This week we talk about Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Hamas. We also discuss Egypt, the Rafah Crossing, and Netanyahu’s motivations. Recommended Book: Going Zero by Anthony McCarten Transcript Israel, as a country, was founded as a consequence of, and in the midst of, a fair bit of conflict and turmoil. It was formally established in mid-1948 after years of settlement in the area by Jewish people fleeing persecution elsewhere around the world and years of effort to set up a Jewish-majority country somewhere on the planet, that persecution having haunted them for generations in many different parts of the world, and in the wake of widespread revelation about the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis in parts of Europe they conquered and controlled. Israel finally happened, then, in part because Jewish people had been treated so horribly for so long, and there was finally government-scale support for this effort following that conflict, and the realization of just how monstrous that treatment had become. The area that was carved out for this new nation, though, was also occupied and claimed by other groups of people. The British and French controlled it for a while in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, but before that it was ruled by the Ottomans as part of their Syria administrative region and, like the rest of their Empire, it was formerly a Muslim state. Thus, what serves as a hallowed day worthy of celebration for Israelis, May 14th, Israel's national day, commemorating their declaration of independence, for other people living in the region, that day is referred to as the Nakba, which translates roughly to "the catastrophe," marking a period in which, beginning that year, 1948, about half of Palestine's population of Arabs, something like 700,000-750,000 people either fled of their own volition, or were forced to flee by Jewish paramilitary groups who moved in to clear the locals leading up to the emergence of Israel, at first, and then by the newfound Israeli military, after the formation of the country. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, people who didn't flee were massacred, and wells were poisoned to kill stragglers and keep people from returning. Ultimately, about 80% of the Arab Muslim population in what was formerly British-held Mandatory Palestine, and which was a Muslim region in a Muslim country before that were forced from their homes leading up to or just after Israel's Declaration of Independence. This, alongside the existing hatred toward Jewish people some regional leaders already had, mostly for religious reasons, sparked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was just one of several and frequent full-scale military conflicts between Israel and its neighbors in the early days of its existence, the Israelis mostly on the defensive, and frequently targeted by surprise attacks by many or all of their neighbors simultaneously, even in the earliest days of their national founding. Israel, in part because of support from international allies, and in part because of its militarized society—that militarization reinforced as a consequence of these conflicts, as well—fairly handedly won every single war against, again, often all, of their Muslim neighbors, simultaneously, though often at great cost, and those victories led to a sequence of expansions of Israel's borders, and humiliations for their neighbors, which further inflamed those existing prejudices and fears. Israel has controlled the non-Israel territories of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—all of them majority Muslim, and collectively referred to as the Palestinian Territories—since the aftermath of the Six Day war (which was one of those aforementioned, all of their neighbors attacking them all at once conflicts) in 1967. Israeli settlers have slowly established militarized toeholds in these areas, kicking out and in some cases killing the folks who live on the