Did Jews steal Palestine?

Did Jews steal Palestine? It's a conflict that so many people argue about, and I've heard activists on both sides make statements that just sounded off. But I realized that I didn't really understand the history of how it began. And when you hear the arguments about it, they all have this element of, "Yes, but before that, this happened." So it's a long history, and it's understandable to be confused. I decided to start at the beginning of recorded human history and see what I could learn.

I'm Ken Lort. My deal here is that I find a question I find interesting, research it, and do my best to present it to you as fairly as I can manage. And this is one of the most complicated and argued-over stories in human history. So, here's what I learned about how both Jews and Arabs came to believe that the world's most contested real estate is rightfully theirs. I also tried hard to make it digestible without dumbing it down. And I really believe that within 20 minutes, you're going to be a lot smarter about this whole thing.

We'll start with the very beginning that saw a lot of players from history converge into one place. Then we'll look at Britain's impossible balancing act after World War I. A history of partition, war, and displacement that followed, and how a Palestinian identity was born. So, let's start as close to the beginning as we can.

The land that we now call Israel or Palestine has been inhabited for over 10,000 years. Archaeological evidence shows hunter-gatherers living there in the Stone Age, followed by some of the world's first agricultural settlements. Jericho, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth, was founded around 9,000 BC. These weren't nations or kingdoms. They were more like scattered communities.

By the Bronze Age, around 3000 BC, the land was called Canaan. It was a patchwork of city-states and various peoples: Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians. They all fought for control of it because of its trade routes. By around 1,200 BC, the Bronze Age collapsed, and the political map was once again redrawn. Out of that chaos, sometime around 1,000 BC, Hebrew tribes emerged in the hill country of Canaan and began forming their own kingdoms. King David made Jerusalem his capital, and his son Solomon built the first temple there. That's how the city became sacred for Jews.

But Jewish rule didn't last long. Their kingdoms fell, and they were exiled. Persia took over next and let the Jews return and rebuild. Then came the Greeks, the Romans, then the Byzantines. Each empire left behind language, culture, and architecture. After crushing two major Jewish revolts, the Romans renamed the province from Judea to Syria Palestina. Some historians say it was intended as an insult meant to erase the Jewish identity. But in any event, Jewish sovereignty essentially ended there for almost 2,000 years.

By the 600s, Muslim armies came in, bringing the Arabic language and Islamic rule. Jerusalem gained the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which are holy to Muslims as the site of Muhammad's night journey. For centuries, Islam defined the region with small groups of Christians and Jews still in the mix. Then came the Christian Crusaders who captured Jerusalem and slaughtered thousands, only to lose it again to Saladin. The Ottomans took it over in the early 1500s and ruled it for the next 400 years.

By the 1800s, the Holy Land was really a little corner of the Ottoman Empire. It was rural, poor, mostly Arab. It was roughly 80 to 95% Muslim, with small Christian and Jewish communities. There was no independent Palestine, no Jewish state, and no national borders, just one big empire that was starting to have trouble.

In 1915, at the beginning of World War I, Britain encouraged the Arabs to rise up against the Turks to help defeat the crumbling Ottoman Empire and promised to back their independence after the war. [music] Actually, during the war, Britain promised the same land to three different groups: Arabs, French, and Jews. Soon though, the Ottoman Empire did fall apart, and Britain took over during the war. For Britain, it would [clears throat] turn out to be an impossible balancing act.

And in 1917, they made perhaps the most famous promise of all, the Balfour Declaration. It pledged support for a national home for the Jewish people. It also vowed to protect the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. Now, Britain had various political reasons to do it, and the declaration excited Zionists, and it horrified local Arabs. For the first time, a major power publicly promised the area to one group. And in doing so, it came face-to-face with an unsolvable problem.

The League of Nations gave Britain the mandate to govern the land and to turn that vague national home into reality while somehow keeping Arab majorities calm. The Jewish National Fund and other Zionist groups began buying tracts of land in Ottoman and later British Palestine. Now, they did it legally, according to Ottoman and later British law. They often bought the land from absentee Arabs or Ottoman landlords, and they paid a lot of money for it. They called it Aliyah, literally ascent, and it meant waves of immigrants who built new towns, including Tel Aviv.

But for the Arabs already living there, the sight of newcomers buying land, fencing it off, and setting up self-contained settlements was frightening. The sales were legit. I mean, money was paid, deeds were signed, but to the local farmers, it being legal was well, beside the point. For centuries, these Arab families had worked the same plots under a patchwork of Ottoman laws that weren't very clear on ownership versus use. Land was tied to your lineage, not paperwork. If your grandfather and your father plowed and planted it, it was yours, no matter whose name was on some record. So, when wealthy absentee landlords sold those same fields to Jewish people, peasants realized they were now living on land someone else legally owned. They didn't see it as a real estate transaction. They saw foreign investors using foreign rules to take the ground beneath their feet.

