Read the full transcript of Dr. Roy Casagranda in conversation with interviewer Jeremy on Office Hours with Dr. Roy podcast titled “Palestine Part 1 – From Ancient Roots to 1948”, September 2, 2025.
Introduction
JEREMY: Hey everyone. Welcome to office hours. We’re not in Canada, we’re back at home, Roy and Jeremy hanging out to talk about all kinds of things. But this particular chat, we’re going to dig into a not very fun topic, but one that’s sad right now. It’s actually, I think it’s much harder to stomach than the Ukraine war because at least in the, you know, the Ukrainians and the Russians, they’re fighting each other.
We’re going to talk about Palestine where one side is just being murdered. There’s no fighting chance. And it’s been that way for a while. And it’s hard to look at, it’s hard to listen to, it’s hard not to feel hopeless and wherever you are in the world to try and help.
So I think thinking about this conversation, I made like this huge list of things I wanted to talk about because I started thinking like, let’s find out why this is going on, the historical aspects of it, what’s currently going on, and then what we can do about it or what might be hope at the end of this horrible process. And in that, you know, I came up with, I don’t know, 30 different points to talk about.
So let’s start. If you want to start, Roy, digging into like, the ancient and historical roots of the region. Like who are the ancient peoples of like, the Palestinian people, because this is before all the Abrahamic religions. So like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, like there were people there before any of these religions existed.
And obviously we’re not like theologians.
So. Yeah. Who are the ancient Palestinians and how did it evolve when the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities emerged from that area?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, so you wanted me to go really far back, so I’ll try.
JEREMY: Yeah, go even farther.
The Ancient Semitic Peoples
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah. So there was a group of people called Semites. They ultimately ended up breaking into two groups. There’s the Western Semites and the Eastern Semites. The Eastern Semites ended up in Iraq and the Western Semites ended up in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Arabia.
And the Western Semites that were in Palestine and Lebanon area were Canaanites and then they basically split into two groups. The Phoenicians being one group, the Jews being another group. I’m not exactly sure how closely related the Arabs were to the Canaanites. I think there’s been a lot of hypotheses out there that they were also Canaanites, but I’m not really sure or at least really closely related.
They’re all really closely related. Like if you look at Phoenician, compare it to Arabic, compare it to Hebrew, it’s shocking how similar the three languages are. You know, like we’re talking Dutch to German level of similarity.
And then on the other side in the Iraq area there was the Babylonians and the Assyrians, those were the Semites that were the Eastern Semites. So eventually there were other Semitic groups too, I should say, in the Western. So like the Aramites and all these different Semitic groups were constantly in a state of warfare and struggling over dominance.
The Formation of Judaism
And eventually Judaism formed, my understanding is about 3,500 years ago or so. And by the way, it started off with two gods, Asharath and Yahweh. I don’t know if people really like to talk about the fact that they were polytheists, not monotheists.
And actually they were never monotheist. Judaism was a Henotheistic religion. So when it eventually became one God because they wrote Asharatha out of their religion, when that eventually happened, then it became a henotheistic religion which said there was one God for the Jews. But it didn’t rule out the possibility that there were other gods for other people.
So once Christianity formed, the Jews regarded Christianity as having a separate God, a different God. They didn’t think they were worshiping the same God, they thought they were worshiping a different God. So that’s the idea behind Henotheism. It doesn’t rule out the fact that there might be multiple gods, it’s just there’s one God for your group.
Multi-Ethnic Palestine
In any case, the Jewish population in Palestine never probably was the majority. They were always in struggle against these other Semitic groups, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians ended up with basically the coastal towns. So the Jewish population was in the interior. It was in the state of constant struggle. In the south of Palestine was an Arab population. So in other words, it was always multi ethnic and multi religious.
Conquests and Captivity
And then eventually they get into trouble because they get conquered. They get conquered by the Persian Empire eventually. Well, firstly first they get conquered by the Neo Babylonian Empire. Let’s do that real quick.
So what happened in the Neo Babylonian period is the Neo Babylonians decided they didn’t really like the Jews at some level, but they thought they had talent. So when the Jewish people were resisting in Palestine, the Neo Babylonians invaded, conquered them and then forcibly extracted a population and made them live in Babylon. Their hope was that they would be able to extract the talent and then keep their eyes on the Jews so they wouldn’t revolt later. That’s the period we talk about as the period of captivity.
It’s worth pointing out that the term Palestine came from the sea people when the sea people invaded and one of the groups that amongst the sea people were a group of people called the Philistines. And that’s where we get the term Palestine.
Persian Liberation and the Second Temple
The Persians are then going to conquer the Neo Babylonians and when they do, Cyrus the Great frees the Jews from captivity. So to be clear, they weren’t enslaved. There were definitely Jewish slaves. I’m not saying there were no Jewish slaves. The population that was brought to Babylon weren’t enslaved. They were just simply confined to the city of Babylon.
So Cyrus the Great, freedom from captivity and then he had a system where he issued a Bill of Rights and it was translated in every language in the empire. So everybody would have this Bill of Rights. And one of the things that was in the Bill of Rights was that the state would pay for and maintain all the religious structures.
So the Neo Babylonians, when they conquered Palestine, they destroyed the Temple of Solomon because they were so mad at the Jewish resistance. So the Jewish, the newly freed Jewish population goes to Cyrus the Great and they say, “Hey, they destroyed our temple of Solomon. According to this Bill of Rights you have to repair the temple.” And he’s like, “Yeah, that’s the deal. We will build and maintain your religious structures. So we’ll rebuild it for you. What did it look like?”
So the Jews came up with this amazing mesa. They built a human made mesa and then they were going to put the second temple of Solomon on the top. And of course Cyrus the Great’s like, “What the hell? The Babylonians destroyed this. They must have really hated you. This is a human made mountain.” And his response was, “I only know one group of engineers in the world that could do this.” So he went and hired Egyptians and they built the mesa and then using Persian gold they paid for the construction of the second temple of Solomon.
Greek and Roman Rule
Then Alexander the Great conquers the Persian Empire and takes over Palestine. And then of course he’s ultimately his empire breaks apart and the Seleucids ended up with it and then the Ptolemies end up with it. So it’s constantly changing hands, it’s constantly in struggle.
And then the Romans take it over. The population of people living in Palestine, the Jewish population, but also the non Jewish Semites that were living there, didn’t like Roman rule and they resisted and they became a bunch of stone throwing rebels who just wouldn’t stop throwing stones at the Romans.
And ultimately in the end, the Romans would have rebellion after rebellion that they had to deal with. They were constantly putting it down. The Romans were especially cruel to the Jewish population. They didn’t put up with this constant state of rebellion. Eventually they tore down the second temple of Solomon and then they turned the mesa, the human made mesa into a garbage dump so they could desecrate the temple.
Heraclius’s Massacre
And then the last time the Romans did anything was either in the year 629 or 630, we’re not really sure the exact moment. But the Romans and the Persians in their last war against each other, which essentially went from 602 to 628, it lasted 26 years. But the first few years there wasn’t really much going on in that war.
The Romans win, which was very rare. The Romans usually didn’t beat the Persians, but they won and they won big. Like the Roman army was parked right outside Ctesiphon, the Persian capital. And so the Persians were obligated to surrender because they were about to lose their capital. And it’s actually probably not true. The Romans probably wouldn’t have been able to take it.
Nonetheless, it was 28 or 26 years of war and there was no sign of victory on the Persian side. So they surrendered. But in the surrender, the Persians said, “Please don’t get vengeance on the Jews. That’s one of our conditions for surrendering. You have to promise us you won’t.” Because the Jews had sided with the Persians against the Romans.
