The Jewish Story: The Challenge of Jewish Power

the tyrant dies and his rule is over says soren kierkegaard the martyr dies and his rule begins there's a place for both life and death in our tale amrat mike foyer and this is the jewish story episode 28 the challenge of jewish power so we've got a little problem it's a problem that i've hinted at a few times and really in the last episode i even named it it's the problem of power before i launch into any discussion of the issue i want to actually express a little bit of gratitude it's the gratitude that such are our problems here in the year 57 78 2018 whatever year you think it is because after 2 000 years of being the object of the power and violence of others the wheel has finally turned and omisrail is facing the very real but enviable challenge of being the subject of power and violence i believe today that many of our problems as a people stem from a lack of understanding and really engagement of the depth of moral psychological and that being jewish law questions raised by the fact that we're finally wielding power back in the bible what it meant to be a keyboard to be a mighty man of power was to swing your spear over 300 dead i mean just look up all the descriptions of david and his mighty men and on some level that definition never goes away but with the loss of our national home the loss of sovereignty the jews fled from the fields of politics and war they fled into their communities into their synagogues and into ourselves and even on the scale of the individual the sages had a very different definition of dubura of might than the bible azah gibbon who is the mighty one he who conquers himself and if you've been following the jewish story for long then you know that there have been notable warriors up until now like for instance schmule nagi back in the golden age of spain and a good handful of powerful politicians but by and large the diaspora turned jewish culture inward and it linked its potency to moral strength and not to the type of strength derived from nationhood land and army institutions of central authority those were the field of play that we ceded to the nations and in many ways over the course of our long exile we began to disparage them all together as hopelessly tainted and immoral but let's remember exile is not meant to last forever and praise be to god in the 20th century a portion of our people decided actually it was time to reclaim jewish power in the fields of politics and war and lo and behold they succeeded i'm standing here right outside the rebuilt jerusalem telling you that it's true but it seems to me that their victory was so swift and complete that we have yet to take the time to really absorb its implications you know as ravitz greenberg said the state of israel was designed to place power in the hands of jews to shape their own destiny and to affect and even control the lives of others taking power and the cost of power in human lives and resources have become central concerns of the jewish people inescapably jewish hands have become dirtied with blood and guilt as they operate in the real world the classic jewish self-image of exile by the by the innocent sinned against sufferer whose moral superiority sustained self-respect is being tested and eroded he finishes by saying ethical muscles not flex for centuries are now used and sometimes they're stiff and sore it's a tremendous challenge to move out of a self-conception which relates innocence and righteousness with powerlessness into the position of power and no one saw that challenge more clearly than david ben-gurion the leader of socialist zionism the pre-state days and of course israel's first and up until bibi longest reigning prime minister as all israel was out in the streets celebrating in 1948 in the wake of the declaration of independence ben graham actually sat alone in his room and he wrote in his diary about his fears of that day first of all he doubted the jews ability militarily to withstand the onslaught of the combined arab armies that was soon to come he also doubted the world's willingness to ever accept a permanent jewish state he wondered also whether the zionist vision of a state like all others of being a ke kola goim a nation like everyone else could possibly be reconciled with the jewish mission to be a light unto the nations and he was most disturbed by the question of whether people so long accustomed to being the victims of sovereign power could suddenly turn around and wield it whether they could take responsibility for themselves and these doubts have only grown in the midst of omni israel and we've been very slow criminally slow in my mind to exercise those ethical muscles and to ask what does our newfound power really demand you know when i look to the west and when i speak to my students at pardes to my brothers and sisters in the united states and i try to understand their relationship to power i see a divided camp and deep confusion on one side are a big section of the orthodox who though small in number are quite strong in spirit and many in my eyes have taken the age-old posture of the relationship between jews and power the stronger and more centralized the closer we get to it if you remember we saw this pattern throughout the middle ages in europe the jews often saw their security and interests to lie with getting close to a central power with which they could directly negotiate their needs and that shifted within europe with the emancipation and the rise of citizenship model along with basically democratic principles of government but in continental europe at least it didn't end well after a rise of significant jewish presence within the parliaments of europe in the interwar period the nazi era basically erased it so anyway it's a dicey relationship to power there's the orthodox there close to power and perhaps a little bit blinded by it and then on the other end of the poll they're the liberals you know i want to assert it to my brother that the post-modern moral relativists who have educated the millennial generation and really shape our culture right now destroyed the idea of evil now you should know he's a staff writer for the new york times as well as a regular contributor to mainstream magazines like harper's and rolling stone which doesn't mean he's just cool and i'm his brother it means that he's completely immersed in the present of american culture so i take his words quite seriously and at first he agreed with me he said yeah people below 40 don't believe in evil anymore but as we continue to talk he paused and he said actually i don't think it's true because he claimed many see anyone who is wielding power as evil and as we spoke it out i realized what he meant the collapse of all the grand narratives all the ultimate truths which throughout