The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 07, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #3 ｜ The Geopolitics Of Israel


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

134.38742

Word Count

2,411

Sentence Count

114

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

24


Summary

In this episode, we discuss the geopolitical and historical background of the state of Israel, why it was created, and why the West supports it, and where is this conflict is going? As you can see, these are simple questions with easy answers.


Transcript

00:00:00.240 Hello, and welcome to the second episode of RealPolitik with me, your host, Firas Mardad.
00:00:05.340 Today, I wanted to talk about something cheerful, not controversial, and very easy.
00:00:10.040 Israel, the geopolitical reasons for the existence of Israel,
00:00:13.920 why we have these seemingly endless wars between Israel and its neighbors,
00:00:19.220 why was the state of Israel created, why does the West support Israel,
00:00:23.480 and where is this conflict going?
00:00:25.860 As you can see, very easy questions, nothing too complex.
00:00:29.260 So let's start.
00:00:30.540 The easiest play to begin always is the map.
00:00:33.680 And so I thought I'd pull up a map of the Middle East and show you where Israel is,
00:00:37.820 and that might help us understand the importance of its location,
00:00:42.020 and therefore its importance to both its allies and its enemies.
00:00:46.000 The first point to make is that Israel is sitting in what is literally the holy land,
00:00:51.820 land that is holy to all three religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
00:00:56.160 Jerusalem is the place where Christ died, obviously.
00:01:01.980 The West Bank and Jerusalem are the center of the Jewish faith.
00:01:04.940 Jerusalem is also, according to Muslims, the place from where the prophet of Islam supposedly
00:01:10.560 went up to heaven to speak to the prophets and to God.
00:01:15.560 It's a particularly important location for all three religions.
00:01:20.140 It didn't always have that much significance, but it's been a site for pilgrimage for the
00:01:26.640 Christians for a very long time, and that gives it an emotive importance that we will mention
00:01:35.220 and discuss a little bit in this episode.
00:01:37.480 But now let's move to the geopolitical importance.
00:01:40.860 Geopolitically, Israel is sitting between Syria or greater Syria, including Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon,
00:01:48.740 and Palestine itself, or Israel itself, and Egypt.
00:01:52.760 This makes it prime real estate, really, because the way that empires have often developed in the region
00:01:59.380 is by tying together the population and agricultural potential of both Egypt and Syria, creating a great power.
00:02:09.380 Most Muslim states that were able to threaten the West, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate,
00:02:16.420 the Ottomans, these managed to control both Egypt and Syria.
00:02:21.660 And any political entity that manages to control both under the banner of Islam instantly becomes a threat to the West.
00:02:31.460 So the solution, so to speak, was to create a blocker state in between Syria and Egypt
00:02:40.840 that would be by default allied with the West,
00:02:45.000 and that would therefore prevent the emergence of a unified polity, political entity,
00:02:52.200 that then becomes a threat through the Eastern Mediterranean to first Cyprus and then Greece and then Italy.
00:02:59.060 This is the strategic logic behind it.
00:03:02.220 Around the end of the Ottoman Empire, when the Ottoman Empire was in decline in the late 19th century
00:03:09.240 and before it ended completely in 1918, different empires had taken a stake in different communities
00:03:17.720 that were subject to the Ottomans.
00:03:20.580 So the French presented themselves as the protectors of Catholicism.
00:03:24.700 This meant that they had influence in, obviously, Jerusalem itself,
00:03:29.580 but especially in Lebanon, where the Maronite community remains steadfastly Catholic
00:03:36.520 and an important ally, natural ally of France and of any Catholic power, really.
00:03:43.240 The Russians, for their part, were allied with the Orthodox Christian community.
00:03:48.600 These were dispersed throughout the cities of Syria and Lebanon.
00:03:53.020 Unlike the Maronites, which mostly took to the mountains,
