 But I don't think you can understand Israel. I don't think you can understand the attitude of Israelis from really from the founding, from before the founding of Israel, certainly all the way to today. I don't think you can really understand without understanding this history. So I thought it would be valuable. And then I wanted to, in that context, look at the Palestinians and look at their attitudes and why they can't succeed. They can't win. So we're going to delve into a little bit of the history of anti-Semitism. Now, for most people, anti-Semitism is kind of this vague notion of, yeah, there was persecution of the Jews for thousands of years and then there was the Holocaust and the Holocaust is the main event, if you will. And it is really the motivation behind the creation of state of Israel, the argument is, and it is the ultimate expression of anti-Semitism. But it's kind of viewed as, in some sense, this aberration, this almost came out of nowhere and suddenly 6 million Jews were slaughtered. And the other association of the Holocaust is very much that this is Germany. The Germans did this and the Germans are responsible. The Germans killed 6 million Jews and it's all on Germany. So I want to challenge those assumptions and kind of give a broader history of anti-Semitism, at least in the 20th century. And then talk about it in the context of the creation and establishment of the state of Israel because I don't think you can understand the creation of state of Israel. I don't think you can comprehend what Zionism means. I mean, and the source of Zionism without understanding this anti-Semitic history. Now, I have said often that the Zionism's the core basis for Zionism and the only rational basis for Zionism as a movement of self-defense and what I found interesting in Javier Redingour's analysis is he basically 100% concurs with that and he puts it in slightly different language. Basically, that's what he's saying. And yeah, so it was nice to get affirmation, but he gave it a historical context that I think you guys will find interesting and I hope you guys will find interesting. So to understand modern anti-Semitism, to understand the creation of the state of Israel, to understand what happened in Europe in the 20th century, you have to go back really to 1881. 1881 was the year in which the Tsar of Russia, the Tsar of Russia was murdered, murdered by anarchists and, you know, we don't need to get into Russian history, but the point is that following the murder of the Tsar, a series of what has come to be known as pogroms occurred in Russia. Primarily in the south, primarily in what today is Ukraine, Poland and to some extent in the northwest in Latvia and Lithuania, but certainly the bulk of it was in Ukraine. To a large extent, the reason for this is the Jews were just not allowed to live in what we would consider today Russia proper. They weren't allowed to live in kind of the eastern parts of Russia. Russia had inherited many of these Jews from, in their conquests, they'd inherited them when they conquered the Lithuanian Polish Empire that existed in Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania, and they'd inherited these Jews. They didn't really want them, they didn't really like them, but they stuck with them and they basically had laws that said you just can't go to certain places. This is where you need to be. Anyway, in 1981, an anarchist group assassinated the Tsar of Russia. Tsar Alexander, I think it's exactly the second, was replaced by a son, Alexander the third, and where as Alexander the first, Alexander the second was relatively liberal for west, Alexander the third was a conservative, really Russian Orthodox, religious, uninterested in any kind of reforms to the system, and ultimately blamed the fact that his father was pro-reform for the fact that he was dead. But part of this, part of the murder is that Jews were somehow blamed for the murder of the Tsar. Not so much for the Russian authorities, but by local administrators, by local people in various areas within Russia, again primarily in what is today Ukraine, the Odessa area, and generally the southern Russian Empire. They blamed the Jews for this, and they started a series of pogroms against the Jews. What are pogroms? There's a tax against Jews, a tax in which they might beat the Jews up, they might kill some of them, they might rape them, they might torture them. They would do something similar to what Hamas did on smaller local scale in a variety of different towns and cities all over the western part of the Russian Empire. And this started a real series of these, and if you think about what was going on in Russia at the time and kind of the social pressures and the kind of the sociological reasons for this, it had very little to do at the end of the day with the Tsar dying and any issue regarding the Tsar. It primarily was a consequence of the fact that there was a lot of change. The industrial revolution is starting to come to Russia towards the end of the 19th century. Industrialization is happening, urbanization is happening. There's just a lot of angst, a lot of changes, a lot of people losing their jobs, and people are looking to blame somebody for this