history have justified the wielding of power in the name of victory is a hallmark of post-modern culture that culture views the world as a discourse of power and all those stories are seen as naive attempts or cynical ones to wield power over others so in a world where ideals and ideologies are cynically exploited in order to motivate the masses toward the aim of accumulating power then anyone who holds power must be a liar and probably a bit evil now i realize that any statement made about a generation or a culture is going to be a gross oversimplification but just touch the implications if he's even partially right it goes a long way to explaining how a whole generation of jews is being slowly but surely dragged into a simplistic narrative that sees israel as a colonial goliath which trampled the arab david and took his land because the other simplistic narrative which zionism in its over-enthusiasm has been offering for the last generation that one about the blameless pioneer and helpless refugee has lost weight by very fact of our success because the jews of israel are holding power we must be wrong and perhaps even evil this is a major question that faces not only the jews but western culture altogether is there any healthy and just model for wielding power in the postmodern world because the problems of not willing power don't go away evil whether you like it or not is still out there in my eyes so if i see confusion when i look to the west what do i see when i look around me here in our fair country mostly trauma and quite a bit of confusion as well you know there's such a thing as a trauma vortex and if you don't know it you need to know it now it happens when some past event was so disruptive that it continues to suck one into its psycho-emotional state in the present even as it moves backwards in time and that phenomenon in turn prevents us from integrating that traumatic event into a healthy identity in other words in a sense trauma is memory gone awry instead of what we've been trying to do in the jewish story telling a story about the past to build a present identity motivated to create the future which we desire trauma mingles present in past in a way in which the future begins to eerily drift toward reproducing that very traumatic past that we're trying to escape so which trauma underlies the psychodrama that defines in many ways the israeli relationship to power take your pick i mean it could be nearly 2 000 years of exile it could be their culmination in the holocaust whose shadow hangs over everyone and everything in israel wherever you live i don't care if you don't think it doesn't or that we should get over it or that dwelling on such things isn't healthy you don't have a choice that's what trauma is and there's so much so much to discuss in the behavior of both american and israeli jewry during the war itself and their subsequent understanding of what happened in europe once the scope of the murder became clear at this point i'll just generalize since we're going to have to have a real discussion later and i'll say that american jewelry at this point largely explains the holocaust as the product of intolerance and the absence of universal human values and thus the slogan never again means in their eyes we can never allow this to happen to anyone again and that's why holocaust education tends to be about tolerance and humanism which are not intrinsically bad the zionist at least the classic zionist interpretation of the holocaust was very different it was larger that 6 million jews died because they lacked an army a state they lacked power never again here means i'll never let anyone do that to us again and the ultimate symbol of this is of course the israeli f-16s flying over auschwitz but like i said a real discussion of the holocaust deserves time and it lies ahead in our story for now the critical difference between american and israeli jews in my eyes is the hundred years war we've been fighting in the land since well before world war ii and which goes on to this very day you know and the trauma of that war can be encountered quite easily i once went with the pardes group to the city of chavron and the then speaker for the jewish community gathers together in a synagogue and if i'm not mistaken that morning or perhaps the the night before there'd been a terrorist attack in his community so he was quite shaken as he began to speak to us within the space of the 10 minutes we had together maybe 15. he mentioned the crusades the inquisition the destruction of the temple nazi germany and of course arab terrorism the echoes of history were so loud in that room that i could tell by looking in his eyes that he didn't know or even care what period we were in it was all one trauma and it's really hard in fact it might not be possible to develop a healthy relationship with power while you're still under continual attack no matter who you want to blame for that attack so we've been tracing the rise of the new jew for quite some time and back in episode 23 i emphasize the role that max nordos call for the new muscular judaism played in the return of a military culture to the jews nordau preached the need for the jews to be spartans rather than helets by which he meant brave warriors rather than frightened slaves and it was he who first resuscitated the memory of shimon bar kochba making him once again a glorious military leader rather than the failed messiah who betrayed the torah as the sages painted him and in particular norada emphasized that barkocchwa's glory was in knowing how to die well death before dishonor nordau began the discussion and certain zionist thinkers and activists will go on to explore and experiment with this new old jewish relationship to power just as eleazar ben yehuda and the other authors of the hebrew renaissance developed a new old relationship to the hebrew language you know in a sense zeb jabutinski and david ben-gurion will do for our tradition of military power what eliezer ben yudha did for our tradition of language and because of the weight of the trauma of exile and the hundred-year war and their intimate relationship to questions of power and violence in our country today there's a psychological level here which cannot be ignored the fraught relationship that peoples who gain freedom after prolonged depression have the power is well documented by the way if you want to read a particularly incisive and challenging look at the subject i recommend you pick up paolo frere's pedagogy of the oppressed in a nutshell ferry observes that the oppression experienced by the oppressed creates a dual existence in their mind the existence of their current state of oppression and a longing for freedom the trick is that since oppression also narrows one's horizons the image of freedom most available to