296. Ottoman Gaza: Gunpowder Conquests & Rising Nationalism (Part 6)

22:39But he was able, through his access to the cotton of the Galilee, to amass tremendous wealth. And with that wealth, he extended his power over more and more territory. He makes the port city of Acre his outlet to the Mediterranean world. And from there, he is able to build a mini empire around much of that southwestern part of Syria that would come to be called Palestine. First time we really see it separate out under a leadership, he will ultimately fall and be overtaken by a mamluk whose name was Ahmed Pasha, nicknamed Al-Jazar the Butcher, because he very much in the line of tyrants of the 20th century, like Saddam Hussein, relied on massive violence to generate total submission through fear.

23:31And Ahmed Pasha Al-Jazar was to rule in the last quarter of the 18th century on the back of what Zahir al-Omar had created and would die peacefully in his bed, having massacred his way into a position of power and really separating Palestine out.

23:48William Dalrymple:I'm quite transfixed with this idea of white gold coming from this region. But are we then also talking about a select cadre of incredibly wealthy people and then an enormous peasant class? I'm just trying to get an image of what people experienced. You're right to point out that most producers living through this time just worked to the bone and enjoyed very little benefit from it. The benefit went to a very small group who established themselves as the rulers and then had a court around them whose members would be made wealthy and then broken by the powers that be. Both Zahar el-Omar and Jazar Pasha allowed their retinue to get rich, but then basically shook them down when it served their interest and demonstrated that no one was powerful except for the tyrant.

24:43Anita Anand:Now, this, of course, is a very important and controversial period, because in some accounts, we have this idea that Ottoman Palestine is in decline. It's sort of ruination. And you get that in some travelers accounts. People like Mark Twain paint a picture of this sort of ancient landscape of crumbling ruins. And that's very much there also in the tone mood in those famous David Roberts prints that you see all over hotels in the Middle East of, you know, a couple of Bedouin in front of an old Roman ruin with palm trees and the whole thing looking very rural and crumbly. The picture you're painting of this sort of nascent capitalist economy with export of cotton and people at the top certainly making money seems to be a bit at odds with that.

25:25There is a tendency to talk about Ottoman decline. And of course, historians hate it because it reduces history to this sort of rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, when really what makes history interesting to us all are the evolutions that are taking place. And so what I would say is happening in Palestine in the 18th century is that you have a phenomenon of peripheral regions of the Ottoman Empire gaining power at the expense of the capital, Istanbul. And so it's what some refer to as a period of decentralization. The Ottoman center is losing control over provincial territories. It's not just Palestine.

26:01Damascus is going through this. Mosul and Iraq is going through this. In eastern Anatolia, the Kurdish Derabays. So it is a phenomenon of the 18th century and maybe a reflection of the weakening power of the mature Ottoman Empire to control all of its provinces. But the dynamism of the history of these regions is, in defiance of all claims, of decline.

26:24Anita Anand:And we talked about cotton. The other thing that gets going at this period is Jaffa oranges, isn't it? This is the time when Jaffa oranges are being planted and being exported. Well, presumably they were being planted at this time, but they really only come onto my historic map in the 19th century as a real commodity of the Mediterranean trade. And an orange is only so marketable as it can be taken from the tree to the market. The local markets can only eat so many oranges. So you really want to know when they're able to create and ship oranges to Europe. And that's going to be in the age of steamshipping in the 19th century.

26:59William Dalrymple:I'm really interested in how as this region starts to have autonomy and wealth, and albeit it's not the trickle down theory ain't trickling so much, but it's there. The wealth is there in this region. But how are other countries around the world reacting? So, I mean, in the 19th century, you've got the Crimean War, you've got Europe trying to make friends wherever it can, different opposing groups trying to get their fingers in different pies. Is this place on the map? Even though the Ottomans supposedly are ruining everything, are people trying to make deals with the local leaders here? Well, definitely as we move from the 18th century cotton trade into the 19th century, you're going to see not just Palestine, but the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean drawn into massive economic and social change.

27:46One is going to be just in trade as industrial Europe is producing far more than its own markets can consume and is looking for exterior markets and the Eastern Mediterranean is right there. So the dumping of industrial goods is changing the nature of trade and commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's also going to be a time in which the European powers begin to play their imperial politics. Napoleon's going to invade Egypt and march through Gaza in 1798 to 1801. In the aftermath of that, you have more and more European diplomatic and consular attention to the region. You have the beginning of European missionaries coming to the region.