social upheaval. And the other, we've talked about this many, many times in the Iran book show, the other is always a good target to blame for what you cannot understand, for what you cannot explain. And the other in this case were the Jews. The Jews who lived in small towns, the Jews who lived sometimes in the larger cities, and as a consequence, throughout Russia there were these pogroms. Thousands of Jews were killed. Again, just killing, beating, burning their homes, stealing their stuff, raping their women. All over Russia this was going on. And as a consequence of this, Russian Jews started leaving. Three million Jews left Russia during this period. They started moving west. The vast majority of them landed up getting on boats out of Lithuania, Latvia, out of Poland, out of Germany, getting on boats and sailing to the United States. Two and a half million Jews escaped Europe and came to the United States during the end of the 19th century. Two and a half million. The other half a million settled in different parts of Western Europe, including places like Germany where they were not exactly welcome. They were not wanted. Between 1880 and 1921, the two and a half million moved to Europe. Now, you have to understand the difference. And this is, again, a lot of this material is from, I don't want to be accused of plagiarism, right? A lot of this material is from this interview with an article that Javier Rettingo wrote and from this interview. But the Jewish immigration to the United States is very different than the Irish, Italian, German, Polish, non-Jewish immigration. Most of these other immigrants sent the young men to America. And if the young men arriving in America settled and could get a job and create some wealth and create an environment, they would then bring their families. And their families would join them in America, whether that is the German migrants who settled in the Midwest. I mean, there's so many German migrants in America. We don't even think of a German, you know, a subculture. They're just everywhere, particularly in the Midwest, all the way down to Texas. Texas is predominantly German, all the way up to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Young men would come and then the family would follow once they got established. And many of these young men actually went back to Europe. You know, depending on the particular migrant group, many of these migrants up to sometimes half of them didn't make it in America and actually got on a boat and went back to Europe. When the Jews came to America, they were running away. When the Jews came to America, the whole family came. Everybody came. Nobody was left behind. Nobody was left behind. And they came here as whole groups, as families. And almost nobody went back. Less than 5% of Jews went back to Europe because they didn't make it. And it's not because they were more successful than other immigrants. It's because they literally had nowhere to go back to. Now, if you've ever seen Fiddler on the Roof, it's definitely worth seeing. There's a movie of the musical, it's a musical. And if Fiddler on the Roof, I mean, the reason they leave is because their place is burnt down. They're hounded. They're persecuted. Once they come to America, they cannot go back. There's no way for them to go back to. And you have to understand this. This is a crucial point about Jewish migration. Jewish migrants went to where they thought anti-Semitism would be less, where they thought they would be safe, and they knew they could never go back to where they came from. There is one particular program that I think has a lasting, I don't know, cultural weight in Israel and among Jews that still know anything about the history. And that is the program in Kishinev. This is, when was this? I had this a minute ago. And the program in Kishinev, Kishinev is not far from Odessa. It's southern Ukraine. And let me just do this. Sorry. Slightly wandering around here and did not, it was not completely piped. Okay. So, Kishinev happens in 1903. It is this town in southern Ukraine, not far from Odessa. And the Jews are attacked, again, no particular reason, but they are attacked. The women, the women, wives, daughters are raped and murdered, often in front of their husbands and in front of their fathers. And what makes Kishinev, what kind of makes it, what made it stick in the imagination, because, of course, there were lots of programs like this, is that a young Jewish journalist was asked to go and report on Kishinev, His name was Nachman Bialik. He became the kind of the poet, you know, basically the main Zionist poet. And he wrote a famous poem about the Apogrom called the City of Slot. And part of what makes the poem powerful, I mean, he describes what happens. He describes the way the pillage and just out of nowhere, he describes the murder, the blood. It's a long poem. It's an incredibly powerful poem. But the thing that made this poem unique is not the description of that, but it was the description of the men of Kishinev, of the Jewish men, who watched as their wives and daughters were raped and slaughtered and did nothing. Not clear, they could have done anything, but they did nothing. I want to read you a bit of this. I mean, it's moving, it's powerful. I don't know, hopefully you get something out of this. It's just a section of the poem. It's a, as I said, it's a very long poem. You can look it up, City of Slotta by Bialik spelled the way it sounds. So this is from somewhere in the middle of the poem. Crushed in their shame, they saw it all. They did not stir, no move. They did not pluck their eyes out. They beat not their brains against the wall. Perhaps, perhaps each watcher had it in his heart to pray, and miracle, O Lord, and spare my skin this day. Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke, beheld their life polluted the light of their world gone out. How did their menfolk bear it? How did they bear their yoke? They crawled, crawled forth from their holes. They fled to the house of the Lord. They offered him thanks to him. The sweet, benedictory word. The kohanim, the priest, sallied forth to the rabbi's house they flitted. Tell me, O rabbi, tell, is my own life, is my own wife permitted after she's been raped? The matter ends and nothing more and all is as it was before. You know, there's another line here that is, that is powerful. Concealed and cowered the sons of the makhabi's. Right? So the makhabi's are the ones that are celebrated in Hanukkah, who were belled against the Greeks and won and established a kingdom in Israel way back. The point of the poem is this. These men were powerless. They did nothing. Maybe they were cowards. They cowered. They hid. They did nothing. When you hear Israelis and Jews generally talk about never again, they're not just talking about the Holocaust. They're talking about Kishinev. They're talking about never will we cower. Never will we hide. Never will we just turn our backs. You can't understand the response in Israeli society to October 7th. Without understanding this commitment that so many Jews, particularly those in Israel have, towards never being cowards again, towards never watching their women raped and doing nothing about it. The whole essence of Israel is a country in which Jews will not watch their families moated, not watch their women raped. A country which will fight, fight for their life, fight for their freedom, fight for their dignity, fight never again. The Jews flee Russia and again, two and a half emigrate to the U.S., two and a half million. But then in 1921, and by the way, the American administrations never really like this, right? They're not exactly excited about the fact that millions of Jews are coming into the country. And, you know, they're already talking in 1910 about, oh, we need a COVID immigration. This is not good. This riffraff of Europe is coming here. We need to do something about it. And, you know, there's a lot of this in the air. And then finally in 1921, a Congress passes something called the Emergency Quota Act. Now, they've been trying for 11 years to slow Jewish immigration. But more and more Jews are coming. And then, you know, Russia has a civil war. Remember the communists, the communists 1918 to 1921, and more and more Jews are coming. They're fleeing because during the civil war, about 100,000 Jews are killed, right? Maybe more, maybe 150,000 are killed. So America says, wait a minute, we can't take all these Jews. Maybe it sounds familiar. And, you know, just in 1921, 120,000 Jews entered the United States. So Congress decides to act. It passes the Emergency Quota Act, imposes quotas by nationality. The Jews have no nationality in the American definition of the time. They'd be the Poles or Russians or something like that. But it's clearly engineered to make sure Jews don't come. And it works. Three years later, the number of Jews entering the United States have gone from 120,000 to 140,000 a year down to 10,000 a year. And by 1934, right, Nazis are already in power. And after this 1921 Quota Act is actually replaced by 1924 Act that is more permanent, only 2,700 Jews managed to make it into the United States. So Jews are locked out. They're locked out of the U.S. They're locked out of much of Latin America. They're locked out of much of Western Europe. Nobody really wants them. The UK doesn't take them in. And there's a real problem in Europe. You can't understand the Balfour Declaration. You can't understand the eagerness of the British to form a Jewish country without understanding that there are hundreds of thousands of refugees in Europe escaping pogroms, escaping being killed. Romania at some point in the 1920s expels its Jews. Poland treats Jews really, really badly even before the Russians come, even before the Nazis come. But there's no way for the Jews to go. They're stuck. They can't go to America, can't go to Canada, can't go to Britain. France is not allowing them in. Argentina is not allowing them in. Not Brazil, not Australia. They've got nowhere to go. And you know, even though the Balfour Declaration has passed before Balfour Declaration is towards the end of World War I, maybe it's 1919 or 18, by then it's obvious that America is shutting down. From 1910 on, the Americans are talking about eliminating and restricting Jewish immigration to the United States. So you've got a real refugee problem. And the one-imagined solution for it is to allow