Over time, what looked to Zionists like progress—draining swamps, building roads, planting orchards—looked to Arabs like encroachment. So Britain found itself trapped between two truths. Jews believed their land purchases and development proved legitimacy. Arabs believed their continuous presence and cultivation did. The British tried to honor both, and no surprise, they managed to make everyone unhappy.

Tensions erupted again and again. In 1920, 1929. Rumors that Jews were trying to take over the Muslim holy sites sparked riots that left hundreds of people dead. By the mid-1930s, those clashes had evolved into the Arab Revolt, an insurgency aimed at halting Jewish immigration and forcing Britain out. Britain crushed the revolt brutally, killing thousands, exiling the leaders, and leaving the Arab side without a leader right before another World War. And also realizing that they just couldn't reconcile the two sides.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a fix: partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jews accepted it reluctantly. The Arabs rejected it. By 1939, as Hitler rose in Europe, Britain issued a white paper limiting Jewish immigration and promising an Arab majority state within 10 years. It was a total reversal of their Balfour pledge.

Then came World War II. 6 million Jews were murdered in Europe while British ships turned away Jewish refugees at Palestine's ports. Underground Zionist groups began attacking British targets. And by 1947, exhausted and broke, Britain had had enough. They handed the entire problem to the UN and walked away. After three decades of ruling Palestine, the empire that once dominated the world couldn't control that sliver of land.

Hey, I researched this carefully, but I'm not a Middle East scholar, and I'm trying to unpack thousands of years of history in a fairly short video, so I'm going to leave stuff out. Now, nevertheless, if I make a mistake or if I leave out something super important, let me know and I'll address it in the comments.

I also want to take a quick break to talk about how the media twists the truth. Not by what they say, but by what they leave out. Think about it. If a reporter makes something up, they'll be fired. Outright lies are rare. But leave out one key fact, skip a crucial quote, and suddenly the truth bends. It's like watching a movie with half the scenes missing. You can walk out thinking the hero is a villain.

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Okay, so Britain literally gave their headache to the UN, which came up with a simple solution, at least in theory. On November 29th, 1947, the General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, with Jerusalem set aside as an international city. That was supposed to settle everything. Again, the Jewish state would get about 55% of the land, even though Jews made up only about 1/3 of the population by then and owned less than 10% of it. The rest would go to an Arab state.

But some argue that statistic can be a little misleading because much of the Jewish portion was the Negev Desert. It was empty, dry, and mostly uninhabitable. The Arab state would have gotten most of the fertile land and towns, a decision made in part to avoid displacing large Arab populations. Jews saw the plan as a lifeline, a legal and moral foundation for the country they'd dreamed of for a long time. Arabs saw it as a betrayal. It was their land and their majority, and now half of it was being handed over to people they saw as recent arrivals backed by a colonial power.

The UN vote triggered celebration in Jewish towns with dancing and singing. But in the Arab towns, it triggered rage. The day after the resolution passed, civil war broke out between Arabs and Jews inside Palestine. For about 6 months, violence consumed the region while British troops stood by. They were ready to leave. Arab militias blocked the road to Jerusalem, cutting off food and supplies to 100,000 Jews in the city. Jewish convoys were ambushed. Dozens of doctors and nurses were killed on their way to the Hadassah hospital.

By spring, the Jewish forces regrouped under a unified command, launching what they called Plan D, an effort to secure the territory the UN had assigned them, plus some strategic areas beyond that. That plan remains one of the most debated parts of the war. In April, Jewish paramilitaries attacked an Arab village near Jerusalem. Roughly 100 villagers were killed, including women and children. The massacre was condemned by Jewish leaders, but broadcast across the Arab world as proof of what lay ahead. Panic spread, and tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes. Some from fear, others being pushed out by fighting or by direct expulsions.

Shortly after, Jewish leadership declared the independent state of Israel. Within hours, five Arab armies—Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—invaded. The Arab state said they were coming to defend Palestine, but really they were probably also competing for it. The war seesawed for months, but Israel held its ground and over the next year pushed back on nearly every front. By the time a peace deal was signed in early 1949, Israel had expanded well beyond the UN's original borders, and they now controlled about 78% of the former Mandatory Palestine. The rest, the West Bank and Gaza, they were taken over by Jordan and Egypt.

