run around and kill a bunch of
Speaker 1: armed civilians. Yes, fucking no.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The aftermath I have a better handle on because I
Speaker 1: found better writing on it. The uprising really set the
Speaker 1: Palestinians to the task of figuring out how the fuck
Speaker 1: to get free, and a lot of people developed a
Speaker 1: lot of different ideas about how to do that, and
Speaker 1: they started doing it and working towards it. Not the
Speaker 1: most important, but I'm going to start with it because
Speaker 1: they have the coolest names, and they're weird and violent
Speaker 1: and I don't know whatever the minority position and how
Speaker 1: to do this, but an important one was a violence
Speaker 1: that was a way in which people tried to figure
Speaker 1: out how to get free. You call violent direct action
Speaker 1: or terrorism. Yeah, And first you have the Green Hand gang.
Speaker 2: Cool name is a.
Speaker 1: Fucking good name for a gang.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they basically just ambushed there's like, I think maybe
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty of them or something, and they just
Speaker 1: ambushed settlers and cops and killed them starting in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine.
Speaker 2: Damn, that's great. It did not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were just like, all right, we're just doing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I canna just kill some people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's interesting because it's like I don't want
Speaker 1: to too hard go into the morality of this, but
Speaker 1: there is a difference between that guy just stole my house.
Speaker 1: I can see him. That is my house. I was
Speaker 1: living there two weeks ago. Like, I mean, there is
Speaker 1: like interesting questions around, like at what point is it like, well,
Speaker 1: now I grew up in this house, and my grandfather
Speaker 1: grew up in this house, but my grandfather stole from
Speaker 1: your grandfather. You know, those those are interesting questions that
Speaker 1: I am not in a position to answer since I
Speaker 1: am a white person living in North America, and if
Speaker 1: you back, I am absolutely culpable as a settler.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I don't know. I don't fucking know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it is, you know, it's it's hard to know
Speaker 2: whether or not. I mean, I don't know. On the
Speaker 2: one hand, yes, of course, you know, there's the idea
Speaker 2: of just because time passes does not mean that, you know, you're.
Speaker 1: The land should go back to the indigenous people in
Speaker 1: North America. No part of me thinks otherwise for that
Speaker 1: kind of right, Yeah, whether or not like kill me
Speaker 1: to take.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, whether or not the violent resistance of the
Speaker 2: you know, ancestors of ancestors of ancestors of people, you know,
Speaker 2: And to me, this is, you know, one of those
Speaker 2: like indigenous struggles that I see as like, there's no
Speaker 2: reason to not look at it from a perspective of
Speaker 2: just being an indigenous struggle and not this like theoretical,
Speaker 2: you know, dissertation on what exactly makes someone indigenous. And
Speaker 2: it's like, I don't know if I if I can
Speaker 2: trace with my own eyes the settler colonial nature of
Speaker 2: this particular thing. And someone is literally holding the key
Speaker 2: to the house that they no longer live in, It's like, well,
Speaker 2: that's clear, at very least it's clear. I'm not totally
Speaker 2: you know, you know, advocating or supporting the you know,
Speaker 2: violence that necessarily, you know, will befall people when there
Speaker 2: is an uprising, But I am saying that I don't
Speaker 2: know how you could look at it as any other
Speaker 2: thing than that totally.
Speaker 1: And so by nineteen thirty, the Green Hand gang goes down,
Speaker 1: they're all dead or in jail. But what do you
Speaker 1: do when the green Hand gang goes down? Well, I'm
Speaker 1: glad you asked you start the black hand.
Speaker 2: All right. We're doing a new hand, all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just new hand, new Color. Yeah, New Day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you like this?
Speaker 1: Even cooler name but less original? Since a Serbian nationalist
Speaker 1: group of the same names. You know, I was gonna
Speaker 1: started World War One. I was going to say, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure I heard of the Black Hand. I also
Speaker 1: think I know the Black Hand from Godfather too, Okay,
Speaker 1: And that was the that was the guy who used
Speaker 1: to run Vito.
Speaker 2: Corleoni's neighborhood before he uh, before Vito Corleoni killed him
Speaker 2: in that hallway with that gun. It was like, who's that?
Speaker 2: And it's like, that's, you know, the Dawn the Black Hand.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of different black Hands out there,
Speaker 2: but yeah, you know this one's cool. If you're the
Speaker 2: Black Hand, you probably kill people. I mean what else?
Speaker 2: I mean it's a cool ass name for a gang.
Speaker 2: Is that you know there's a black Hand? Here's my
Speaker 2: app fuck off?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I run a library.
Speaker 2: I mean that's cool. Yeah. Better Yeah, killing people library,
Speaker 2: library of weapons you used to do murder?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that should be available.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we got to find one of those.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so this black Hand is it isn't a different
Speaker 1: language and whatever. You can't own a name as cool
Speaker 1: as a black Hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I had trouble finding detailed sources on either of the
Speaker 1: Colored Hand crews in English, and so I might return
Speaker 1: to these folks more as I learned more about them.
Speaker 1: But I know a little bit more about the Black Hand. Basically,
Speaker 1: there was this guy named iz al Din al kasm
Speaker 1: and he'd cut his teeth supporting Libyan resistance to the Italians,
Speaker 1: then fought the French occupation in Syria, and then he
Speaker 1: went over to Palestine to help fight the British.
Speaker 2: Okay, so he's just the coolest motherfucker who ever existed.
Speaker 1: Go on, Yeah, and he's a tinerant preacher, and he's
Speaker 1: just going around the country as a muzzllem my tinerant preacher,
Speaker 1: and he's saying, we should probably use violence to resist
Speaker 1: our entire country being stolen from under our feet. Yeah, hell, yeah,
Speaker 1: started a bunch of groups with which to do that.
Speaker 1: The most famous, or at least the one that people
Speaker 1: had the coolest names got into the books I was
Speaker 1: reading was the Black Hand, which was formed in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty or nineteen thirty five, who fucking knows.
Speaker 2: I read them nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: Have yeah, April nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: And they had some internal divisions right away within the
Speaker 1: Black Hand or within these larger collections of groups that
Speaker 1: are trying to do this violent resistance. Some folks are like,
Speaker 1: all right, well, let's just immediately attack settlers, like kind
Speaker 1: of a green Hand kind of attitude, you know, and
Speaker 1: others are like, no, we should get ready first and
Speaker 1: have a coordinated action and the settlement of Palestine.
Speaker 2: Here we go. Meetings.
Speaker 1: I know, there's the pro meeting and the pro immediate
Speaker 1: murder plans. Yeah, valid points. Yeah, both obviously have their
Speaker 1: pros and cons. But yeah, meetings, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think I'd rather just get just go straight to
Speaker 2: the murder than have another processing session. Kil I'm kidding.
Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty five, which is either their fifth year
Speaker 1: or their very beginning, who knows, they had between two
Speaker 1: hundred and eight hundred fighters, and they were offering military
Speaker 1: trainings for peasants as they went around, and they would
Speaker 1: just raid Zionus settlements and kill people.
Speaker 2: In bombshit Oh shit crazy.
Speaker 1: Alcasm himself died in a gun battle with British police
Speaker 1: after being surrounded in a cave in nineteen thirty five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: His funeral was attended by five thousand people, and so
Speaker 1: the British soldiers shot into the crowd at the funeral.
Speaker 2: Oh this is al Cassom. This is oh shit, Oh.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, you know more about this guy?