00:03:55.660 the Orthodox tended to remain in the cities.
00:03:57.700 So the British found themselves not really having a significant ally.
00:04:02.360 So there were periods where they were allied with the Druze in Lebanon,
00:04:07.280 but then the rise of nationalism imposed the rise of the Jewish question.
00:04:14.180 The rise of nationalism and the rise of liberalism really imposed the Jewish question.
00:04:20.300 And it was basically as follows.
00:04:22.580 When Europe was very obviously ruled as Christian Europe,
00:04:29.420 with a very strong connection between the state and religion,
00:04:34.220 the Jews were seen as outsiders.
00:04:36.440 And as a result, they were given certain spaces that became ghettos or that were ghettoized.
00:04:42.040 And in those spaces, they were isolated from the rest of society.
00:04:46.760 But with the rise of the idea of the nation-state,
00:04:50.620 there emerged a problem.
00:04:51.800 There were these citizens that belonged, in their view, to a different nation, to Israel,
00:04:58.220 who spoke the same language of everybody around them, but were different.
00:05:03.960 And it became hard to figure out a way to deal with Jews in general,
00:05:10.960 especially as the emancipation of the Jews in Europe progressed
00:05:14.920 with the ideas of liberalism and nationalism,
00:05:17.780 especially as they were allowed into new professions,
00:05:22.160 especially as, in some cases, they became pretty important families in finance and in mining and in other industries.
00:05:31.620 And so, what was to be done with those Jews?
00:05:35.480 Were they to be treated as equal citizens,
00:05:38.440 even though they often had families in hostile countries,
00:05:44.600 say, a French-Jewish family with a presence in Germany or with a presence in Britain?
00:05:50.020 Or were they to be treated as a separate nation?
00:05:54.140 And it wasn't clear, really, what the answer was.
00:05:58.100 And so, as Britain became in an important position to influence the Middle East,
00:06:03.180 this question of what to do with Europe's Jews
00:06:07.460 also began to have a strategic, imperial answer.
00:06:14.100 And that answer was,
00:06:15.900 why not help them migrate to the Middle East,
00:06:20.140 and then they would have no choice but to be allied with Protestant Britain?
00:06:24.620 It helped that there was some religious support for the idea
00:06:28.540 among some evangelical Protestant communities.
00:06:33.300 Not all Protestants supported this idea, obviously.
00:06:36.600 And it helped that it suited Britain's interests
00:06:39.540 to try to establish some kind of presence in the region.
00:06:44.640 And so, during World War I,
00:06:46.260 given the importance of Jewish families in finance and in mining
00:06:50.800 and their perceived or real political influence,
00:06:55.120 the British decided to announce the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917.
00:07:02.060 And that declaration said that His Majesty's government
00:07:06.840 would support the establishment of a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine,
00:07:14.240 so long as this did not affect the civil and religious rights
00:07:19.180 of other communities in that country.
00:07:22.380 Vague statement.
00:07:23.700 It didn't specifically say that Britain's policy would be to support a Jewish state.
00:07:28.880 It didn't explain what it meant by civil and religious rights of other communities.
00:07:37.160 But it was enough to make Lord Rothschild happy.
00:07:42.820 And the consequence of that was obviously Jewish support in World War I.
00:07:51.360 And then when World War I ended and the Ottoman Empire was defeated,
00:07:55.980 Britain made good on her promise through the various peace conferences
00:08:00.020 that followed the First World War
00:08:01.820 and through the establishment of a mandate under the League of Nations
00:08:07.580 that gave Britain control over what were then known as Palestine here
00:08:14.080 on the area, all of the west bank of the Jordan River and Transjordan,
00:08:21.400 a country that had never existed before,
00:08:24.600 but that was established under a British mandate
00:08:29.300 with the aim of establishing a state thereafter.
00:08:33.220 The British ended up in control of Iraq, Jordan and Israel.
00:08:40.000 They had allies in Saudi Arabia
00:08:43.640 and the French ended up in control of Lebanon and Syria.
00:08:49.300 And this was the beginning of the existence of those states.