the oppressed is that of their oppressor in other words it's easy for a slave to picture freedom as having the hand which holds the whip as opposed to the back which receives it now ferry has his own analysis of why how this dual existence comes to be and what its implications may be for educating toward liberation and they're worth reflecting on but you know it's a truism that the jews never fit any neat paradigm and though i have to say i can see that our return to sovereign power is definitely marked by elements of the psychodrama of freedom as he describes it there's there's more at play here because as i said after the destruction of the second temple and the advent of the great exile we adapted new models of power we didn't just sit as its objects and one of them was our ever present phrase because of our sins we've been exiled from our land the belief that it's our actions on the moral plane our sins and our merits which drive history is a very different model than the belief that history is driven by kings and their wars and i've been holding it out for quite some time as a sort of ability to retain agency when we lack the classic elements of national power land and military but i have a creeping doubt about that about 10 years ago harvard professor of literature ruth weiss wrote a book called jews in power which i admit i have yet to read in full but in it she coins a very interesting term that she calls moral solipsism right which she says is the recurring tendency of jews be the individuals or communities to pay greater attention to our own moral performance than to the necessities of survival and the behavior of our enemies for our entire story i've been claiming that this notion that because of our sins we are exiled from our land is it taking a historical agency it wasn't the romans that destroyed the temple but rather our sins and i'd hold out that this belief that true power exists on the moral plane is a very important element in our survival and in thriving in our spiritual mission even bereft of those traditional sources of political and military power but i've started to wonder how much this attitude might just be a branch of what professor weiss calls moral solipsism i mean after all it was the romans that actually destroyed jerusalem even if god let them do it because of our sins at what point do we hold our enemies responsible for their actions instead of taking them upon ourselves and through that by the way find the strength to defeat them one example and then we can get back into the flow of history weiss note that when golden ear greeted president anwar sadat of egypt on his historic 1977 flight jerusalem she gave him the famous reproach we can forgive the arabs for killing our children we cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill theirs it's a pithy statement by the way which she may or may not have said there's some questions no matter though because it became an iconic israeli attitude and as white points out the quote expresses more concern with israeli children's moral decency than with their enemies designs to kill them and she claims a greater understanding of her enemies and a greater appreciation of the political reality of power would have been to say to him we jews are here to stay no matter what you do and that would demand realism and tolerance which perhaps would lend greater credence to peace but you know after all israel is the only country i'm aware of which is one repeated major battles in the 20th century and then immediately began to sue for peace so this is just the tip of the iceberg of our problem and it's only the beginning of our discussion of it as sovereignty draws nearer and nearer in our story the issue is going to become ever more pressing and as in so many things david ben-gurion will be among those who understood the issue best he even coined the hebrew word for the challenge he called it right what was facing his newborn state the need for you the word for which there's really no english equivalent but that roughly translates as acting in a sovereign-like manner what mamlakh meant to ben graham was our ability to handle power military power political power in an effective responsible and moral fashion but in order to do that first we have to have a state and as the great nationalist thinker earns renown observed such things are most often brutally established we saw the beginnings of the rise of jewish military power with the formation of hashomer the guardsmen in 1909 by manian israel i hope you remember the story and hashomer was devoted to protecting the new jewish agricultural settlements that were then springing up in the isolated places of ottoman palestine but you should know despite its avowedly defensive posture the slogan of hashmere was with fire and blood judea fell with fire and blood judea will rise it's a line taken from yaakov kahan's poem shir khabir yunim the song of the gosh the thugs or the brigands written after the kitchen of program and i hope you recall it was in the wake of kishnev that the need for jewish power in the old fashioned style became welded into the zionist dream kishnev and hashomer began a process but it was the jewish legion which really got it underway when world war one broke out the jews of the yeshuv in the land of israel were increasingly terrorized by the turks and arabs this despite their professions of loyalty and even offers to send their young men to serve in the turkish army and as we saw last episode this persecution culminated in the expulsion of all foreign citizens from tel aviv yaffo which amounted to a significant percentage of the jews in the yeshuf in the ensuing months 11 000 jewish refugees were evacuated by ship and the vast majority passed through alexandria in british ruled egypt the british had to create two refugee camps for the boatloads of desperate jews coming in they called them gabare and mahruza where conditions were as difficult as you would expect in wartime and among the refugees who arrived in the first wave was one man who stood out described by all accounts as a tall broad-shouldered lean man with tranquil nordic features and a special touch of dignity lent by his empty sleeve it was the one armed jewish hero of the russian army joseph trumpledor the elder trump door was born in piategorsk russia i'm sure i said that wrong his father served as a cantonese you remember that these were the young jewish men taken away sometimes as early at age 12 to serve 25 years in the russian army and when he was released from the army he was recognized as a so-called useful jew and allowed to settle outside of the pale settlement which meant that though a proud jew trumpeldorf's beginning his upbringing was more russian than jewish and that's what made it a natural decision to volunteer for the russian