Speaker 2: No, I know that this is a huge figure within
Speaker 2: the Palestinian resistance, like legend and narrative. Yeah, like this
Speaker 2: is you know, like, yeah, this is the fucking the
Speaker 2: patron saint of Palestinian resistance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's got to be a book in English about him,
Speaker 1: and I just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the book in English about it is Wikipedia,
Speaker 2: as far as I know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got the like through the like. I've read
Speaker 1: like maybe like six articles about him, but it's that
Speaker 1: thing where one of the articles will have slightly more information,
Speaker 1: but then five of the other articles have different information.
Speaker 1: And yeah, but anyway, his death is going to help
Speaker 1: spark the uprising of nineteen thirty six, and yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of people basically are specifically following in his footsteps
Speaker 1: as a specific thing. Yeah, you absolutely live on as
Speaker 1: a martyr, but we're not yet. It's nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about some of the other ways
Speaker 1: that Palestinians resisted. It seems like there was three prongs
Speaker 1: of it then and probably still And I mean these
Speaker 1: are kind of just the three ways he resists shit.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There was armed resistance largely by secretive groups. There was
Speaker 1: popular struggle organized from the bottom up that used a
Speaker 1: comparatively nonviolent strategy but was not pacifist. And that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that you see reflected a lot and like,
Speaker 1: especially like the First Antifada and stuff like that. Right,
Speaker 1: And then they're legalistic approaches that relied on pressuring both
Speaker 1: the power structures like the British government, as well as
Speaker 1: raising popular awareness around the world. It probably takes all
Speaker 1: three of these to get anything done. And my personal
Speaker 1: bias tends to be towards the popular struggle to kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But the lines between these approaches are often blurred,
Speaker 1: which is good. People should do it as ethical and
Speaker 1: strategic in any given situation, rather than assuming that one
Speaker 1: is the right one always.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In November nineteen twenty nine, there was an Arab village
Speaker 1: conference in Jaffa offering ideas about how to avoid the
Speaker 1: bankruptcy of farmers through agricultural credit unions and shit like that.
Speaker 1: Student groups met and started organizing. A national fund was
Speaker 1: set up to help farmers who lost their land to settlements.
Speaker 1: But there's like this heartbreaking thing. I read a lot
Speaker 1: of ins and outs about this national fund and how
Speaker 1: hard they work, traveling across the country'd raise all this money,
Speaker 1: and by the end they raised like, you know, almost
Speaker 1: a million dollars after like a year hard work or whatever.
Speaker 1: And then it's like and then some South African heiress
Speaker 1: gave the Jewish Zionist Fund four million dollars. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: day that they announced that they had gotten a million
Speaker 1: dollars at the right one.
Speaker 2: Yes, every every time, and there's god fucking damn it,
Speaker 2: all right, let's have another bake sale. Yeah, but no
Speaker 2: matter how many bake sales you do. And they were,
Speaker 2: you know, in terms of they were doing impressive fundraising
Speaker 2: for what they could get. But yeah, not not nearly
Speaker 2: as good as the one South African heiress who were
Speaker 2: random British patron who's just like going to give them
Speaker 2: five times the amount of money.
Speaker 1: Totally. But like fucking like the resistance during this period,
Speaker 1: and I mean during all of everything, but during this
Speaker 1: period it was just so stark what they were fighting
Speaker 1: against like that we're going to fight the British Empire,
Speaker 1: you know, as this like starving barely existent, like because
Speaker 1: we just got free from the Ottoman's place, you know.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that they're able to do all of this
Speaker 1: level of organizing is amazing. Like everything I read is like,
Speaker 1: oh and this thing we could have done better, we
Speaker 1: could have done this better or whatever. But like they
Speaker 1: did amazing shit with what they had. In this period
Speaker 1: past nineteen twenty nine, women started stepping up in a
Speaker 1: major way. Take the story of Mattiomogenum, who was a
Speaker 1: Palestinian Christian woman who was born in Lebanon in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine. Her family moved to New York City when
Speaker 1: she was a kid, and then her and her husband
Speaker 1: moved back to Palestine in the nineteen twenties, and so
Speaker 1: she does a lot of the English language work that
Speaker 1: is going to happen during this time period to try
Speaker 1: and get the word out and things like that. She
Speaker 1: worked with another woman, a Muslim Palestinian woman named Terab
Speaker 1: Abd al Hadi, to form the first Palestinian Arab Women's
Speaker 1: Congress in nineteen twenty nine. And this group splints off
Speaker 1: into like just a ton of different women's organizings groups,
Speaker 1: and I would actually have to go back and do
Speaker 1: like a two parter or just on them, which I
Speaker 1: might eat because they're really interesting in order to get
Speaker 1: into all the ins and outs of all the groups
Speaker 1: they form. But they're related to each other, almost all
Speaker 1: the women's organizing that's happening at this time. And they two,
Speaker 1: the two of these women would do things like have
Speaker 1: They'd be like, oh, a Christian woman should present to
Speaker 1: the Muslim group, and a Muslim woman present to the
Speaker 1: Christian group, and it ruled. They kept doing this like
Speaker 1: this was still a part of all of the organizing.
Speaker 1: Soon more than two hundred Palestinian women were part of
Speaker 1: the Palestinian Arab Women's Congress, supporting the Palestinian National Congress
Speaker 1: and its demands to end the Balfour Declaration and Jewish
Speaker 1: immigration and create an actually democratic government and things like that.
Speaker 1: And they did all kinds of organizing. They brought grievances
Speaker 1: to the British government. They organized letter writing campaigns, but
Speaker 1: they organized letter writing campaigns to foreign press, which like
Speaker 1: actually does something. Sometimes letter writing campaigns work, but like,
Speaker 1: let's be real, usually not right.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you know, in my dad's head, nothing
Speaker 2: works better than writing a letter. My dad has written
Speaker 2: so many letters or just anything, not just like you know,
Speaker 2: serious stuff like you know, getting you know, the prescription
Speaker 2: drug medication lower you know, in price, but like trying
Speaker 2: to get a show uncanceled on television. He's a big
Speaker 2: believer in the you know, write a letter.
Speaker 1: Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't it?
Speaker 2: Did it? Oh? I didn't know that? Good for Buffy.
Speaker 1: I have this, I have this vague memory from the
Speaker 1: nineties of Buffy pe canceled after.
Speaker 2: One campaign to get Buffy.
Speaker 1: Back, something like that. I don't know. If you're a
Speaker 1: big Buffy fan and I'm wrong, don't tell me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: can we tell in this world in which that happened,
Speaker 1: I would have that exactly. And so they kind of
Speaker 1: create the first Foreign Press Office for Palestine because Palestine
Speaker 1: was distinctly lacking in state apparatus, because the Paris state
Speaker 1: that existed from the British was controlled by the Zionists
Speaker 1: already at this point. The women also organized a demonstrations,
Speaker 1: like at one point, one hundred and twenty cars of
Speaker 1: women drove around Jerusalem, stopping at all the foreign consulates
Speaker 1: to hand out leaflets despite being told in no uncertain
Speaker 1: terms that they were not allowed to do this, and
Speaker 1: they were like, yeah, we're gonna We're gonna do it
Speaker 1: anyway though, We're.
Speaker 2: Still gonna do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Mattel was basically in charge of the English language work
Speaker 1: of the Women's Congress, writing telegrams to the Queen of
Speaker 1: England and shit like that. The Women's Congress also developed
Speaker 1: silent protests as a tactic, one that carries on to
Speaker 1: this day to the group Women in Black. There's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a direct lineage here, but it's like coming from
Speaker 1: the well around the same issues, just with sixty years break.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: They also started a school, They formed prisoner support groups,
Speaker 1: raising funds so that the families of incarcerated activists wouldn't starve,
Speaker 1: and they got at least three political prisoners freed from
Speaker 1: the British authorities through public pressure campaigns that might have
Speaker 1: been letter writing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, possibly.
