Full transcript of “La nascita dello Stato d'ISRAELE: una storia mai risolta”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 This is the story of the creation of a state: Israel. In the years of British rule, between 1918 and 1949, the holy land, Eretz Yisrael for the Jews or Palestine for the Arabs, ended up corresponding to a well-defined area included to the north by the Litani river in Lebanon, to the east by Jordan River and the Dead Sea and to the south by the Gulf of Aqaba. 60% of the territory that makes up the Holy Land is largely desert and uninhabitable. Since ancient times, the climatic factor pushed populations to concentrate in the more fertile hilly areas of Judea, Samaria, Galilee and in the strip between Haifa and the Jordan. In 1881, the population of Palestine was approximately 450,000, of which ninety percent were ethnic Arab
0:47 Muslims. The Jewish population was very limited and amounted to a maximum of 20,000 individuals. Made up of both Ashkenazi Jews, of European origin, and Sephardim, of mixed Spanish, North African and Middle Eastern extraction , this small community, which remained in Palestine since the times of the Diaspora under the kingdom of Babylon, was concentrated in the four sacred cities of Jewish tradition: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tzfat and Tiberias. Palestine has always been a land of conquests, but it was the Ottoman Empire that reigned over it from 1517 until 1918. As history teaches us, the Jewish populations, spread across the length and breadth of Europe and the Middle East, were all considered second-class citizens. Anti-Semitism affected the Jews to the extent of discrimination, ghettoisations, pogroms and violence, much of
1:36 which occurred in the so-called Zone of Residence, a portion of territory that went from Memel in Lithuania to the Crimea controlled by the Russian Empire starting from end of the 18th century. All this was the fuel that served to fuel Zionism. Zionism was the doctrine that changed everything. Zionism emerged in Europe in the late 1800s from the desire to create a Jewish state to save itself from the anti-Semitic persecutions of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Since the time of the Babylonian exile, returning to the Holy Land and founding a state there was an understandable choice for the Zionists: the Holy Land was closely linked to the message of redemption and salvation of the Jewish people after the apocalypse. The true success of Zionism is due to its founder himself, the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl
2:22 who made it a truly international movement. The catalyst for Zionism for Herzl was the Dreyfus Affair. Faced with the unjust conviction of the French officer, guilty only of being Jewish, Herzl became obsessed with the need to find a solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. If even France, home of emancipation and the values of the revolution, had been swept up in the anti-Semitic vortex, where could they feel safe if not in their own land? Assimilation would not have solved the problem, because Western societies did not seem willing to do so. Spreading his ideas in Central European circles, Herzl made no explicit reference to the fate of the Arab population who had lived in Palestine for centuries, but already in 1899, Herzl
3:07 wrote to the then Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Zia Al-Khalidi, arguing that Zionism was not a threat to the Arab inhabitants of the region. Zionism received a major boost between 1903 and 1906 following a major wave of Russian pogroms. The renewed attacks were a consequence of the unrest surrounding the 1905 Revolution, with the tsarist regime seeking to counter the revolutionaries by diverting popular attention and anger from the monarchy to the Jews. These tragic events were an important factor that triggered the first two Aliyahs in Palestine, two great waves of Jewish emigration, involving a total of approximately 70,000 people. To transform Zionism from an ideal to a reality, money was still needed. Much money. Frantic for funds and after
3:53 receiving a resounding NO from the Ottomans, Herzl turned his attentions to the British. The United Kingdom, which on the North African side controlled Egypt through a protectorate, was ready to wage war against the decadent Ottoman Empire. For the British, controlling Ottoman Palestine was fundamental to the management of the Suez Canal which it secured their traffic to and from India. Herzl's ideological successor, Cham Weizmann, leveraged precisely this need, offering the support of future settlers in the control of Palestine, and committed himself - with a note from the then secretary for foreign affairs Arthur James Balfour, addressed to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, Swiss banker and member of the Zionist movement, - to make available to the same movement, in the event of victory,