28:31Through faster transport, more and more pilgrims coming to the region. The Holy Lands really begins to attract growing interest from common people. And that is going to be accelerated by the work of a good Briton named Thomas Cook, who in the 1860s is going to take advantage of steamshipping to extend the privilege of the Grand Tour, formerly just the bastion of the aristocracy to any middle class tourist who wants to go across the classical world into the Eastern Mediterranean.

29:01William Dalrymple:Yeah. And if those of you are scratching your head listening to this going, oh, I wonder if that's that Thomas Cook, the one that does the high street, yes, that Thomas Cook. This is the whole origin story of the Thomas Cook story. But being somebody who's very interested in politics, I'm most interested in diplomatic efforts, material links and having industrial relations. That's one thing that happens behind closed doors. What with diplomatic missions? Would European nations have sent a diplomat to a city saying, this is somebody who's going to contact Palestine? How did the rest of Europe view this region, which involved the cities that you've talked to, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Gaza, Would they have seen it as one contiguous power that they would have to send one person to who would umbrella the whole region?

29:50William Dalrymple:Or how did it work? So diplomatic relations with the provinces of the Ottoman Empire evolved over the 19th century, and European powers got a more extensive presence in the major towns and cities of the Ottoman East. So in the course of the 19th century, you'll see consuls going from Cairo, Istanbul, maybe Izmir, to begin to dot the map of the eastern Mediterranean, Beirut, Jerusalem, later in Damascus. What's driving the extension of the European diplomatic presence is going to be either trade or else it's going to be pilgrims and tourists. I mean, basically, countries only send diplomats to places where they have interests, and that's the nature of their interests in the Eastern Mediterranean.

30:35But it just grows so much in the course of the 19th century, and so too does the diplomatic footprint as not just Britain and France, but Prussia, Genoa, Venice, Russia, Greece, they're all there. Even the little United States will begin entering the game sort of in the 1840s as American missionaries begin to flood into Lebanon and Syria. So this will be the driver of the foreign interventions in this region. But at base, it always harkens back to the holy places, the crusades, that legacy, they're very conscious of all of that.

31:10William Dalrymple:But Eugene, I'm just really fascinated. Just say on Napoleon's desk, there is a map unrolled and all the European powers are deciding where to send our man in Haifa or whatever. Are they looking at a region that is marked Palestine or Philistina? What is this place that they are sending their diplomatic representatives to? I think you would find that most 18th, 19th century maps would have Palestine marked on the Eastern Mediterranean in big, bold letters spanning an undefined territory, but with Jerusalem sort of in its middle, maybe where the E of Palestine goes or something, the same way that you'd have Syria written across parts to the north of there.

31:55These were Roman toponyms. They were the ways in which Europeans conceived of the Eastern Mediterranean. And in a way, those Roman toponyms were also absorbed into Arabic. So the word Palestina from the Latin becomes Philistine in Arabic, and will be reintegrated into European usage as Palestine. And that toponym definitely features on modern maps from the early modern period.

32:23Anita Anand:Obviously, it's a highly contentious, but how much are the people who are living in Gaza, or in Jerusalem or in Nablus, are they thinking of themselves as Nablusi and just inhabitants of their town? Or would you have found people in the 19th century who described themselves as Philistine, as Palestinian? So the 19th century is key to this question. I would say before the 19th century, you were in a pre-nation state world where people simply did not go around describing themselves as national figures. They would not be, you know, Italians in 1710, right? They would be Florentines or Venetians.

33:01William Dalrymple:Or Genoans, yeah. Or Genoans. And the same applied to the Eastern Mediterranean. If you were to identify, it would be to a town, or if you were from a big city like Damascus, to a quarter. Or it might be a tribe if you were from a rural community or a village, but not a national unit. But that nation state idea and the whole political ideology of nationalism catches on like a contagion in the course of the 19th century. And by the time you get to the end of the 19th century, when people in the southern Syrian regions that come to be known as Palestine describe themselves, they will begin using the word Filestini, Palestinian.