And so Heraclius, the Roman Emperor, said, “Yeah, yeah, of course I’m happy to sign a treaty that bans me from getting vengeance on the Jewish population.” So by the way, the Persians had captured the true cross, the holy sponge and the holy spear, and they had taken it to Ctesiphon. And so that was part of what he got. He got those three relics back, he took them to Constantinople.
And then in 629, end of 629 or beginning at 630, he decided to bring those holy relics back to Jerusalem. And while he’s there, he’s looking at the city. And he goes, “You know what? Screw it. I really just hate Jews.” And he wanted to massacre them. So he massacres the population in Jerusalem, driving them out or killing them outright, and essentially drove most of the Jews out of Palestine in the process. He probably killed about 20,000 people in that massacre.
JEREMY: And this was what year?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It was either 629 or 630.
JEREMY: Okay.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: And it was probably winter. That winter somewhere in that winter. It might have been later, or earlier, but it was right around winter.
The Jewish Diaspora
JEREMY: So was there already like a Jewish Diaspora at that point, or was that kind of like the big part? So I’m thinking, you know, you’re talking about the destruction of the second temple, when the Romans destroyed it, and now we’re jumping ahead a little bit, but is the Jewish population already kind of leaving that area and kind of a more dispersed area through the Middle East?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Oh, definitely. Multiple events brought Jews out. You know, Jews had migrated to Egypt. There were Jews living in Ethiopia. Jews had gone into Europe. So there were Jews in Spain and Italy, Greece. They were in North Africa already at this point.
When Cyrus the Great liberated the Jewish population in Babylon, he said, “I like you guys a lot. It would be amazing if some of you moved to Isfahan in Iran. If anybody’s willing to do that, I just want you to know I’ll give you land and I’ll set you up.” And a group of Jews moved to Isfahan. There’s still descendants of that Jewish community 2,600 years later still hanging out in Isfahan.
So there was already this movement of Jews throughout the area. And then every time the Romans would exact cruelty on them in Palestine, they tended to disperse even more. So when Heraclius killed 20,000 or so people in his massacre, it was probably a small percentage of the Jewish population because it had already been spread out so much.
JEREMY: So then what was life like for the Jewish population and the Palestinian population after those events, like, in the broader region?
The Arab Conquest and Jewish-Muslim Relations
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Roman rule had always been extremely cruel, not just in Palestine. In 391, roughly 392, when the Romans burnt the Great Library, they also attacked the Jewish quarter in Alexandria and drove off or killed the bulk of the population of Jews. Alexandria at the time was the largest Jewish community in the world. So the population wasn’t actually in that moment in Palestine so much. It had spread out so much that it was now in Alexandria that Roman cruelty was just a regular part of everyday life.
The Roman cruelty gets interrupted really dramatically when the Arabs build their empire because they end up conquering the entire Persian empire and about 60% of the Roman Empire. In the areas that they conquered, the Arabs treated the Jewish population as sisters and brothers and they didn’t unleash the kind of cruelty that the Romans had.
The Jewish population found immediate allies in the Arab population and frequently would act as go-betweens between Christian communities and Muslim communities, because a lot of the Christian communities had put sanctions on any interaction with Muslims. So the Jewish people found that they could go in and they could make a deal with Christians on behalf of Muslims.
In a really interesting way, the partnership between Muslims and – because there were Christian Arabs as well – the partnership between Jews, Christians and Muslims under Arab rule was really strong and a really healthy one. You get some really amazing philosophy that comes out of that period.
In fact, when Spain begins the process of getting rid of its Jewish population under Queen Isabella, a huge number of those Jews actually ended up moving to Morocco because they knew it would be safe in the Arab world. Some of them went to the Ottoman Empire, some of them unfortunately dispersed into Europe where they were just going to get pogrom on a regular basis. But for Jews living in the Middle East, the Arab conquest was a huge relief. It meant no more Roman persecution until the Crusades.
The Crusades and Christian Anti-Semitism
When the Crusades launch in 1096, the first thing the Crusaders do is they launch the world’s first ever pogrom on the Jews living in the Rhine River Valley in Germany. They massacre thousands of Jews, rape thousands of Jewish women. That’s how they start the Crusades.
Then when they arrive in the Middle East, they just slaughter Jewish communities. They slaughter Muslim communities as well. They would burn down synagogues because they thought there was no way to cleanse them. But when they captured mosques, they would just do a prayer and switch them over into churches. But for the Crusaders, Jews were so impure and so contaminated, you couldn’t clean up a synagogue. That was the level of hatred that the Christian world had towards the Jewish population.
JEREMY: Where did that come from?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: The majority of that hatred was just the leftover of the Roman Empire’s hatred. There was no rationale behind it. I mean, Jesus was a Jew. So if you’re trying to use logic, the Christians shouldn’t hate Jews. It makes no sense. It makes no sense for Christians or Muslims to hate Jews because so many of the prophets are Jewish. You can’t reconcile religion. You would have to hate your own religion.
Really it was just mostly a leftover of the Roman hatred of the Jewish population that then got turned into, “Well, the Jews killed Christ” and that became logical justification. It’s completely irrational and illogical, but that’s how most of these hatred-based things are.
JEREMY: They’re just…
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: I really want to hate that guy. I’ve got to come up with some way to make it make sense. “You killed Christ, so I hate you.”
JEREMY: So maybe a lot of pent up anger and they just wanted to direct. Sounds like how we most anger these days for everything, right?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s what is happening in the United States with immigrants. There’s literally no reason on earth for a bunch of colonists and immigrants to hate immigrants. And yet that’s the thing happening in the United States right now.
The Origins of Modern Colonialism and Zionism
JEREMY: Speaking of colonies, so how did we get from, you know, we have these empires and then we go from empires to continuing a new era of empires where we have, we’re colonizing different places, which I guess is the same thing. We just started using different terminology with it kind of with a different purpose behind it. Makes it seem better somehow. We’re not just conquering, we’re colonizing. We’re pushing you out to make this space better for us. So that transition in the Levant area and specifically Palestine, when would that have started do you think? Or what started that?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, so you were talking about the contemporary situation that we’re facing.
JEREMY: Kind of. So yeah, definitely more contemporary. We’re not talking about ancient history or crusades. So maybe I’m thinking Zionism. Zionism is pretty, it’s a pretty new concept in terms of human history.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, it’s a 135 year old idea.
JEREMY: Yeah, it’s post – you know, in terms of for all of our U.S. listeners, it’s post civil war.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah.
JEREMY: So it’s not that old. I mean, goodness, thinking about we did the Trail of Tears. We did all of this in the US before it started in Palestine. So I feel like we are a good example of how to do these horrible things that are about to happen in the years to come.
American Influence on Global Oppression
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: We inspired the rest of the world. I mean, we inspired South African apartheid. We inspired Zionism, we inspired Nazi Germany and Nuremberg. The Nazis that we were trying, kept going, “What are you talking about? You were our inspiration” and kept trying to invoke our Supreme Court rulings in their defense. Buck v. Bell was their favorite thing they would invoke. They’d look, “Dude, all we ever did was copy you.”
Buck v. Bell is the Supreme Court ruling that allows the state to forcibly sterilize anybody they want. For the record, for those of you, it’s 1927. Buck v. Bell. It was part of our eugenics program that the first state in the United States that started eugenics program was Indiana in 1901. So it was 26 years into our eugenics programs. It has never been overturned. It is still the law of the land, just for the record. And there are still cases of people being sterilized by the state.