4:39 portions of Palestine in which to found a first Jewish homeland, or, as expressed in vague terms, a Jewish national home. That letter would go down in history as the Balfour Declaration. The British had more than one motivation to accept the requests of the Zionist organization: to incentivize German Jews to rise up against the Kaiser during the Great War, to influence the Jewish advisors of the then American president Woodrow Wilson, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, and to attract the favorable attention of the Russian Bolsheviks, many of whom were Jews. The Balfour Declaration, however, was not the only agreement made by the English: In order to foment the Arab revolts and destabilize the Ottoman Empire from within with the Divide and Conquer strategy,
5:24 the English, through Henry McMahon, made contact with the sheriff of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali Al-Hashimi. In exchange for his people's help, Hussein demanded independence from the Ottoman Empire and the formation of a large Arab state once the war was won. The British accepted. All very beautiful. It's a shame that two years before the end of the conflict the English had signed a secret pact with the French to divide up the Middle East. Three words: Sykes-Picot agreement. The Sykes Picot Agreement envisaged dissecting what remained of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war. To do this, the English and French worked with precision, they sat at a table... and used a ruler. Colonial Style. France gained control of parts of Anatolia, Lebanon and the northern Syrian coast. The United Kingdom instead receives the strategic provinces of Basra and
6:14 Baghdad in Mesopotamia. The intermediate area would have been intended for a "confederation of Arab states", but in reality it was divided in two, with France going to exercise its influence in the northern half, including present-day Syria, while Great Britain would oversaw the southern portion. Palestine fell to Anglo-French rule. The hunters who divide the bear's skin even before having killed it, an image that fits perfectly. At the end of the war however, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and things went as planned. For the British. The then British Prime Minister David Lloyd George became convinced that a colony, or rather, a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine protected by Great Britain, would first of all favor the interests of the Crown, helping not only to secure the Suez Canal but also to keep the French at bay
7:02 in managing the area. For Lloyd George, Zionism was nothing more than a means to his own imperialist ambitions. The Zionist Organization itself was aware of this and did everything to pique the interests of Lloyd George: among the first to speak openly in Great Britain in favor of a state for the Jewish people was Sir Herbert Samuel, Jew and director general of the British post office, future high commissioner of Palestine in 18. “Such a state would be the center of a new culture, a fountain of enlightenment and… a strategic asset to the empire,” Samuel wrote to Lloyd George.” However, Samuel immediately made a premise: it is better to avoid doing it immediately. A state with fewer than 100,000 Jews, surrounded by 5-6 times its Arab population, would have
7:48 immediately generated a bloody conflict. Better to encourage gradual but constant immigration so as to shape a Jewish majority over time, he always wrote in his letters to the prime minister. In terms of time, Samuel believed it would take at least a century. In the first days of April 1918, the Zionist Organization, led by Weizmann, arrived in Palestine with the approval of the English and set in motion to accelerate the process of establishing a Jewish homeland. After a while, the Arab elites, seeing that the British they had no intention of respecting the pacts stipulated for a great Arab homeland, they began to oppose and attack the new Jewish neighborhoods that had sprung up in a short time in cities such as Jerusalem and Jaffa. The Arabs of Palestine would have had as a point of reference in their struggle the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini who had been
8:37 elected Magistrate of the city by the English in the hope of keeping the waters calm. With the obtaining of the Protectorate by the League of Nations, the British Crown put into practice what was written in the Balfour Declaration, favoring the arrival of new Zionist settlers from Europe. The Yishuv, the Jews who arrived with the first two waves of migration at the end of the nineteenth century, grew in number and much more rapidly than the Arabs. In 1918 there were approximately 60,000 Jews and nearly 700,000 Arabs. At the end of 1922, according to the first British census, 84,000 Jews and 760,000 Arabs. The increase was due to immigration, which stood at an average of 8,000 people in the two-year period 2020-22. The next step was to guarantee
9:23 the new settlers capital with which to buy land and funds on which to build factories and farms, the kibbutzim. To do this, the Zionist Organization created the Jewish National Fund with the aim of raising money and supporting the costs of all those who wished to move to Palestine. To recruit and assist new settlers to move to the Middle East, the Jewish Agency was finally established which, during the period of the British Mandate, ensured control of immigration quotas throughout Palestine, as well as the creation of the Haganah, the paramilitary responsible for the defense of the settlers' territories and which would become the basic nucleus of the Israel Defense Force. In the years between the two wars, expansion was favored by factors such as the world crisis in 1929, crop failure and major famines which caused enormous damage to
