Episode 98: What Israel’s founding fathers knew about terrorism, with Dr. Bruce Hoffman

>> Hi, everybody.

“Welcome to an exciting new episode of As Khalid.”

If anything, today we're going to discuss an intriguing chapter.

Injuation is rarely history. We're going to talk about terrorism during the British mandate. The British mandate period begins with General Allen B's Triomphane conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. It ends on May 14, 1948. That's the day of the Israeli Declaration.

Independence, it's the day, of course, of the exploration of the British mandate. When the last British governor departs from Haifa, while the sound of gunfire being exchanged by Israeli and Jordanian snipers is already ringing out in the Jerusalem Hills, here to take us on a deep dive. Is Dr. Bruce R. Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University,

the Shelby Column and Catherine W. Davis, seeing your fellow for counterterrorism and homeland

security on the Council on Foreign Relations, he's worked in think tanks, he's worked in academia,

“he has a doctorate from Oxford, he's one of America's premier analysts of terrorism, counterterrorism,”

insurgency, counter insurgency, and the specific book we're going to dive into is his 2014 book "Anonymous Soldiers," which I highly recommend. It's wonderfully written, it opened up for me. New ways of thinking about the Etzel, the Ilgun, sometimes it's called, and the leche to Jewish militias in pre-state Israel, who raised some really fundamental and fascinating questions

today about the nature of warfare, the nature of terrorism. The book won two great awards, the National Jewish Book Award in 2015 in the Washington Institute's Gold Medal. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that we have a beautiful sponsorship for this episode.

This episode is sponsored by Kalmella and Uzi Levine of San Francisco, who asked to dedicate the episode to the memory of Nev Raviv and Nirel Zini, a young couple, who were brutally

murdered by Kalmas near their home in Kfarazan, October 7, 2023, sadly they never met

“Nev or Nirel, but they heard of the tragic story from Tamiraviv, Nev's mom.”

Nirel met during their army service and moved to Kfarazan in early 2023. In October 10, 2015, while serving in the IDF, Nirel was severely wounded during an operation, and from then on, every 10th of October became a special day for the family, a celebrating and marking Nirel's survival and rehabilitation. On October 10, 2023, Nirel was planning to celebrate that day by proposing to Nev.

He never got the chance. Nev was pursuing a master's degree in psychology and hope to become a therapist in their memory, Nev's mother Tamir founded the Nev Nirel Centre in Betianai, town just north of Nittania on the Mediterranean coast. In collaboration with Dr. Kfield Feffel, the centre is a tranquil sanctuary on the Mediterranean

Sea, which offers world-class post-traumatreatment to combatants and survivors who desperately need it. The Nirel Centre is the only place in Israel that operates an intensive daycare program, as well as a research unit that hopes to create a protocol that will allow the centre successes in post-traumat rehabilitation to be replicated.

It's truly moving and inspiring to see how Tamir has been able to channel this bottomless sadness into a project of care, hope and love, a ray of light for a nation that is still in search of healing. Once I also would like to invite everyone to join our Patreon community. It helps us keep the lights on.

If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, that's where it happens and you get to be part of our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. You can join us at patreon.com/ashravevanything the link is in the show notes. Bruce, how are you?

Very well. How about you, Aviv? Good. Good. You're really happy to have come across this book, which went under my radar.

At the time, let's put on the historian hat and ask, "Set the scene for us." The British tank Palestine from the Ottomans in 1917, they're on opposite sides of World War War I, walk us through quickly to May 1948 when the British flag is lowered and you depict it beautifully in the opening of the book where a mournful bagpipe is played in the last British governor goes home.

Walk us through that history really quickly so people know where we are. Sure. Well, like many episodes of contemporary affairs in history, Britain's rule of Palestine began on an extraordinarily optimistic and happy note. You have to go back to World War I where there had been several thrusts by the Egyptian

Since 1914 that it failed, and then General Sir Edmund Allenby, a failed commander on the

“battlefields of the Western Front in Europe, is reassigned to what he thinks is a demotion”

or a career stopper to take over, to take the reigns of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, because obviously British were based in Egypt then. So very foreloiringly and reluctantly he goes to the Middle East thinking his career is over. And he finds his Mithiai, finds his skills in, he was a cavalryman, and on the static trench warfare of the Western Front in World War I, of course he was stymied, but in the vast

open deserts and plains of the Sinai of Gaza, of the negative, he really finds his calling.

And engineers, a series of successful battles that conquer Gaza, that had resisted conquest

by the British on several occasions during World War I, then executes a brilliant coupe domain in Bershava, attacks the Turkish forces using the Australian light tors from the rear, and then marches on Jerusalem. Now not only did he see his assignment as a demotion, but he was given an impossible task,

“because the Prime Minister, British Prime Minister Lloyd George Delson, you have to conquer”

Jerusalem by Christmas, because of course it's 1917, World War I has been dragging on for three years, British forces have suffered terribly, not just in the Western Front, but in Galipoli, for example. Alndy is told, you've got to give the British people this belief, this boost, in morale by seizing Jerusalem by Christmas, and he delivers.

He conquers Jerusalem at the beginning of December 1917, he's welcomed as a liberator. Of course the previous month Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration, which was the statement of policy sent by the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Edmund Rothschild, the head of the Zionist Organization in Britain that commits the United Kingdom to facilitating

“the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home on the condition that it does not”

prejudice the rights of the existing inhabitants. That's more or less a verbatim description of the Balfour Declaration, because he is enormously elastic. So of course, Palestine itself are terribly under World War, during World War I under the Turks. I mean, the force had been stripped bare farmland, had been eroded and crops, you know,

grabbed without any sort of view to sustaining them by the Ottoman Empire. So Palestine was in a very bad shape and here come the British.

And this is open-mindedness that they're going to restore for the first time in four centuries

Christian rule to the Holy Land to Jerusalem, the city, contested by all the Abrahamic faiths, so it begins very optimistically and with his tremendous success. And within basically three years, things begin to unravel. Once the first Jewish immigrants under this particular Alia arrive in Palestine, a very modest number, it immediately triggers Arab fears that Palestine will be taken over by the Jews.

And we have the Nebimus riots in Jerusalem in 1920 that was basically, you know, a religious march descends into mass rioting, directed against Jews and the Arab police force, mutinies, joins the rioters, there's no protection. And this sets in motion the idea that the issue of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, or the Jewish community in Palestine, is it was known at the time, requires a self-defense

force. And the leading exponents of that was some of the name Vladimir, Jabitinsky. And Jabitinsky organizes what becomes the embryo with the nucleus of the Haganah, which of course was what produced the idea of these real defense forces. However, Jabitinsky, as well as the instigator of the riot, some of the name Haja Minal

Husani, who was subsequently appointed the Mufdi of Jerusalem, or as he styled himself, the Grand Mufdi of Jerusalem, are both arrested and tried for violence, for offenses, against civil order, and both given prison terms. And in 1921, there's an additional set of riding this time, not in Jerusalem in the Old City, but in Tel Aviv, exactly on the same zone between Tel Aviv and Java.

