The War Before the War: What Everyone Gets Wrong About Israel-Palestine

29:18And really, the numbers just start growing and growing. They really take off in the 30s, particularly after Hitler comes to power in January 1933 and other anti-Semitic movements are on the ascendant across Europe and Poland and Hungary and Romania. And so the numbers just keep climbing and climbing. And so in 1935, you have 60 ,000 Jews coming to this land legally and perhaps some more illegally, we don't quite know. But the majority of them legally, the vast majority most likely. And that's double the figure of two years before. So the Arab community in this land is not stupid. Even subsistence farmers in the countryside, who perhaps many of whom were still illiterate in this period, were certainly perceptive enough to recognize that the face of this land was changing rapidly and that if things went on this way, the Jews would be a majority before long.

30:15Because in the period that I'm writing about, 36 to 39, kind of the core of my book, the Jews are already approaching roughly 300 ,000 people, which is about 30 % of the population. And so, again, it really shouldn't be all that shocking that there was Arab opposition to this. The question, of course, then as now, but especially then, was how they responded. And of course, it was sort of from the Arab or Palestinian perspective, the argument is often heard that, well, we tried diplomacy. We tried to work within the boundaries of the law. And when that didn't work, we turned to violence. And there's a certain way in which you can make that argument.

31:04And you can say that the revolt was a result of desperation, that he had tried everything else. On the other hand, as I mentioned, there were outbursts of violence, serious violence, right at the get-go, right at the start of the mandate. And so, yes, that's all a very long-winded way to say, I think, the fundamental, that's really, there's a figure in my book and in the history of this land called Vladimir Jabotinsky, who's kind of the ideologue, the intellectual inspiration, let's say, the ideological forerunner of sort of right-wing Zionism. He's really ideologically sort of the ancestor of the Likud and other right-wing Zionist movements today.

31:49And what he says, and he's no slouch, no peacenik himself, but he says the tragedy is that this is a conflict of right against right. He says very rarely in human history is there a case in which right is all on one side or another. But in this case, it's really a question of right against right. But, he said, in his view, the Jewish case was nonetheless stronger. It was the difference between, I forget the exact metaphor, but I think it was something like a starving man and a man who'd like another helping at the table or something like that. So he viewed the Jewish condition, the Jewish plight, as so desperate as to override the rightness and the justice of the Palestinian airplane.

32:39Right.

32:39Coleman Hughes:And so in the case where there's two rights, where both sides have a legitimate claim to a state or nationalist aspiration in the same region, the logical thing is to compromise. and though what I've been saying is that I can sort of equally see it from both sides, the way it's not symmetric is in the total unwillingness of the Arab leaders who actually mattered at key points like al-Husseini to compromise and that through line throughout the history. um consistently jewish leaders have many times begrudgingly many times with with uh longer term term hopes to get more territory but they have been willing to compromise at key points the peel commission the u.n partition and so forth but uh arab leaders have not been willing to compromise and so the notion that you you know we start we tried diplomacy diplomacy so we have Now we have to do violence.

33:49Coleman Hughes:Even if you want to make a true version of that argument, you have to add that, you have to change it to become, we tried using diplomacy to get everything we wanted, to get 100 % of what we wanted. And when that failed, now we have to try violence to get 100 % of what we wanted. The notion of using diplomacy or whatever to get 50 % of what we want has been so taboo in the Arab community for such a long time. One of the lessons you could take from the Great Arab Revolt of the late 30s is that terrorism works because Palestinians had a goal of reducing Jewish immigration, and they met that goal.

34:38Coleman Hughes:Zooming out to the broader history of the conflict, to what extent do you think Palestinian terror has worked as a tactic? And to what extent do you think it works for them today? So I think in the period of the revolt, it certainly bore fruit. After the first six months of revolt, which was matched by a general strike, actually one of the longest general strikes anywhere in history, the Arab economy cut all the contact with the Jewish economy with the British administration. And after these six months, the British agreed to send a royal commission known to history as the Peel Commission after its chairman, Lord Peel.

35:25And this is the highest form of inquiry in the British empire. This is answering to the king directly. It's in the name of the king. And they send this delegation over here to the Holy Land. And they He interviewed dozens of prominent Jews and dozens of British administrators and eventually a number of prominent Arabs. I say eventually because the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who is the head of the Supreme Muslim Council and is by far and away the most prominent, the most powerful Arab and Muslim in Palestine and appointed by the British. The Mufti boycotts the proceedings completely because they refuse to stop Jewish immigration completely at the get-go.

