Freedom "For the Sake of Logic"

Jewish Emancipation in Europe: 1550-1840

Over the ten months, I’ve come to realize how little I truly understood about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. More troublingly, I’ve realized how little anyone understands about the conflict. Most news coverage is simultaneously sensationalist, and also shallow, providing only the most basic, and most recent, of context for events. Worse, it seems everyone who is “terminally online” has a terrible, biased take - either ardently “pro-Israel” to the exclusion of any criticism of Israel’s government, or adamantly “pro-Palestinian” to the point of ignoring well-established facts about Iran’s use of Hamas and Hezbollah as proxy combatants against Israel.

Originally, I thought some good explanatory videos would find their way onto Youtube, as a knowledgeable creator stepped into the void, much as Perun and others did on the Ukraine war. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, at least to my knowledge. Since it hasn’t, I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands.

So, here, I present the first of hopefully many videos on the historical context behind the conflict in Israel and Palestine - this one on the emancipation of Jews in Europe in the Early Modern period, which set the stage for the emergence of Zionism, and the eventual creation of the state of Israel.

Future videos will tackle the emergence of Zionism, the status of Palestine under the Ottoman empire, the multiple waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine before WWI, the role of WWI and the colonial powers in establishing today’s political boundaries, the impact of the Holocaust and WW2, the various conflicts between Israel and it’s neighbors (1948, Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, etc.), and many other topics.

I hope you’ll come with me for the journey. Here on Substack, I will be providing the full video script below the cut, to subscribers, as well as an ad-free version of the video, and occasional articles on other topics as time permits.