British mandatory authority.

“And one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration, the Herbert Samuel, a leading liberal”

party member of the British cabinet, perhaps next to Rothschild, the most prominent

Jew in Britain, is named the first high commissioner.

And in retrospect, this may have been a mistake because, as a Jewish person, as an architect of the Balfour Declaration, the new, the first high commissioner is intent on proving his quinnimity and equality to all peoples. So he pardons, Jabitinsky, as well as Hajami Nal Husani, and then appoints Hajami Nal Husani, the Mufdi, or the Grand Mufdi of Jerusalem, as he called himself.

And thereafter, you see a period of uncommon quiet settle over Palestine during the 1920s. But during that period, a younger generation of our Palestinians, start to reject the

“council of their elders and start to gravitate around the new leadership offered by a”

more radical and extremist individual, which was Hajami, who believed that Arabs must actively resist the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. And over those eight years, Hajami consolidates his influence on the 1929 riots, which

are a game changer for Palestine. Firstly, rather than being confined to just the old city of Jerusalem,

or the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, this becomes a country wide uprising. And it does at target the new communities established by Jewish immigrants that are fairly well defended. But the old ancient communities in Habran and Safat of very devout Jews, who helpless defenceless Jews who were targeted. And the one thing about my book and the perspective is that I relied very heavily on British documents. I also did research, of course, and he

“is rally archives and in the US archives. But basically, the story it tells is how political”

violence, what we might call terrorism, from both sides, influenced British policy. And when you read the British reports of the 1929 riots, I mean, they really read something akin to what we saw of a social media or in the 43-minute clip that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs prepared about October 7. I mean, wanting cruel, absolutely heinous acts of violence, the murder execution rape, all those kinds of things that we saw in October

7, occur in 1929. And this triggers Jabitinsky to think differently, that it's not enough just to have a reactive self-defense force. And of course, Haganahs, the Hebrew word for defense. And he argues that when the next clash comes, which he believed was inevitable, and don't forget, Jabitinsky was the author of the famous 1923 article that an iron wall had to be built between the Jews and the Arabs in order for the Zionist enterprise to survive.

He argues that an offensive capability will be necessary. And from the 1929 riots and from dissonance in the Haganah, that believe a more aggressive force is needed. The Irgonce

finally, you'll meet the National Military Organization of Merges. The 1930s were another

period, the early 1930s, that is, of relative quiet in Palestine. In fact, economically Palestine prospers enormously, you just have to walk around Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, Jerusalem the Y.M.C.A. building the King David Hotel. What's now the world or a story? It was the Palace Hotel, the Rockefeller Museum. You see all these beautiful architectural gems that fortunately still exist. And you see in Tel Aviv, the Bauhaus movement and some of the

beautiful architecture around Tel Aviv. So, lots of money is actually flowing into Palestine and investment. But also, with the rise of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, Jewish immigration increases significantly. And that over the succeeding two years increases dramatically. And that sparks the 1936 Arab rebellion, which lasts until 1939 in which Oren Kessler, of course, is written a brilliant book that also won the Jewish Book Award, a Palestine 1936,

which is a great companion to my book. And the Arab rebellion is significant for two principal reasons in our discussion. Firstly, it's not just the tax against Jews and not just organized opposition to Zionism. This is a major revolt against British rule precisely at a time when the British government is very concerned that war is going to break out in Europe with Nazi Germany. But also when the Far East against Imperial Japan, and Britain

does not want to be caught with internal security having its troops. There were tens of thousands.

the Arab rebellion. When these two wars are going likely to be fought very soon, both

“in the European continent and in the Far East. The second element, that's important, trust”

understands. This is when in 1937, the Ergun commences offence of operations and begins to an essence implement the biblical invocation of an I for an I for an II for a II. It engages in very similar acts of violence that the Arabs had engaged in, particularly bombs placed and crowded, soaksore, or marketplaces, attacks on trains, attacks on vehicles, kind of sum up that period and move on to conclude with the 1940s, Britain decides that it militarily

defeats and brutally suppresses the Arab rebellion, but it decides it's got to put in place political measures to ensure the rebellion will not arise again, and we have been 1939 white paper, which essentially initiates the Balfour Declaration, cuts off Jewish immigration

“to Palestine says that for the next five years, a grand total of only 75,000 Jews”

will be able to emigrate to Palestine. This is in 1939 at the direst movement in the history of the Jewish peoples and World War II breaks out. Jabitinsky immediately calls on the Ergun, which they abide by, to declare a truth, to cease up active operations against the British, and affect the Ergun's commander at the time, David Razil, perishes on a secret mission for the British army in Iraq to blow up the strategic oil fields, but also

to attempt to kidnap the move of the Jerusalem who had fled Palestine during the Arab

rebellion, and for the next five years, basically, the focus is on winning the war.

Now in late 1943, a corporal attached to General Vadislav Anders Polish army in exile, coincidentally arrives in Palestine, and his name is Minachim Began, and one of the remarkable

“stories I think is how you have a corporal with absolutely no military experience. I mean,”

Began had been trained as a lawyer, had worked at what was then less prodoratively known as a propagandist. We would call them someone now who is a strategic communications director for Beatar, which was, in essence, the youth group of the New Zionist organization, which was Jabitinsky's rival group to the World Zionist organization in the Jewish agency. So Began is very skilled at communications, information operations as you might call it today, but he's

a lowly corporal in an army that has never fought here, arrives in Palestine. He finds the

Ergun in disarray, because Brazil had been killed in 1941, and takes the helm, and decides that the war now, at the beginning of 1944, is very clearly in the Allies' favor, and it's just a matter of time for victory. And resolves to prize open the gates to Palestine that had been closed off to Jewish immigration. And the Ergun resumes its revolt in February 1944 with the bombing of the immigration offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, very symbolic, as they're enforcing.

