The crisis in Israel - Palestine continues, currently unfolding with the Israeli attack on Gaza, immediately preceded by the Hamas-led massacre in Southern Israel. Unpicking the history and origins of these events remains a particularly difficult task, with history used and abused by people with points to prove on all sides. For that reason I was particularly happy to be able to conduct an extended interview with the historian James Barr, whose books on the history of the Middle East, including A Line in the Sand and Lords of the Desert are some of the best regarded guides to the region, particularly in the early years of the twentieth century.

With James, in this first episode, we got to the bottom of famous moments in the Levant region in the early twentieth century, including the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration, as well as the underlying colonial tensions, notably between Britain and France that drove much of these events. In a subsequent episode we will talk about Jewish militancy in the mid-twentieth century, the events of 1948 including the Nakba and the establishment of the State of Israel. 

You can follow James via his website https://www.historythatmatters.org/ as well as on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/jamesbarr.bsky.social

I am on Twitter @snellarthur, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/snellarthur.bsky.social and arthursnell.substack.com 

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@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank.

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