So in case you’re wondering, not only did we inspire the Nazis, we’re still doing it.
Theodore Herzl and the Birth of Zionism
Zionism came about. There was an Austrian, a Jewish Austrian named Herzl. And what happened was a thing called the Dreyfus affair. So 1096, there was that pogrom on the Rhine River. Europeans, Christian Europeans, began to systematically regularly pogrom Jewish communities. So anytime anything went wrong, the Jews would get blamed. There was an inflationary event. The Jews did it and they would get pogrom. You know, there was a thunderstorm that caused flooding and killed some people. The Jews did it and they would get pogrom.
This was happening from Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe. It didn’t matter if you were in Russia or in France. There was pogrom taking place on a regular basis for 800 years by the time we get to Theodore Herzl. So you would have had to have been completely oblivious to European history to not come to the conclusion that life as a Jew in Europe was hard because of the constant pogrom that took place.
Interestingly enough, the Dreyfus affair, the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the creation of Zionism, wasn’t a pogrom. Dreyfus was an officer in the French army who was then framed and incorrectly found guilty for intelligence leak in the French army. He ends up going to prison. Everybody knows he’s framed. It’s obvious. It’s a kangaroo court. The French were just looking to scapegoat somebody and Dreyfus got scapegoated. For the Jewish community that felt bad because he was Jewish.
So Theodore Herzl goes, “We just can’t be here. There is no way we’ll ever integrate into European society.” It’s worth pointing out though that Herzl was also – sorry that Dreyfus was also German. So he was from the part of France that is ethnically German majority. So when he gets busted, the French aren’t just busting him for being Jewish. They might not have even cared that he was Jewish. They were probably busting him because he was German. And it was an easy way to scapegoat somebody in the French army. But it doesn’t matter. That’s how the population, the Jewish population interpreted that it was an anti-Jewish attack.
Early Zionist Plans and Palestine
What Herzl comes up with is an idea of creating a Jewish majority state somewhere on the planet. He was really interested in Uganda. There was talk of doing it in New Mexico and Arizona. There were several other places that were mentioned. And he was very much against doing it in Palestine.
Having said that, he starts this congress of people who are trying to figure out where to do this and they start to organize Zionism very quickly. Most of the Jews who were interested in Zionism decided Palestine was the place because they saw it as a way to return back to their ancient hereditary homeland.
The Reality of Ethnic Identity and DNA
Now it’s worth pointing out we have these weird notions about race and ethnicity and nationality. So I’m going to use myself as an example here. When you become a minority in a country and then you give it several centuries, what ends up happening is that because you’re slowly interbreeding into the majority population, you can do the math on this. It’s not hard. I’ll show you how it works. You will eventually start to lose your ethnicity genetically. So in other words, you will stop being that immigrant population because you will end up breeding in.
So think of it. I’m part Swedish. My Swedish ancestors are Finland Svenskar, which means they’re Swedes from Finland. So they moved hundreds of years ago into Finland as colonists. To be clear, they weren’t the good guys in this story. But let’s say I’m the first Swede in Finland to marry a Finn. So now my children are half Finnish, half Swedish. And then let’s say they marry a Swede. So now their children are 3/4 Swedish, 1/4 Finnish. But if that kid, that’s 3/4 1/4 marries a Finn, right? That means that at that point their child is going to be 5/8 Finnish, 3/8 Swedish. And every time that happens, they get further and further away from being the halfway mark.
So eventually what starts to happen is that minority population’s DNA fizzles up when. When I did my DNA test 23andMe. I’m not very Swedish. My grandmother was almost pure Finnish because her ancestors had been in Finland for so many centuries, there was no way to retain it.
So in other words, if you were to look at Jews living in Europe, they looked European. If you were to look at Jews looking in Morocco, they looked Moroccan. If you were to look at Jews living in Egypt, they looked Egyptian. Jews living in India looked Indian. Jews living in China looked Chinese. There’s no weirdness or anything. It’s not horrible. They’re still Jewish. I’m still Swedish. Because it really isn’t about DNA. It’s about identity.
My people identify as Finland Svenskar. They have Swedish last names, they spoke Swedish. There’s no magical DNA thing that links you to anything. Native Americans are starting to figure that out. All these stupid fractions are keeping track of, 1/8, 1/32nd, 1/64. At what point? So, you know, it’s the thing of, I have a ship and I repair it and I keep repairing it, and 200 years later, I’ve replaced every single part in that ship. Is it still the original ship? And the answer is, yeah, of course it is. It never changed its name. The whole time, all the cells in your body are completely replaced. What is it? Every seven years? So, yeah, that’s how this works.
JEREMY: It’s the culture, it’s the story. It’s…
The Zionist Movement and Land Acquisition
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It’s the culture, it’s the story. The genetics doesn’t really matter. Having said that, that was the claim they were making was we have this genetic, ethnic, racial connection to this chunk of land. Let’s go home.
Ironically, the people who were living there were ethnically, genetically, 80% Jewish. They had mostly converted to Christianity and Islam. But there was a Jewish Palestinian population because under Arab rule and then later Ottoman rule and everything in between, because there were the Seljuks and the Fatimids and the Mamluk. And under all those different groups, the Jews had thrived and they had done very well for themselves.
And so there was always, under Muslim rule, a Jewish community, with the exception of during the Crusades in Palestine. So when these European Zionists are talking about Zionism, and then Zionism as an ideology spreads to the United States, they’re talking about ignoring the fact that there’s already an existing population there, ignoring the fact that ethnically and genetically that population is actually very heavily Jewish. A lot more than they are because they’re so now heavily very European.
And they want to go because they think of themselves as real Jews and replace the population that’s already there. And they know there’s a population of people there. They start telling the lie of “a land without a people, for a people without a land,” and it’s just not true in any way, shape or form. And they know this.
So they have a problem. And the problem is if they go under Ottoman rule and they live in Palestine, the Ottomans aren’t going to let them make their own state. That’s not going to happen. So that there’s no path towards creating a Jewish only state in Palestine as long as there’s an Ottoman Empire. But that doesn’t mean they can’t move there.
And so little by little, Jews start to move and they start to buy land. Ironically enough, they were having trouble getting financing for land to do mortgages. There was a South African bank that jumped in and started helping them make the land purchases. I just think that’s so South Africa, South African bank that stepped in and said, “Yeah, we’ll help you.” Birds of a feather, right? We’re white colonists in Africa, you’re white colonists in Asia, let’s help you out.
And as time went by, by the time we got to 1947, the Jews owned 7% of Palestine. They had purchased, legally purchased, and had a deed to 7% of the land. So then go ahead. No, go ahead.
JEREMY: So before we get that far ahead, I know that there’s the Balfour Declaration. So that was during World War I.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Correct.
JEREMY: So how did that, because in my mind I’m thinking, yeah, that’s a great notion. You guys should, and if you want to spend the money and live somewhere else, we can all do that, that’s fine. How does the idea of you’re saying need to get these people out of here, which we’ve done the same thing in American history. We had the idea of manifest destiny, which is “hey, this land belongs to us. Oh, there are people here, whatever.”
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah.
JEREMY: It’s our God given right to go from sea to shining sea. So the Balfour Declaration, how did that kind of create the mindset of beginning to partition this land and make it something different? And it kind of pushed people into different places.
The Balfour Declaration and Imperial Ambitions
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah. So the British Empire at the start, before World War I even started, was looking how it could partition the Ottoman Empire. And one of the things that they were also really keen on doing was splitting Iran in half. And so the British and the French actually got together. Sykes Pico and they carve up the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire. The Persians didn’t belong to the Ottomans.