This ban, the land registry offices, because of course, in 1940, as part of the 1939 white paper, very severe restrictions had been placed on Jewish land purchase, which let me say people

always claim that the Jews stole the land in Palestine. All that land was purchased, and

there were great restrictions even in normal times on the amount of land Jews could purchase. In the land registry offices, so very symbolic attacks. And Began resolves that this uprising will be different from all other ones, that it will not target human life, it will only target inanimate symbols of British rule over Palestine. In parallel to that, we have the Lechii, the Lachami had a Dysarel of Freedom Fighters for Israel. Led by Avraham Stern, who had been one

of Razil's lieutenants, Stern was very steeped in the history of the Irish rebellion against British rule, the 1916 Easter uprising, which occurs in the midst of World War I, and Stern's philosophy is that with Britain consumed with fighting World War II, now is the time to rise up against the British government, not to abide by the truce that Jabatinsky and the Ergun have declared. And he creates this splinter group that was known to, you know, the British is the Stern gang. I mean,

they're dismissed as a bunch of bank robbers and crooks, but this is a particularly interesting organization because it had its own moral code as well. It's code was firstly to engage an individual

administering the mandate. And also, it's belief is not entirely realistic, is in creating an anti-imperialist new Middle East that would unite Jews and Arabs, so that there would be sort of this joint anti-imperial body. Also, the other thing is that the lefty may be one of the few groups. I've been studying

“terrorism now for 50, literally for 50 years. And I think the lefty is one of the very few groups”

that actually admitted at the time that it used terrorist tactics. And was completely open about that. And said, we're trying to terrorize the British into leaving. And of course, one of the lefty's

most infamous or most important operations was the assassination of Lord Moine, the British minister

resident responsible for all British policy in the Middle East. Close friend of Winston Churchill, he was assassinated on November 1944. And what the book discusses controversially, I think, is that Winston Churchill had been prepared. He was the prime minister of course during World War Two. Winston Churchill was a lifelong friend of the Jews. In fact, his first election and Manchester

“during the War War in the early 1900s was for constituency that had a large Jewish population.”

He was always a Zionist, always supported Zionist, and 1943, Churchill had put together a special cabinet committee to investigate how to resolve the conflict over the Holy Land and arrive at

some political resolution. And ironically, Moine was assassinated on a Tuesday. The first Tuesday,

November 1944, to coincide with the US elections where it was expected that Franklin Roosevelt would be elected to a fourth term, which he was, and part of Lechi's strategy was to knock the US election off the front pages with the Moine assassination. But as I said, Moine was a very close personal friend and political ally of Churchill. Churchill was a long-time friend of Zionism.

“Told high emvitesmen, first president of Israel. I'm one of the fathers of Israel and of Zionism,”

that he had stacked this special committee with all of the Jews, friends and the British government. And basically, he, on the Sunday before, so basically two days before Moine was assassinated. He told vitesmen a checker, said the Prime Minister's retreat, that the cabinet was about to be presented with a plan that would result in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. And in Churchill's vision, the next big three meeting, he would raise this issue and would get the buy and of both

Stalin and the Soviet Union and Roosevelt in the United States to jointly all three countries would impose this settlement on Palestine. So history could have been completely different.

Had Lord Moine not been assassinated. The loss of Churchill's dear friend meant that Churchill never

really spoke out in favor of Zionism again. I mean, of course, after 1945, he was in the opposition. He wasn't Prime Minister anymore, but the Jews lost a great friend from that incident. Then just to wrap up with the end of World War II in 1945, the Haggara, Etsel and the Lachy, joined in a united resistance movement that Thenoat Hamari and coordinate operations. And there was always tension in that relationship, and I'm sure we'll explore this later, the Kingdom bombing of the King David hotel in

July 1946 was carried out as part of that relationship. And then the book basically argues that the activities of the Ergun in particular, of Etsel in particular. I mean, Lachy was really not as consequential, except in a negative sense with a Moine assassination. But that, in my view, Etsel under the leadership of Began, who proved himself to be a very effective strategist, certainly sped up the clock to Prime Britain of the time to arrange its withdrawal from Palestine

in such a way as it would have preferred, which is to say that Palestine become an Arab state, very similar to the Emirate of Jordan, or trans Jordan as it was known that very closely tied to Britain through treaties, through relationships. Of course, the commander of the Arab Legion then was John Pasha Glob, a British officer. So Began sped up the clock to Prime, the British of that opportunity. And I also think had a huge impact on Britain's strategic

I have to get you to get to this point, but it was, it was perfect. You focus in on three events, the big three events, right? The bombing of the King David Hotel, the assassination of Lord Moine, which, you know, just to double down on on the tension and the sense that, you know, Vicemen understood the deep crisis that the Lord Moine assassination meant for the Zionist movement in British, among British imperial leadership, that opens the sezon, the so-called hunting season,

in which the Haganna goes out. And sometimes rather brutally suppresses the Etzel in the Lechie because they had come. Sorry, just the Etzel. Yeah, I'll explain why. That's very

“important point, you make. Yeah. So please. Well, I mean, this is the interesting thing,”

Lechie was responsible for the assassination of Lord Moine. You're absolutely right to focus on Vicemen's reaction. In fact, Vicemen told Churchill that the murder of Lord Moine, had seared him as much as the loss of Vicemen's own son who was serving with the royal air force during World War II in Paris, in a bombing mission. So the Jewish agency, which, in essence, was the representative of the Jewish community in Palestine's time, is pressured

now to take action against the terrorists. Particularly, one would expect against Lechie. But no, they see Etzel and the new Zionist organization that had been founded by the revisionists they're called by Jabatinsky, who himself had died in 1940 or 1941. They decide to go after their main rival to use the Moine assassination as an excuse. And I mean, they kidnapped and many instances tortured for information members of the Etzel. And this is a dark chapter in Jewish

and Zionist history. Why do they not go after the Lechie? I'm sorry, I'm revealing here a little lacuna. Why did they literally not go after the Lechie? They left them completely out. It was just a power struggle between the two larger groups. Well, it was rationalized that they'll take out the bigger terrorist threat as it were, posed by Etzel, which was more numerous.

“We were talking about the Etzel hat. I think these numbers are very hard.”

2,500 something like that. And Lechie was a few hundred. And then they argued they would turn on

the Lechie. But the Lechie were always peripheral. They just weren't large enough to have the impact

that the Etzel did. And I would argue too that they didn't have a leader like Begon, who, as I said, was a true strategist and understood as we know today the nexus between communications and political violence. I mean, terrorism. Let's get into it. So these three moments specifically, the bombing of the King David Hotel, assassination of Lord Moine, and the hanging of the two British sergeants. These were events that, if you could just tell us really quickly

about them, we heard about Lord Moine, the King David Hotel, and the hanging of the sergeants, that were the front pages of British newspaper. Well, very dramatic on British public opinion,