For the Arabs, the outcome was devastating. Roughly 700,000 of them, more than half of their population, fled or were expelled. Entire villages were emptied, and only about 150,000 Arabs remained within Israel's new borders, and they became the Arab citizens of the new state. That exodus was known as the Nakba, the catastrophe.

But not as many people seem to remember that there was another exodus happening literally at the same time. Between 1948 and the early 1950s, Jews had a knock of their own. Roughly 800,000 Jews were forced out of Arab countries, many from places like Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt, where their families had lived for centuries. Most resettled in Israel, which then doubled in population in 3 years. Two groups of people lost their homes almost simultaneously. One side built a new nation. The other side was left stateless, scattered across refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.

After the war, Jordan took over the West Bank and gave many Arabs citizenship. Egypt controlled Gaza but never offered any citizenship there. No Palestinian state emerged, and when the UN later called for the refugees' return or compensation, neither Israel nor the Arab states made that happen. Most Arab states didn't let the displaced Palestinians relocate within their borders. I did a video about why, and so far, it's the most popular video I've ever made.

So, the 1948 war determined that a Jewish state would exist. But what would happen to the Palestinians who had lost their land? Israelis saw the war as a matter of survival and independence. To Palestinians, it was dispossession. Either way, 1948 cemented the divide that defines the conflict to this day.

Now, let me pull back and talk about the Palestinian identity for a minute, because it's changed a lot over the past century. Before 1948, Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians who lived in Palestine, they didn't really think of themselves as a separate nation. Their sense of belonging was local. They were members of their city or religious community. They were Muslims, Christians, or Jews. Under Ottoman rule, the area wasn't even an official province called Palestine. Most people saw themselves as Ottoman subjects but gave their real loyalties to their family, their clan, and their hometown rather than to a nation.

Under British rule, the word "Palestinian" still didn't mean what it does today. Early on, it was geographic. Anyone living in the British Mandate could be called Palestinian. In fact, some of the best-known Palestinian institutions were actually Jewish, like the Palestine Post newspaper, which later became the Jerusalem Post, and the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra. Palestinian basically described where you lived.

But newspapers, political committees, local leaders, they started using the term "Palestinian" to describe themselves as a distinct community within the Arab world, even though they remained Arab, just like you could be both French and European. Then that Arab Revolt against the British rule and Jewish immigration helped solidify their identity. Peasants from villages fought alongside urban militants, and the shared struggle gave birth to a more unified sense of a Palestinian people. >> [music] >>

Then came 1948, and the Nakba turned Palestinians literally into a far-flung group of people. The old landowning families and the village hierarchies collapsed. They were replaced by refugee camps and scattered groups abroad. And for 20 years, the Palestinian cause was folded into a larger Arab cause. Leaders like Egypt's President Nasser promised that all Arabs would unite and that one day they would liberate Palestine. They tried and once again made things worse.

The war came when President Nasser kicked out UN peacekeepers from the Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and gathered troops on Israel's border. Syria and Jordan joined in a military pact with Egypt, and Israel saw what was coming and struck first. It was the Six-Day War in 1967, and it changed everything. The result was devastating for the Arab side. Israel destroyed Egypt's air force while it sat on runways, and Israeli ground forces took huge amounts of land. When the ceasefire came, Israel controlled the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Roughly 1 million Palestinians were then under Israeli military rule. In less than a week, Israel tripled its territory and created the occupation that defines the conflict today, although they didn't keep all that land.

Israeli settlements started going up in occupied territories almost immediately. By the 1970s, what began as military outposts became permanent civilian communities. For Israelis, the occupation was about security. For Palestinians, the occupation was theft. In slow motion, Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization became the political and symbolic home of Palestinian identity. And through the '70s, the PLO's armed struggle and global diplomacy made "Palestinian" a household word. The PLO staged hijackings and terrorist attacks against Israelis and Western targets. Another Palestinian faction attacked Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics, killing nine of the athletes. This terrorism hardened Israel and a lot of American attitudes, and it made peace seem impossible.

More cycles of armed resistance and terror attacks followed over the decades, as well as peace deals that have always looked promising and then faded away. There's still no Palestinian state. Israeli settlements have multiplied, and Gaza and the West Bank, they're still divided. Was it thievery or really a clash of two national movements with lots of shared history and trauma? Too many people want stories with simple victims and simple villains. I usually can't give that to you, and I certainly can't give that to you here. The world is too nuanced, and now you're among a very small percentage of people who actually have a handle on how this whole thing really began.

You know, I never expected to do so many videos on the Middle East, but people seem to like them, and I certainly learned a lot in producing them. If you're interested in more, here's my playlist for the whole batch. Thanks so much for watching, and if you think these videos are worthwhile, consider telling a friend. That would be pretty cool. Until next time.