And the idea was that Russia, Italy, France, the UK and Greece would each get a piece. So Russia would get a big chunk of land in Thrace and Constantinople. They would have patient in Dardanelle and Bosporus that would allow them direct access to the Mediterranean. The Greeks would get Izmir area. The Italians were going to get Antalya, that beautiful coastal region of southern Turkey. And then the French were going to get Syria, Lebanon, Iraq. And then the British were going to get Palestine, Jordan and southern Iran. And then the Russians were going to take North India.
The Russians had a different thing in mind. They decided to go communist and anti imperialist. So they refused to participate in them. And once they’re out of the picture, the British couldn’t conquer the southern half of Iran. They needed to divide and conquer it. They needed the Russians to get the north. And of course that means the Russians aren’t going to go into Constantinople. So the Russians are out of the equation.
So the British tell the French, “Sorry, Iraq is ours.” That’s our consolation prize for not getting southern Iran. And the British were in the bigger, better, more powerful position. So the French were just like, “I guess.”
Zionism and Anti-Semitism: Strange Bedfellows
In that while that’s going on, the Balfour Declaration goes on. Because what Balfour is thinking is, so one of the things that’s interesting about Zionism is it’s intimately intertwined with antisemitism. So the ideology of antisemitism was originally called Judenhass, which literally means Jew hatred. But hatred is an emotion. And so in the 19th century, staking a claim to an emotion sounded irrational at a time when, post Enlightenment, we’re all supposed to be rational thinking, logical beings, scientific beings with a scientific method.
So they decided to come up with a new term and they came up with anti Semitism. They thought if they said anti Semitism, it didn’t sound as emotionally charged as Jew hatred did. Their goal was to purge Europe of the Jews. So no more pogroms because there wouldn’t be any Jews to pogrom. It’s not, its origin of Jew hatred was in the pogroms, but they’ve advanced past that. By the time they’re saying they’re anti Semitic, they didn’t care how the Jews were out of Europe. The goal was just to get them out.
So when Herzl comes up with Zionism, they’re like, “Yes, that’s brilliant. We can expel the Jewish population and we can put them somewhere else. We don’t care where. Palestine, Uganda, whatever makes Australia. We don’t care. We just need them out of Europe.” So in an ironic twist, the Zionists and the anti Semites are actually working towards the same goal.
Balfour gets wrapped up in all of this and without the authority to do so, declares that Palestine is the Jewish homeland. And of course the British are annoyed with him because they’re like, “No, dude, we’re taking it over as part of our post Ottoman Empire carve up event. We’ve got our knife out and it is Turkey.” And everybody loves to carve a turkey in Thanksgiving. They’re carving off chunks here and there.
And for the British, owning Palestine was the fulfillment of the Crusades. They finally got Jerusalem. I’m trying to remember his name, Girod. The French General Garod. He wins the battle of my saloon, which was a right on the border between Lebanon and Syria, is fought in 1920 because in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, an Arab state that owned the Hejaz Mountains. So western Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon had formed and its capitals in Damascus.
And its flag was very similar to the Jordanian and Palestinian flags. The black and the white flag stripes I think are flipped. That’s the difference between the flags. And the king of it was King Faisal. So if you watch Lawrence of Arabia, it’s the guy played by Alec Guinness, he became the king of this state.
And when the Ottomans were forced to surrender, the British and the French were like, “No, we’re not letting you have this state because that territory is going to us.” And except for the Hejaz Mountains. So the British made a deal with the Saudis. So the Saudis would get the Hejaz mountains and in return for the Saudis allowing the British to take Palestine and Jordan and Iraq, and then the French would take Lebanon and Syria. So the British end up becoming really good friends with the Saudis in the process. Right? Because they’re working in tandem together.
King Faisal was then given the consolation prize of becoming the king of Iraq. So the British were like, “You’re unemployed. We heard you’re unemployed.” Ghurad goes over after he’s defeated the Arabs and Faisal is surrendering, he goes to Salahdin’s tomb and he kicks it. Salahdin’s tomb is in Syria. He kicks it. And he goes, “Salahdin. We’re back.”
In other words, in everybody’s mind, the end of World War I was the fulfillment of the Crusader dream. There’s nobody. Nobody thought any other way. Today, people are like, “No, whatever. Such bullshit.” World War I ended up being a new crusade. And so when the British got Jerusalem, it was the dream of dreams because Richard the Lionheart never captured Jerusalem. So here they were, finally fulfilling Richard the Lionheart’s dream, seven and some change centuries later, they pulled it off. And they were so excited about it.
And so the idea of creating a Jewish state was, no, that was anathema. So Balfour was, in a way, this sort of cheat, right? The race started, but the fire, the gun hadn’t been fired yet. And so the British stopped it from happening.
JEREMY: So how did it evolve from World War I to wrapping up World War II to what happens?
The Rise of Zionist Terrorism
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah. So then, as time goes by, it becomes increasingly clear to the Zionists who are moving to Palestine that, A, they’re not buying the land fast enough, right? By 1947, they got to 7%. If they were going to try to own, their goal was 80%. So at the rate they were going, it was going to be several centuries before they were going to get to 80%. So that they began to realize this isn’t happening fast enough.
A, B, they began to think that the British were never going to let go of Palestine. This Palestine was going to become for Britain what Gibraltar is for Britain or Northern Ireland is for Britain. There was going to be this peace they were going to hold on to.
So a group of terrorist organizations formed, Irgun, Leahy, the Stern Gang. There’s all these little Jewish terrorist organizations that form the Zionist terrorist organizations. And they begin killing people. They blow up a school bus, they attack a hotel, they attack a British military installation. And they’re doing the kind of terrorism that we came to associate later with the Palestinians. They were doing it in the 1920s and 30s.
JEREMY: And this is in Palestine?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, it’s in Palestine. And it was driving the British absolutely bonkers. At one point, they captured Yitzchak Shamir, who was a member of Leahy, and they exiled him to Uganda because they didn’t know what to do with him. When you think about it, that was really gentle. Why not shoot him? He’s a terrorist. You gotta hand it to the Brits. That was really humane. “Dude, we’re sending you to Uganda. Bye.”
Leahy actually met with Adolf Eichmann because Adolf Eichmann was trying to figure out his goal as a Nazi was how do I get the Jews out of Europe? That was his goal. And so he was willing to work with Zionists in Palestine because it got them out. Ultimately, he concludes, and the Nazis conclude that this isn’t fast enough, that more desperate measures need to be taken.
So in 1941, at the Waldsee Conference, Adolf Eichmann decides on the final solution. And they began exterminating Jews in death camps. But up until that moment, he wasn’t, he didn’t feel any need to do that. And so representatives of Eichmann met with Leahy, I believe, in Lebanon, and they worked out a deal.
And so again, Zionism and anti Semitism will work hand in hand. They’re two sides of the same coin. In a way. What Zionism is, it’s the acceptance of antisemitism. It’s like, “Okay, we can’t live with white people because white people are just too evil and cruel and sadistic. So we need to go somewhere else.” And those same white people are like, “Yeah, bye, go. We can’t wait to get rid of you.”
And so World War I, World War II breaks out.
JEREMY: And.
The Reality of Holocaust Knowledge
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: You know, there’s this thing, this general kind of “well, we didn’t really know how bad things were” that the United States will say, or Germans who are living near the concentration camps or the death camps would say, and the answer is no. People did know to a degree anyway, right? There was some level of “we weren’t fully sure what was happening, but we’re pretty sure things were bad.”