“and engineered to drive British public opinion. Tell us about that. Yes, and that's exactly”

right. I mean, the King David Hotel was the nerve center of British rule of Palestine beyond

any doubt. Firstly, the Palestine government was there. Basically, about 80% of the hotel had been

taken over during the Arab rebellion for the Palestine government's secretary. As British army headquarters or British military headquarters, I should say, for both Palestine and trans Jordan, and also of the headquarters of both MI6 Britain's Foreign Intelligence Service and MI5's Britain Security Service. So unlike a lot of depictions in contemporary history, the King David Hotel was not an ordinary host story. That was just a hotel that the air gun decided to bomb. As I said,

it was the nerve center of British power, was defended by 400 British troops. I mean, if you look at the contemporary maps, there were checkpoints, roadblocks, pillboxes, machine gun

emplacements, barbed wire all over it. But the British always wanted to convey as part of their own

narrative for their own information operations, a sense of normality. That the situation in Palestine was under control, and that the revolts of the Etcel and Lech, we're not as consequential as anyone may believe it was being reported. So the King David Hotel tragically still had some rooms, but it's wonderful lobby was still open to take tea. It's bar was open. It's restaurants were open, and beneath the south-western wing of the King David was Laurie Sean's nightclub, which was

always an operation. And big and in the Etcel, at the orders of the Haganah, decided to strike at

Operation Agatha, or Black Sabbath, where in June 1946, in an attempt to bring Palestine to heal,

and then the Jewish rebellion, the British army had arrested 250 representatives of the Jewish Asian scene seized all the documents and the soft mood building, you know, in Jerusalem, but also in the offices in Tel Aviv. Many of those documents, the Jewish agency at Haganah feared, would reveal this alliance with Etcel and Lechis, so they wanted them destroyed. That was the main reason for the bombing. And it's often being controversial. So the documents were held

“in the military intelligence office in the hotel, which I believe, or minus one, or something like that,”

in the northern wall. Not a lot of floors, they were on the floor to the left of the wing, believe it or not. And then Haganah also then came and said, you know, we're canceling the Operation, but the answer decided to go forward with it anyway. Walk us through, I mean, this is so contestant, and this itself could be four episodes, but just very briefly walk us through the whole bombing story. Well, for two years, for a well over a year, Etcel had warned that they were

going to attack the King David. So this has some residents in modern times. It was a warning that

was ignored, and the British were confidence of those defenses. And it essence, there's always been

a controversy. Warnings were issued. Bagan did seek to avoid the loss of life because there were many civilians there. There was civilian Arab and Jewish, as well as British employees of the British government. And that gave the British a false sense of security that the Etcel would never attack

“a target that risk Jewish casualties. And of course, I think it was 17 Jews died as part of the 91”

persons who were killed. That they very few of them were actually military. And most of them were civil servants, in fact. So warnings were issued. The time frame that the warnings were issued to always being is always being controversy, controversial. In the book, I kind of walk us through that and show that even though the warnings were issued, they were not merely with enough time to affect the evacuation. And even if the King David had been evacuated, ironically, the

shards of glass and broken masonry may well have killed even more people. So that's one of the

armies of it. But in essence, the warnings were never conveyed. Mornings were issued. They went to

the switchboard of the hotel. They were never conveyed to the British officials. And this has been documented in a lawsuit that the then chief secretary of the British mandate Sir John Shaw brought against Bagan when his book The Revolt was published in the early 1950s. And private detectives scoured Israel and could not find anyone who could verify one of the big myths that Sir John Shaw pulled out a pistol and told his staff to remain in place and said, "I'm not here to take orders

from Jews. I give orders to Jews." That is patently false and as the book shows has been seriously repeated and become an inflated lie. So we can debate whether it was terrorism or not.

“Two points on that. Firstly, as an historian, you have to, you can't impose contemporary”

values and perspectives on historical events. This was an era when there was no hesitation in using the word terrorism. Unlike today, where every major newspaper, a news outlet, camouflages the word terrorism or terrorist with resistance, liberation, with militants, with gorillas, with gunmen and so on. Whether it was the New York Times or the London Times, the King David Hotel was described as an act of terrorism at the time.

As I said earlier, it was not an ordinary hotel. It was a bona fide military and intelligence target, but then we call up with a question is who should bear responsibility for the 91 persons that perished in the attack, even if that was not the intention. And that, I think remains controversial to this day. But this goes back to your point about this saison. As Jews and Israelis, we have this enormous capacity for self-reflection, I would argue, to critically assess even the

darkest parts of our history. And one of the things the book also brings out is that Avraham Stern was so dedicated to the idea of removing British imperial colonial rule from the Middle East that he may have made overchores to the Nazis that he sent an emissary to be a route to meet with the Nazi ambassador to kind of make common cause to expel the British from Palestine and then Germany could achieve its solution of the Jewish problem by allowing the Jews to immigrate to Palestine.

I mean, these these are controversial, dark periods, but the work of Benny Morris, the work of Warren Kassler, the work of many other historians has shed light on them. And as you pointed out, the beginning of my mind book does not present this necessarily. It presents the warts as well as

to reflect on one's history is enormously important. So King David remains controversial.

I just, you know, to me it's not a terrorist attack. It is a legitimate military target. It's hard to imagine a more legitimate military target where the attacker didn't take the measures they could have taken to prevent civilian harm. That's a particular kind of problem, but it's not terrorism to me is a moral marker of the targeting of civilians. So what the etsyl did before

“big in, I think, is unquestionably terrorism. Yeah, but people who worked in the British office”

of taxation, for example, the postmaster general, for instance, was killed in that attack. I mean, there's a complexity around the civilian architecture of imperial power. But the British don't get to rule another land and pretend like nobody's allowed to fight

them for it. But don't forget, the original, it was with enormous Jewish enthusiasm and consent

that Britain came to Palestine. I mean, the Balfour Declaration was tied up with Allenby's conquest. Right. And then, and then the British Empire helped Shepherd to corral the Jews into the gas chambers. And maintained that policy in 1943 when it knew what was happening, 44. 45 after the war when they were depis in the British control, Birgen, Belsen, Jews are still living in Birgen, Belsen in 1948. As listeners, this podcast,

no, very, very well. And at that point, I don't, you know, you can, by the way,

“be working hand in hand with the powers that be as a small people. What are your options?”

So, for example, when Stern sends an emissary to meet with a Nazi representative,

this is a desperate man who thinks the Jews are going to be slaughtered, or are being slaughtered.