00:08:53.080 Now, it should be mentioned here that these states
00:08:55.400 didn't really have a history as states as such.
00:08:59.020 For the previous 400 years, they had been provinces of the Ottoman Empire
00:09:03.820 with its capital in Istanbul, Constantinople,
00:09:08.120 whatever you wish to call it, which dominated that whole region.
00:09:11.640 The Ottomans were an interesting bunch, to put it mildly.
00:09:15.720 Islam, to its credit, knew how to rule minorities.
00:09:19.940 It gave them a special protected status
00:09:23.480 where the state wouldn't really be unnecessarily aggressive towards them,
00:09:30.220 so long as they understood that they were second-class citizens
00:09:33.600 and that they were not equal to the Muslims.
00:09:36.400 So it was a functional arrangement, so to speak.
00:09:41.100 And for the previous 400 years, since 1517, I believe,
00:09:46.020 these countries or these localities hadn't really governed themselves.
00:09:49.780 There was some form of municipal authority,
00:09:54.180 but it was obvious that the state was in the hands of the Ottomans
00:09:58.700 and their bureaucrats and their slaves and what have you.
00:10:03.300 So new states were just drawn on a map and created.
00:10:07.820 There was some historic reasoning for it,
00:10:10.420 in that, for example, in Iraq, Basra and Baghdad were always connected.
00:10:15.180 In Syria, the string of cities going from Aleppo through to Hama,
00:10:25.220 through to Homs, through to Damascus were always connected.
00:10:28.740 But there was also a bit of lack of logic to it,
00:10:32.880 in that Tripoli was a port associated with Homs,
00:10:36.260 not so much really with Lebanon.
00:10:39.900 Lebanon was just the mountainous part of Lebanon here.
00:10:44.120 It never had the Bekaa Valley or Tripoli or Tyre or even Beirut as parts of it.
00:10:52.560 So these countries were assembled with some logic,
00:10:56.020 but the lines differentiating them were completely new.
00:11:01.760 This is why the lines are perfectly straight
00:11:04.920 and look like they were made with a ruler,
00:11:07.260 because they hadn't existed in the past.
00:11:10.000 These were all just provinces of the Ottoman Empire,
00:11:14.860 each one with some kind of distinct identity,
00:11:19.240 especially Mount Lebanon,
00:11:21.340 especially the Syrian coast or the tribal areas between Iraq and Syria.
00:11:27.440 But they weren't really countries.
00:11:29.700 And then all of a sudden they were.
00:11:31.940 Like I said, Israel fulfilled this function.
00:11:35.200 And part of the reasoning for its establishment
00:11:38.760 was to address the Jewish question in Europe
00:11:41.880 and to create a natural ally
00:11:45.460 that would justify Britain's presence in the Middle East.
00:11:50.540 As Britain took control,
00:11:52.220 it basically opened the door to Jewish immigration
00:11:54.880 into the land of Palestine or the land of Israel
00:11:59.680 or whatever you want to call it.
00:12:01.780 And the numbers of Jews kept on growing.
00:12:04.260 Naturally, this led to friction with the Muslims
00:12:07.200 because they saw that the objective was to establish a Jewish state.
00:12:11.640 This was the publicly stated policy.
00:12:14.760 And they didn't want one.
00:12:17.160 Understandably so, one would argue.
00:12:19.620 The early Zionists all pretty much understood
00:12:22.140 that they would have to impose the state by force of arms
00:12:26.860 on the local population and on the surrounding Arab population.
00:12:31.620 You had outspoken people like Jabotinsky
00:12:35.560 who made that extremely clear.
00:12:38.660 And others were of the view that eventually,
00:12:42.160 after enough defeats,
00:12:43.880 and if shown the economic benefit,
00:12:46.380 the Arabs would one day accept peace with Israel
00:12:49.660 and accept that the Jews weren't going anywhere.
00:12:52.680 And therefore, they would just deal with Israel
00:12:55.380 as a new fact of life.
00:12:56.520 And they would accept her existence.
00:12:58.720 As the number of Jews in this territory increased,
00:13:04.160 eventually, they became around 26% of the population,
00:13:09.080 30% of the population of the total area.
00:13:12.840 And after World War II, two things happened.
00:13:15.580 Firstly, the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust
00:13:19.120 made it much more important to have a state for the Jews.
