Hi everyone, welcome to the pod. I have just had major dental surgery, which is why I've got a Lisp. Do you hear that?

Anyways, down the podcast, I'm overcoming that Lisp because we got emergency breaking news in the world, and that is a situation in Israel Palestine.

Violence fared up initially following the decision of the Israeli state to forcibly remove Palestinians from a historic district of Jerusalem, and that seems to now have grown into full-scale warfare.

Those of us that love history when challenged will say that history is essential to understanding the nature of the world around us, and the example that is often given is the situation in Israel Palestine.

Without understanding the history stretching back thousands of years is impossible to understand why do you two people, the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs claim this land to be their own?

On the podcast we have addressed this before, we've had Avi Shlame, the historian, Simon Seabag Montefiori talking about the history of Jerusalem, and the tragedy of this situation as he put in which two people both have valid historical claims to see this land as their own.

In this podcast I want to hear from somebody quite different, Dr. Yara Hawari is a young Palestinian academic, she's a writer, a senior policy analyst for Al Shabaka, which is an independent think tank, and I want to discuss with Yara the slightly more recent history, the history since the British left in 1948 right up to the present day.

Over the next few weeks we're getting from different voices from all sides and none of this struggle. If you want to go and listen to Back Episodes this podcast, including the ones I've just mentioned, you can do so, history hit to Dr. TV, history hit Dr. TV, it's like Netflix for history, with the Ozeir documentary, but importantly we've also got the entire back catalog of this podcast.

Please go and check that out, history hit Dr. TV, but in the meantime here is Dr. Yara Hawari.

Yara, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me down.

Let's go back a fair way to start with. At the end of the British period of occupation of Palestine, what was the demographic makeup of the place we now refer to generally as Israel Palestine?

So sort of the coming to the end of the British mandate of Palestine, the Palestine still had a majority population of indigenous Palestinians and these Palestinians were of all different faiths.

What we saw happening during the British mandate, especially towards the latter part was this massive influx of European Jews who had been inspired by the cause of Zionism to move to Palestine.

And so in the last few years of the mandate, this really shot up, but on the eve of when the British pulled out, it was still a Palestinian-Jority country.

And obviously the Second World War was taking place appalling genocide against Jewish people within Europe.

So the British mandate would have seemed like a safe haven.

And that's how it was portrayed and sort of marketed in the beginning. It's very interesting. At the beginning of the Zionist movement, it was actually rejected by many Jews around the world, especially Jews in Western Europe.

So they saw themselves very much as part of the European people as part of European culture. And Zionism was very much a fringe idea. And actually people didn't want to move to what they considered this sort of backwater in the Middle East, this very unsvilar place.

And so what happened with WWII, obviously, with the pogroms in Europe and the Holocaust, was that it effectively gave a lot of Jews no option but to immigrate and to flee.

And they saw Zionism became more and more attractive to a lot of people. So we really saw Jewish settler moves to Palestine increasing in those latter years.

And to the British, how was land apportioned? All these new people arriving. Was they buying land? Were they taking land? What was the process before 48?

So the relationship between the British mandate and Palestinians and Jewish immigrants is incredibly important to look at.

...