I'm Christopher Leighton and this is open source.

With the historian John Judas we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine.

It has been in fact a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples

in stop and go warfare over a small plot of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

What if, as in James Joyce's most famous line, what if that 100 years of history is itself the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake.

Can we break the nightmare war cycle by relearning the history, by taking it again, by doing it over.

John Judas, do you believe in solving problems by pulling up their roots for a fresh look at them?

Well, you either solve problems that way you find out that they're insoluble one way or the other.

I've been submerged in the historical study you wrote and published in 2014.

We should have read it then.

You called it Genesis. Harry Truman, American Jews, and the origins of the Arab

Israeli conflict. On the present course of events toward the horror show of October, November this year.

You write that by now the Palestine problem is hapless and hopeless.

But can you imagine a historian's intervention in the history still unfolding.

I can imagine that at various points in that history, which really goes back maybe 140 years,

not even a century, there were moments, there were times when intervention was possible.

I'm pessimistic about the present to tell you the truth.

I'd ask you to start this century or more epic at the end of World War I roughly where the

Lawrence of Arabia movie ended or maybe with the Balfour Declaration of

1917. Remind us Britain's foreign minister Arthur Belfort committed the Brits to finding a national

home for the Jewish people in Palestine, or perhaps a nation. the word kept changing,

but Balfour was also openly working his own imperial strategy

...