Israel - Birth of a Nation - Sir Martin Gilbert

HT to Pam Gellar of Atlas Shrugs for her post Saturday Night Cinema: Israel, Birth of a Nation

There, she has made this comment:

This documentary made by the History Channel and Gilbert is a good introduction. Bear in mind, Arab is the euphemism for Muslim. And missing from this account is:

the Arab [Muslim] League's political or Islamic theological explanations for the refusal to accept a new Arab state alongside the Jewish one.

There's only the demand of Transjordanian King Abdullah I--that Israel submit to Muslim rule, or face war.

Also missing are any extant archival radio or news clips of Arab exhortations to flee--or destruction of Israel. Possibly only the news clips survive, but the documentary missed an important opportunity to air them.

Finally, while Jewish immigration from Arab nations is mentioned in passing, the forced exodus of nearly one million Jews from Arab and Muslim nations is not reported here, nor is Israel's absorption of their vast majority. That's unfortunate, since Middle Eastern Jews had lived in Arab and Muslim countries for thousands of years.

But it covers much history:

The legends of the stolen land and "ethnic cleansing" are hard if not impossible to support if you carefully step through the evidence presented here by one of the most respected English-speaking historians of the century.

Fair Use as per US Copyright Law. The legends of the stolen land and "ethnic cleansing" are hard if not impossible to support if you carefully step through the evidence presented here by one of the most respected English-speaking historians of the century.

This film is very important for its very detailed walk-through of the major events of a war that gets trivialized frankly by everyone. "The Arabs attacked and eventually Israel prevailed' is how people usually refer to it. But the problem is that leaves Israel open to the typical canard-production myth-makers who take theoretical conversations like "We don't stand a chance with all of these Arab villages" being translated in to today's claims of "ethnic cleansing" that had been "planned from the start."

We are going to revisit this film after the entire collection of documentaries have been uploaded, when I put together a comprehensive summary that deals with all of the accusations. Just remember that Jews have been blamed for any number of ridiculous things like the plague of European middle ages, when their separation (in ghettos) and cleansing rituals (the oldest Biblical books have cleansing and dietary commandments that today are understood for their health benefits) that translated in to a relatively healthy population among their numbers, and accusations of the Jews poisoning water supplies has been traced back to that and other myths. Once they featured on the "usual suspects" lists, their history then had them down as "known trouble-makers."

The banking industry they began was forced upon them apparently, but it has even been established all the way back to Constantine's day in the early 4th century AD, where the Roman Pagan's who were instructed to adopt Christianity had a different reading of Christian doctrine and needed a reason to keep the Pagan priesthood structure. This also fit nicely with a desire to move focus away from Rome as putting Jesus Christ to death; by rendering the Gospels as blaming Jews collectively (when all that the text really is doing is identifying various small groups among those who were in on it). "First the Jews (among them) and then the Romans (among them) should have been clear enough. Following this sad progression can be overwhelming when you think of the blood that has been shed over that time. It makes me somewhat ashamed of our civilization, but at least we have the integrity to look at it critically rather than making excuses. Progress can't happen without honestly evaluating history.