army in 1902 during the russo-japanese war that broke out two years later that's when he lost his left arm to shrapnel and when the military doctors urged him not to go back to the fighting given his handicap joseph's response was eerily familiar for those who know the end of his story but i still have another arm to give to the motherland nevertheless due to his handicap he soon left the army and began to study law it was at that time he began to be drawn into zionist work trumpledor quickly gathered a circle of young zionists around him and in 1911 they fulfilled their dream of making aliyah of going up to the land of israel but when world war one broke out being an enemy national russian citizen he was deported along with all those other jews to the british refugee camps in egypt never fear though because it was here that he made a fateful connection since the onset of war the idea of a jewish fighting force that could assist the british against the turks and perhaps even gain a foothold for the jews in ottoman-palestine had been floating quietly amongst the few zionist leaders in the british empire i say quietly because the official policy of the zionist movement was neutrality as we mentioned last episode they saw joining the war effort as a lose-lose proposition i mean remember there were jews in every country fighting on every side of the battle and they were afraid that if the germans won the repercussions would fall on the jews living in france and britain while if the allies won the jews in germany austria and the other axis states would be the ones to suffer hayam weitzman chief zionist statement in the british empire was actually sympathetic to the idea of a jewish fighting force but he bowed to the policy of outward neutrality something which we know he didn't always do follow the party line but furthermore weitzman was acutely aware that the british jews themselves whereas in villain about the idea of a fighting force in the empire as they were about zionism as a whole the assimilationists mostly wealthy and titled jews were posed to any exclusively jewish unit because it was anathema in their eyes that jews be singled out in any way as a distinct entity in the british national body the official zionists led by nachm sokolov who was then living in london were opposed because as we said their policy of the wzo of the world zionist organization was neutral and the strongest opposition actually came from the poor jews of london's east end they were recent immigrants from the russian empire and they were not about to fight for the hated tsar who happened to be britain's ally at this point but there was one jew for whom a jewish fighting force was a dream truth is it wasn't just a dream it was already a reality in his mind it was something which must be and therefore would come to be through partially at least his agency zev jabotinsky was born as vladimir japotinsky in odessa in 1880 into a deeply russified middle class jewish family in many ways he was the culmination of the dream of the russian enlighteners his education was completely in russian schools but he was such a master of the russian language and popular culture that he didn't stay in them long he was recognized as a talented journalist from a young age and by 1896 he was already off in switzerland in italy as a correspondent for a major paper russian language paper in odessa interestingly enough for those japotinsky fans out there he wrote his articles from italy under the pseudonym altalena which means swing in italian or perhaps old italian in yiddish you'll remember that name in a few episodes so in our story we first met jabatinsky speaking before a circle of odessa zionists on the very night that the word of the kishnev pogrom reached the city and if you'll recall even then he was known as a passionate and talented writer and order he was considered a rising star in the zionist movement but it was in the wake of the pogrom that he added the title of militant to author and order as he threw his heart into organizing what became quite controversial jewish self-defense organizations but he was still part of the mainstream and in 1908 the world zionist organization sent jabotinsky to istanbul to take up the position of editor-in-chief of a new young turk daily newspaper that had been founded and was financed by wzo president david wolfson but the paper like so many other things fell prey to the war and in late 1914 jabutinski was left jobless and at loose ends and with the keen insight for revolutionary opportunity that marked his entire career he headed for the refugee camps outside of alexandria by the time japanese reached the camps in late december there were already 1500 jewish refugees gathered and he immediately began to organize them his language and leadership skills quickly making him a useful liaison for the british and on march 3rd he called a meeting of the leaders in the ghabari camp with the goal of creating some collective response to their banishment from the land of israel and it was at that meeting that dzev jabitinsky and joseph trump aldor first met it was a stormy night a huge argument ensued there was no ideological unity amongst the refugees and certainly none of them saw jabotinsky as their natural leader nonetheless when he challenged them by saying it's impossible to sit here with folded arms and subsist on charity and telling them there was no doubt that sooner or later the british would march on palestine they had no argument against them in fact he stirred their hearts enough that volunteers began to step forward and the leaders of the camp that night voted to recruit a jewish unit to fight on the side of the british army on the palestinian front for the liberation of their land and despite the qualms of assimilationists and advocates of neutrality and international negotiation for jebetynski a militant posture was the only proper response to their expulsion later when he was head of the betar youth movement that he'd founded jabotinsky would formulate seven principles which he crafted into an oath meant to bind every member of batar by the way betar is not only the name of the capital of the barcocca rebellion which fell to the romans their our last jewish stronghold in the land of israel it also is an acronym which he would later say stood for breit joseph trump laura the covenant of yosef trumpledor which we will explain by and by but this principle these seven principles one of them was magen protection or has he called it military preparedness in jabotinsky's vision every jew must complete some military training and know how to use weapons in order that they be ready at any time to respond personally to a call for national defense and as everybody knows sometimes the best defense is a good offense so jabotinsky and trumbledore