36:15So he boycotts the proceedings until the 11th hour. And then finally, as they're about to leave, he says, okay, you know what, we'll talk. And so they speak to the Mufti and a few other prominent Arabs, and they go back to England and they write this very long report. And the report ultimately ends up being sort of a win for the Jews because it's the first time in history, it's the first time in Palestine's modern history that this notion of a two-state solution is put on the table, this idea of partition, this radical, dramatic, revolutionary solution to this burgeoning Jewish-Arab conflict, namely a two-state solution.

36:51This whole idea of a Jewish state, not just the Jewish national home as pledged by Balfour, but a state with everything that means. And so that is seen as a tremendous win by the Jews, even though the state only comprises about 17, 18 % of the land between the river and the sea. But nonetheless, the fact that the British send this commission is very much recognizing Arab grievances. And then the real undeniable achievement of the Arab revolt and Arab violence comes two years later in 1939 in the white paper. And so in mid-1939, this is obviously a crucial, critical, perilous time for the Jews of Europe.

37:34Britain decides to wash its hands of the whole Palestine affair. The war clouds are gathering over Europe. It seems to be a question of when and not if war with Hitler is going to come. The Brits have already lost some 200 plus servicemen in Palestine. There's a huge troop deployment to Palestine, the biggest between the world wars for Britain, and they decide it's not worth it anymore. They're particularly worried about getting back to India. They're particularly worried about Muslim opinion in British India. This is pre-partitioned India. It includes the lands we now call Pakistan and Bangladesh with their large Muslim populations, and they were worried that if the Muslims of India, of the empire, were angry about Palestine, that it would cause real problems for the war effort.

38:24And so they call a conference in London and they produce this white paper, this policy paper, this statement of policy, which basically says, we're done. Basically says this Balfour experiment has essentially reached its aim. There is a Jewish national home now of 300 ,000 people. And basically from here on out, any further, it sets a cap on Jewish immigration of 75 ,000 total over five years, which may sound like a lot, but consider that in 1935, 60 ,000 Jews came to mandate Palestine legally in one year. And now the limit is 75 ,000 over five years. And again, this is 1939 on the cusp of the Second World War.

39:11and as we know in hindsight, the Holocaust. And after that point, any further immigration would be contingent on Arab consent, which everyone understood would not be forthcoming. And so this is a tremendous win for the Arabs, but the Mufti, and so you have celebrations in the streets of Nazareth and Nablus, and it's seen as finally the sacrifices that the Arabs have themselves made in their revolt are finally seem to be vindicated. But the Mufti, this doesn't go far enough for the Mufti. The Mufti surprises all of his aides by rejecting this because instead of he doesn't want 75 ,000 Jews, he wants zero Jews.

39:53And he doesn't want independence in five or ten years. He wants it now. And so the Mufti, as many of your listeners know, will become infamous in the Second World War. He spends it in Berlin, meets with Himmler several times, meets famously with Hitler once. and really becomes the most important propagandist and recruiter for the Nazis and the Arab and Muslim world. All of this to say the violence of the Arab revolt yielded real gains for Arab Palestine, but their leadership was so intransigent, namely the Mufti, and so inept that they were not able to capitalize on, really on any of them.

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41:20Coleman Hughes:It's the highest-rated CBT-I program in the App Store. Thousands of people have used it to fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and actually wake up feeling refreshed. No medication required. It may even be covered by your insurance. For our listeners, Sleep Reset is offering a free seven-day trial available only at thesleepreset.com slash podcast. Start your first week of real clinician-designed insomnia treatment tonight. There's a couple nuggets in your book that were really interesting to me because they bear on this core question of what the Palestinian hatred and fighting of Jews in that land is really about.

42:04One thing it might be about is nationalist aspirations of the kind

42:10Coleman Hughes:that are recognizable all over the world. Groups of people that speak one language, feel like one nation, they want to have a nation state. Another thing it could be about is jihad. In other words, a religious motivation that comes from scripture, that comes from the idea that Jews and Christians are non-believers. They reject the prophet Muhammad, and that the proper political organization ordained by the Quran is a Muslim state where all other people of the book, Jews and Christians, live as dimmies, as second-class citizens. And that it's a further affront for Jews to have any level of control over anything that's been a Muslim land at any point.

