Jew Oughta Know

Day Eleven of the war between Hamas and Israel. For years Israel has brought sick Palestinian children into Israel for lifesaving medical care. Hamas responded by sadistically massacring Israeli children. Today we’re talking about Hamas and its intersection with Gaza’s history, crucial context for understanding how we got to this moment.

Unimaginable savagery in the worst attack on the Jewish People since the Holocaust. It's a declaration of war by Hamas, the genocidal group dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel. What's going on? How did we get here? What's next?

Black September cruelly murders 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The local police are helpless to resist, the rescue operation goes wrong, the world watches on live TV, and Golda Meir sees that, once again, Jews are being killed on European soil.

A civil war in Jordan between King Hussein and the PLO threatens to bring in Israel and its neighbors. Though a victory for Jordan, it created one of the most deadly terrorist groups that Israel would face: Black September. A daring commando operation thwarts an airplane hijacking, but that would prove to be just the beginning of the group’s ambitions.

The early 1970s saw the rise of the Israeli Black Panthers — a movement of young Mizrahi Jews fed up with systematic inequality and social discrimination that left Jews from the Middle East and North Africa lagging behind the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. The met their match in Prime Minister Golda Meir, whose disapproval only fueled their efforts to wake Israeli society up to their plight.

Israel was founded to provide a safe place for Jewish life to flourish. But by the late 1960s, millions of Jews remained trapped in the Soviet Union, refused the emigration visas necessary to leave. The plight of these “refuseniks” kicked off an international campaign to free them, and in 1969, eighteen Jews wrote to Prime Minister Golda Meir explaining why they looked to Israel for rescue.

Rabbi Moshe Levinger was all in favor of building settlements in the West Bank, but with a twist: he thought confrontation with the Israeli government, rather than cooperation, was the way to achieve a Jewish foothold in their historic land. He set his sights on establishing the first urban settlement in the heart of Hebron: one of Judaism’s oldest cities, now populated exclusively by Arabs.

Palestinians hit on a winning formula for attacking Israel and publicizing their own cause: airplane hijackings. And Prime Minister Levi Eshkol dies, replaced by Israel’s first (and so far only) female prime minister, Golda Meir. By turns empathetic and aloof, ideological and pragmatic, pioneering and traditional, Golda came into office struggling to reconcile the Israel of her dreams with the changing country before her.

The Six Day War did not mean the end of fighting, just a new phase. At a summit in Khartoum the Arabs rejected peace, negotiation, and recognition of Israel, leaving violence as the only acceptable option. Egypt and Israel began fighting the War of Attrition, while Yasser Arafat’s PLO terrorist group challenged Israel’s patience and strength. These events and the Occupation engendered a developing new Palestinian identity.

Israel's second settlement in the Occupied Territories was Kfar Etzion, established in the West Bank on the ruins of a destroyed Jewish kibbutz. It was the first settlement of the Religious Zionism movement, merging the ideas of Zionist settlement with messianic redemption, and spawned both public support and criticism.