Speaker 1: They were cool as shit. They were all so actively feminist.
Speaker 1: I spent a while in this rabbit hole this week, right,
Speaker 1: and there was you know, someone like social media posts
Speaker 1: about some of the more interesting radical women fighting in
Speaker 1: Palestine during this time, and then you'll have this like
Speaker 1: pro patriarchal, like Muslim man being like, stop calling these
Speaker 1: women feminists. You're just bringing your Western values, and then
Speaker 1: all these like Muslim women or like shut the fuck
Speaker 1: up what he was talking about, you know, dude. And
Speaker 1: so I like, I went into this research being like, oh,
Speaker 1: I should be real careful about this. They a lot
Speaker 1: of their splinter groups had names like feminist group and
Speaker 1: things like that.
Speaker 2: So there we go.
Speaker 1: And I don't know whether the Women's Congress itself or
Speaker 1: at least some of these splinter groups, including a lot
Speaker 1: of these founders that I'm talking about, protested the mandatory
Speaker 1: wearing of veils. And it's worth pointing out because they're
Speaker 1: often flattened as like women's auxiliary of a men's movement
Speaker 1: and as if are not concerned with the rights of
Speaker 1: women in their society, and that is not the case.
Speaker 1: Mattel wrote books about women's liberation in Palestine, saying that
Speaker 1: a local Palestinian government would be essential for justice for women.
Speaker 1: She herself survived the Knakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's
Speaker 1: gonna happen in nineteen forty eight. Her story drops away
Speaker 1: after that mostly, but we know she lived a fairly
Speaker 1: long time. She moved to the US in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: and she died in Virginia in nineteen ninety two. One
Speaker 1: of the other groups that seemed to grow out of
Speaker 1: the Women's Congress has a name that's usually translated to
Speaker 1: the Chrysanthemum Flowers. And this is the like, this is
Speaker 1: what the Instagram post was about.
Speaker 2: This is the like.
Speaker 1: Instagram post worthy group. They rule, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: And I want to find a book about them in English.
Speaker 1: I found so many contradictory sources about this. Nothing ever
Speaker 1: more contradictory than these things. Rat all o'khawan is the
Speaker 1: Chrysanthemum Flowers. They were formed in nineteen thirty three or
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six or nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 2: Oh man, okay, all right, no, seven thirty three. I
Speaker 2: can't do that math, so let's call it.
Speaker 1: I think. I think it was nineteen thirties, or maybe
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty six. That felt like the most legit source.
Speaker 1: I think nineteen forty seven they became an armed group,
Speaker 1: because at some point they become an armed group. And
Speaker 1: this is why people like them. As if you find
Speaker 1: pictures of women with guns and a revolution. People get
Speaker 1: really excited about that, including my secture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's dope ass picture. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This group Chrysanthemum Flowers was formed by two sisters, one
Speaker 1: of whom people tend to agree was named Moheba Kurshid.
Speaker 1: The other might have been named Naraman Khurshid or Arabia Kurshid.
Speaker 1: Lots of sources say each Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean when it comes to names, this is where
Speaker 2: you know, you know Al Cassam, I you know know
Speaker 2: Al Casam, but it's the full name where I think
Speaker 2: it was just the first two names. I was like,
Speaker 2: I don't know this, and you know they.
Speaker 1: It's my pronunciations.
Speaker 2: It's the pronunciation, and it's also the nicknames. They all
Speaker 2: have cool nicknames too that are sometimes in there. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it says also where they're from, long Home.
Speaker 1: It's a good point.
Speaker 2: What can you do?
Speaker 1: And there's transliteration happening like it's actually I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: aw woe is me about this? It's it's literally just
Speaker 1: a problem of the format of the show where I
Speaker 1: have a week to research everything because I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: it makes it hard to to google them, right, because
Speaker 1: they have a million different spellings of the transliterations and
Speaker 1: things like this. But you know, when language barrier is
Speaker 1: a major issue. One of the stories I read was
Speaker 1: basically like understandably being like, yeah, if you read historians
Speaker 1: who don't speak Arabic, they won't get this right because
Speaker 1: all of the sources are in Arabic. And I'm like, yes,
Speaker 1: to be clear, I'm not a historian. I am a
Speaker 1: pop historian who yes, tells stories. I am a storyteller, yes,
Speaker 1: And I am a guest on podcasts. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: are expected to know all of it.
Speaker 2: Never listen to me. Yeah, except if I'm on my podcast.
Speaker 2: Listen to me then, But you.
Speaker 1: Know, what is my job? I also failed at was
Speaker 1: doing an ad break earlier. So now you're going to
Speaker 1: get it now. Oh all right, just ad break right now.
Speaker 1: And Rebecca so Mohiba was a school teacher in Jaffa,
Speaker 1: a city to the south of Tel Aviv that is
Speaker 1: now considered part of tel Aviv. And I suspect that
Speaker 1: that's not a great thing that is considered part of
Speaker 1: tel Aviv, because Jaffa seemed to be the kind of
Speaker 1: cultural center of a lot of the Palestinian world. She
Speaker 1: advocates for women's rights in education. She was part of
Speaker 1: the Arab Women's Association. Her and her sister formed the
Speaker 1: Chrysanthemum Flowers, a word that I have spelled differently every
Speaker 1: single time I've written into this script, even though it
Speaker 1: is an English language word. And at some point they
Speaker 1: formed this and it started as a mutual aid organization.
Speaker 1: It did allow the work of what we've been talking
Speaker 1: about earlier. It provided relief to families who were displaced
Speaker 1: by settlement. It also provided funds for women to go
Speaker 1: to school and get education, which is fucking cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they worked very actively for religious unity, as basically did
Speaker 1: everyone during this time period, during this chunk of time,
Speaker 1: that's what they're doing with this organization mutual aid. Later
Speaker 1: they're going to move into arms struggle. They're going to
Speaker 1: be the first all women military unit in the region.
Speaker 1: They become an armed organization after Mohibo watched a young
Speaker 1: boy assassinated in his mother's arms by a Zionist sniper.
Speaker 1: That was probably the nineteen forty seventh thing. It might
Speaker 1: have been nineteen forty eight when that happened. This unit
Speaker 1: fought in the defense of Jaffa during the Nakba in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight, and they're sick photos of them with
Speaker 1: like I think, old timy submachine guns. And I'm not
Speaker 1: covering the Nakba, but just to follow Moheba's story, like
Speaker 1: nearly all of one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants of Jaffa,
Speaker 1: she was ethnically cleansed. Every account I've seen says that
Speaker 1: they were literally driven into the sea. You can find
Speaker 1: photos of this. They had to flee on boats and
Speaker 1: scores of people drowned.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know that whole, Like every single thing that
Speaker 1: the Zionists claim that Palestinians want to do to the Jews,
Speaker 1: you just slowly find them having done.
Speaker 2: Having done them during the Nakba and or recently. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the whole. Every accusation is a confession thing. Yeah, that
Speaker 2: bears out to be true so often that I'm like, guys,
Speaker 2: just stop accusing, because I'm just going to research it.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna google it, and it's gonna be a
Speaker 2: thing you did. Just stop accusing.