10:12 Palestinian agriculture. As a consequence, many Arab families, in order to survive the crisis, were forced to sell their land to Jewish settlers who had financial support from the National Fund, while some even ended up expropriated by the British themselves. Many Arab politicians, including Husseini, criticized these moves, saying that selling land was like selling blood and family. These factors contributed to the demographic decline of the Palestinian population which went from 82% in 1931 to 70% in 1939, and also to the ignition of Arab nationalists who began to worry about the idea of becoming a minority in Palestine. The relative calm of the 1920s was thus broken in 1928 by attacks by the Arabs incited by the Mufti of Jerusalem Husseini himself, first at the Western Wall, then throughout Palestine,
10:58 causing more than 200 victims in a single day on the Jewish side. The British, who cunningly chose to keep only 292 police in Palestine, were unable to contain the violence. British inefficiency in defending the colonists led to the strengthening of the Haganah which became a full-fledged army. Added to this were two Zionist paramilitary groups: Irgun and Banda Stern, responsible for terrorist actions against both the Arabs and the English. Radicalization. Here is the word to define what was happening on both sides. On the Arab front, the first signs of radicalization occurred in 1935, when Sheikh Izz Al-Din al Qassam founded the terrorist organization Black Hand with the aim of channeling the anti-Jewish resistance into a single organization. Al Qassàm invited the Arabs to no longer sell their lands to settlers,
11:48 lands that were now in short supply, openly inciting a holy war both against them and against the English. The same thing happened on the Jewish front, when in 1931 Haim Arlozoroff, director of the Jewish Agency, publicly declared that Zionism would have to rely on the use of force to achieve its goals. This polarization materialized in 1936, when Palestinian workers united in a general strike to denounce employers' refusal to hire Arab workers in Jewish-run businesses. The general strike lasted about 6 months and it became part of a larger Arab revolt that would last until 1937. As the violence subsided, Britain appointed a special commission, the Peel Commission, to investigate the causes of the unrest. Hmm… what could these causes have been? On the Israeli side
12:37 , there was pressure for the partition of Palestine, a proposal clearly opposed by the Arabs who, in addition to considering that territory as theirs by right and as sacred Muslim soil, feared that a small Jewish state would be a springboard for a future expansion. At the end of the investigation, the commission's 400-page report indicated – for the first time – the partition of Palestine into two entities, a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews would receive less than a fifth of it: most of Galilee, the fertile plain of Esdraelon, and the coastal strip up to the present city of Ashdod. The remaining 80% would remain an independent Arab state. But it soon became clear to the Arabs that, according to the terms of the account, the
13:23 most fertile and best-watered lands in Palestine would go to the Jewish state. The Peel Commission then made a further recommendation: a population exchange between the two future states, approximately 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews. The Arabs rejected the conditions, stating that the objective of the Commission was not so much peace as the pacification of the Arabs of Palestine. It is no coincidence that the armed struggle resumed a few weeks later. The Arab rebellion, which lasted until 1939, despite the Palestinian defeat, convinced the British, this time led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, to make another proposal through the so-called White Paper of 1939: instead of a division of Palestine , the country would remain unified, with proportional representation of Jews and Palestinians in a
14:12 British-supervised government. The white paper was received negatively by the Jewish population , as it proposed not only placed severe limitations on the purchase of land by Jews, but established a limit of 75,000 individuals per year on immigration, when previously the numbers averaged around one hundred thousand. people. Limiting immigration was not a wise choice, considering that in March 1939, National Socialist Germany, in addition to intensifying repression, had recently annexed the western part of Czechoslovakia. The bad wind blowing in Europe only served to stiffen the Zionists. At this point the Palestinians made a big mistake: despite the failed uprising and despite the concessions received, Hussein's Arab Supreme Committee rejected the conditions of a unified country. For many Palestinians, supporting the Axis forces therefore seemed