Well, don't get his parents were trapped in Poland. And Jabotinsky gives a speech. Europe is a, in Warsaw, the famous Warsaw Speed. Europe is going to die. Ben Gurion explains to Palestinian leaders in the 30s. When he meets with two Palestinian journalists in Geneva, I need to prepare for millions of refugees to come. These are desperate, desperate people. The Zionist tragedy is that they saw something catastrophic coming and everything was in that

right. So, to judge them, it's not just to judge them based on different morals. It's, if we completely ignore the fact that millions of Jews were about to die or were being systematically exterminated that moment. And they were desperate, but totally unable to do anything about it. They sent what? Three dozen commandos into Europe. The British actually didn't want more help from the issue, because it didn't want military organizations established an issue

to go fight the Nazis systematically. They were preparing for Rommel's push through North Africa to create a new massada stand among the Jews of Palestine because the Nazis have already established a special Einsatz Group in Egypt, or however, you pronounce that in German, to eradicate the Jews of Palestine. That's the world in which these people are making these choices. So, I'm sounding very defensive. My point is not to be defensive at all. There were moments,

“I think it's unquestionable to my mind that this was simply terrorism, not just technically,”

but morally in all these different ways, but if you de-contextualize the big thing, you know, it's like, there's a big thing, and then there's a hundred little things. And if you only ever see the hundred little things, and don't see the gigantic thing, you won't understand these people. And so, I, and I'm not accusing you of that. That's in the book. Like, that book works very much there. No, you're getting to the heart of, I think, what makes the book in this period of history

so interesting. I mean, I would just say that two things. Firstly, terrorism back then was different than it is today. Airliners weren't hijacked. Twin towers weren't brought down. But it was, it was called terrorism. And again, from the historians point of view, then, as it was recorded in the papers, and also the Jewish agency, David Ben Gurion called that Salalahi terrorists. I mean, this, you know, so I, so I'm, again, the responsibility of a story.

Terrorism is completely today. It's much more heinous. It may be even less justified given their constellation of circumstances that you describe in which, of course, I emphasize in the book that this was the moral cause that animated bacon and why he was such a great leader because this was the most urgent tragic time in, in the history of, of Jews. But it's also a reflection, having studied terrorism as long as I do. I think I have a different attitude towards the word.

I'm, to me, it's a term that describes something that's not necessarily pejorative. Okay, so it's seen as an enormously negative word right now. And if that's no dive into that, because to me, it's, it's not the unavoidable civilian death toll, and then we can argue about

objectives, self-defense, even preemptive, you know, these are all gray areas. And I accept that,

but literally 9/11 to me is terrorism. A suicide bombing targeting Israeli children on a 7/30 AM city bus in Jerusalem in 2001, which is a school bus, and for all intents of purposes, because Jerusalem kids take the city bus to school, at the height of the peace process, in order to torpedo the peace process, because Hamas hated the idea that there would be two states, that to me is terrorism. It is the targeting of civilians. It is something especially heinous,

and when the panelists, I, by the way, say that when Palestinians target the IDF, that's not terrorism. It's war. It's guerrilla war, or it's some kind of, but it's,

there's another moral sort of, there's a moral hierarchy where it is a step way down

“when you're targeting civilians for political ends. I think that's the FBI definition. So,”

where am I wrong? Where does it get complicated? Well, because you're applying a 21st century lens, and 21st century terrorist incidents, I mean, school children war and killed, almost anywhere in terrorism, back then, terrorism was very different phenomena, but I think we have to be clear of terrorism. The general definition is acts of violence undertaken by non-state actors. In the pursuit of political ends, let's say, in a very narrow definition,

it was still, as I said, it was widely viewed as terrorism, even by the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine. And there was what Edsel and Lucky did, what I'm trying to point out in the book is exactly those ambiguities. And I don't, I don't think we can, can resolve them,

“but I think it's important to acknowledge that there was this moral imperative, but also at the”

time, though, these groups were seen as operating outside of the mainstream of Zionist diplomacy and policy. Well, they were the only, I mean, we don't have to make, sorry, no, please. What would you make of the argument that when the Edsel targeted the King David, my feeling, okay, based on dealing with this stuff over the years, but nevertheless, let's leave it at just my feeling. Is that that is 100% a legitimate operation, and now you can critique any detail about it,

and the detail about it includes civilian dead. It's a very big detail, but the fundamental legitimacy of the operation is unquestionable to my mind. And when the Edsel bound marketplaces, Arab marketplaces, that was fundamentally not legitimate. It wasn't the targeting of Arab forces, police, British imperial administration, or forces. It was, it was literally to kill Arab civilians. That was a moment that was, that was ill. There's, there's a gulf there, and I want to word to describe

that gulf. Well, we got to build stuff for courage. What? You know, civilians died, and this was what differentiated the hog and off, which eventually became the idea from Edsel and Lachy, is that it did avoid harming British, taking any British life. I mean, blew up all the bridges for instance, connecting Palestine with the outside world, blew up Coast Guard stations, for example. You're right that the intention of the King David was not to kill people, but I would say that,

you know, terrorism like war is easy to begin, but difficult to control, and the result is often tragic, most tragic to civilians. So does that even if the Edsel and Began did not intend to kill civilians, but civilians died, does that absolve them of that responsibility? Especially when they had to have known that would be part of the result. Well, or that there was a high risk. I mean, again, there's, there's imperfect solutions to these questions, which is what makes them fascinating,

“but for instance, if it is rarely diplomat, is blowing up overseas, is that terrorism or is that war?”

The killing of Ambassador Al-Gov and London, which precipitated the second, the, the first

Lebanon war, um, by the Albany Dollar Organization, an interesting, yeah, I mean, but that was seen as an active terrorism. I think of that as terrorism, it allows terrorist strategy, but you know, how how can we look at the assassination of Lord Moine differently? And what the book makes even more complex is that even at the time, with both the assassination of Lord Moine and the King David hotel, I would argue that both groups had moral qualms about this as well, because in the aftermath of

the Moine assassination, a mythology was constructed that Lord Moine was, was, was an unrequited, was, was a, a vicious anti-Semite, which is, is not, which was not true, but to justify the assassination.

one, a libel case that he did not pull out a pistol and wave and brought up people and tell them

“not to leave the King David. So there was even the self-reflection then, to me, what encapsulates”

this whole phenomena, and actually, whether it's 21st century or 20th century, was something that another future Prime Minister of Israel, in addition to Began, it's Akshamir, who was the operation's chief of Lechi, said when he had two 19-year-olds, Eliahu Betzuri and Eliahu Akhimu, he sent to Cairo to murder Lord Moine. And he famously said, a man who goes forth to kill another, must believe one thing only, that by his deed he will change the course of history. And this is

why we have political violence, because it is designed to change the course of history exactly as you're describing. Okay, I want to, that's fascinating, and I'm a little upset that I don't have all the answers in their total finality. I want to, I want to get into something really fascinating that you raised in the book at length, which is, and we touched on it already, which is the way that especially Began among these leaders, what he called the glasshouse strategy,

where the goal was to generate friction with a British, to force the British to oppress, to kill, to suppress, and to make those very visible in the world stage in a way that turns British

oppression, British tactical winds on the ground, into basically strategic losses,

diplomatically, in terms of public opinion, in Britain and in the West. The glasshouse strategy, can you tell us about that, and then, and then I want to dive deeper into it, because this terrorism was primarily before anything else, a propaganda war. Exactly. And it reflected Began's background

“in experience and information operations. Well, his book The Revolt, I think, is one of the”

seminal treatises on uprisings on rebellions of the nexus between violence, political violence, and communication. That's a form of violent communication. And what also, I think, you know, I'm going to go against my, well, what also I think is interesting is that what maybe Edcels campaign and Lechys to an extent, but especially Edcels, is that the

violence was always choreographed for a purpose. It was designed to reach a wider audience.