Speaker 1: Where'd you get that idea driving into the sea? He
Speaker 1: would do such a thing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you wouldn't want Yeah, oh, here they are driving
Speaker 2: people into the sea and not even It's funny because
Speaker 2: like that that phrase. I've always I don't know, I've
Speaker 2: always been like that's a hyperbole or it's metaphor you
Speaker 2: know exactly. I didn't literally think you could drive people
Speaker 2: into the sea. Yeah, that is a thing that happened, apparently.
Speaker 2: I like all of the like really.
Speaker 1: Quick versions of the chrysanthemum flower and then like are
Speaker 1: like and then she was driven into the sea. But
Speaker 1: then it is like literally and they always put that
Speaker 1: in there, and so I'm like, so then I spent
Speaker 1: a while researching about that, even tho. I again, this
Speaker 1: isn't a knock episode or so about the fall of
Speaker 1: Jaffa and scores of people drowned and they had to
Speaker 1: flee on boats to other countries. And I think only
Speaker 1: a few thousand people were able to stay in Jaffa
Speaker 1: during this ethnic cleansing. Yea, And now it's part of
Speaker 1: Tel Aviv fun.
Speaker 2: Let's all go dancing.
Speaker 1: But the chrysanthemum flowers are at as hell. I can't
Speaker 1: wait to one day tell you out more about them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Back to the early nineteen thirties, there were also a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of various political parties cropping up which promoted
Speaker 1: not cooperating with the British system, resistance desionism, and creating
Speaker 1: a pan Arab alliance. So it's basically it's like the
Speaker 1: thing that happened in the wake of this nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: nine uprising is that Palestinian started really organizing and trying
Speaker 1: all of the different strategies legal popular revolt and I
Speaker 1: don't know what if a grenade solves my problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in nineteen thirty three, two separate assemblies of over
Speaker 1: five hundred people started developing plans for nonviolent, non cooperation
Speaker 1: models for an independence movement. Nonviolent marchers were getting shot
Speaker 1: dead by cops in the streets. Twelve people killed one
Speaker 1: of these demonstrations on October thirteenth, nineteen thirty three, and
Speaker 1: twenty four killed or sixteen killed and two hundred and
Speaker 1: four people were injured. On October twenty seventh. Some of
Speaker 1: the protests against land sales were working, but only the
Speaker 1: protests that happened when they were aimed at Arabs who
Speaker 1: were going to sell the land, not already sold land.
Speaker 1: The Zionists were not fucking back and down. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: is some reason to hope during this period the intentional
Speaker 1: demographic takeover of Palestine by Zionists, it starts stalling out
Speaker 1: because I don't know if you knew this, most Jews
Speaker 1: not Zionists.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, as it was like a you know, it
Speaker 2: was a thing you could be into if you had
Speaker 2: a particularly adventurous spirit and you were like, hey, you
Speaker 2: know what would be fun to uproots intentionally you moved
Speaker 2: to a place in which we don't know the language
Speaker 2: or the culture, and you know, it hates me and
Speaker 2: everyone hates me. It's you know, and if you're a
Speaker 2: European Jew around this time, you're like, you know what,
Speaker 2: that actually doesn't seem like that bad of an idea
Speaker 2: We'll go to based on how things are going here. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this idea of you know, again, of all
Speaker 2: Jews being inherently Zionist is a complete falsehood.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: By nineteen twenty six, after years of these policies, seventeen
Speaker 1: percent of the Palestinian population was Jewish. By nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: it had raised all the way to eighteen point five percent.
Speaker 1: So it got that one point five bump. Yeah, until
Speaker 1: boy Who's going to stomp onto the world stage and
Speaker 1: fuck everything up for everyone? In nineteen thirty three, something happened.
Speaker 2: You know his name, Charlie Chaplin. That's right, he's gonna
Speaker 2: waddle into the room with his bendel and his Joe
Speaker 2: mustache and his mustache, and he's gonna fuck every ye.
Speaker 1: Good politics and bad feminism.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty three, something happened that History podcast never
Speaker 1: talk about the rise of Nazi Germany since the UK
Speaker 1: and the US and all these other places were like,
Speaker 1: well we don't want you something an awful lot of
Speaker 1: Jewish people, for very understandable reasons, We're like, well, maybe
Speaker 1: Zionism isn't so bad after all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, kind of the only option at the point
Speaker 2: at which people were moving there in droves.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, the Nazis at this point were quite happy to
Speaker 1: see the Jews go. At first they were like, well,
Speaker 1: you can go, but you can't bring your stuff. We
Speaker 1: want all your stuff. The Jews had been organizing a
Speaker 1: massive boycott of Nazi goods since nineteen thirty three, and
Speaker 1: so Zionists were like, hey, well we'll lift the boycott
Speaker 1: if you let people leave Germany with their stuff. And
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany was like, all right, y'all can leave Germany
Speaker 1: and bring your money with you. I guess this agreement
Speaker 1: was called the Transfer Agreement, and it was not uncontroversial
Speaker 1: among Jews. Internationally, non and anti Zionist Jews were entirely
Speaker 1: against it. Pretty uniformly. Most Zionists, or at least the
Speaker 1: political entities, supported it because it supported the Zionist project
Speaker 1: and because it helped get Jews safely to Palestine. Yea,
Speaker 1: many Zionists were firmly against any cooperation with Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that the Jews in Germany were like, that's
Speaker 1: easy for you to say over there in Palestine, a
Speaker 1: US get the fuck out police. Yes, the agreement did
Speaker 1: save about sixty thousand Jewish people from the Holocaust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they did not go to an empty country, and
Speaker 1: nor did they show up to assimilate into Palestinian culture.
Speaker 1: They were showing up into a project that was designed
Speaker 1: to take over, as they've been clear about so. In cities,
Speaker 1: Palestinians led huge revolts against the destruction of the society
Speaker 1: at the hands of Zionists. In the countryside, they turned
Speaker 1: to friend of the pod things that other people will
Speaker 1: call you a bandit for doing, Like hey, guy, you
Speaker 1: can't have all this land sorry, I will shoot you
Speaker 1: if you keep trying to take.
Speaker 2: It from me. Yeah. Nice stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just comes up a lot on this show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this show, we are pro banned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're depending on how cool your hat is.
Speaker 1: I know, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty five, Britain offered everyone a deal. It's like,
Speaker 1: I think kind of the first I don't know, I
Speaker 1: think it's called this, but it's like the first one
Speaker 1: state solution attempt. They offer a legislative council of twenty
Speaker 1: five members that would include five Brits, eight Muslims, seven Jews,
Speaker 1: three Christians, and two people representing commercial interests.
Speaker 2: Fun. I love those commercial interest guys, just being like, uh,
Speaker 2: I also sell I sell the most oranges.
Speaker 1: So I got to see I've run across this in
Speaker 1: early twentieth century stuff where they were more mask off
Speaker 1: all over the world about that, where they were like, well,
Speaker 1: of course someone in the government has to just represent
Speaker 1: the rich people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need someone here to represent you know,
Speaker 2: this group of people, this group of people, and this
Speaker 2: guy's right to use slave labor to get sugar.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. That is describing the early federal systems of
Speaker 1: many countries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always like, oh, okay, but who has the
Speaker 2: most power here? Oh I think you know, I think
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And now, of course, you know, you just have
Speaker 1: lobbyists that represent all these commercial interests instead of more
Speaker 1: power than the electorate.
Speaker 2: That's right, but.
Speaker 1: Actually I think they still even have whatever. I'm not
Speaker 1: a big government understander. And so they offer this solution.