It’s to the point where aerial photographs were taken of Auschwitz and they’re in the National Archives. And the aerial photograph has markings labeling everything. So there’s the crematorium, the gas chambers, so they knew what was there. So the Allies, the people living nearby, like there’s this kind of feigned “oh, if we only knew” – all bullshit. They totally knew. Maybe they didn’t know the full extent to which it was happening, but they knew.
American Anti-Semitism During WWII
So one of the interesting twists is there were Jews who were trying to get to Britain. In the United States with St. Louis is a ship filled with Jewish refugees coming to the United States. The United States redirected it, sending it to Cuba. And after being stuck in Cuba for a while, ultimately most of them were sent back to Europe and many of them actually end up dying in the Holocaust.
So one of the great ironies of all this is that the United States flexed its anti-Semitic muscle in the period of World War II to the point where we literally caused Jews to die because we wouldn’t take them in as refugees. People were polled in a survey, “how do you feel about Jewish refugees leaving Europe?” And two thirds of Americans said that they feared they would be terrorists.
And so as a result, they didn’t want those Jewish refugees coming into the United States because they feared they were going to work for communist organizations or they were working for Nazi Germany secretly and they just didn’t want to have them. And so when the government sends ships like the St. Louis back, it’s really an expression of sort of the organic homegrown anti-Semitism that the United States has always had.
The Evolution of Nazi Concentration Camps
In the beginning, in Germany, during the Holocaust, like the initial stages when they were first building concentration camps, they were kind of a joke. Like they barely had any fence, the guards weren’t armed. Most of what happened was you had to do lots of push-ups and jumping jacks, you know, like it was almost like a fitness program in the beginning.
And they just, little by little, like you slowly boil the frog, kept making it crueler and crueler and crueler until they got it to the point where they were literally death camps. And one of the reasons why it transformed this way was funding. They just didn’t – the government hadn’t allocated the funding to do the full cruelty.
But another reason they did it this way is it was deliberate. It was a way to get the Germans who were going to be committing these crimes against humanity and this cruelty, ease them into it. The fear that the Nazis had when the Nazis would recruit people for the part of the SS that was going to be in charge of the Holocaust – the Death Head League. That’s a great name. They had a skull and crossbones on their helmet. But that was just an SS symbol that they got from the Prussians. The Prussians used it.
When these guys were doing this, they would test you to see if you were a sadist. And if you scored as a sadist, they wouldn’t recruit you because they wanted somebody who was going to follow orders. They didn’t want somebody who wanted to do this.
JEREMY: Interesting.
Nazi Recruitment Psychology
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah. So their goal was to recruit school teachers and butchers and mailmen and police officers, just regular, everyday common folk, and then put them into a situation where they’re starting outside of the concentration camp. Like maybe they’re cleaning the laundry or they’re somehow or food delivery. So they know there’s a concentration camp, but they’re not even sure what’s going on inside.
And they have the slow contact and then you just slowly ease them in until you’ve got them where they’re doing the worst of worst. And that was the goal, and it was very effective. The Nazis understood human psychology to a degree. They weren’t geniuses by any means. They were actually idiots. Kept making lots of stupid mistakes and thank God, because it lowered their efficiency rate and ultimately cost them the war. But they did know enough about psychology and propaganda and how to trick people that they would do these really interesting steps.
Jewish Survival Strategies
One of the ironic twists is as things got worse and worse, Jews were trying to flee and a lot of them realized they weren’t going to get away. You kind of needed to be a person who was of interest if you were going to get away, right? Like if you were Herbert Marcuse or Hannah Arendt or one of the scientists that we’ll employ on the Manhattan Project, we can’t wait for you to show up because you’re a brilliant mind and you’re going to do something great for us.
But if you were a common Jew, and you know, there’s the stereotype that all the Jews were rich and they were all bankers, the reality was they were just as rich as everybody else. And a common Jew just didn’t have the kind of economic wealth that was going to get them back to safety.
So some Jews began to make the calculation, “what’s the safest place in Germany? What’s the safest place?” And they realized it was the Wehrmacht. And there was actually a large number of Jewish men who just simply joined the German army because it was safe, you weren’t going to get gassed.
Now, it turned out, was probably a big miscalculation because by the time the war ends, a huge portion of the German army is dead. Seven million Germans died over the course of the five and a half years that they fought World War II. Six million of them were men. But in the beginning, right, that was the calculus was, “oh, at least the state isn’t going to get me. I might end up being killed by a Soviet soldier at some point, but at least I’m not going to be killed by a fellow German.”
Because most of the Jews living in Germany didn’t identify as Jewish first. They identified as German first in the same way that the Protestants living in Germany didn’t – they weren’t running around wanting to create a Protestant only state. They were Germans. The Catholics were Germans. They just happened to be a different religion. And so for them this was a strange reality that the Nazis hated Jews so much because those Jews were thinking, “dude, what the hell? I’m a German. Why would you hate another German?”
JEREMY: Well, especially like going back to what you said earlier, but at this point, several centuries and maybe a millennia later, a lot of these German Jews are – they look, they sound, by all means, they are German. So like, how would you even know a German Jew is a German Jew?
Nazi Racial Classification System
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: And so many of them have converted to Christianity. Like Karl Marx, he was raised a Christian. Yeah, he had Jewish ancestors, but they converted. And so, you know, if I remember correctly, Edmund Husserl also converted.
So one of the weird twists about the Nazis is for the Nazis, this was an ethnic thing, this was about genetics, this was a bloodline thing. So there was no way to convert out. So what they needed was they needed the census data. IBM had been doing the census for the Weimar Republic. So the Nazis when the Weimar Republic bought the census data, they didn’t care about the religion, so they never bought that segment of the data. They only bought the part of the data that they needed for voting purposes.
So when the Nazis came to power, they went to IBM and they were like, “hey, you guys asked in your survey what a person’s religion was, right?” And IBM’s like, “yeah.” And the Nazis go, “we want to buy that data.” And that’s how they knew where everybody was. That’s how they knew what door to knock on at night was. They had IBM’s religious data.
But then what they would do is they would go into the government records and they would look at birth certificates and they would trace your ancestry back and they’d be like, “yeah, you’re a Protestant now, but your grandparents were Jewish” and that meant you were in trouble. There was no way to unjewify yourself. Like you were an atheist, you were a Protestant, you were a Catholic, it didn’t matter.
And there was actually a member of the SS, it turned out he was a quarter Jewish. And when they found out, they just shot him in the head. You know, like a high ranked member of the SS, he was actually one of the only blond men in the top echelon of the Nazi party. If you look at their pictures, they’re all a bunch of brown haired, black haired men who are trying to create the perfect blonde race. You’re like, “dude, have you guys looked at yourselves? You’re clearly the guys you’re trying to get rid of,” right?
JEREMY: Yeah. I mean, I imagine there are so many people who are just completely ignorant to the fact that they had Jewish heritage, ethnicity. You know, Jewish DNA. And so suddenly they find themselves in this – you know, you’re an SS officer and you’re like, “no, I’m all for this.” And suddenly someone’s holding a gun to your head and you’re like, “what?”
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: What happened?
JEREMY: You know, and I’m sure that there are other reasons too. It wasn’t just – it seems like it would have been an easy excuse to commit some heinous acts at the same time, like, “oh, it turns out that, you know, this guy I don’t like at all, or who got the promotion and I didn’t like, he’s Jewish.”
Arbitrary Nazi Rules
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, yeah, let’s stop him. I mean, that’s basically what Heidegger did to his professor, Edmund Husserl. He was like, “yeah, that guy’s of Jewish descent. Let’s fire him.” And they did. And then Heidegger got his teacher’s job. So it was like a dirty little maneuver.