Jews to emigrate to what is then, at least post-1921, British mandate over territory they had captured from the Ottoman Empire. And a few Jews and some Jews do that. Some Jews emigrate to what's called Palestine under the British occupation. They by-land the wealthy Western European Jews eager to help their fellow Jews from Eastern Europe settle in Palestine, the Rothschilds, other Jewish bankers, by-land they subsidize agriculture and they basically help establish this settlements of Jews in this area. Now, I've talked about this before, but the fact is that as Jews are settling in this area, they're creating industry, they're creating agriculture, they're actually creating jobs, creating industry. And a lot of Arabs move into what is called Palestine in order to take those jobs. Very few Arabs lived in what is today Israel pre-the Jews arriving there. I mean, there were some, but a lot less because there was nothing really there, swamps and desert and a bunch of other stuff. So Israel absorbs some of these people in Europe, but very few for a lot of reasons. One is it's a relatively uncivilized place. It's relatively undeveloped. It's very difficult to go there. E. Jones corrects me. The Balfour Declaration was November 1917, relatively early in the war. But again, the writing was on the wall, at least in terms of the United States. It had been on the wall for 1910. So some Jews go there, but it's a very tough place to go. And the British don't want them there. Not really. Once the British, when World War I, and they've signed a lot of, they've cut a lot of deals with the Arabs. And look, the Arabs have oil. The Arabs, you know, a lot of Arabs, they were ready. The British are not really committed to this idea of a Jewish state. So they allow some immigration in, but not a lot, into this territory. In 1936, in Palestine, there was an Arab uprising, both against the Jews and against the British, to try to kick the British out, and to try to kick the Jews out. And... But the Jews keep coming. Again, they've got nobody else to go. After, you know, the Holocaust. And it's really important to note about the Holocaust. You know, again, people perceive the Holocaust as this German thing. Germans did it. But the reality of the Holocaust is that the Germans could have never killed as many Jews as they did, without the cooperation of people in the various countries, all over Europe. Indeed, in countries where there was little cooperation, fewer Jews died. Denmark actually saved almost all of its Jews. It refused to cooperate with the Nazis, and it allowed the Jews to escape. Belgium's cities, where they cooperated with the Nazis, about 70% of the Jews were captured. Belgium's cities that did not cooperate with the Nazis, only between 30% to 40% of the Jews were captured. In Hungary, the Nazis wanted the Jews of Hungary, so they could slaughter them. The Hungarian authorities decided, okay, and they basically shipped 470,000 Jews to Germany, to Auschwitz. But they only took the rural Jews, the Jews who lived in a lot of villages, the Jews who had not assimilated. The Jews in Budapest that behaved like them, that lived amongst them, they refused to turn over to the Germans. And indeed, almost all of the Jews of Budapest were saved. In Poland, there were programs, killing of Jews, before the Nazis arrived. In many cases, the Poles cooperated with the Nazis in killing the Jews. And little known in history, there were programs of Jews returning to their villages after the concentration camps, after they'd been liberated by the Americans or the Russians, returning to their villages in Poland, only to encounter local Poles, refusing to accept them, refusing to give them their homes back, refusing to allow them to settle back in their homes, and kicking them out, sending them back to where they came from. In Paris, in France, the local French authorities rounded up the Jews and handed them to the Nazis. Paris, again, the Nazis could have never done this by themselves. Just once enough Germans, they were fighting a war, they were busy. Without the cooperation of people in these countries, there could have not been the scale achieved in the Holocaust. It just never would have happened. Italian Jews were rounded up, not everywhere, not in all of Italy. I remember Selene resisted in the beginning, but at some point they were rounded up. Jews were rounded up everywhere. If you've read Anna Frank Diary, you know that she, they hid, her family hid, and they could have gotten away with it hiding, if not for somebody in the community, in the Netherlands, in Holland, in Amsterdam, ratting them out, as happened all over the place. Sure, there were some people, some places, some individuals who did not work with the Nazis, who helped protect Jews, but the vast majority did not. So when the war ends, and the Americans liberate the camps, and the camps are liberated elsewhere, many of the people in those camps, the non-Jews go home. They go back to where they came from. Many of them are in much better physical condition than the Jews. The Jews were uniquely treated by the Nazis with the idea of working them to their death. So when the camps were opened up, the Jews were in particularly horrible