Hey everybody. This is

This is Darrell Cooper and you are about to hear a special episode of the Martyr Maid

podcast. This episode is meant to be a sort of addendum to fear and loathing

in the New Jerusalem. My earlier series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If you've managed to find this episode without having first listened to that earlier series,

I recommend listening to that series first. I know it's a time

investment, but it is very thorough and there are going to be a lot of things in this episode

that I'm going to glide past or maybe cover lightly because

I'm going to be assuming that you're already familiar with that earlier material.

I'll try not to do that, but it's going to be inevitable. This episode's going to cover

the period from 1948, the year of Israeli independence and the Palestinian Nokba to the Lebanon War of 1982.

It is not meant to be a thorough history of that period, the way fear and Loathing was of the pre- 1948 period.

To do justice to that story would require another 10 episodes, not just this one.

So this one has a narrower focus. The story I want to tell today

is not about every figure and every event and motivation relevant to the conflict

in those years. It's specifically about how the level

of savagery has escalated over the years, the steps by which those escalations occurred, to bring us up to the point where we are now,

with virtually unrestrained violence and dehumanization completely normalized on both sides.

So it's not a pretty story.

And several sections of this podcast are not going to be for the faint of heart.

It's not something to listen to with your kids in the car. At times when I was putting

the notes together, it started to even feel a bit voyeuristic. The violence started to feel sort of gratuitous and pornographic you could say because

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