History of Jews in Israel, Film Review

http://www.bodyandsoulthemovie.com/

Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation
documentary by Gloria Greenfield
Film Company: Doc Emet.

[From article]
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the UK, who tells us that "Jewish identity is born in the land of Israel. It begins with two momentous journeys, of Abraham and Sarah from Mesopotamia, and the other, several centuries later by Moses and the Israelites from the Egypt of the Pharoahs; and ever since, in a sense, to be a Jew has meant to be on a journey to the Promised Land."
The story continues. Author and historian Robert Wistrich points to the fact that though it is hard to document exactly when the special relationship of the Jewish people with the land began, it was at "the very minimum close to 3,000 years" ago, and possibly much longer.
[. . .]
Shalmanesser III of Assyria, "a great monarch of the ninth century before the common era," who describes how he fought against a "coalition of Levantine monarchs led by Ahab the Israelite, who went to war with 2,000 chariots."
[. . .]
a touchsone to the Second Temple period, written between about 250 BCE and 68CE, when the Romans devastated Qumran on their march of destruction to Jerusalem.
The goal of this terrible march was of course the extinction of Jerusalem -- and the Temple -- in 70 CE. Some years after the catastrophe, as Gafni says, there was a major Jewish uprising in the province of Judea led by the Jewish general, Bar Kochba. "That uprising, the last Jewish uprising of antiquity, failed," and many thousands of Jews were killed or taken abroad as slaves.
[. . .]
a touchstone to the Second Temple period, written between about 250 BCE and 68CE, when the Romans devastated Qumran on their march of destruction to Jerusalem.
The goal of this terrible march was of course the extinction of Jerusalem -- and the Temple -- in 70 CE. Some years after the catastrophe, as Gafni says, there was a major Jewish uprising in the province of Judea led by the Jewish general, Bar Kochba. "That uprising, the last Jewish uprising of antiquity, failed," and many thousands of Jews were killed or taken abroad as slaves.
[. . .]
from the 1840s onwards, Jews were a majority in Jerusalem, outstripping Muslims and Christians. From then to now, that never changes.
[. . .]
"The first three great secular Zionists," he continues, "Moses Hess, Yehudah Leib Pinsker, and Theodor Herzl, were all driven by successive phases of antisemitism," in Germany, in Russia, and on the streets of Paris during the Dreyfus affair. So "there was the pull of religion and the push of antisemitism."
[. . .]
Anita Shapira of Tel Aviv University sees the phenomenon of Zionism as a triangle: "The people, the Book, and the Land -- three inseparable entities."
[. . .]
Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School discusses in this context the Yassir Arafat lie: "That the Jews never lived in what is now Israel, that it is all a myth, that the Jews really come from Eastern Europe, that they have no Middle Eastern DNA…and he sold that bill of goods to many, many Palestinians."
[. . .]
"One of the goals of Palestinian historians, begun in the 1990s, is to write a history of Palestine that won't allow for the existence of any other people in the land” -- what Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls a “pseudohistory.” The Palestinian Authority, continues Marcus, "often cites the persecution of Jews in European countries as proof, not that the Jews were persecuted, but as proof of the Jews' evil nature."
[. . .]
So what they have done is turn Jesus into a Palestinian, indeed into a Muslim, and thereby denied Christian history.

http://americanthinker.com/2014/10/body_and_soul_the_state_of_the_jewish_nation.html

October 19, 2014
Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation
By Janet Tassel