42:59Coleman Hughes:And whether Palestinian terrorists or political groups are motivated by the former or the latter is pretty important because it's possible to compromise on nationalism, on territory, and so forth. It's much harder to compromise if the motivations are religious. Jihadism, as we've seen from ISIS to Al-Qaeda, is a totalizing philosophy that admits of no compromise, really. And I think there are interesting elements in your history that sort of bear on the question. One that I hadn't heard was that, I think this is like in 1919, the first Palestine Arab Congress happens. And the initial ask from the Arabs of Palestine is not to have a country called Palestine, but it's to be part of Syria, to be the southern part of Syria, right?

44:04Coleman Hughes:And this is interesting to me because it puts an outer bound on when true Palestinian nationalism, like a distinct Palestinian identity and political consciousness could have arisen. Obviously, this is very controversial territory for people because people on the pro-Palestine side of this debate want to say, like, Palestinian identity has been a thing as distinct from Arab identity for, you know, hundreds of years or something like that. But, you know, the fact that in 1919, the obvious ask from the Arabs of the region was no. I mean, there's an Ottoman, basically a county of the Ottoman state called Syria.

44:52Coleman Hughes:That's what we're a part of, and we want to be part of an Arab version of Syria.

45:00Coleman Hughes:What is your view on sort of when a distinct Palestinian national identity arose? And also, an even bigger question, to what extent is the anger directed at Jews a product of nationalism as opposed to religious belief? Yeah, so I think it's a plausible reading of history. I think it's the likeliest reading of history that if Zionism had not really happened, not really taken off, if the Jews hadn't come here in significant numbers, this land would almost certainly be part of a greater Syria. That was, as you mentioned, that was kind of the goal, the ask after the First World War. There was kind of a Syrian-Palestinian Congress.

45:51Even the Mufti, before he was the Mufti, in the riots of 1920 that I mentioned, when he was just a young man, he was actually convicted in absentia by the Brits for inciting, for riling up the crowd. and he kind of, he was holding up a portrait of King Faisal of Syria, the very short-lived Hashemite king of Syria, later the king of Iraq, and saying, this is your king, this is your king. And so it was, and even in the period of my book, 1936, 7, 8, 9, when the mufti rejects this two-state solution that I mentioned in 1937, when the Arab leadership rejects this proposal, the statement that they put out says, Palestine will be Arab, will be independent in a wider Arab federation, or something like that.

46:52That's almost an exact quote. Palestine will be Arab, will be free, and in an Arab confederation. So there were different, even as late as the 1930s, it wasn't entirely clear and obvious. There was not only one sort of voice in terms of what the Palestinian Arabs wanted. The unanimity or the near unanimity was, we could say unanimity, was against Zionism, was on arresting the growth of immigration and land purchases and any advance towards any kind of Jewish autonomy. Um, but so it was, it was quite clear what they were against, but the, the, but in terms of what the end goal was, it was not even as late as the thirties and arguably the forties, it was not at all, uh, clear.

47:46And so, uh, so look, I'm not, I don't mean to suggest that there was no notion at all of Palestinian identity before, before the forties or even before the British mandate. I mean, there was an Arabic newspaper here in Jaffa called Filastin before 1917. So clearly the word existed in some way, shape, or form. But typically this land, two Arabic speakers was typically referred to. It was typically, you know, if you were in Jerusalem, it was Jerusalem. If you were in Nablus, it was Nablus. But in general, this land was considered southern Syria for the most part. And there's even a somewhat well-known quote by a member of the Khalidi family, one of the major families, the major Arab, great Arab families of Jerusalem.

48:34Of course, Rashid Khalidi is a prominent professor at Columbia, of course. There's a member of the Khalidi family who complains to, I can't remember if it was complaining to Herzl or to the Brits. that I think it was to the Brits where he says, you know, this word Palestine was invented by the Zionists. For us, it was always, it was always Southern Syria. And so it's complicated, but the notion that there was a, there was a distinct Palestinian identity, you know, going back to the Canaanites, you know, I think is, is rather a stretch in terms of the, in terms of, I think, and I don't think Palestinian nationalism is alone in this.

49:16And that's so much of it develops in relation to something else and as a as a as a mere image or reaction to something else i don't think that necessarily delegitimizes it it's common actually by history it's it's extremely common and so um if you could even argue that's the norm in some ways but um uh but yeah so so that that's on that question and the question of religion look i think i think on the whole, there was a significant, there still is, but there was an even larger significant Christian Arab minority here during the mandate. Bethlehem was still majority Christian. Now it's very much a minority.