00:13:25.560 It was seen that even the democratization of Europe
00:13:29.640 and the transformation of Europe
00:13:31.160 that had happened after the First World War
00:13:34.380 was really not going to be enough to keep the Jews safe.
00:13:38.700 And therefore, the number of migrants
00:13:41.100 that were trying to get into the land of Palestine
00:13:45.340 increased dramatically.
00:13:46.980 This obviously led to even more conflict.
00:13:50.900 And this contributed to the decision
00:13:52.940 by some Palestinians and a lot of Arabs
00:13:56.360 to align themselves during the Second World War
00:13:59.880 with the Axis powers
00:14:01.140 on the promise that the Axis powers
00:14:03.960 would help get rid of the British Empire.
00:14:08.180 And therefore, that would end the project
00:14:10.760 of Jewish colonization of Palestine.
00:14:12.920 This didn't work.
00:14:14.380 The Axis powers were obviously defeated
00:14:16.380 and, you know, thank God for that.
00:14:18.840 The result was the strengthening
00:14:20.720 in the minds of the West
00:14:23.260 and in the minds of the Jews themselves
00:14:25.160 of the case for Zionism.
00:14:27.300 In 1947, the nascent United Nations
00:14:31.500 tried to figure out a solution for this.
00:14:34.260 So they decided to agree to the partition of Palestine
00:14:39.260 into two states, one for the Arabs
00:14:44.320 and one for the Jews.
00:14:46.400 And this is a nice map of that planned partition.
00:14:52.000 It gave a big chunk of the north of Palestine,
00:14:55.400 the area around Akka or Accra, to the Arabs.
00:14:59.720 It gave the West Bank and more to the Arabs.
00:15:05.440 It gave Gaza and the border with Sinai to the Arabs.
00:15:09.260 The objection from the Arab side
00:15:12.300 was based on two premises, really.
00:15:16.820 One premise was that this partition favored the Jews too much
00:15:23.380 because the Jews were around a quarter
00:15:28.040 to a third of the population
00:15:29.380 and they got 53% of the land,
00:15:33.080 whereas the Arabs, who were at least two thirds
00:15:35.780 of the population, only got 47%.
00:15:38.740 More importantly, it basically acknowledged something
00:15:44.000 that the Arabs had always rejected.
00:15:46.460 From their perspective, they weren't adequately represented
00:15:50.140 in the conferences that followed the First World War.
00:15:53.240 Even though there was some Arab representation,
00:15:56.600 the Palestinians themselves,
00:15:58.200 or the people who would then eventually
00:15:59.600 call themselves the Palestinians,
00:16:01.860 were not present and they were not represented.
00:16:05.320 And so why should they accept this imperial diktat?
00:16:09.100 Just because a large number of Jews
00:16:12.320 had been imported into their country
00:16:15.580 under the auspices of a foreign empire,
00:16:18.500 why would that be a legitimate case
00:16:22.260 for them to surrender so much territory?
00:16:25.400 A third argument would be perhaps
00:16:27.620 that for Muslims, the surrender of the Holy Land
00:16:31.340 and specifically of Jerusalem would never be accepted.
00:16:35.060 Jerusalem is the third holiest place in Islam
00:16:37.700 after Mecca and Medina.
00:16:39.820 So why should they accept this compromise
00:16:43.240 when there was no righteous cause for it,
00:16:47.840 at least from their perspective?
00:16:50.220 The UN at the end of the day,
00:16:53.000 or the League of Nations,
00:16:54.520 or whatever you want to call it,
00:16:55.960 wasn't something that the Muslims
00:16:58.440 had been an active participant in.
00:17:01.200 And it didn't reflect the values
00:17:04.760 and the understanding of Islam.
00:17:07.100 So why should this concession be made?
00:17:10.540 For the Jews themselves,
00:17:12.060 even this partition plan was not acceptable.
00:17:15.940 They said that they would accept it,
00:17:17.940 but the reality is that if you looked at this map,
00:17:22.060 this entity in blue would very easily
00:17:26.040 be defeated in the first war
00:17:27.900 because it didn't have any strategic depth.
00:17:31.400 More importantly,
00:17:32.660 or to some equally importantly,
00:17:35.540 it didn't give the Jews anything in Jerusalem.
00:17:38.940 As a matter of fact,
00:17:40.160 it kept them quite a distance from it.
00:17:43.340 And what is Judaism without Jerusalem?
00:17:46.700 How to justify this?
00:17:48.180 How should this movement be justified?
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