I read Von Luck’s book “Panzer Commander” and he fell in love with a journalist. And she was an eighth Jewish. She was an eighth and her father was a quarter Jewish. That was basically the cutoff. If you were an eighth, you were okay. If you were a quarter, you were in trouble. You had to walk on eggshells. So there’s this constant tension about what’s going to happen to this woman’s father.
But here’s the twist. He was an officer in the Wehrmacht and so when he wanted to marry her, but the rules that the Wehrmacht had was an active duty officer couldn’t marry a person who was one-eighth Jewish, but an inactive duty officer could. It’s so random and arbitrary and then so he’s like, “so if I go on leave, I can marry her and then what happens when I come back and become active duty again?” And they’re like, “well, you’ll have already married her, so it’ll be okay.”
JEREMY: The rules we create for ourselves to get around things and to create different scenarios is just – it’s mind boggling. That’s like all of human existence because…
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It’s all about hatred management.
JEREMY: Just. Yeah, hatred management, justification. How do I get what I need but still do the bad thing.
The Madness of Targeting Intellectuals
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, exactly. And then the twist of twists is what state wakes up one day and goes, “you know what? I really hate the smartest segment of my society. I’m going to exterminate it.” You know, like Freud, Husserl, Marx, Einstein. Like, yes, it’s true there are a bunch of non-Jewish Germans who are brilliant geniuses, but it’s also true there was a huge section of Germany that was Jewish, that was genius.
And it’s clear that the Jewish population was disproportionately overrepresented in the genius pool. You know, Arendt and Marcuse, the list goes on. And Horkheimer and Fritz Haber. It’s just insane. So there’s also a madness to all of this that’s going on that makes no sense. It’s cruelty stacked on cruelty mixed with arbitrariness.
JEREMY: Right, so how does this then lead to the outcome of 1947 and then going into 1948 in Palestine?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah.
JEREMY: So unless you have more to talk about Germany and everything a little bit.
The United States and the Holocaust: A Troubling Pattern
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: And it’s this. At no point did the United States ever… Because we bombed the living hell out of Europe. We didn’t just bomb Germany, we were bombing our allied countries too. We just… If you were under Nazi occupation, we were going to bomb you.
The question was only… We had designated several cities as off limits for bombing. So we weren’t going to bomb Rome, for example, that was off limits. We weren’t going to bomb Florence, we weren’t going to bomb Heidelberg, Paris, Prague. There was a few cities that we just decided under no circumstances would we bomb them.
Heidelberg, Germany was spared because we already knew that we were going to use that as the headquarters for United States army during the occupation period. And we just wanted a nice, pretty intact town to be our headquarters. So we decided not to bomb it.
You know, if you’ve ever been to Prague, you know why we didn’t bomb that city. It is one of the world’s gems. It is truly one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen in my life. Rome, it’s kind of obvious. Florence, Italy, you don’t want to… There are some places you didn’t want to bomb. But we bombed the living hell out of Europe.
There was another area that we didn’t bomb and we were very careful not to anything to do with the Holocaust. So we never bombed a single concentration camp, a single death camp, or a single railroad track leading to one of them.
Now here, you know, I’ve heard logic about this. I should say illogic about this. “Well, we were worried we’d kill Jews.” Okay, so don’t bomb the concentration camps, because those were just prison slave labor camps. Right. There’s a high probability that the Jewish population could survive that.
But the death camps, why wouldn’t you bomb the death camps? They’re going to die anyway. And maybe if you bombed, would give them a chance to run away. You would break down a wall or knock a fence down. And then certainly you want to bomb the trains, because if you can, yes, if the train derails, there’s a chance that Jews will die. But at least you give them a chance to jump out of the passenger cars. And passenger cars, who am I kidding? The boxcars. And they could run into the countryside and escape. We never did it.
And also another thing to think about was if we blew up that train, that was a train they couldn’t use for military purposes. So it served a dual purpose of helping interrupt the Holocaust at the same time crushing Germany’s ability to do warfare. And we never did it.
We spared Dachau and Bergen Belsen and Treblinka and Auschwitz and Paris and Prague and Florence and Heidelberg. And I have to ask the question, why. Why did we not feel the need to drop at least one bomb on something like, wait till there’s no train on the track and blow up the track, just interrupt it somehow?
And the answer is, I think at the end of the day, we wanted to maximize the Holocaust. We wanted to make it as bad as possible. And I think there were two reasons for it. One, we were still extremely anti-Semitic, so we didn’t care that the Jews were being murdered, and we were happy to let it unfold. And the second thing is, I think we were Zionists. We were anti-Semitic Zionists, and we wanted to create Israel in part so that we could encourage American Jews to leave. So we thought the way to do this was to make sure the Holocaust was as horrific as possible so that we could convince the world that Israel needed to be created.
JEREMY: Do you think there’s also an aspect of… We wanted to maintain the crime scene, so to speak, so that in one part, yeah, let’s make it as… Let’s not facilitate necessarily, but not do anything to disrupt the Holocaust so that after World War II, we can obviously be the good guys here. You know, this is… Yeah, I’m just thinking of, you know, going back to the public like, “Oh, my gosh, look at what we found.” And it’s… None of it’s damaged. You can still go to all these places today for the most part. And it’s… They’re in great shape. You can walk through the crematoriums.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: I went to Dachau. I am purely scared. I will never go to another thing like that again. It was horrific. I was crying the whole damn time.
JEREMY: Yeah, yeah, I was in Dachau as well. And it’s just, it’s…
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: I’m glad Germany’s preserving, but it’s horrific.
JEREMY: Yeah, they’ve actually done a really good job at the museum of just… it is sobering. And it’s just… Yeah, horrific is the right word.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It’s horrific.
JEREMY: They have…
Historical Parallels and the German Model
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Everyone’s persuasive. They never fired up the crematorium because it was not a death camp. It was just a slave labor camp. So, you know, Auschwitz is even worse. Treblinka, those were death camps. People were brought in the rail cars and then exterminated.
So I’m part German. This is a point of shame for me that we did this. You know, we have to live with this shame forever because in the thousand years… Well, 1,000 years is too long. Our civilization will be definitely gone by then. In 110 years, right before our civilization blinks out, we’ll still remember that we did this. It won’t be a thing from some ancient civilization that we’re not connected to.
It’s worth pointing out though, and you keep hinting at this, the United States did it first. We genocided the Native American population. And then on top of that, we brought in slave labor in form of African American slavery. And you know, that’s exactly what the Germans were doing. They were exterminating Poles and Ukrainians and Russians and Serbs. And they were doing it with the intent of colonizing that land. And they of course killed Roma and they also killed Jews. This was a massive project.
But they also enslaved populations too. So they were doing both the slave plantation kind of model and the genocide. And then they also had reservations. They basically turned Southern Poland into a giant Polish reservation in a similar way that we did with Native American reservations. They called it General Government. The Germans used French to describe their concentration camp and they called it the General Government. And you’re like, “What is the title?”
JEREMY: Wow.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah. And of course the whole thing is to confuse people, I think.
JEREMY: Yeah.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: To make you go, “I don’t even know what that is.”
JEREMY: What’s another layer of justification too, for the general public, I think it’s like… No, the name is General Government.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah.
JEREMY: And it’s just a little off because it’s in French. So it, you know, I don’t quite understand it. So it can’t be the thing that everyone else is saying it is. If you think that way, then, you know, you’re just distrusting.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Exactly.
