Hello and welcome to the second episode of Real Politics with me your host, Phiras Madad. Today I wanted to talk about something cheerful, not controversial and very easy. Israel, the geopolitical reasons for the existence of Israel, why we have these seemingly endless wars between Israel and its neighbors, why was the state of Israel created? What does the West support

Israel? And where is this conflict going? As you can see, very easy questions, nothing too complex.

So let's start. The easiest play to begin always is the map. And so I thought I'd pull up a map

of the Middle East and show you where Israel is.

And that might help us understand the importance of its location and therefore its importance to both its allies and its enemies.

The first point to make is that Israel is sitting in what is literally the holy land, land that is holy to all three religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Jerusalem is the place where Christ died, obviously.

The West Bank and Jerusalem are the center of the Jewish faith.

Jerusalem is also, according to Muslims, the place from where the prophet of Islam supposedly went up to heaven to speak to the

prophets and to God. It's a particularly important location for all three religions. It didn't always

have that much significance, but it's been a site for pilgrimage for the Christians for a very long time and that gives it

an emotive importance that we will mention and discuss a little bit in this episode.

But now let's move to the geopolitical importance.

Geopolitically, Israel is sitting between Syria or greater Syria, including Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine itself, or Israel itself, and Egypt.

This makes it prime real estate, really, because the way that empires have often developed in the region is by tying together the population and agricultural

potential of both Egypt and Syria creating a great power. Most Muslim states that were able to

threaten the West, the Umayat caliphate, the Abbasid caliphate, the Ottomans, these managed to control both Egypt and Syria,

and any political entity that manages to control both under the banner of Islam instantly becomes a threat to the West.

So the solution, so to speak, was to create a blocker state in between Syria and

Egypt that would be by default allied with the West and that would therefore prevent the emergence

of a unified polity, political entity, that then becomes a threat through

the Eastern Mediterranean to first Cyprus and then Greece and then Italy. This is the strategic

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