33:40It is the beginning of an awareness of a separate identity, which is still proto-national. But I think for 20th century Palestinians, it demonstrates the deep root of their national identity. And so it becomes quite a contentious thing. When does the Palestinian identity emerge? I would say that that would be something that's happening in the course of the 19th century. And not until the end of the 19th century could we really see people using the place named Palestine as a personal identity marker.

34:08Anita Anand:We're going to take a break in a minute. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how, as well as the European consuls who are now looking at the holy places with Christian eyes, There is increasing attention on the whole Jewish identity of the Holy Land, and East European Jews in particular are beginning now to emigrate and the birth of the Zionist movement. That's all after the break.

34:37Anita Anand:this episode is brought to you by my favorite london review of books in our journey to unpick the complexities of the past it's clear that history is not a straight line it's a vast intricate and complex tapestry to truly understand a political revolution or the fall of a dynasty you have to build up the picture piece by piece you need diary entries and poetry that capture the scale of emotions the secret correspondence of a diplomat and the sharp discerning insights of the era's great thinkers. And it's this art of the deep dive that the London Review of Books champions. They bring together the world's leading thinkers and interrogate a rich range of topics through long form essays.

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37:09Anita Anand:Welcome back. Now, we're going to deal in this half with the rise of political Zionism in the late 19th century. But before we go into that political movement, Eugene, will you paint us a picture of the Jewish community in Palestine? They're well integrated. They've been there for centuries. They share many village shrines with their Muslim and Christian neighbors. But the numbers are not huge, are they? Was it 5 % to 10 % at this period? That's right, Willie. And it's really important to remember that there was an indigenous Jewish community in Palestine before Zionism. And they were concentrated in the cities of rabbinic learning, such as Safad, Tiberias, Jerusalem, Hebron.

37:48and while these communities were old and deep-rooted, they really didn't extend much further. I think there might have been a synagogue in Gaza, but there really wasn't a Jewish population of any significance in Gaza itself, unlike the cities to the north.

38:03Anita Anand:So take us through the beginnings of the Zionist movement. Where does it begin? What's inspiring it? And give us a picture of the pogroms and the anti-Semitism which are driving it in Europe. Well, Zionism is really a creation of the push and pull factors of the 19th century. And I mean, I think many people have been pulled to the Holy Land. You had Jewish pilgrims coming for religious pilgrimage, many of them to die in the Holy Land. This is part of the Russian diplomatic presence in Jerusalem dating back to the early 19th century. Then you had, from the same Russian Empire, the horrors of pogroms in 1881, in which the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire were subjected to brutal and terrible violence.

38:49And this drove many to seek to flee the Russian Empire. And this increased those who were taking the path to the Holy Land for religious purposes.

38:59William Dalrymple:And is it some kind of religious mandate? You mentioned sort of to die in the Holy Land. Is that a religious mandate? Where does that come from? My understanding is that for many observant Jews, the annual plea that next year in Jerusalem settled every Passover was realized by pilgrimage. And so this goal that next year they would celebrate Passover in Jerusalem has driven observant Jews to seek a chance before they died to go to Palestine. But with the turn of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, I think it drove a larger and larger number of Russian Jews to make the move, and they found that there was a support infrastructure among Jewish philanthropy in Western Europe.

39:42Certainly, the Montefiore efforts around the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the schools that they created across the Eastern Mediterranean for Jewish communities to have access to a modern education. And indeed, the Rothschilds with the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association were there to support the acquisition of land and to help the colonization of Jews in what were then the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1880s, even before you had the emergence of political Zionism, you had an infrastructure, you had push and pull factors that were leading to a rise in Russian and European Jews choosing to migrate to Palestine.

40:23Anita Anand:You also have Western politicians like Lord Palmerston, who are advocates of the Jews returning to Palestine for political reasons. Palmerston writes that the Jews could be useful in buttressing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, thus helping to accomplish the key object of British foreign policy in the area. What's going on there? Well, I mean, I'm going to argue it's the same motive that lies behind the Balfour Declaration when we get to that, this notion that one might be able to benefit from a Jewish community in Palestine to advance distinctly national or imperial interests is something that links Palmerston to Balfour.