Speaker 1: The Arab High Council, which kind of represents a lot
Speaker 1: of the you know, the elites or whatever it gets called,
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, well we'll take it. It's not perfect,
Speaker 1: but whatever, we'll take it. It seems better and what's
Speaker 1: going on? And the Zionists were like, well, I know
Speaker 1: that that would let us wield power that's vastly disproportioned
Speaker 1: to our actual demographic numbers, but that doesn't give us
Speaker 1: a majority or total control. So no, yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a object fell through.
Speaker 2: It is a crazy it is. Yeah, it's just it's
Speaker 2: an absolutely nuts thing. When you're so confident in your
Speaker 2: eventual demographic majority that's going to be pulled off through
Speaker 2: some way, we'll see that. You're just like nope, we
Speaker 2: are running this place or nothing. Yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just like imagine how different because you know,
Speaker 1: eventually the British proably would have still left. And like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know, I just like it's sad
Speaker 1: when I think about like all of the different times
Speaker 1: people tried to be like what if it's just not
Speaker 1: an ethno state.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah? Yeah, And like I think of that, it
Speaker 2: speaks to, I mean the time period in which all
Speaker 2: this was taking place, the time period in which you know,
Speaker 2: modern in which Zionism was you know, created, and it
Speaker 2: speaks to kind of like just culturally, you know, in
Speaker 2: terms of Western culture, it being not at all a
Speaker 2: weird thing to just be like, no, our ideology says
Speaker 2: that we're going to make this a racial thing, and
Speaker 2: it's weird of you to think it would be anything
Speaker 2: other than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why wouldn't we do that? Yeah totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which, like listen, I'm willing to look at in
Speaker 2: terms of like in its correct historical context, not to villainize,
Speaker 2: but to understand. I just hate the revisionism that people
Speaker 2: do when they talk about this time because all you
Speaker 2: ever really hear about is the Arabs rejecting every peace
Speaker 2: proposal and every you know Congress of Zionists, you know,
Speaker 2: within the British Mandate Palestine, being like we just want hey,
Speaker 2: we'll share. Well, of course we'll share. And it's like,
Speaker 2: this is not the case. This is not the case,
Speaker 2: no matter how many times you pretend it is the case. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This same year, everyone finally knew what was happening because
Speaker 1: kind of a Looney Tunes way on October sixteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five, some people were unloading a ship and there's
Speaker 1: a barrel labeled cement and they dropped the barrel and
Speaker 1: it broke. The men didn't come out, no, no, it
Speaker 1: was it was guns and ammo locks and shit. And
Speaker 1: someone said, hey, that's not cement. Yeah, that one barrel
Speaker 1: is probably the only barrel that somehow accidentally it must
Speaker 1: have come from America. They were like, it's just a cement. Guy,
Speaker 1: I got it mixed up with.
Speaker 2: His a you know, they got the mafia there. Just
Speaker 2: the bag of a truck fell off. What can you
Speaker 2: do anyways, look away.
Speaker 1: And so people were like, oh, underground terrorists, I as
Speaker 1: militias are getting armed and now we know it seems bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It kind of became do or die for folks, and
Speaker 1: it all came to a head in nineteen thirty six
Speaker 1: and gets called well then not particularly evocative title is
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine Arab Revolt
Speaker 1: of Palestine or a vocative the Great Revolt? I know
Speaker 1: which one I would rather be part of, the one
Speaker 1: that implies you might win, not the one that's like,
Speaker 1: but what happens in nineteen thirty nine?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like anything that starts with great. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, whether it's like wars or gatsbies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or deals like these deals.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Nothing that was good, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Planned that one by Sophie reminded me to an ad.
Speaker 1: Here's the ad break and we're back the Great Revolt.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of really fucking cool movements, the Great
Speaker 1: Revolt wasn't started by this or that group, not any
Speaker 1: of the congresses or the different patriarchal families, or the
Speaker 1: political parties, not even the communist parties or the Black.
Speaker 2: Hands or the Green Hands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, although I guess it kind of was a little
Speaker 1: bit started by some of the revolt could be labeled
Speaker 1: as starting from the black hand guy getting killed a
Speaker 1: Cassam and then also some terrorist actions. It led to
Speaker 1: some things that where some settlers got killed, and then
Speaker 1: some Arab kids got killed.
Speaker 2: But the point is it's organic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But overall, I mean it was a lot of
Speaker 1: different Like a lot of these things, a lot of
Speaker 1: different things are called the start point of it. But
Speaker 1: the first thing that happened out of it was a
Speaker 1: six month long Friend of the Pod general strike, probably
Speaker 1: the longest one we've talked about on this show, besides
Speaker 1: the general strike of enslaved people in the US South
Speaker 1: during the Civil War. As for why it had to
Speaker 1: start from the grassroots, I want to quote from the
Speaker 1: book The One Hundred Years War on Palestine. In the
Speaker 1: two decades after nineteen seventeen, the Palestinians had been unable
Speaker 1: to develop an overarching framework for their national movement, such
Speaker 1: as the WAFT in Egypt, or the Congress Party in
Speaker 1: India or Shinfeane in Ireland, nor did they maintain an
Speaker 1: apparently solid national front, as some others peoples fighting colonialism
Speaker 1: had managed to do. Their efforts were undermined by the hierarchical, conservative,
Speaker 1: and divided nature of Palestinian society and politics, characteristic of
Speaker 1: many in the region, and further sapped by a sophisticated
Speaker 1: policy of divide and rule adopted by the mandatory authorities.
Speaker 1: But by nineteen thirty six this divide and conquer wasn't
Speaker 1: working because that only affected the political class, not the grassroots.
Speaker 1: A British civil servant who'd quit over how Palestine was
Speaker 1: being treated. Because there are some decent people from wherever
Speaker 1: you're born, He described the cause of the revolt like
Speaker 1: this quote. The rebellion today is, to a greater extent
Speaker 1: than ever before, a revolt of villagers, and its immediate
Speaker 1: cause is the proposed scheme of partition. The moving spirits
Speaker 1: in the revolt are not the nationalist leaders, most of
Speaker 1: whom are now in exile, but men of the working
Speaker 1: in agricultural classes who are risking their lives and what
Speaker 1: they believe to be the only way left to them
Speaker 1: of saving their homes and their villages. I just I
Speaker 1: really like how clear that is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like a British.
Speaker 1: Guy writing at the time. One of the first groups
Speaker 1: to throw down in this general strike was the Arab
Speaker 1: Car Owners and Drivers Committee, and a lot of this
Speaker 1: was actually tax strikes. After months of strikes, the Arab
Speaker 1: High Arab High Committee signed on agreeing to non cooperation
Speaker 1: and civil resistance all the stuff that people have been
Speaker 1: advocating the whole time. They basically the leaders got drag
Speaker 1: kicking and screaming into supporting what the people were already doing,
Speaker 1: which is a tiles oldest time. Their demands were basically,
Speaker 1: we want a democratic government and to stop Zionists from
Speaker 1: colonizing our country. Resistance was a huge part of it,
Speaker 1: literally under the classic slogan no taxation without representation.
Speaker 2: Well, that sounds like some straight communism to me.
Speaker 1: I know, absolutely, the reds must be there.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, that's no taxation without Stalin was like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, oh, I'm going to get the details of
Speaker 1: the slightly wrong. So this partition is being planned, and
Speaker 1: at first the communist parties were against the partition because
Speaker 1: they lived there, and they were like, we don't want
Speaker 1: the partition. But then I think, I think I just
Speaker 1: read this like right before, but didn't put in the
Speaker 1: script because I didn't want to talk too much on Stalin. Randomly,
Speaker 1: Stalin was like, no, we support the partition. So then
Speaker 1: all of the fucking Palaestinian communists had to be like,
Speaker 1: we support the partition. Yeah, partition great, yeah, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: the actual cool people doing shit support committees spread all
Speaker 1: over the country doing mutual aid work like taking care
Speaker 1: of the sick and supporting families. Nonviolent marches were met
Speaker 1: with bullets as always, organizers were jailed, martial law was enacted,
Speaker 1: and this is all for the nonviolent stage of the revolt.
