Zionism and It's Discontents

CONFLICTED

Message Heard

Religion & Spirituality, History

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Having avoided it for as long as possible, Aimen & Thomas finally turn their attention to the state of Israel: its backstory, its modern re-emergence, and its impact on the civilizational fault lines crisscrossing the Middle East. In the present day, Arab statesmen have never been closer to their Israeli counterparts, both sides united around a shared enemy: Iran. This marks a dramatic sea change from the past, and to help explain it, as so often this season, this episode reaches back into the Bronze Age, establishing the mishmash of peoples who have long called the Holy Land home, before returning to the pivotal late-Ottoman period, as Jewish migration to that corner of the Ottoman Empire, under the banner of Zionism, inspired the local Arabs to respond with nationalist ambitions of their own—culminating in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 Listen to exclusive bonus content and get all episodes ad-free by subscribing to Conflicted Extra on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for just 99p/month. Join our FB Discussion group to get exclusive updates: https://www.facebook.com/groups/450486135832418 Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted Join the Conflicted Community hub on Discord to discuss all things Conflicted with fellow dear listeners, get exclusive content, bonus episodes and ad-free listening. Register your interest through the link: http://www.levellr.com/conflicted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.9	Hello, Aiman. Hello, hello. Hello from Greece. In fact, here I am in sunny Greece, sunny springtime
0:06.9	Greece, enjoying myself enormously. I hate you. You will like this though, Aiman. The other day,
0:13.8	I was at a dinner party in Athens, and I was sitting next to a splendid old Greek gentleman
0:18.1	who told me all about his ancestors in Alexandria. Do you remember last episode we were talking
0:23.7	in that last episode, all about the Aswan Dam? Well, this guy's grandfather had been the Greek
0:29.2	engineer who built the dam in Aswan that preceded NASA's dam. And he was still saying, he was saying,
0:35.3	and I don't know why NASA needed to build a new dam. There was nothing wrong with my grandfather's
0:40.0	dam, nothing at all. So the history that we talk about and conflicted, it really is still alive
0:45.8	in the memories of people in the Middle East. Not that I want to say Greeks, Greeks are Middle
0:50.2	Easterners. I wouldn't want to offend their sense of sympathy. No, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
0:54.4	The Greeks, they have to accept the armadilism because they, in 2,300 years ago, they invaded
1:00.9	the Middle East, Anatolia, Europe, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt. So they have to bear the consequences
1:08.2	and they should be lumped with us. Man, Middle Easterners, no wonder the conflicts never end,
1:14.6	your memories are far too long. Indeed.
1:24.4	Today's episode, it's the big one. I mean, or is it the big one? Tell me, why do you think I've
1:50.4	been so scared, really? Now for three years, so scared to talk about Israel on this podcast.
1:57.6	Because literally it is a minefield. Wherever you step, it might blow in your face. So I always
2:07.2	avoided this conversation with so many of my friends. And whenever people keep telling me,
2:13.6	oh, you are not sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Have you ever been occupied?
2:17.9	Whatever I say, well, yeah, my mother's village in South Lebanon, Shiba,
2:21.9	it was occupied by the Israelis. From 1978, the year I was born, ironically, all the way until
2:27.6	the year 2000. Wow, that's amazing. So growing up in Saudi Arabia, you knew the whole time your
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