traveled to alexandria to present their proposition to the british military representative in egypt general john maxwell but his response was hardly encouraging i've heard nothing of an offensive against palestine he said i doubt whether such a thing will be launched at all also he added the law doesn't admit foreign soldiers to the british army i can make only one suggestion that your young men enlist in a mule transport unit for some other sector of the turkish front i cannot do more than that japotinsky was deeply insulted by the suggestion that the jews were only fit to be mule drivers now some historians like to attribute his rejection of the idea of a transport unit as a reflection of his so-called aristocratic pretensions but you could just as easily say that is a reflection of another one of his core values now hadar is a fascinating word in its original biblical usage the hebrew word means splendor beauty glory and in the context of jabutinski's code it's almost untranslatable it represents a combination of honor national dignity and personal responsibility which was meant to bring out the best in every jew at every moment in other words in his eyes it was beneath the jews to be relegated to transport when they had a rich history as warriors and there was a need for soldiers on the battlefront now yosef trombledor had no such compunction after they left maxwell he turned jab dinskin he said to get the turks out of palestine we've got to smash the turk on which front you begin smashing is just a question of tactics any front leads to zion and though japotinsky did not agree later he would point to this attribute of trouble doors as yet another principle to be incorporated into the beta oath he called it use mobilization that every jew should be prepared to take on each and any service for the sake of their people but for now jabutinski returned to europe to pursue his dream of a jewish fighting unit while joseph trumbador formed a transport unit from volunteers in the refugee camps in alexandria and lieutenant colonel john henry patterson was chosen to head the new transport unit dubbed the zion mule corps and they were attached to the impending gallipoli campaign now a word about colonel patterson just to appreciate the nature and depth the texture even of the anglo-zionist alliance at this point this is what patterson wrote in his journal after he received his commission from general maxwell a jewish unit had been unknown for two thousand years since the day of the maccabees those heroic sons of israel who fought so valiantly it's curious that general maxwell should have chosen me because he knew nothing of my knowledge of jewish history and my sympathy for the jewish race when as a boy i eagerly devoured the records of the glorious deeds of the jewish military captains such as joshua yoav guidon judah maccabee i never dreamed that i in a small way would become a captain of a host of the children of israel for paterson the zion mule corps was filled with biblical and even prophetic overtones from the past but for trumpledor zion mule corps was a historic opportunity to actually build a new jewish future and the two would work quite well together we're going to see in a coming episode an even more powerful product of this particular christian zionist alliance in the person of ord wingate that's just the teaser his stories yet to come meanwhile if you don't know the glibly invasion was a catastrophic failure a disaster nearly a hundred and thirty thousand lives were lost on both sides and even though some contemporary historians will claim that it proved a critical aid to the russians it wasn't a total loss for our story all we need to know is that the allies withdrew in tatters the zion mule corps among them its ranks decimated colonel patterson was seriously ill after the battle it was sent back to britain and captain trumbledore assumed command of the remnants of the zion mule corps meanwhile japotinsky had not ceased his political battle for a proper jewish fighting force he was in london but unfortunately in a pattern which began to define his zionist activities the official body of the zionist movement was his biggest opponent when the executive committee of the world zionist organization the wzo met in copenhagen in june of 1915 jabotinsky tried to persuade them of the necessity of forming a fighting force to help the british liberate the land of israel but in the end this is what the committee declared quote in view of the oft-repeated rumors about the formation by england of a jewish legion for the conquest of palestine the zionist actions committee declares that every undertaking of this kind is in sharpest contradiction to the entire character of zionist activities that the zionist organization will have nothing in common with any such undertaking therefore the actions committee demands that no zionists should be under any circumstances participate in or support any such undertaking the wzo had effectively disowned jabytinsky and said by definition his actions made him not a zionist in truth this was the first step in a break that would actually lead him to secede from the world zionist organization in and form his own alliance of revisionist zionists more on that later but for now even without official support debutinski's efforts in london slowly advance and if you're wondering how just recall the nature of the british war government that we described in the last episode and the christian zionist influence within it and as dabatensi climbed higher and higher on the political ladder with his plan so the opposition against him grew the russian immigrant jews actually began to agitate so violently against him that periodically he required a bodyguard his meetings were being disrupted by organized jewish protesters who would blow whistles and pelt them with rotten tomatoes but still jabotinsky pressed on and once again this determination became a hallmark of zeb jabeten's political career and one which he bequeathed by the way to his disciple menachem begin future prime minister if you are correct if you're in the right then you never waver from your cause no matter what opposition you arouse and we'll speak in a later episode about how jabotinsky and the revisionists became the internal enemy which the socialist zionists needed in order to consolidate their rule a struggle which really began here but for now we have the early signs of yet another principle from bethar's seven principle what he called chadnis one flag zabatinski used to say that serving two ideals is like serving two gods you simply can't do it and that single-mindedness lent a tremendous power to everything he did and may have been a jab that would consider the divided heart of the socialist zionists meanwhile in mid-july 1916 the remnants of the zion