49:55And when you look at the sort of aggregate Christian attitude to the revolt, look, I never found a single instance of a Christian Arab taking up arms against the British or the Jews. It may have happened, but in five years of research, I never found a single instance. Which may come as news to anyone who's seen Anne-Marie Jasser's film Palestine 36, but I wrote a piece about that in the Free Press, but that's a different discussion, perhaps. In any case, in terms of violence, there was little to none on the part of Christians. What there was is there was certainly a significant element of the Christian community here, the Arab Christian community, that agreed with the political aims of the revolt.

50:47Namely, Palestine needs to be, whether it's in a confederation or independent, it needs to retain a strong Arab majority. I think there were probably significant other reserves of Christian Arabs here who probably would have wanted the British mandate to remain indefinitely as kind of a hedge, kind of a safety mechanism. There's a line in my book written by the editor of Filistin, the most prominent Arabic paper. It was a Christian guy named Yusuf Hanna. And this was some of the most illuminating material that I found in my research where these letters between him and the correspondent for the New York Times, who was a Jewish, Jerusalem-born, anti-Zionist, Arabic-speaking guy by the name of Joseph Levy.

51:36And they had very, very candid correspondence between them. At a certain point, this editor of Philistine writes to the Jewish New York Times correspondent and says, look, there's not an Arab worth his salt in Palestine who wants to be ruled by Jews, but there's no self-respecting Arab who wants to be ruled by bandits. And he's talking about the Mufti and he's talking implicitly about this radical, extremist, Islamist sort of philosophy and leadership exemplified by the Mufti. The Mufti is kind of really set the template for this kind of ideology and leadership, at least here. Starting in the 20s, he launched this thing called the Barak Campaign.

52:23Barak is the Arabic name for the Western Wall, in which he really promoted this idea that Al-Aqsa is in danger, the Jews want to rebuild the temple. And really, in many ways, this set the scene for the riots that I mentioned earlier of 1929 in Hemron. But really, the Mufti, long before, he was hanging out with Hitler and Himmler in Berlin was a completely committed anti-Semite by any, by, by any measure. Um, and so, um, yeah, so it's, it's, it's, uh, there was a strong, there was in the Arab revolt, you see a strong kind of melding of nationalist themes with Islamic themes. It's not to say, you know, George Antonius was Christian and he was very much ideologically on board with the revolt, arguably, and certainly against Zionism.

53:23So it is complicated, but it's really in this period that led by the Mufti, you have this melding of Arab nationalism with Islamism.

53:33Coleman Hughes:Another related point that I didn't know that I found in your book and thought was really interesting was, I think this is when the Peel Commission becomes official, the president of Lebanon at the time, who's a Christian, I think he congratulates, was it Wiseman? And he says, but he says, look, I can't congratulate you publicly because if that got out, the Christians in my country, Lebanon, would suffer a massacre. And so I guess, first of all, how seriously do you take that? Was he exaggerating for effect? Was he expressing a real fear? And if so, what does that say about the nature of the Arab Muslim grievances?

54:21Coleman Hughes:In other words, a lot of what you hear is that, well, these Jews had all, most of them had recently come from Europe. Most of them were, you know, to find their indigeneity, you'd have to go back a few thousand years. And there's a statute of limitations on that. Well, okay, put that to the side. Lebanese Christians, no one doubts their indigeneity. They're equally indigenous as the Arabs, if not maybe even more so. But the idea that they were under threat too, simply because they were a religious minority, dissects out the variable of recent arrival and paints a picture of the inherently vulnerable status of religious minorities in Arab Islamic polities.

55:11The relationship between the Christian leadership in Lebanon and the Zionist leadership before 1948 is really fascinating and very much underwritten about, as far as I can tell. But the instance that you mentioned was in 1937 when they published the Peel Report. And it's not just that Emil Ede, the president of Lebanon, sent Weizmann a telegram or something. They were together in the same hotel lobby in Paris, I think it was. And the president of Lebanon raised a toast to Weizmann and said to the future president of the Jewish state. And you also have reports from the British consulate in Beirut, in which they also confirmed that the Christian element, as they call it, in Lebanon is on the whole happy about this prospect of a Jewish state.