physical shape. The Jews tried to go back to places like Poland, and the Poles turned them around and sent them away. They refused to let them back. And indeed, a couple of hundred thousand Jews, Holocaust survivors, spent two years after the war in the concentration camps that they had been liberated from as refugees without a home waiting to figure out what their fate was. In the United States, the Truman administration tried to get Congress to pass some kind of bill to allow these Jews to come to the United States. Congress refused. A combination of Midwestern Republicans and Southern Democrats claimed that they did not want these Jews. And there were these hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees roaming around Europe in the mid-1940s, post-war, without anywhere to go. Some of them tried to make it to a pre-Israel-British mandate. And the British caught the ships, turned them around, built a camp in Cyprus and held them there behind barbed wire. These, again, people who had survived Auschwitz, people who survived the concentration camps were now being held behind barbed wire in Cyprus. So when Israel declared its independence in May of 1945, there is a flood of these Jews into Israel. And these Jews are committed to one thing. This, they're going to make this their home. And as I said before, they're not going to tolerate being bullied. They're not going to tolerate being slaughtered. They're not going to tolerate being raped. There will be no more pogroms. They're committed to defending themselves. The 1948 War of Independence is a war of motivated individuals. They've just been slaughtered in Europe. There's nowhere else they can go. America won't take them. South America won't take them. Indeed, when the camps opened up after, you know, when the camps are liberated at the end of World War II, there are lots of people in these camps who are not Jews. And they don't want to go back to Russia. They don't want to go back to communism. Or they can't go. They'll be killed. All of those are invited to emigrate to Latin America, to other countries, all over the place. They all find a home somewhere. The one group that nobody wants, even after the Holocaust, even knowing exactly what happened in the Holocaust, the one group that nobody wants are the Jews. There's nowhere to go. Literally, there's nowhere to go. I mind you that my claim is that Zionism is a movement of self-defense. It's the movement of people who are being oppressed, being killed, being murdered, all over the world. They have nowhere else to go. And they build a civilized country. They build a home. They create it. They make it. They don't take it from anybody. They make it and create it. And, you know, Hudson, when he establishes the Zionist movement, 1897 is the first meeting of the Zionist movement, he says, look, he says during this period, he said, Europe is going to get rid of us. Europe does not want us. Europe will kill us. And there's no guarantee that won't happen anywhere we go if we leave Europe. The only way we can survive as individuals, the only way we can survive is by establishing our own state. He says the Germans, this is the age of nationalism, the Germans are Germans. They will not tolerate Jews who are both Jews and German. You're either German or you're not. He says this is a movement moving throughout Europe, this nationalism. They will not tolerate the outsiders with split loyalties. The, you know, the Dreyfus argument. The Dreyfus had split loyalties between his Jewishness and his Frenchness. And it's what Tucker Carlson said the other day about Ben Shapiro. He has split loyalties between his Jewish loyalty to Israel and between being an American. The Jews have no way to go. And then in 1950s, once Israel is established, the Muslim and Arab world decide to get rid of their Jews. You know, some of the richest people, I can't remember if 25% or a third of the real estate in Baghdad was owned by Jews. Jews were incredibly wealthy, successful in Iraq. The Iraqis expelled all their Jews. They weren't allowed to take their wealth with them. They left with whatever they could put in a suitcase and they were kicked out. Most of them went to Israel. A few of them who maybe had foreign passports who could get in, went to France, Europe, maybe America, very few. But most of them, over one majority, went to Israel. Moroccan Jews, they literally rounded up all the Moroccan Jews, hundreds of thousands of them, put them in planes and sent them to Israel. Some of them were wealthy and educated, again had foreign passports, went to France, but almost all of them landed up in Israel. The Yemenite Jews, Yemenite, where the Houthis are today, were going to be slaughtered and killed, evacuated to Israel, Egypt expelled its Jews, Syria expelled its Jews, Lebanon expelled its Jews, and most of them made it to Israel. Committed to what? These are refugees. And indeed, they lived in conditions of refugee-type camps for many years in Israel. But they were committed to building a home. They were committed never to be at somebody else's behest, never to be dependent on the whims of someone else. They were committed to fighting for themselves, to securing their own independence.