Show Notes
This is the first installment of something that doesn’t really have a name; the Grad School Files? That sounds a little like a bad Netflix show. I’ll take suggestions, but in the meantime, we can simply define this as it is: the first adaptation of one of my academic papers from graduate school into an honest-to-goodness episode of History Impossible. The first thing I want to say is that it was more difficult than I expected to adapt an academic paper into a podcast than I expected. The material is all there, but speaking in formal academic language manages to put me to sleep, so I did my best to spruce things up with this episode.
The second thing I want to say is that a lot of the material in this one will be familiar territory, just more focused on a single event (or grouping of events) in Israel-Palestine history: that is, the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. This was something I hadn’t planned to do until inspiration smacked me upside the head in my second semester, largely propelled by the lack of awareness I was seeing some of my cohort-mates possessed about the conflict in general, to say nothing of the minutiae of its long, long history. As has been covered at length by me and many others, this has very clearly become a political issue with no tether to history, when that history matters more than the politics.
In any event, what resulted was this, but in paper form (that has also been published in written form on Substack and Patreon, as some of you may remember): an investigation into the formation of group identity—that is, of the declining British Empire, the Zionist movement, and the Arab nationalist movement—via the conflict that came to be known as the Arab Revolt of the 1930s. Apart from a few folks—like the awesome Oren Kessler, much of whose work I incorporated into this episode—very few scholars have focused their attention on this event, sandwiched as it is between the punctuated chaos of the 1920s and the Second World War. I hope looking at the event this way—as a crucible, to use a word Kessler has used—adds to the conversation.
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More from History Impossible
Hey everyone. No preamble here. Just a nice bonus as a thank you for your continued support. As the title suggests, this is an audio adaptation of an essay I wrote about the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and how it led me to reflect on my generation, that is millennials, seems to believe about itself regarding trauma, adversity, and the future.
We often hear about how the Second World War was more morally nuanced and complex than we have been led to believe. This is, to a certain extent, very true. The Axis powers meted out a level of genocidal destruction and suffering upon tens of millions of people across the world, decimating generations in places as far flung as Poland and the Philippines, and Croatia and China. To call their actions existential by their very nature is to arguably undersell the threat they posed. The Allies realized these were the stakes and were eventually faced with a very real question: what would it take to stop such a threat? It required what many have come to believe was the unthinkable: meeting destruction with destruction. And in meeting the Axis violence with more violence did indeed bring the war to its ultimate end.
In this newest episode of History Impossible we’re joined a second time by Richard Lim, host of the This American President podcast, who last appeared on this program a couple years ago to discuss the insane, contentious election of 1876. He is also the author of a new book, Refusing a Crown: How George Washington Changed the World, which releases on October 13, 2026, and covers the most significant aspect of America’s first president: his restraint from seizing power that almost certainly would have remained his.
“Because remember: Russia is a religious experience.” Those are the oft-repeated and well-said words by the host of The Eastern Border podcast, my good friend Kristaps Andrejsons. They are well-said because there are very few alternatives for explaining Russian actions, rhetoric, and political culture over the past near half-decade in its World War I-style conflict with Ukraine. The Russian religious experience, made emblematic by Kristaps’ and my favorite shared punching bag Aleksandr Dugin, is a phenomenon best understood as a more formalized and colossal version of what ISIS was ten years ago, and it helps explain why Kristaps believes the spiral of the Russian state as we currently know it is beginning in 2026.
Antizionism, as it has become, has been having a bit of a moment for going on three years. It is a tough nut to crack, given its various claims of varying legitimacy and, as we have covered more than once on History Impossible, its increasing tendency to veer into outright antisemitism, especially by those looking for a supposedly intellectual and moral veneer for their racial and geopolitical fixations. Part of the reason for this confusion is the complex intellectual history of the position, which, after 1948, became more complicated than the relatively straightforward debate over Jewish statehood before, during, and after the Holocaust.