JEREMY: Yeah, man.
The Scale of World War II Devastation
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It’s worth pointing out that Germany murdered 5 million Poles in World War II. 3 million were Jewish and 2 million were Catholic. Per capita, Poland was one of the most severely murderized places in World War II. Yugoslavia, Poland, and Russia, I think, were the… And China actually, also Indonesia might be up there too. It had a really high death rate. Those were millions of people dead in each of those places.
And so World War II ends, and there’s this horrific moment of, “Oh, my God, what just happened?” You know, eight years of… A little bit over eight years of war. 65 million people dead, whole cities flattened. And there’s this exposure that there was a Holocaust. So anybody who was still in doubt or confusion or didn’t understand was suddenly forced to confront the fact that something really horrible had happened beyond just the war.
And one of the things that the Zionists began doing is they began saying really big numbers. So they would say 11 million dead. And I think at one point, some Zionists were even saying a larger number than 11 million, but there were only 11 million Jews in Europe. So, you know, 13 million. And you’re like, “Wait, where’d the other 2 million come from?”
And eventually the number that everybody kind of settled on was 6 million. And that’s problematic because that’s one of the things that the Holocaust deniers like to do, is they like to pick on the number because the number is probably closer to 5.1 or maybe 5.4 million. So then they go, “If you’re exaggerating and calling it 6 million, then maybe you’re lying about other things.”
And so one of the things I think we need to be careful with is, first of all, in terms of catastrophe, what’s the difference between 6 million and 5 million? Already? I can’t wrap my mind around it. So I’m trying to make the habit of not giving the Holocaust deniers any ammunition, because one of the things that’s scary about this moment is I’m seeing the rise of antisemitism. I mean, I think it’s popping up everywhere, and we need to be really careful as we thread this that, you know, if you’re anti-Zionist, you’re not anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism is a very specific thing. It is the hatred of Jews. Being against Zionism has nothing to do with hating Jews. In fact, if anything, most anti-Semites are Zionists. And so it’s actually the other direction. And so for people who are allies of the Jewish people, like myself, like you, we want to skirt this thing and be really careful to make sure we don’t give ammunition. So that’s why I will always say 5.1 to 5.4 million Jews were killed.
The Human Cost of Current Events
JEREMY: Yeah, Yeah. I think you make a really good point in terms of the broader context of talking about Palestine and Palestinians and genocide and different things. To be clear, it is not the Jewish people that are doing this. If anything, the Jewish people are also caught up in this horrific thing. So they can’t… It’s hard for us to think, what can we do?
I can’t even imagine the general public who is paying attention and looking at these things, who are not Zionist. How helpless they feel that their neighbors who are trapped and stuck and starving and dying of thirst and who are being shot and their homes are destroyed. And, you know, here they are…
I was thinking this the other day. I was getting emotional. I was feeding my cat and I was looking at my cat and I was like, “My cat is so much better taken care of than some of these people right now.” And it’s just heartbreaking. So I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Jewish in Israel, in your neighbor, in… You know, it’s just hard. It’s a hard topic to talk about.
The Complexity of Anti-Zionism vs. Anti-Semitism
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It really is. And it’s a complicated topic because most people who hear, you know, if you say, “I’m an anti-Zionist,” they can’t separate it out. And they immediately go to, “Oh, you’re an anti-Semite.” I’m like, “No, that’s that guy over there with the KKK hood on his head. That guy, the swastika flag. We’re in a different camp.”
The UN Partition Plan of 1947
So, okay, so World War II ends. There’s this point of trying to figure things out. And the Zionists have what they think is a perfect justification for creating a state in Palestine. They go to the UN and the UN votes and votes to partition Palestine.
Now, the crazy thing about it is in ’47, when the UN makes the vote, 7% of the land lawfully belonged to Jewish colonists because they had purchased it. So they had the deed to the property. The UN gives 45% of the land to a Palestinian state and 55% of the land to a Jewish state.
Now what’s interesting about that is a huge chunk of the land that they’re giving to the Jewish state is the Negev desert, which is like it sounds, it’s a desert. So when you look at it in terms of arable land, it was probably closer to 40% going to the Jewish state and 60% going to the Palestinians. So even though it wasn’t an even split in land in terms of square acres, in terms of quality land, actually a little bit more was going to the Palestinians.
Having said that, the Jewish state is Jewish only. Well, the Zionists were hoping to create an 80%, 20% ratio. They thought that was sort of the golden number. Whereas the Palestinian state will be multi-religious, like Jews, Christians and Muslims will live in the Palestinian state.
So the creation of Israel will be an apartheid state right from the get-go. Because it’s going to be a colonial state, a colonial enterprise not unlike what the Afrikaners did. Apartheid is the Dutch word for segregation. So not unlike what American colonists did. And then what will happen is there will be a minority population in Israel that will be Arab, that will become the cheap labor that the Israeli state can employ to build its homes and roads. You need that. So they don’t want this to be a 0% Palestinian population. They’re not sure that they can even achieve that. They just want it to be 80%.
Arab Rejection of the Partition Plan
When the Arab population around the world, so Arabs in Morocco and Arabs in Iraq and Arabs in Palestine hear what the UN is doing, there is universal rejection of it. Because in the Arab mind, they couldn’t understand why Palestine wasn’t going to become an independent secular state.
They didn’t have any problem with there being a Jewish population in Palestine. There was a huge Jewish population in Morocco. There was a significant Jewish population in Egypt. There was a big population in Yemen, a big population in Iraq, a big population in Syria and Lebanon. So the idea of there being a big population in Palestine made sense. Nobody thought that was weird in any way, shape or form.
In fact, as Jews moved to Palestine, Palestinians were welcoming them. Even once the terrorism kicked in, Palestinians were confused because they saw the Jewish people coming in as brothers and sisters escaping persecution. The Palestinians, by the way, also let Armenians in. So during the Armenian genocide that the Ottoman Empire enacted, a lot of Armenians had escaped to Palestine. And the Palestinians were like, “Yes, Jews, Armenians, you’re both welcome, come, of course, we’ll let you in.”
So there was this confusion, I think on the part of Palestinians. “Wait, why are you doing this?” What happened was it was so bad that there were Palestinians who were letting Jewish Europeans live in their homes. And then after partition, if the Palestinians stepped outside of the home, they’d come home and they’d find the locks changed, and they were like, “Wait, why can’t I get in my home?” And then the family, the Israeli family on the inside, just simply wouldn’t open the door, wouldn’t talk to them, wouldn’t let them in, and they would just… That’s how they would lose their home.
And so in the mind of the Palestinian, this was just an upending of, “Wait a minute, we welcome you in, we put you in our house, we fed you, and then the first opportunity you had, you stole our home from us.” They couldn’t reconcile this.
So the Arabs very loudly say, “We reject the UN partition plan.”
The 1948 War and Military Disparities
So in 1948, the Israelis launched an offensive campaign and attacked and invaded Palestine militarily. And they fought. They didn’t fight the Palestinians because the Palestinians had no army.
So what happened was in World War II, Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians, or the Jewish colonial settlers in Palestine, both volunteered to join the British military. So I can’t remember the name of the movie that came out that was set in 1940. Dunkirk. It’s… It was just a few years ago. It’s probably got an obvious name like Dunkirk or something.
JEREMY: I think there is a movie called Dunkirk.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yes. Yeah. Was it like five years ago or something like that? Yeah. So there was… It was like the ultimate Brexit movie. It was, “Here we are, we’re Britain against Europe, and here we’re doing our last stand.”