mule corps reached london still under the command of captain joseph trumpledor and they were subsumed into the 16th platoon of the london regiment jabatinsk immediately enlisted as a private in the unit but he didn't cease to lobby for a full-scale jewish legion and colonel patterson had recovered from his illness and became quickly an invaluable ally in that struggle struggle it was because aside from british anti-semitism and the pro-arab lobby of the colonial and foreign offices that we noted in the last episode patterson recorded in his memoirs that highly placed jews in the government were his biggest opposition in fact he labeled them as sanbalats that's a name that echoes the people in the book of nehemiah who opposed the return of the jews and the restoration of jerusalem following the babylonian exile back in the first sorry the sixth century before the common era go listen to that i was going to say the first and second episodes of season one if you're curious but this is what he wrote i happened by chance one day to be the prominent member of the sanbalat deputation to the war office those are the high placed jews trying to stop him and in the course of conversation i asked him why he objected so strongly to the formation of a jewish regiment he replied that he had no faith in the russian jews and feared they would bring discredit on jewry i said that what i'd seen in gallipoli of the jews from russia i had more faith in him than he had and then i felt confident i could make him into a good soldier he was kind enough to remark well perhaps under you they will turn out to be good soldiers but then they might win palestine and i don't want to be sent there to live do you hear the divided loyalty finally after three years of struggle only months before the balfour declaration the formation of a jewish battalion was officially announced in august of 1917. now due to the lobbying of those sanbalats the name jewish regiment was dropped and apart from a star of david on the sleeves of their tunics the soldiers were not identified as jewish officially they were the 38th battalion of the royal fusiliers made up of british volunteers who were actually members of the zion mule corps and a large number of russian jews but they were giving kosher food they were assigned a rabbi as their jewish chaplain and allowed to respect shabbat and the jewish holidays in april 1918 the 38th was actually joined by the 39th battalion raised in nova scotia and recruited from the jews of the us and canada and by the end nearly 7 000 jewish volunteers made up the 38th 39th and 40th battalions of the royal fusiliers and in june of 1918 the royal fusiliers crossed the forge of the jordan and fought their ways toward jerusalem zev jabotinsky held the rank of lieutenant and was in the first battalion to cross the river just try to imagine what he felt as jewish soldiers followed in the exact footsteps of the ancient general joshua who'd fought the same battle to enter the land thousands of years ago jabotinsky and his many other members of the jewish legion amongst them yoshi trumpledor and david ben-gurion had high hopes that after their victory the legion could serve as the core of a jewish defense force under british patronage but they were wrong field marshal edmund allenby famous commander of the british forces that had just defeated the turks was no great lover of the jewish legion and perhaps according to some not even the jews but what was clear that he attached far more strategic importance to the region's arab aspirations than the zionist ones and at his command most of the jewish legion was disbanded in 1919 reduced to one battalion which however in recognition of their bravery and contribution of the war effort was granted the official name of the first judeans and the menorah emblazoned with the hebrew word kadima meaning eastward or forward became its badge that's the same menorah that would become the official symbol of the state of israel and even though it has a different number of branches which is so evocative of the maccabees those priestly warriors who were willing to fight to the death for the sake of the sovereignty over their land as were the modern maccabees of the jewish legion they were disbanded but their work was far from done the british could take away their commissions and even their guns but a core of the legion remained in the land of israel and their newfound military experience would become in high demand as the storm clouds of violence began to gather once again you know we've spoken many times about the peculiar situation of the land of israel a tiny sliver of land a small people which throughout history has been sandwiched between huge empires first it was egypt and assyria in the ancient world then greece and persia then the seleucids the ptolemaics followed by the romans and the parthians and the 20th century was no different i hope you recall from last episode the sykes pico agreement and mcmahon hussein correspondent if not go back and listen again do your homework but for now just recall that the that britain had perhaps promised parts of the middle east to three different peoples the jews the arabs and the french and all that was even before the war had ended and they'd begun to double cross all three from the beginning and more or less the same time that general allen be conquered jerusalem his forces entered the city of damascus as well and there they were joined by the forces of the arab revolt led by the hashemite leader faisal hussein and in order to fulfill the promises of the mcmahon hussein correspondents and of course to undermine the french position the british established faisal as king of the newly declared country of syria but don't get too excited because he didn't last long the french didn't take this assertion of british colonial power laying down they managed to secure the league of nations mandate for syria and from there the franco-syrian war erupted and who of course was caught between france and britain you guessed it the settlements of the ishov now in relatively short order faisal and his arab armies surrendered but not to worry the british made him king of the country of iraq that they just created out of mesopotamia just as they would carve out the kingdom of trans jordan from his brother abdullah only a year later we'll have to talk more about that but for now like i said who was caught between these war and colonial powers and their arab clients the agricultural settlements founded by the zionists in particular the tiny vulnerable ones in the area of the upper galilee methula farguladi hamra and telhai now the land around telhai had been worked intermittently since its purchase in 1905 but it was only permanently settled as a border outpost in 1918 by the veterans of the jewish legion led