15:02 a natural thing, especially since Italian and German propaganda had promised the Arabs independence with the defeat of Great Britain. Hussein himself had openly supported National Socialism's seizure of power, but there was no shortage of controversy even with the Jewish Agency which maintained good relations with Berlin, despite the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws. The issue is still controversial today. The Jewish Agency , which managed the exclusivity on the issuing of emigration certificates, was accused of combating the phenomenon of illegal immigration which had worsened throughout Europe from 1934 onwards . The agency would instead have favored selective emigration, which favored the arrival of individuals socially useful to the Zionist project, such as a young or wealthy workforce , effectively preventing much larger flows that would probably have saved
15:52 the lives of many people. At the end of the war, the crimes of National Socialism, including the Holocaust, brought with them a sense of collective guilt towards the Jewish people, helping to accelerate Israeli independence. The climate of tension, the thorny issue of migrants and the attacks by both the Arabs and the Israelis, together with the fact of having gone through a long and bloody war, finally induced the British to abandon the Palestinian game, for them a game now lost, giving up to the "mandate" in May 1947 and passing the buck to the newly formed United Nations Organization. Israeli independence achieved after the war was the pinnacle of inability of the UN to know how to correctly manage the crisis resulting from English disinterest. This led to the vote and approval of Resolution 181, in which the country was separated into two states: Israel, which would receive 55% of the territory, and Palestine,
16:41 with 44%. The 1%, the Jerusalem-Bethlehem corridor, would have remained an international zone. At that news the Zionists rejoiced, while the Arabs left the room declaring the resolution invalid. They couldn't understand why 37% of the population had been given 55% of the land (of which they only owned 7%). The Arab delegates claimed that any effort to implement the resolution would lead to war. Ben-Gurion, for his part, knew this very well. Resolution 181 triggered the Zionists' final push to take as much land as possible and expel as many Palestinians as possible. That momentum coincided with the destruction of Palestinian villages and mass expulsions. It was the silent beginning of the Nakba, the Catastrophe, as
17:31 the Palestinians would call it in Arabic. When the British withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, the Nakba numbered over 370,000 Palestinian refugees and displaced persons. Faced with those events, the newly formed Arab League did not stand by and watch: by secretly sending funds, weapons and volunteers to the Palestinians, the League established a Liberation Army to attack the Israeli settlements and the new colonies that were being formed. The day after the declaration of independence, the armies of five nations – Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq – invaded Israel. The War of Independence of 48 is often compared to the myth of David – Israel – against Goliath – the Arabs. The reality was very different: individual
18:18 Arab countries sent small contingents without ever uniting them under a single command. The most capable armies, the Jordanian and Iraqi ones, limited themselves to occupying the West Bank which Transjordan aspired to control to the detriment of the national aspirations of the Palestinians. The invasion was a fiasco for the Arabs, who were defeated by the small Israeli army. The real losers, however, were the Palestinians: of them, over 750,000 were expelled from the areas that became part of the Jewish state and were resettled in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Between 300 and 500 villages were destroyed and demolished, often also following massacres as in the case of Deir Yassin. In less than a year, the potential Palestinian state no longer existed on paper: part of it was under Israeli control;
19:06 West Bank in Jordanian hands; and Gaza under Egyptian administration; As for Jerusalem, the famous green line would have acted as a demarcation between the western part of the city, in Israeli hands , and the eastern part, in Jordanian hands until 67. At the end of the war, Israel's surface area increased by 55% to 78% of the entire territory, reducing the amount in Palestinian hands to 22%. To date, that 22% has been reduced to around 11%, in a series of islands scattered and separated from each other. I'll stop here, we are practically only at the beginning of the tormented history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As I like to make videos, a blockbuster wouldn't be enough to cover the whole story properly.
19:53 Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video . I take this opportunity to remind you that since the video will most likely be demonetized due to the unpleasant topic, the channel wouldn't get very far without the help of patrons. In the description you will find ways to keep this project alive. For the rest, thanks everyone. Best regards. Per aspera ad astra.