There had been many revolts against British rule and many of Britain's colonial possessions. The Seapoy rebellion in the 18th, middle of the 19th century uprisings in Cyprus and Africa and so on. But this was the first one that went outside the locus of conflict and appealed to an audience

“beyond the footlights. Especially at the end of World War II to an audience in Moscow and Paris,”

in London, in Washington, but also in New York. A lot of said about the United Nations and it's attitude to terrorism today, bacon deliberately choreographed a lot of the, the Edcels operations to have an impact on the fledgling United Nations organization. That was then meeting in New York. And one of his successes is that he was granted two audiences with the United Nations

Special Committee on Palestine, which basically reached the same conclusion that the Royal Peel

Commission had come to in 1937 and that is in contemporary times known as the two state solution. That only the partition of the Holy Land into separate Jewish and Arab states could hold out any prospect for peace. But it's remarkable that bacon was as the leader of the an underground movement, a small underground movement was granted two audiences with unscoped to put the Edcels case before them, which shows the effectiveness of his campaign to focus worldwide attention on Palestine.

And that was the plan. How did the one achieve the other? Bacon was hated by the British. The UN still needed the British to coordinate with the British, collaborate with the British. The Americans wanted something different from the British that was tension there. But nevertheless, you couldn't do things without the British in the room. How was the hated benachlan bacon invited into the UNscop? Stereptitious meetings between the chair of UNscop and bacon.

He was not obviously invited to any of the formal sessions that were conducted in the YMCA building. In fact, so this had to be a seraptitious meeting. But the fact that the chair of UNscop felt he had to reach out to bacon was a tremendous success. And then to finish the answer to the glass house. So it was partially to get the world looking into Palestine. But bacon understood

heinous collective punishments and mass executions that the Nazis, for example, had resorted to

in Europe. And that was his goal is to push Britain to the breaking point where the population would say "It's not worth staying there, give it up." And that goes back to your earlier question about the significance of the hanging of the two sergeants in August 1947. All imperial powers believe they can break the will of a resistance by resorting to capital punishment. And interestingly,

“although I think it was 147 Arabs were hanged, executed during the Arab rebellion. By the summer of”

1947, so the final months before in September 1947, Britain announces to the United Nations.

It's leaving by the following May. And that's the creation of Israel in May 1948. So in the

final months before Britain makes that announcement and reaches that decision, the British military commander decides to get tough with the etsyl and lachy and signs off on the execution of that stage. It was three members of that soul. Bagan says that if you execute those three members, again, I for an eye tooth for tooth, we will execute your soldiers. But there's an important precedent to this. In January 1947, a British military court had sentenced an underage

an adolescent member of the Ergun who was 16. The defense emergency regulations that were used

“by the British to brutally suppress the Arab rebellion were also applied against the etsyl and lachy's”

campaign. And one of them was the death penalty for carriage of arms. But this etsyl fighter was

16 years old. So instead the British military court sentenced him to be flawed, which was something that was common during colonial times. And Bagan said, for centuries, you have been whipping quote unquote natives in their own country. This will not happen in Erick Sea, Israel. We will not stand for it. And if you whip this 16-year-old, we will whip your officers. And Trudeau is word after the 16-year-old is whipped by the British authorities, Bagan, kidnaps, for British

army and RAF officers and flogs them. And in the book, I showed that this was the incident that really began to shift, not just the British public's attitudes towards getting at a Palestine, dramatically shifted after the King David hotel. You have editorials and all the major British newspaper saying enough, this isn't worth staying here. But then, but the British government is determined to hold on to Palestine because it wanted the deep water port of hypha for the Royal

Navy for two reasons. Firstly, the oil pipeline from Kierkook in Iraq, the Iraqi petroleum companies' pipeline went to hypha. So this is where the British Navy stopped to get its oil, but also to protect the Sue Eskateau, which still in the late 1940s, the British regard as the lifeline to its empire. So the chief of the Imperial General Staff of the Vacant Montgomery Montgomery of Alameen and the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan were determined that whatever happened

in the future of Palestine, Britain would retain its military basing rights, such as it had in Jordan. After the flogging, you can see this in the documents. In February 1947, all of a sudden, both Bevan and Montgomery begin to think, maybe it's not worth staying in Palestine. And then it's the hangings of those two sergeants in August 1947, and retaliation for the execution of the etsl members, that produces widespread anti-Jewish riots in every major British city, and where the government

of Clement Atley just weeks later announced this to the UN. We're done with Palestine.

“So terrorism works. It does. Well, I think we have to admit, it always does.”

I mean, look at Israel today. I mean, Israel is, you know, more shunt, more isolated, exactly as Hamas intended with October 7th. It may not work in a strategic level. Thankfully, it's very rare that terrorists have come to power through their violent campaigns. But certainly impressoring governments in undermining the resolve of the population to support government policies, often in the war of narratives. The war of ideas, terrorism does succeed. It's not the failed

strategy that many scholars. I mean, this is why my book is so controversial. Scholars and polls, and probably why it didn't sell that very well, is in 2014 and '15 when ISIS was running

Historically, terrorism is not the failed strategy that scholars, statesmen and others argue it is.

“It's a it's a monumentally significant strategy. Look at what 9/11 rocked in the world. It'll take”

historians 50 years to figure out the balance between the good and the bad, the abandoning of a lot of assumptions in the Middle East that may maybe maybe in the sense that suffering drives real reform, maybe will drive better outcomes in the future. But it worked in the sense of the appeal that it was meant to cause and it didn't. I don't know if Al Qaeda is happy with the net result in the Middle East, but it changed the world. Fundamentally, terrorism is a tool that if you use it intelligently

and you use it with a very, very clear, headed, clear-eyed propaganda, understanding, information war, understanding, can deliver for you tremendous results. So in Gaza, for example, the Israelis very much won the ground war, especially if you expand it to the proxy system to the Iranians. Hamas is no longer a threat to Israel. It's only a threat to Gaza at this point because nobody knows how to rebuild a Gaza de Hamas controls, but Hamas won the war it fought, which was a terrorism

spark terrorism driven information war. And so we need to pay a lot of attention to terrorism. A lot more, we may be dismiss it. We don't necessarily believe that the West can do things about terrorism, but in fact, terrorism can drive massive policy and lead the British Empire to pull out a powerstime. Well, have you hit a couple of nails right on the head? I mean, firstly, let's think about the two seminal events of the 20th and 21st centuries. The assassination of the Archduke

Franz Ferdinand heir to the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo in June 1914, set in motion what at the time

was the world. First World War and a great, you know, a great conflagration, that changed the world.