One of the crazy things about the movie was everybody was white. You just… It’s just white person after white person after white person after white person, and you’re like, “Dude, the French army had African soldiers. There were Moroccans and Algerians and Senegalese and Cameroonians.” There were black and brown soldiers in the French army. The British had a bunch of Indians that they left behind.
And the people, the racists who made that movie couldn’t figure out how to show the color of those two imperial armies. Tens of thousands of Indians got left behind because the British were like, “No, no, no, we’re going to bring the English over first. If there’s any room left, we’ll bring you Indians. But what the hell, why would we bring you. We don’t even like you.”
And so that movie, to me, is the quintessential whitewash that in La La Land, right? A movie about jazz with no main black actors in it. It’s like the white fantasy we’ll get. We can’t create our own culture. We had to rely on black people to make us a good form of music. But we really hate black people, so we’re not going to… We’re going to pretend like they had nothing to do with it and just make a musical about nothing that was from them anyway.
Military Training Disparities
So when the Israelis, the people who will become Israelis, the Jewish settler colonists in Palestine, volunteer to join the British army, they were actually put into a military unit and trained and given weapons and actually saw combat. When the Palestinians did it, the British were like, “No, we don’t want you guys to learn how to use any weapons because you’ll fight us someday.” So they made them stevedores and they just loaded and unloaded ships.
And so when ’48 happens, the Israelis are trained. They have weapons. They know what they’re doing. The Palestinians knew how to load and unload ships. And so as a result, they weren’t really in a position to fight. They had done nothing to prepare for this fight. I think the fight completely caught them off guard.
The Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing Campaign
And then the Israelis did a massacre. They actually did multiple massacres. One of them was at a place called Deir Yassin. And they just went in with machetes and chopped the Palestinians to pieces. And they did it because they were trying to trigger a panic.
Their thinking was, “We’re not going to end up with all of Palestine, but we’re going to end up with a bigger chunk than 55%. If we can get the Palestinians in the 55% to flee through fear, then we’ll end up hopefully with the 80-20 population split.”
They really didn’t end up with one, just for the record. They ended up with about a 75-25 population split, which is close to the 80-20. So I guess I think they can give themselves an A-minus for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was a very successful campaign.
The Arab Armies’ Failed Response
And when the dust settled, so the Arab armies that fought – the Egyptian army, the Jordanian army, the Syrian army – when they fought, they were incompetent, to say the least. They didn’t coordinate their actions. So the Jordanians went in first, the Egyptians came in later. So there was a lack of coordination.
The Egyptian army had been supplied with weapons from corrupt people. So some of the weapons didn’t work. They had bought a bunch of Stuarts, the little tank caps the United States used in World War II. They were fast, but you couldn’t destroy anything with them because their 37 millimeter gun isn’t going to penetrate the armor of a Panther. And so I’m not even sure what they were for. I would have put a flamethrower on all of them because a flamethrower can destroy a Panther because they’re a fast small target zipping around.
And so they just bought a bunch of these. But they were, they’d all seen combat. They weren’t brand new Stuarts, they were used Stuarts. So some of them, they couldn’t turn to the left because the mechanism didn’t work. They could only turn to the right. And some of them, the turret didn’t work anymore or the machine guns weren’t working, or it was just disaster.
The rifles the Egyptians went in with, half of them couldn’t fire because the firing pin was messed up on them. And so these incompetent, poorly experienced armies go in to fight these Israelis and they just get their asses handed to them. It’s a catastrophe.
The Outcome: Israel’s Territorial Expansion
When it’s done, instead of ending up with 55%, the Israelis conquered 78%. The remaining 22% became the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In terms of arable land, the Israelis probably ended up with 70%, 75% of the arable land. They still had the Negev desert. So that sort of, it didn’t give them the 78%. So there’s probably about 70% of the arable land. So the Arabs really just got hosed in this.
Most of the population today in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are actually refugees from the rest of Palestine. In other words, they’re not native to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, they’re transplanted from the rest of Palestine. And so that’s how Israel is created. It’s a series of massacres that are designed to trigger a panic. Panic does happen. Most of the Palestinians flee Israel.
So today it’s about 25% Arab with Israeli citizenship and about 75% Jewish with Israeli citizenship.
The Druze and Bedouin Arrangements
There’s also a huge Druze population because one of the things that the Israelis realized was the Druze were never going to quit. They would fight to the death. And for the Druze, this was an issue of loyalty to the land. So they have this profound deep connection to the land. So the Israelis actually went to the Druze and made a deal and they said, “Look, we’re all about the land too. We’ll make you a deal.” And they basically integrated the Druze in and gave them citizenship and they have voting rights and representation in the Knesset.
The Israelis also went to the Bedouin and made a deal and the Bedouin foolishly went along with it. The Druze ended up better off than the Bedouin. The Israelis never intended to honor their deal with the Bedouin. So the Bedouin in the end got screwed.
The Druze are too dangerous for the Israelis to screw them because they know that first of all, the Druze are not only armed, they serve in the IDF. So for the record, for those of you who don’t know who Druze are, because I think there’s this confusion. Druze are a sect of Shia Muslims. The Mufti and Allah Zhara has actually clarified this because there was a little bit of confusion. And he has said that they are a sect of Shia Muslims. So it’s not just my opinion. There’s a widespread opinion now. Some people will be like, “No, they’re heretics.” Yeah, yeah, whatever. They’re a sect of Shia Muslims. At the end of the day, that’s all there is to it.
So ironically enough, a segment of the IDF is actually Muslim. So it’s complicated. In the same way the Crusades got complicated in Messi, right? There were Turkoman who fought for the crusaders. There’s a high probability that some, if not most of the Turkoman were actually Turks and maybe even some Arabs and Kurds in the mix who ended up on the other side. And so in a way, the Druze in Israel have become the Turcomen of the Crusades.
JEREMY: It’s wild. Yeah, it’s… You know, this happens in almost every topic that you talk about, but history just, you know, repeating itself.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It’s like, wow. Yeah, this is a recurring theme.
Wrapping Up Part One
JEREMY: It feels like a surprise every time for some reason. I think for this episode of Office Hours, which we, I think we’ve landed on a name finally for our little hangout. I think this should be enough because it’s a lot to kind of sit with and we’re going to do this again because we have, in my list of things we’ve made it through one and two of like 10 different things that I wanted to talk about.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Four more episodes.
JEREMY: I mean, we might… talking about ancient history and getting to where we are now, we just got to the formation of Israel after World War II. And so the rest of it, I think, gets us closer to where we are today. But that’s just a huge chunk to understand that history.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: I mean, that’s 3,500 years.
Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead
JEREMY: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So next time we’ll talk more about what that actually looked like. You kind of went into it a little bit, but the apartheid and the actual what it was like on the ground, kind of the day to day life and then going into the systematic removal and erasure, the settlements, you know, the further division between Palestinians and Israelis and maybe start getting into why Israel is trying to completely eliminate even more.
But there’s just a lot of. There’s a lot to talk about. So thank you, Roy, for chatting all of this with us. Anything else you want to add before we say bye for now?
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Thanks, Jeremy, for doing this.
JEREMY: This is awesome.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah.
JEREMY: All right, everyone, until next time. We look at some of the comments. If you have any other questions, we might add them to these. We always tend to get people riled up in the comments section. So y’all have fun out there and we’ll see you next time.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: Yeah, I’ll get a bunch of hate email.
JEREMY: We’ll see.
DR. ROY CASAGRANDA: It’s easy to find my email, so hit me up.
JEREMY: Bye, guys. Thanks, Roy.
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