40:59But more than that, I think that the anti-Semitism of Western Europe, enshrined around the Jewish question, had many in European countries looking to Palestine as a place in which perhaps they could encourage the migration of their own Jewish communities as a way of solving their own anti-Semitic problems. This will, I think, re-emerge as one of the drivers around the time of the Dreyfus Affair in France. And I think it's one of the push factors that made many politically engaged Jews who began to take from the Jewish question and its underlying anti-Semitism, the idea that they were a distinct nation who would never really be accepted and assimilated into Europe and to seek, through a national movement, national revival in their biblical homeland, Palestine.

41:51That's, I think, the background to the emergence of a political movement known as Zionism.

41:55William Dalrymple:We have talked about the Bar for Declaration on this podcast before. What we haven't looked at is actually other countries and what is going on there. In the early 1800s, you have someone called François-René de Chateaubriand who is a writer, a politician, somebody who has the ear of Napoleon Bonaparte through his writings. But he says something where he says, look, we got to help the Jews and he calls them, I mean, this is a direct quote, I believe from him, the legitimate masters of Judea. So how much does that influence the thinking of France? We've talked a lot about the thinking of Great Britain and we'll come back to that.

42:32William Dalrymple:But what about France? What is going on there? Again, I think you'll find that you had many influential people spouting on the subject without necessarily taking significant political action. So there is this contrast in the emergence of, let us say, political Zionism between what are realistic nationalisms, where a people is on a land and seeks to have their own self-determination and sovereignty, which is going to be nationalism in Germany or Italy. And Zionism is trying to unite the Jewish people who are in diaspora, spread across four continents. The dream of Zionism versus the reality of nationalism will always be a tension.

43:12And people like Chateaubriand, Palmerston, Disraeli, were all spouting ideas without them having any realistic political outcomes.

43:22Anita Anand:Take us now to the early Zionist organizations and to Theodore Herzl. Who is he and what is his ideas? Herzl is, in a sense, the first intellectual to harness the push and pull factors that we have been describing into a distinct political agenda to create a Jewish land in Palestine. Born in 1860, he's going to write influential tracts, der Judenstaat, or the Jewish state, which will set out this agenda. And then as a journalist, he's driven to see the need for a Jewish nation state by his own realization that there is no solution to European antisemitism. And for him, I think it was the Dreyfus case, a case in the aftermath of the 1870 war.

44:11William Dalrymple:Yeah, let's talk about that. For those who don't know what the Dreyfus there was about, just give us a little thumbnail, would you? Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French army who was scapegoated for the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, as though Jews had been in some way responsible for a French defeat that was a national humiliation. And in his trial, which was, by all measures of justice, unjust, this was a story that was covered by Herzl as a journalist, it was the moment of awakening for Theodor Herzl that there was no future for Jews in Europe, even in post-revolutionary France, Republican France, with its philosophy, its ideologies of equality.

44:53William Dalrymple:Herzl writes in his journalism, as you say, about what he saw with his own eyes there around the court as the Dreyfus Favre was being tried. And he writes about sort of mobs sort of shouting death to the Jew. And that certainly has an enormous impact on him and what he thinks the future of European Jewry will be. And for him, the future of European Jewry was only secure in a Jewish state. And the natural place for that Jewish state was in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, Palestine.

45:20Anita Anand:He's responsible for the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Tell us about that, Eugene. Well, here again, we see the organizational ability of the journalist to be able to rally a group of fellow believers to debate the issues of Jewish nationalism. And it was a major turning point. In a sense, Jews in Europe had been struggling to assimilate and be accepted as British, as German, as French. The idea of claiming a separate Jewish national identity was going in the face of all those efforts epitomized by Benjamin Disraeli, who was the first Jewish prime minister of Britain, who saw in his arrival both as a member of parliament and later as prime minister, the possibility for assimilation and integration.

46:09To then turn around and say, actually, we as Jews are a separate nation, seemed to be going with the arguments of the anti-Semites. And it was a very difficult challenge for the Zionist movement to try and gain powerful and influential people to support their political agenda of trying to create a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. And that's what the first World Zionist Congress held in 1897 seeks to do. And it will be the beginning of political Zionism and its efforts to secure a broad base of support in the capitals of Europe.