56:06It was kind of a surprise to everyone, to the Jews, to the Arabs, to the Christians in Lebanon, that the Peel proposal granted Galilee to the Jews, because at the time, Most of the Galilee was still overwhelmingly Arab in this period. So it was seen as kind of a gift to the Jews, kind of the agricultural hinterland for the future state. And so the Lebanese Christians, there were of course exceptions, but on the whole, were quite pleased at this notion of having a non-Muslim neighbor to their south. But as you say, they couldn't say so publicly. Even the Maronite Catholic Archbishop also sent Weizmann a letter of congratulations.

56:44You even had the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister of Lebanon, who was on very good relations with the Zionist leadership. And they actually coordinated the setting up of a settlement on the border, a Jewish settlement on the border of Lebanon that was all done in cooperation with the Sunni prime minister because there was this tremendous fear of Islamic extremism, particularly after the mufti. The mufti in 1937 flees Palestine because by this point, it's clear to everybody that he's pulling the strings of the revolt. So he flees the country and he ends up in Lebanon outside of Beirut. And so the Christian Lebanese, and not just the Christians, were extremely worried about this radicalism taking root there.

57:40Coleman Hughes:And this is at a time when the Christians would have been the majority of Lebanon, right? So there hasn't been a proper census in Lebanon since 1932, I believe. And even then, I'm not sure how accurate the numbers were. I think the consensus is that there was probably a Christian majority or at least plurality in that period. But, of course, the Christians in Lebanon were always the likeliest to emigrate elsewhere. And there are questions of birth rate, and I'm not a Lebanon expert by any stretch. But the Christian population of Lebanon, in many ways, it's fascinating. When you look at Lebanon, in many ways, it was sort of meant to be a Christian Israel, right?

58:20It was meant to be a Christian national home. It's not a perfect analog, but it's not a crazy thing to say. It was meant to be a sort of Christian national home for the Christians of that area, of Mount Lebanon and Beirut, but also just sort of the region. It was meant to be a refuge. and um you know any i think sometimes i think you know those people who call for a a you know right of return of for for millions of palestinian refugees and their descendants and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren or who call for a two-state solution sorry three state a one state solution between the river and the sea what they're really calling for is israel is for israel to look like lebanon namely a complete mess where everyone's at each other's throats where everything where politics are purely a sectarian affair, not to mention years of horrible, bloody civil war.

59:12I mean, that's the future that awaits a multi-ethnic mosaic where everyone's battling it out for supremacy because the demographics are so kind of splintered.

59:27Coleman Hughes:I think that's actually slightly even too optimistic because, you know, Lebanon, obviously it had, you know, a 15-year civil war or something like that. It was in the late 20th century, precisely along this Muslim-Christian split. But there, both sides, they weren't fighting over indigeneity. They were just fighting over, you know, basically political power sharing and so forth and having different interests. with Israel, I think the passions and the hatreds in some ways are even deeper because the Palestinian politics has elevated to a sacred dogma that no part of the land can be Jewish at all.

1:00:18And so you're right.

1:00:22Coleman Hughes:One of the things I found really flippant when debating people like Dave Smith and who agree with that is like, okay, if you were living somewhere and you were being asked to make a political choice that was very likely to end in civil war, because that's what happens in every neighboring country. Anytime there's political instability, anytime it's extremely sectarian. All of these countries, whether it's Sunni Shia or Christian Muslim exist on a knife's edge without adding the variable of, this is our land and these interlopers don't even belong here. It doesn't even need that variable to ignite in civil war, the Middle East.

1:01:03Coleman Hughes:Can you honestly say that you would just say, oh yeah, well, you know, sure. Okay. 40 % risk of civil war. Yeah, I'll take that. Because of some abstract philosophy about what people deserve. It's like, it's a display. And by the way, I would say the same thing from the Palestinian side. I'm not saying every Palestinian would agree or even most would agree. But if a Palestinian said, look, I think by rights it's all ours, but I understand if we live in a one-state reality, it's going to make the Syrian civil war look like child's play. We don't even have the state capacity to control the extreme element on our side if we wanted to, and I'm not sure that we want to.