Speaker 1: Prisoners are getting gunned down for non violently refusing orders
Speaker 1: in jail and like one guy's quote is shouting, martyrdom
Speaker 1: is better than jail as he refuses orders in jail
Speaker 1: and gets killed. The Arab High Committee tried to co
Speaker 1: opt the general strike in classic form. They called an
Speaker 1: end to the general strike, being like, oh, don't worry.
Speaker 1: The British have totally promised they'll take our concerns seriously.
Speaker 1: Now we've totally totally shown them. This didn't happen. The
Speaker 1: end of the general strike did happen. The British were like, well,
Speaker 1: we've given a lot of thought and here on our
Speaker 1: gloomy island we've decided what's best for you.
Speaker 2: Over there, we'll give you know what they always know
Speaker 2: what's best. I'm very excited for what this deal is
Speaker 2: going to be. It's funny, better than a lot of
Speaker 2: the shit now, but it still sucks. Yeah, we will
Speaker 2: give seventeen percent of your country to the Jews, the
Speaker 2: most productive seventeen percent, and do a little ethnic cleansing
Speaker 2: in those areas quick, and you can have the rest
Speaker 2: of the country. Only when I say you can have
Speaker 2: the rest of the country, you'll still be under our
Speaker 2: colonial administration. Are anti colonials? Sorry, this is mandated. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this was the first partition of Palestine. So part two
Speaker 2: of the uprising wasn't as polite as the General strike
Speaker 2: of nineteen thirty six. In October nineteen thirty seven, they're like,
Speaker 2: all right, well that didn't work. Armed revolt time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's kind of how it goes, especially you know, you
Speaker 2: get that first antifada and you're just like, you know
Speaker 2: what that was. That was pretty good. It was a
Speaker 2: very peaceful except for all the you know, murder, idf
Speaker 2: doing the murder. And then you get that second intifada
Speaker 2: and you're like, oh, yeah, now this is the one
Speaker 2: that everyone's going to bring up.
Speaker 3: I know, I know.
Speaker 1: And there's like the intro quote to the chapter in
Speaker 1: one of these books was the whole those who make
Speaker 1: a nonviolent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like that is just true.
Speaker 2: That's just true. That's just exactly. I mean, it just
Speaker 2: bears out in history every single time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, yeah, and they people will go
Speaker 1: back and forth with some of the tactical stuff with this.
Speaker 1: It seems like they almost pulled this off. It took
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand British soldiers to bring this to heal.
Speaker 1: This is one soldier for every four adult Palestinian men.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Now as they crushed it, it went real bad. There's
Speaker 1: like the Brits are bringing in, you know, bombers and shit.
Speaker 1: I've read ten percent. I've read seventeen percent of Palestinian men.
Speaker 1: Adult men were either killed, injured, arrested, or driven out
Speaker 1: of the country during this time period. For demographic comparison,
Speaker 1: that would be like if around twenty million adult American
Speaker 1: men were rounded up and killed or driven out of
Speaker 1: the country or oh shit whatever. One of the leaders
Speaker 1: of the revolt was an experienced guerrilla fighter, and I'm
Speaker 1: just bringing them up. This part of the story is cool.
Speaker 1: And when I say experienced, I mean he was in
Speaker 1: his mid seventies or his early eighties. Hell yeah, depending
Speaker 1: on which source he read. His name is Farhan al Sadi,
Speaker 1: who'd spent a bunch of time in prison and then
Speaker 1: he joined I think the Black Hand when he got out.
Speaker 1: I don't know love about him as a person to
Speaker 1: like say one way or the other. But eventually he
Speaker 1: was convicted of he I think he was the guy
Speaker 1: who fired the shot that started the the pre part
Speaker 1: of the revolt where I said, some where some settlers
Speaker 1: got killed. I think he had like pulled them off
Speaker 1: a bus and killed one of them or something. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But he wasn't convicted of that. He was convicted of
Speaker 1: the possession of a single round of ammunition and that
Speaker 1: was the death penalty. They knew who he was, but
Speaker 1: they couldn't prove anything else. As the best I can tell, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he died at either age seventy five or eighty one,
Speaker 1: so I guess by that we have to say seventy eight. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: in the of a gorilla struggle. And I think that
Speaker 1: this is a heartwarming It is never too late to
Speaker 1: follow your dreams. Inspiring news story, just like actors who
Speaker 1: don't get their start until their fifties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the same thing. You never know when you're
Speaker 2: going to be you know, the spark of a revolution
Speaker 2: or be a revolutionary Shahid. You know, it's never too
Speaker 2: late to give up on your dreams, folks.
Speaker 1: Now, meanwhile, the British go full fucking mad Max on
Speaker 1: the rebels, and I wish I did not mean this literally.
Speaker 1: They had developed this trick I had never heard of
Speaker 1: over in Ireland or what you do? You take a
Speaker 1: prisoner and you tie them to the front of your
Speaker 1: car or train so the other rebels can't attack your
Speaker 1: convoy because there's a living person tied to it that
Speaker 1: is your prisoner.
Speaker 2: So so first of all, that is just straight up
Speaker 2: mad Max, insane. And second of all, you're telling me
Speaker 2: the British were using human shields. Yes, absolutely, And there
Speaker 2: was photos of this. The one I've seen isn't a
Speaker 2: guy like tied to the grill. It's two guys tied
Speaker 2: up to a little trailer being pushed by the front
Speaker 2: of the vehicle. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: So they tied to the grill is like a little
Speaker 1: bit more brutal. They had to develop the thing to
Speaker 1: push in the front of this fucking car. They went
Speaker 1: to a fucking auto shop fabricator and we're like, we
Speaker 1: need a mad Max a guy and the guy was like,
Speaker 1: I'm from the future. I know totally what you mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Like that's crazy because I just took a
Speaker 2: time machine to watch that movie and now I'm back
Speaker 2: here and I chose this time randomly because I'm evil,
Speaker 2: because I'm evil, and I just like, you know, making
Speaker 2: weird shit for the British. Yeah. So yeah, let's do it. Bro,
Speaker 2: Let's let's make this mad Max fucking torture human shield machine. Yeah,
Speaker 2: every every accusation, every single goddamn time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you are suspected of being a rebel, the
Speaker 1: British would blow up your house or kill your family,
Speaker 1: just doing the like we're sad we can't do this
Speaker 1: in Ireland anymore, so we'll do it here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They would demolish random homes and villages. This is against
Speaker 1: international law, the whole collective punishment thing that has never
Speaker 1: stopped an empire, especially not in this part of the
Speaker 1: country or a world. Thousands were arrested without trial. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, the British destroyed this village, Baca Algarabia,
Speaker 1: burning down almost every wooden building and leveling seventy stone houses.
Speaker 1: Then they arrested all the men in town and there's
Speaker 1: this pattern that I've seen a bunch of times. Your
Speaker 1: big shitty colonial state is trying to repress an anti
Speaker 1: colonial or anti authoritarian revolution. So like, ah, we locked
Speaker 1: up all the men, were like good now, and then
Speaker 1: the women take things even harder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's most because they're just like women. They can't
Speaker 2: do anything. I know.