46:43Anita Anand:Now, what does Herzl think about the Arabs already living in Palestine? Is he aware that they are 80 % or 90 % of the population? Does he think they're going to live together alongside each other? What's his vision for this? Well, Herzl's quite aware that there is already a population in Palestine. There was a delegation that was sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations, and they reported back that the bride, meaning Palestine, is beautiful, but married to another man, meaning inhabited by another people. So they were well aware. And I think Herzl's solution was, go gently, give push to the local populations to clear the land to enable the space for Jewish colonization, and that this needed to be done with the cooperation rather than coercion, buy up the land and then push the people off it.

47:34But he was clearly looking for an incremental driving of the local population out to make space for a Jewish national home.

47:41Anita Anand:There's an entry in his diary, which is often quoted in the history books, and it's Herzl's diary from the 12th of June, 1895. This is just his own thoughts written into his own journal. This is not something that's published. He writes, we must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side, but the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

48:18Anita Anand:Is there much of that sort of thing said publicly, or is that just private thoughts? I believe that Herzl's thoughts were still at this point kept private. I don't think that talk of the expulsion of the local population would have earned the Zionist movement much support. And remember, at this point, the Zionist organization is reaching out to the Ottoman an empire to try and petition for the creation of Jewish colonies. Without official permission, you have the Rothschild-supported PICA organization funding the purchase of lands for the creation of colonization. Since 1882, you've had an uptick in the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, creating towns and farming communities in land supported by Jewish philanthropy.

49:04So there is this notion that you can ask for permission, but then you run the risk of being denied, or you can simply go about buying land and encouraging settlement and building up a Jewish presence in Palestine. That would be the basis for a claim to a state. I think that that is the route that Herzl, until his death in 1904, was to pursue.

49:25William Dalrymple:And Herzl dies at a very young age. I find this astonishing, actually, that he was only 44 when he died. He died of heart problems, a heart attack, potentially. Many around him said, this is a man who worked himself to death, but his death didn't mean the end of his ideas. Let's go to 1904 and the founding of Tel Aviv. I know this is a series about Gaza, but this is an interesting step on the way to telling the story of Gaza too. What happens in 1904 and why is it so seismic in the region? Well, in a sense, Tel Aviv is going to stand out as the first genuinely Jewish city to be built in the land of Palestine.

50:05Until this point, you could talk about settlements that would become the kibbutzes of popular imagination. But the idea of a modern Jewish city where there had been no previous Palestinian town, this is to the north of Jaffa. It was on beach land. It was laid down with broad avenues. It's called the White City for its Bauhaus architecture. It was a distinctly Jewish articulation of urban space. And in that stood out from everything surrounding it in Palestine. This was perhaps the boldest cultural claim of a Jewish presence in Palestine yet undertaken. And that's still at a time where the presence of Jews in Palestine was a distinct minority and with no official support from any power, least of all the Ottoman Empire.

50:54Anita Anand:1904, you have the founding of Tel Aviv. Now, in 1908, you get an incident of serious violence breaking out now between the new Zionist settlers and the inhabitants of Jaffa, the Jaffa riots of 1908. What's going on there, Eugene? Again, relatively speaking, a small scuffle, but it does lead to fatalities, and it demonstrates the growing tension between the local Palestinian Arab population and the Jewish immigrants, who, by the beginning of the 20th century, are already politically motivated. They're there with an ideology. They are seen by the Palestinian Arab community as a threat. So members of the Ottoman parliament from Palestinian jurisdictions have tried to raise the issue of Jewish immigration in the Ottoman parliament to try and get the government to stop allowing the flow of migrants.

51:49They're increasingly seen as a threat to the status quo. And with such intense tensions, it was unsurprising that you would have the outbreak of street fighting and riots that would lead to violence.

52:04William Dalrymple:I mean, just sort of highlighting what the violence is, you've got Jews attacked during the Purim celebrations. You have one Arab who's then stabbed to death. Then barely months later, you have four Jews who were killed by locals for what they describe as nationalist motives, the spiral starts small, but then starts getting rapidly larger and larger. You said just a moment ago what the reaction was of Palestinian Muslims. Do we have any record of Palestinian Jews who've lived there, as you say, for centuries? What they are thinking about what's going on here? Well, the relationship between the indigenous Jewish community of Palestine and the new immigrants is quite an interesting one because the local community was not itself ideologically motivated.