by yosef trumpledor and when the franco-syrian war began the arab villages and the nomadic bedouin tribes in upper galilee quickly allied with the arab kingdom of syria under faisal while the jewish residents chose to remain neutral basically they were waiting to see which side of the border they were going to end up on and early in the war a kafagiladi resident was actually killed by armed bedouin and therefore the jewish farms were on alert and regularly pillaged by the pro-syrian bedouin on this pretext of searching for french spies and soldiers that's why when on march 1st several hundred arabs marched to the gates of tel hai and demanded to search the settlement the response to the jews was to bar the gate and call for reinforcements one of the farmers fired a shot in the air it was a pre-arranged signal that brought ten men led by joseph trumpledor who'd been posted by hashomer in order to organize the defense of the entire region in the process of negotiation the head of the arab forces was actually allowed to enter telkai in order to confirm that there were indeed no french forces present but unfortunately not everyone inside tel kai got the word and when one of the jews shocked at seeing an armed benue inside the compound confront him with a pistol the battle erupted and when the smoke clears five arabs and six jews were dead and among them was yosef trumpledor in the end the jews were forced to abandon their outposts which was burned to the ground by the bedouin as they left it was a tragedy but in a region where war has reigned for over a hundred years and where sadly in the 20th century thousands of soldiers have fallen in battle not to speak of civilians one might be tempted to dismiss the battle of tel kai as tragic but insignificant that would only be because you undervalue the power of national myth now joseph trumbledor was already a legendary member of the issue when he died and as word spread of his now famous last statement never mind it is good to die for our country the power of tel hai as a symbol blossomed overnight you know the historical academic world defines a national myth as a symbolic narrative relating to an important event in the nation's past that embodies sacred national values of the present and which is used as a charter for political action do you hear our pattern it's something that happened in the past which embodies values in the present and orients us toward future political action now first of all we actually have to appreciate the pain eight dead two had been actually killed in a previous engagement was a very high number for the tiniest shoe by the way the city of kiryat shmona known as the capital of the north literally means the town of the eight and was named after them and not only eight dead the loss of the well-known and highly respected trumpledor added to the collective sense of loss and grief but what was the symbolic power of telchi that makes it an actual critical moment in zionist education to this very day well it depends on who you ask because despite the fact that national myths usually serve to promote solidarity telhai is a case study in how they can also become an agent of national conflict i'll resist the temptation to make a joke about jews and our inability to agree about anything even our national miss the entire issue of agreed that telehigh marked a turning point in jewish history they marked the emergence of a new type of jew in the land of israel max nordau's muscular judaism had finally come to fruition in yosef trumpledor's heroic example of joyful self-sacrifice it's good to die for our country was the motto of this new jew and within a few years the 11th of adar that's the jewish month in which the date of the battle tel hai falls out became a pilgrimage say it was complete with youth pilgrimage to the site and public programs that were held throughout these shoes many people immediately after the battle eulogized trumpledor and all the other fallen including of course zeb jabotinsky trumpler's friend and companion in battle but it's really the eulogy of joseph heim brenner the pillar of hebrew renaissance then living in the land who himself would die only a year later defending an isolated farmstead from an arab assault it was his eulogy entitled a sacred place which was critical in creating telhai as the center of zionist sacred mythology a cold calculation he said would have left no room for doubt that telhai should have been evacuated but the heart a selfless heart believed in miracles it believed the normal laws would be suspended that devotion was everything that love for a piece of earth could move mountains besides if we left every place in which there was danger there would be no place we would not have to leave no position we would not have to retreat from but to where and what now danger is everywhere and when tomorrow or the day after it overtakes us in this or that form will we know every one of us that we have no choice will we realize the necessity of rising to the occasion will each of us stand his ground with the name of trumpledor and trumpledor's comrades on his lips in the place chosen for him by destiny in the immediate aftermath of battle no one argued with the message of tel hai which was really embodied not in the famous words of trumpledor but rather in those of aaron shure one of the casualties of the first battle of telkai who said one does not desert a place nor give up that which has been built that wasn't their argument the argument was who has the right to wear the mantle of these martyrs was it the growing body of jeputinski's followers who saw the gun as the means to national liberation or was it the controlling culture of the socialist zionists who preferred the plow in the early years of zionist settlement which were totally dominated by the religion of labor it was the image painted by the bible in the book of nehemiah which most inspired the settlers you know it says in the fourth chapter the 10th and 11th lines he says from that day on half my servants did work and half held lances and shields bows and armor and the officers stood behind the whole house of judah who were rebuilding the wall the basket carriers were burdened doing work with one hand while the others held a weapon one hand on the gun one hand on the plow but the fight over the legacy of tel hai foreshadows a struggle between the nationalist and socialist streams within zionism that would break out in the coming decade over which one is the true instrument in holding fast what we built the gun or the plow and that argument would emerge in the coming decade as the fundamental ideological split between the socialist zionists and the revisionist zionists in their attitude toward the pioneering spirit was it defined by one's strong sense of national mission and a