Speaker 1: Somehow they picked up rocks with their weak womenly arms.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the women of the village brought their kids and
Speaker 1: a bunch of rocks and went to the military barracks
Speaker 1: at night and were like, give us our fucking men
Speaker 1: back and started throwing rocks.
Speaker 2: Fuck yes, and it worked. Wow.
Speaker 1: They got all of the men released from prison by
Speaker 1: storming the prison with rocks.
Speaker 2: That is badass. Yeah, and so those are really really
Speaker 2: nice wives. You know, I would like would do that
Speaker 2: for me, but I don't think she would. Just tw
Speaker 2: you know that these were decent husbands, you know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: clearly these are decent husbands. You know. With me, Francesca
Speaker 2: would be like, you know, you need you need a
Speaker 2: few weeks in there.
Speaker 1: You know, prisoner. You know, we'll just put your name
Speaker 1: on all the things draw to the cause.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. She'll be like, you know what, I got
Speaker 2: kind of a busy schedule this week. Can I throw
Speaker 2: some rocks? Get a prison next week? I'm just getting
Speaker 2: I love my wad former guest of the pod. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, other prisoners were liberated by more traditional methods
Speaker 1: rebels with guns, storm jails and let Yeah.
Speaker 2: Classic, classic, classic way to do it. There's multiple methods,
Speaker 2: always good. Yeah, I always say go with the classic,
Speaker 2: but I like, you know, the gangs of women with rocks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's all you have is rocks. Exactly, go with the rocks.
Speaker 3: Like when you buy name Brad Dreno, even though you
Speaker 3: know that there's other brands that work just as good better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You never go wrong storming to prison with rifles exactly.
Speaker 2: I mean, for the most part, you could never go wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, it totally doesn't end well badly for anyone any
Speaker 1: talking about rebels took out an acting district commissioner, an
Speaker 1: Australian guy who'd been really excited about the partition of
Speaker 1: the country, and so four masked men did him a
Speaker 1: shooting in September nineteen thirty seven, on his forty first birthday,
Speaker 1: while he was on his way to his Protestant Church.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, happy birthday. I know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's a couple presents bonus holes and the speed
Speaker 1: holes makes him go faster.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly helps them blow out more candles. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The British lost their fucking British minds over this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they rounded up people and started torturing and raping people
Speaker 1: to get information.
Speaker 2: Fuck.
Speaker 1: The funny thing about like being the boring reformist organization
Speaker 1: like the Arab High Committee that like Higher Committee that
Speaker 1: was like ended the strike and trying to play nice
Speaker 1: with the British. It never works. You're not safer after
Speaker 1: you know this Australian dude gets killed. The Arab High
Speaker 1: Committee was declared illegal and basically all the Nationalists leadership
Speaker 1: was deported or went into exile. But classically, a bottom
Speaker 1: of rebellion doesn't stopped by deporting its self at leaders
Speaker 1: and people went even harder. British lost. The British lost
Speaker 1: control over a lot of the country, especially the rural areas,
Speaker 1: and also a bunch of the cities. It was also
Speaker 1: this revolt that the Kafia, that black and white scarf
Speaker 1: became the symbol of rebellion and Palestinian pride.
Speaker 2: Oh all right, that I did not know that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I did know that. I've always known that totally.
Speaker 2: If we're wrong, I got it from a history book. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 2: if we're wrong, I didn't know that for a reason.
Speaker 1: I did get because wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like I mean things like that. I'm always like,
Speaker 1: there's probably multiple times or places, but that whatever sounds right,
Speaker 1: I'll go with it. The Palestinians almost pulled this off.
Speaker 1: One British general set in nineteen thirty eight. The situation
Speaker 1: was such that civil administration of the country was, to
Speaker 1: all practical purposes non existent, and that practically every village
Speaker 1: in the country harbors and supports the rebels and will
Speaker 1: assist in concealing their identity from the government forces. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, they got the fucking world. How different it
Speaker 1: would be if they'd pulled this off. Yeah, the two things.
Speaker 2: I imagine you say that sentence a lot on this podcast.
Speaker 1: I absolutely do. That is kind of the I'll be
Speaker 1: like the we we almost we almost did it is
Speaker 1: the other name of the show.
Speaker 2: If I almost did it, by Jim.
Speaker 1: We almost pulled it off, by every revolutionary everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the two things that brought down this rebellion. Were two
Speaker 1: things we see bring down an awful lot of rebellions. First,
Speaker 1: and I think this is the most important thing to
Speaker 1: point it to, overwhelming military force of the British and
Speaker 1: their complete lack of like interest in following any semblance
Speaker 1: of law as they do it. You know, you're talking
Speaker 1: about shooting and prisoning or exiling almost one man and
Speaker 1: five in the country. That is twice a decimation for
Speaker 1: anyone keeping track.
Speaker 2: Oh, I forget that decimation is like a unit of measurement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how to kill guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I just always saw it as just like
Speaker 2: a word meaning a thing, but it's like a specific
Speaker 2: amount of dead, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was funny. This actually came up in one of
Speaker 1: our most recent episodes. I think of it as related
Speaker 1: to a Tolstoy story about happening in the Russian military,
Speaker 1: and then Sophie pointed out that it was a Roman thing.
Speaker 1: Thinks about the Roman army, Roman military once a week. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how it goes.
Speaker 2: But yeah, hey, it.
Speaker 1: Didn't correct me. Must be right, that's okay. So they
Speaker 1: had one hundred thousand soldiers and they you know, fucked
Speaker 1: up everyone. They found the other thing that happened was
Speaker 1: a successful divide and conquer ended up kind of coming in.
Speaker 1: In the end, Palestinian started splitting between those that wanted
Speaker 1: to compromise and those that didn't, or, as another source
Speaker 1: put it, basically, it was like different strong men were
Speaker 1: vying for control, which would have been avoided by grassroots
Speaker 1: and democratic institutions. That's probably the bias of that author,
Speaker 1: but I probably share that bias. This split went badly.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of assassinations were the result of the split. One
Speaker 1: rebel wrote that it had started off as a war
Speaker 1: against the English and the Jews, but quote transformed into
Speaker 1: a civil war where methods of terrorism, pillage, theft, fire,
Speaker 1: and murder became common, which Jesus Christ no wonder. Ireland
Speaker 1: and Palestine are such tight friends. I'm just doing an
Speaker 1: ad libs from the same script talking about what the
Speaker 1: British did in Ireland.
Speaker 2: Yea splits and.
Speaker 1: You know violence, Irish and Irish violence and Palestinian on
Speaker 1: Palestinian violence.
Speaker 2: The British are really good at that. They Americans taken conquer,
Speaker 2: but they can't cook a fucking meal. Weird, Now, well,
Speaker 2: they have to conquer places that know how to Yeah,
Speaker 2: they have to conquer places that know how to eat good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so the only way, no wonder, there're so mad. Yeah.
Speaker 1: By the summer of nineteen thirty nine, the rebellion was
Speaker 1: crushed and Palestine was way way weaker. After the revolt,
Speaker 1: the newly armed and trained Zionist settlers came out on
Speaker 1: top because they were kind of like, I mean, like
Speaker 1: the British mostly did this right, but then the Zionists
Speaker 1: are like getting some military training, They're getting all these weapons.
Speaker 1: Even the General Strike wound up playing well for the
Speaker 1: Zionists because as different Arab industries shut down, Hebrew labor
Speaker 1: stepped up. If the Arab revolt had only been against
Speaker 1: the Zionists and the British had stayed out of it,
Speaker 1: the world would have been a completely different place today.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well that's kind of the truth of anything the
Speaker 2: British touch.