52:50Their presence in Palestine dated back generations, and they were not politically so much as religiously motivated in most cases. And they saw their place in local societies having been long established by the norms governing relations between Muslim, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The European immigrants were much more assertive. They were much more politically engaged. And so there's a tension between the local and immigrant Jewish populations of Palestine that meant that they weren't all working towards the same goals. And I don't think that the indigenous Jewish population was really drawn into the activism of the new immigrants.

53:32Anita Anand:So we now have, at this point, just after the the founding of Tel Aviv, and the Jaffa riots, we have a newspaper founded in Jaffa in 1911 from a pair of Christians called Isa el-Isa, who's joined by his paternal cousin Yusuf el-Isa. And this newspaper is called, significantly enough, Philistine. Is that something that is significant in itself, Eugene, the title? Here again, it's the beginning of people beginning to identify a distinct geographic place with a political identity. And as we said before, in an earlier age, perhaps a town identity would have been the most that one might have recognized.

54:15But seeing Philistine, Palestine, as a common territory of the readership of that newspaper, which was not confined to Jaffa, which would have been sold in Jerusalem and in Haifa and down in Gaza. And in a sense, it's part of the awakening of a distinct notion of a Palestinian identity. But remember, still within an Ottoman context, where independence from the Ottoman Empire would have been beyond the imaginings of your average Arab citizen. They claimed a distinct place identity, but it wasn't yet, let us say, a nationalist identity. But certainly, a step in that proto-nationalism that would emerge after the creation of a mandate after the First World War.

55:01So in 1914, now this is just on the eve of the First World War breaking out, which is what

55:09Anita Anand:we're going to be discussing, and the siege of Gaza, which is going to be dominating our next episode. Just before that, Philistine discusses this issue that we were just talking about. And And this is a quote from the newspaper in 1914. Ten years ago, the Jews were living as Ottoman brothers, loved by all the Ottoman races, living in the same quarters, their children going to the same schools. The Zionists put an end to all that and prevented any intermingling with indigenous population. They boycotted the Arabic language and the Arab merchants and declared their intention of taking over the country from its inhabitants.

55:42Anita Anand:On the eve of the First World War, Eugene, is that now something that people are really beginning to talk about across Palestine, or is it just a small group of intellectuals in Jaffa?

55:52William Dalrymple:And is it true? I mean, what is the veracity of it? You say, you know, this is the start of a nationalism movement. Is it based in truth or something else? In a sense, Palestinian nationalism was disadvantaged in the face of Zionism, in that Zionism was a well-articulated ideology. And the people who subscribed to Zionism knew what their program was. Palestinians living under Ottoman rule in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, were not allowed to have a separatist nationalist ideology. The Ottoman states clamped down on any expression of separatism. They didn't want to see the balkanization of the Arab world as they'd witnessed in their European provinces.

56:32Anita Anand:In Bulgaria and in Greece, which by this stage have just broken off because of nationalist movements. So Greece was the first one to go. Greece went already in 1820, and the progressive breakaway of all the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans was exactly what they're trying to avoid in Palestine, and why the Ottomans were actually so hostile to Zionism, because they saw Zionism as a movement that was trying to separate a territory from Ottoman rule. So in a sense, Zionism, fully-fleshed nationalist ideology, Palestinians have no scope to create a nationalist movement in their own right. They're part of the Ottoman Empire, but they feel under threat.

57:13And they see the Zionists coming in growing numbers. They are assertive. They have the support of European philanthropy to help them buy land, to build towns and villages, and to create a bridgehead for more Jews to follow. And all I would say is at this point, you're still dealing with a Jewish community in Palestine. That is absolutely tiny. You're still 4 % to 5 % of the total population. So it's not as though the numbers are the threat, but it is the political agenda and the increasing power of land purchase that they were mobilizing that is going to go a long way to creating tensions between the communities of Palestine.

57:53William Dalrymple:So here we are, simmering tensions on the eve of World War I. Join us in the next episode when we see what that cataclysm of international warfare will visit on this region. And if you want to listen to that Empire episode with Eugene right now, just head to empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com to sign up to our membership, really for the price of a fancy coffee a month. So that's empirepoduk.com. You get early access, bonus episodes and a weekly newsletter. For now, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.

58:26Anita Anand:Goodbye from me, William Durimple.