subsequent willingness to sacrifice even one's life or was the divining characteristic of the pioneer their commitment to settling and working the land the revisionist would hold up tell high as a mobilizing story for their call to armed confrontation to jabotinski's blood and sacrifice as central principles of national ideology while the socialists look to it as a support for their ideology of restraint in their struggle with the arabs and eventually the british rather advocating settlement in agriculture as the center point of national action they even argued over whether trump or was more of a farmer as a soldier great ideologue of japanese movement would say in 1920 what do they mean the socialists have to do with trumpledor why don't they go on a pilgrimage to the grave of dollar gordon why do they go to a pilgrimage to the distant grave of trumpledor the militarist trumpledor who volunteered for the zion mule corps in gallipoli while on the other hand in a pamphlet published by the histodroot we had the great labor union which dominated israel really until not so long ago written for ghana note for the directors of nursery schools the description of the martyrs of tel kai reads as follows they were not heroes of the sword and the spear but heroes of the spade and the plow the weapon did not come but for the builder's stick they knew how to die as heroes because they knew how to live as heroes the heroes of work and construction you know in his role as part of the provisional committee which led the issue jabotinsky had actually advocated for pulling back from the upper galilee settlements which he saw as impossible to defend in the face of the chaos of the franco-syrian war and in the struggle over the myth for who owns the story of telchi that decision was thrown right back in his face this is what beryl catnilson leader of the socialist zionists wrote in the workers paper davar years later one should not forget that the tel high heroes fought and fell in a two-front war not only the war against bandits who wish to destroy a place of peace and labor but also war against indifference helplessness alienation and fear at home in the issue and amongst its leaders one should not forget their horrible isolation there and the response of the believers in so-called pure nationalism who had the ability and the influence to help you can hear it this idea of a two-front wars begin is going to begin to define the relationship between the socialists and the zionists and really it represents the struggle over this myth represent a vehicle for what will become a split within israeli national consciousness to this very day i'll just give you one example so you can understand the power of such a national myth it was on the 11th of the dara hell high day that gush emunim in the 70s the block of the faithful that drove the settlement movement issued a public call for volunteers to join settlements in sinai the west bank gaza and the golan because even today no one doubts that telhai is a symbol of the firm resolve never to abandon a jewish settlement but the argument's no longer about whether the best means of doing so is the plow or the gun today the argument's about whether we want this symbol of holding fast at all just a brief word of conclusion to bring us back to the question of power because tel hai will begin a cycle of struggle with the arabs and eventually with the british that will force military power into the center of zionist activity and i'm particularly struck by the power of martyrdom i'll let you draw your own conclusions but i can't resist pointing out a striking parallel in jewish history we could even call it book ends to exile the second commonwealth which was the last period in jewish history when questions of military and political power were dealt with on a national scale ends not only with the barcode rebellion but with a very powerful image if you don't remember the barcode rebellion please go back to season 1 and listen to episodes 9 10 11 but in particular i'm thinking about the image with which our sages chose to end the story of that rebellion i'm talking about the martyrdom of rebbi akiva tied to a stake in the midst of a roman coliseum the executioners tore his flesh from his body with iron rakes it has the final agony approached so did the time of kriya shema of the declaration of god's unity which in our tradition is the ultimate acceptance of the kingdom of heaven and in that moment of torturous pain rabbi akilah began to declare shmaya sorel hear israel and his students forced to watch the death of their master cried back to him rebbe even now they couldn't comprehend how in the midst of the brutal separation of body and soul both personally as he died on the stake and nationally as the last vestige of sovereignty was being stamped out around him they couldn't understand how rebbi kiva could say that he had his whole life longed for this moment of devotion and they watched as his soul left his body with the word echad one the assertion that there is only one and that devotion carried on israel through nearly 2 000 years of disembodied national existence it wasn't just rabbi akiva's flesh that they stripped away and the belief that beyond all comprehension everything comes from one source even our history is largely what held us together and here on the other end of that centuries-long journey the zionists who of course many of whom most of whom at this point had abandoned that belief are nevertheless struggling to reverse that process to reunite body and soul and to do so they had to rehabilitate parkour not as the rebellious one but as a glorious military leader ready to choose death and national destruction over dishonor and in their quest to find the strength to hold fast to the land in order that the process of national re-embodiment could be achieved they found a powerful symbol in the words of that soldier farmer the one armed hero joseph trombledore it is good to die for our country i just want to thank a few people i want to thank all the people who give their hard earned money to help make this show happen to keep it free and widely available and i want to invite you to join them right now you can go right now to rob mike.com in the upper right hand corner you'll see a little button that says be a patron and you can click on through to get a little bit of her podcast support i also want to ask everyone listening send me your questions your thoughts season 3 is approaching and i want to respond you can do it at rob mike foyer gmail.com or you can just find me rob my foyer on facebook i also want to thank the land of israel network for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many amazing people i want to thank the pardes institute p-a-r-d-e-s dot org dot il for building an institution allows me to