Speaker 1: I know, if the British had stayed out of it,
Speaker 1: a tale of utopia is al. If the British had
Speaker 1: stayed out of it, then all the people fleeting programs
Speaker 1: could have gone to the UK.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know, it's just uh, it's and it's
Speaker 2: it's interesting too because I always find the mirroring of
Speaker 2: the two, the you know, the British colonial mindset and
Speaker 2: the Zionist mindset being so similar that it's when you
Speaker 2: see a British Israeli official talking where you go like, oh, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: the same same, same, same thing. It's like, you know,
Speaker 2: whenever I would see like what's his name, Alon Levy,
Speaker 2: who was like the former the former government spokesman for
Speaker 2: Israel wh would go on all the TV shows before
Speaker 2: he was fired because somehow he lied too much even
Speaker 2: for Israel.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And like you know, you you hear his you know,
Speaker 2: his British accent, and you you hear what he's saying
Speaker 2: in the way saying. You're just like, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: this is like a British this is a very British
Speaker 2: euro centric type of you know, viewpoint. And also you know,
Speaker 2: just the whole affectation of it is very British And
Speaker 2: it kind of puts Zionism in this context that you
Speaker 2: didn't initially put it in because they've done so much
Speaker 2: reht conning in order to make it not seem like
Speaker 2: this Western settler colonial movement and rather some sort of
Speaker 2: indigenous rights movement created by the those you know who
Speaker 2: were kicked out of the schtettle in the pale of settlement,
Speaker 2: and it's like, no, nope, nope, not my full story here.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've been aware of a lot of the
Speaker 1: modern stuff about Israel Palestine for a very long time,
Speaker 1: but this time period, a lot of the like quick
Speaker 1: history type stuff I had read had really basically been like, well,
Speaker 1: just too many Jews were coming, and it was okay
Speaker 1: when there's three Jews, but people got really mad if
Speaker 1: lots of Jews came, as compared to specifically being like no,
Speaker 1: this was a specific and conscious setting up of settlements
Speaker 1: that were outside the rest of society, and like just
Speaker 1: a completely fundamentally different thing.
Speaker 2: Is it?
Speaker 1: Really? That was the like I knew a lot of
Speaker 1: the broad strokes of a lot of this, but that
Speaker 1: was the stuff about the really early stuff that I
Speaker 1: was like, oh okay, now I yeah again it I.
Speaker 2: Think it's like, it's context that is important to understand
Speaker 2: for anyone who's like, who's you know, recently coming to
Speaker 2: this conflict and wanting to learn about it, and and
Speaker 2: it's it's you know, this context is also hard I
Speaker 2: think for some people on you know, for not just
Speaker 2: for like Zionists, but also for people who are anti
Speaker 2: Zionists trying to understand the conflict or learning about it
Speaker 2: and knowing that there was like you can't say, oh,
Speaker 2: the Palestinians were only ever victims. They were never you know, victimizing.
Speaker 2: It's because no, there was violent revolts going on against
Speaker 2: what they were seeing coming on the horizon. Was there
Speaker 2: eventual ethnic cleansing and they were right about it? Yeah,
Speaker 2: And you know it's like you can't say, oh, well,
Speaker 2: we only ethnically cleansed because they started revolting because they
Speaker 2: were worried about us ethnically cleansing, when it was so
Speaker 2: clear from the writings of early Zionists like Hertzeul, like Jobatinsky,
Speaker 2: you know, like fucking just like the entire early Zionist
Speaker 2: cohort was saying demographic majority is everything, and ethnic cleansing
Speaker 2: is the only way to go about it. You know.
Speaker 2: So they're not wrong. And it's not to say that
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, you know, I love killing people or whatever,
Speaker 2: but it's to say that this history that we have,
Speaker 2: this one sided narrative of just like oh, the Arabs,
Speaker 2: you know, didn't want there to be Jews or thought
Speaker 2: there were too many Jews or whatnot. Yeah, is just
Speaker 2: is just completely completely missing the point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, if you support the protests that are happening
Speaker 1: whenever you are listening to this as we're recording it
Speaker 1: right now, there's really amazing and inspiring protests at universities
Speaker 1: across the US that the police.
Speaker 2: Are violently putting down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, violently putting down because people are camping on a
Speaker 1: place they pay forty thousand dollars a year to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that the mainstream media and government officials are calling
Speaker 2: anti semitic, even though there's a large and disproportionately Jewish
Speaker 2: population of people who are there supporting the protests for
Speaker 2: you know, divestment on these college campuses from Israel. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and you know all that all that fun stuff, all
Speaker 2: the you know, fun authoritarian bullshit that we doesn't affect us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So support those things or whatever is happening by
Speaker 1: the time you read this. Because until Palestine is free people, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean straight up, that is the That is
Speaker 2: a hard fast truth of it. And if you want
Speaker 2: to support them through uh laughing, Ah, I've got a plug.
Speaker 1: For you, Okay, what is it? I will support them
Speaker 1: by laughing.
Speaker 2: It's called Bad Hasbar the World's most moral podcasts. A
Speaker 2: podcast that I do about Israeli propaganda. It is mostly
Speaker 2: just you know, me and some friends sitting around talking
Speaker 2: about just some crazy propaganda that we saw, you know, recently,
Speaker 2: and making fun of it. It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: It's cathartic. I don't think it will help anything in
Speaker 2: the world, So obviously, give your time and energy to
Speaker 2: something you know, more direct, Yes, more direct.
Speaker 1: But direct stuff matters. But direct stuff matters too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you but if you want to, you know,
Speaker 2: like to have an emotional break from it, and you
Speaker 2: want to you feel like no one else is is
Speaker 2: giving you permission to, you know, be mad. Come, come,
Speaker 2: come laugh with us. It's fun.
Speaker 1: Wholly endorse this podcast. I wrote. My plug is that
Speaker 1: I have a substack Marto Kildroy dot substack whatever, and
Speaker 1: recently by whenever you hear this, but maybe not super recently,
Speaker 1: by whenever you hear this, I wrote a piece called
Speaker 1: Casting Fire, which came out of a conversation I had.
Speaker 1: I was giving a presentation to students at the New
Speaker 1: School unrelated to the occupation. A class had read one
Speaker 1: of my books and I was zooming in to talk
Speaker 1: to them about that, but then the occupation had taken off,
Speaker 1: so instead we talked about what I have learned through
Speaker 1: my experience and through my reading about the stages of
Speaker 1: protests and how to avoid recuperation, and how we inoculate
Speaker 1: ourselves against various types of splintering, the things that destroy movements,
Speaker 1: how to avoid it. It's called casting Fire. It's very short,
Speaker 1: but it's free. It's an essay. That's what I got, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have a new podcast. It's a weekly podcast
Speaker 3: hosted by Jimmie loftis called sixteenth Minute of Fame. And
Speaker 3: if it is after April thirtieth, the trailer is out.
Speaker 3: If it's after May seventh episode or more.
Speaker 1: And that's the weekly rewatch podcast of sixteen Candles where
Speaker 1: every week Jamie watches sixteen Candles its top in a
Speaker 1: different way, the subject just over and over again forever.
Speaker 1: It's the Groundhog Day of podcasts about a different movie.
Speaker 2: My gosh, pod yourself a sixteenth candle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we will be back next week with more stuff. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think we'll be back next week with Jamie loftus
Speaker 1: probably unless schedules change, in which case we won't. Bye everyone.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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Speaker 3: visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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Speaker 3: your podcasts.