1:01:51Coleman Hughes:And my children could end up dying in that war. I mean, why would I mandate that? Why would I go charge headfirst into a reality where my whole family could die because of an abstract notion of justice that I've been sold? I think it's, you know, I don't really forgive anyone. Sorry, I forgive people in the conflict with skin in the game, their opinions and prejudices. But people living in the West, thousands of miles away, with no skin in the game, to say, well, like, obviously, obviously they've got to be like Lebanon. And if they're not, you're a monster. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

1:02:32Coleman Hughes:And it's really bothersome from a perspective of, I guess, virtue signaling is sort of the word. right? You're saying that because it makes you look good. And you literally couldn't give a shit if this led to a million deaths, because it's thousands of miles away. It's not you. I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, no debate there. Okay, so I guess that gets to the end of my questions about your book. My last question is, what are you thinking about these days? I assume you're paying attention to the latest news, the prospects of a true peace, the splitting of Gaza between Hamas control and Israeli control.

1:03:22Coleman Hughes:What's your optimistic outcome over the next six months to a year? And what's your pessimistic outcome? Yeah, it's a tricky one. It's hard to be optimistic when it comes to this region, when it comes to the prospects of any kind of Israeli-Palestinian accord. Certainly when it comes to the Gaza Strip, I'm old enough to remember the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. I was already working in journalism at the time when Israel pulled out from Gaza in 2005, when the Bush administration encouraged or sort of pushed Israel to sort of concede to or accept the idea of Palestinian elections, which produced the Hamas victory in 2007.

1:04:19Of course, Hamas forcibly pushed out Fatah and the PA from Gaza. I remember all of that. And I remember the looting of the greenhouses that were left behind by the Israeli settlers there. This is not ancient history. It's very hard to be optimistic, let alone the horrors that we've seen on October 7th. And of course, the horrors we've seen in this Gaza war over the last two plus years. So with all of that throat clearing having been made, it's like things can only, things can only, I was going to say things can only get better, but I'm not even sure that's the case. I would like to think that all of these massive pledges of billions of dollars, that they actually happen, that they come to fruition, that there's investment in Gaza, that there's some kind of, that this technocratic committee can somehow create a better horizon for the strip.

1:05:36It's hard for me to see from this vantage point, if I'm honest with you. It's hard for me to see how the sticking point really, the bottom line, even with the most complicated issues in this part of the world, is typically a bottom line. And I think the bottom line in Gaza is disarmament. And I've really struggled disarming Hamas. There are estimates that Hamas has, the Israeli estimate is that Hamas has 60 ,000 Kalashnikovs, for example. And Hamas is essentially, I don't see a world in which they agree to give those up. I really don't. And, you know, there are those who say there's even a member of the technocratic committee.

1:06:23The most pro-Hamas member of the technocratic committee is the guy who's in charge of tribal affairs. Anyway, long story. But this guy said just yesterday, he said, look, these AKs, these Kalashnikovs are for self-defense. They're not. They can't do any real harm. Well, of course, on October 7th, much of the death and destruction, the massacres and the atrocities were conducted with exactly these kinds of weapons. And it's exactly these kinds of weapons with which Hamas both executes its own people in Gaza and just keeps its iron grip on the territory. So I think it'll ultimately come down to disarmament.

1:07:01So far, no country other than Israel has proved itself willing to risk its own soldiers to disarm any Hamas members, let alone tens of thousands of them. So I think that's the bottom line. And I don't really see how you square that circle. So it kind of, at this point, the most, the likeliest scenario that I see, unfortunately, is that Hamas continues to be the most powerful actor in the half of the Gaza Strip that it still controls where 99 % of Gatlins live.

1:07:35Coleman Hughes:And as Haviv Rektigor put it, I think there's nothing you can build in Gaza that Hamas won't either unbuild, destroy, or repurpose for terror. So as long as that's true, it is hard to be optimistic. And as happy as I was to see to see that Trump was able to get a quote-unquote peace plan or really more of a ceasefire. I don't think people should be misled by his salesmanship about, you know, what's likely to happen here or what he achieved, you know. So the saga continues. There'll be more to talk about. In the meantime, I think there's a lot in your book, Palestine 1936, The Great Arab Revolt, that people won't have heard or read in other books.

1:08:23Coleman Hughes:So I really recommend that they get it. And you tell the history in a very engaging, character-focused way as well. So I really recommend people get that book. Follow you online, Oren Kessler. Thank you so much for coming on my show. Thank you so much, Coleman. It's a pleasure and an honor. Thanks so much. Now, finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate health care and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers, and this is the big thing. Compare costs up front. The big picture? More transparent pricing benefits everyone.

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