September 11, 2001, a terrorist act sets in motion just as you've eloquently described to change in the world we have today. That's the first thing, second thing is maybe, you know, where you really hit the nail on the head is think about it and you described it exactly right. Nowadays, terrorists are not for something. They're generally against something. They want to destroy peace processes. They want to pull down established orders. They want to create chaos as you

described. I mean, that part was certainly a Bin Laden's goal and you could argue on October 7. That was also a goal of Hamas. Bagan did not want to create chaos. He had a specific outcome, a very specific outcome, in mind, as you described earlier, and then the book also recounts a dire time in Jewish history where there was a true genocide unfolding in Europe. And so maybe one of, I have to think more about this, but one of the ways that we understand

terrorism is what it's purpose and what it's outcome is for and whether it's towards creating something or towards destroying something. And that's a very important dichotomy that we're bringing out between 21st and 20th century forms of political violence.

“This goes to your point. I think you call it the ethics of efficacy.”

What do we do with the ethics of terrorism if it works? What do we do with it? If we ourselves and I'm very proud that the Jews understood how to play the British Empire. After the British Empire felt that it could play the Jews and the Arabs and run the world and have all the benighted provincials right doing their bidding. And then the Jews are not just the Jews different groups, different places. I think the Malmau rebellion is a useful chapter in

this whole saga, but nevertheless the Jews showed that they could actually play the British Empire in response. And the British didn't deserve to die at any point, but the British Empire deserved to be played by this desperate little refugee people that they themselves were callously playing for imperial interests. And that's my feeling towards those events. So as just I think that's a very mainstream Israeli perspective on those years. The moment my people were using terrorism,

“I think again, not every moment, not every act. I think it was fundamentally justified,”

necessary and drove one of the great liberations of human history. So how do we understand the ethics of terrorism when it works?

It may be one of those questions we can never understand because there's not one

single variant of terrorism. It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes and does things that might conform to just war theory and then on the other hand, violates seriously just war theory. So we may never come to come to any kind of conclusion.

by David Frump, good at wrote the great book, a piece to end all piece about how the modern

“Middle East was born. But he also had a lot to say about terrorism and in this article,”

which is over 50 years old, but his points is exactly right. He said the way we define terrorism depends upon whether we identify and sympathize with the perpetrator and that it's not terrorism, its liberation, its resistance, its justified or whether we sympathize and identify with the victim.

And then because of that targeting, it becomes terrorism. So this is always being the problem.

Basically where you sit is how you stand on this issue. As an academician, as an historian, as an analyst of terrorism, I have tried not to view it pejoratively or positively, but as a phenomenon of national security that is often ignored is often dismissed and discounted and shouldn't have been. And in fact, that's the reason I got involved in this field in the first place. I was a freshman in college in September, 1972. And while everyone was at the

freshman events, I was glued to the television that was in a wood box that had rabbit ears, watching the Munich Olympic tragedy unfold. And of course, tactically, that was a tremendous failure, the black Septemberists, the members of the elite unit formed by us or our our fought, weren't able to free any of the prisoners held in Israel or to free German bottom line half of a terrorist. But strategically, it was an enormous success. It put the PLO on the map.

I mean, the next year, Yasser Arafat is invited to address the United Nations General Assembly, the following year the PLO is granted observer status in the United Nations. And by the end of the 1970s, the PLO, a non-state actor has diplomatic relations with more countries than Israel, the established

nation state. So it's that effective terrorism that is always interested me. And I try to look at it

as a doctor. It looks a cancer, for example. And it's a no one's comfortable with cancer as a

“term, but we have to call it what it is and that's how we can dissect and understand it.”

So let me suggest how I sort of navigate these waters when I have to talk about them, which is literally my profession. So I have to do it all the time. And then I want to get one last question and we'll finish. Thank you for your time. And this has been wonderful and fascinating. And I learned new things from this book, which you know, I'm an arrogant Israeli to learn new things in English about, you know. I want to suggest that what? That's great praise. Thank you a lot,

honored to be here. This is Israeli arrogance. That is great praise. So I would say that if I, if I'm approaching a terrorism event, a terrorism question, a movement, then my two questions are, is the goal legitimate, right? That's a baseline. If the goal is the extermination of a people, it doesn't, you know, you could even pursue the terrorism gently.

It's, it's still, that's Hamas to me. I mean, they want my people dead and gone. And the second

is, I have actually found that in my conversations with Palestinians, well, when I say things like, well, but don't use terrorism, then they say things like, well, we don't have the vote in, you know, the West Bank, right? Our goal is legitimate. You're going to start parsing out what actual mechanisms we use to get there. And I found that that moral debate prevents us from getting to any serious political debate, policy debate, historical debate, narrative debate where we start to penetrate

these narratives and start to really understand who the hell standing in front of us. And so I don't deal with those moral. I mean, here with you, it's, you know, if I'm already with a premier expert preeminent expert on it, I want to ask these questions, but I don't deal with it. When I, when I tell Palestinians, Hamas is evil, I don't explain to them that they're evil because they

“want to murder my children. I think it. I'm going to hunt Hamas for all time. I'm going to vote”

for the person who says he's going to do that. That's, that's me. But what I tell them is Hamas is destroying Palestine, not Israel because what Hamas has done is massively radicalized over 30 years and Israeli public that could have gone a different way. And what Hamas has done is committed to a zero sum conflict where one nation succeeds in one nation collapses because Hamas is absolutely convinced God will make sure the right nation wins. And so it wants that end of days total war.

Well, that's a terrible thing I explained to do to Palestine, it's not to Israeli because the Jews don't know how to lose that war. The Jews are a refugee people. And if you knew our history, you would understand why we're immune to this strategy and Hamas is selling you a bad strategy.

of some kind of theoretical, oh, no terrorism? It's the efficacy question that you read. This isn't going to work. So when the Jews did this terrorism against the British Empire, it was a good reason to think, you know, the British were giving up India. The empire was teetering. They had massive financial problems after the war. It wasn't a bad reason to think this could be the thing, the tipping point that could push them out. That's not the case here. The case here is that

Hamas, by forcing you into a zero sum conflict, for since it's founding in 1987, has guaranteed that you cannot wake up and step out of this trap and get to any kind of better path. Efficacy becomes a more valuable moral language and political language than just the morality of terrorism. Well, let's complicate the smart say that, is there a more totalitarian organization that Hamas that imposes its will on the Palestinians that is intolerant,

“that rules ruthlessly and let's compare it to bacon. What did bacon do in 1948, 1948?”

He created a political party that was in opposition three decades, but nonetheless, he participated in democracy. He believed in building something. It may not have been his vision of Zionism, but he didn't revolt against the Jewish state. Israel, he became very inspired on his people in the Al-Talina incident. We went on national radio and said there won't be a civil war. Precisely, that was exactly what Hamas could do that. Exactly my point. That's the difference

between, I guess, builders and those who tear down. My last question is, I want to get your advice for Israelis. The last two years were in astonishing revelation of Israeli incompetence, unbelievable competence in the intelligence sphere, astonishing unimaginable miraculous competence in the air force and cyber and all these other spheres. Doing things with F-35s

“that the Americans never designed the F-35s to do, destroying drones from within Iran against”

Iranian targets to prevent those missiles from even things that are human intelligence capacities, the no intelligence apparatus anywhere in the world has accept Israel's. And yet, in one arena, the arena at which Manachim begging himself most excelled at. The arena which catalyzed or at least

sped up significantly the founding of the country. The arena that you think Jews would know is critical,

which is the information war arena. The use of terrorism, how terrorism is used, how that information war arena can influence the hard war, the kinetic war, the intelligence space, the diplomatic window, the Israelis didn't even show up. A minister of public diplomacy literally resigned a week after October 7 because she didn't want to waste public funds on something that isn't real. The Israeli government never approached this at the cabinet level. There are some junior

spokespeople who barely respond to the international media when each new wave of crisis comes out. There's no that's just the sort of banal institution. There's no strategy. There's no framing.

For a year and a half in this war, in its anyhow, basically kept silent about the goals of the war.

While Smotrichen Benvier, we're saying it's about ethnic cleansing, saying it openly and proudly. And so we didn't just lose, I've said this a hundred times. We didn't just lose our enemies. We weren't going to not lose. We lost friends because Israel couldn't understand that the framing and the inter- and the narration of this war. The Israeli soldiers who went to Gaza did not go to Gaza to commit ethnic cleansing. They didn't

want to empty Gaza and begin to settle Gaza. But Netanyahu, because of his narrow political coalition reasons, stayed silent and the world was supposed to believe the Havives. We're saying that's not what the Israeli people want. As soon as our hostages are back, the Israeli people suddenly want the war to end by huge, huge margins. It wasn't for them ever about any of that stuff that the campaign against Israel's about.

But we never spoke. I mean, the prime minister literally never, never mind grand strategy,

clever tactics, information war. We literally never spoke. So how does a country

“born in the understanding of the value of information and propaganda?”

I truly lose the capacity to even navigate that space. Sam Harris asked me something like this on his podcast and my answer was explaining the Zionist culture, which I firmly believe is a big part of it. It's explaining the Zionist culture. If you don't stand in justify yourself to the world, you don't, you know, justify your existence, justify your actions. There's an allergy to Israeli culture to Zionist writings from 140 years ago to that.

But nevertheless, we're not idiots. We know this is a major arena of war. We know we lost it.

if you would, analyze from how the Israelis never got so lost on that. And also,

what should they know about it? What should they understand? What should they get back? What should they learn from their own? Damn history, from their own founding story about the value of these things and how not to have it used against them in the way that Hamas managed to. Well, it really reflects a lot all we've been talking about is that bacon had a compelling narrative.

“And that's why we debate whether the bombing of the King David hotel or not is terrorism,”

because his narrative is you very eloquently described as very powerful. The gates were closed to Palestine, even after World War II. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews years later, languishing by the displaced persons camps or even in the former concentration camps where they were imprisoned. So he understood that. It's not just Israel nowadays. I mean, the United States arguably one of the criticisms of America's own war on terrorism is that it lost the narrative.

But to me right now, the biggest damage that is being done is that Israel, by lacking this public diplomacy, as you described in information operations, has allowed the rest of the world to hijack the word Zionism or Zionist and turn them into epitets that to turn an narrative that as we see in polling in the United States, both parties are turning against Israel. And to discuss Zionism, that was almost impossible because that has become a loaded

pejorative term in many circles and people don't understand that it is the fundamental right of all peoples, including the Jews to self-determination. In a homeland that, of course,

historically, spiritually, culturally, linguistically has always been their homeland for centuries.

But that messages somehow being lost now. And it has been turned into this, you know, settler colonial dynamic that there's being no effect of pushback against that is resulting

“in an alienation from Israel that I think has to paint not just Israelis, but Jews in the”

diaspora because it's a completely new and different reality that we have to deal with that. How we can counter that now, as you've just described, is enormously difficult. Maybe it just begins with the realization of what years after the war started. Our own history teaches this story. And so if we just paid attention to the founding of Israel, we would know it's power, the power of this arena, the importance of it.

And think too about bagans' humility. You can go to the bagan institutes in Jerusalem. And in this museum, in this research institute, is basically a mock-up of his apartment in Tel Aviv. He lived very modestly. He was very humble, but he also thought about how to accurately communicate to a wider audience beyond the issue of beyond what was then, Erick C. Israel, before he began the state of Israel. And he succeeded. And you know, when we look back, the

architect of the Camp David Accords, which changed the Middle East and continued, I think, to hold out the prospect of peace. I mean, you have bagan beam one, you know, at the foundation of that, beam amongst one of the few people who was able to achieve that. And that's that's significant. But again, he understood the dynamics of politics and communications. And he was, he was genuine.

“I mean, he lived his life. He led by example. That's why described his apartment. We're not talking”

about political figures today that live in lavish estates or are multiple homes. He lived very humbly. And he was a great statesman. There was a generation of Israeli leaders, Ben Gurion, too, on the left, finished his long career, founded Israel, and finished in a little shack in the desert in Akibut. Besides now we are led, not just Netanyahu, but emphatically also Netanyahu, also Borac,

also Al-Mert, by people who are got wealthy in public service, which is never a good sign.

And, and they're dog by never ending questions of corruption and favoritism and manipulating the system. And it was a different generation back then. Maybe we need, maybe we need a better generation. I don't know. I think of how bagan was catapulted into office. He appealed to the neglected to the misraught neglected. I mean, a famous speech he said, you know, I'm a chalk chalk basically.

a problem of politics in the 21st century as well. Okay. A lot of lessons to learn. Thank you so much.

“Dr. Hoffman, Dr. Bruce Hoffman for shedding tremendous amount of light. This is the book.”

It's called anonymous soldiers. Read it. It tells us a lot about the world we live in today.

And it's a fascinating deep dive into that history back then in the founding of the state.

Thank you for joining me. You're very welcome. It was a great pleasure.