1:20:09
In the year 70 AD, Roman legions stormed Jerusalem, burned the temple, slaughtered its defenders, and carried the sacred vessels back to Rome as trophies. It was punishment. Over the course of 70 years, the Jews had launched four uprisings, and Rome decided that simply killing people was not enough. The root cause had to be destroyed, the bond between these people and this land. Israel as a state had perished 700 years earlier. Now, Rome was destroying the last thing that remained of it. Judea, its capital, and the very memory of its existence. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina. The word Judea was erased from the map and replaced
with Syria Palestina. A temple to Jupiter was erected on the Temple Mount. Rome fell. But, the people whose memory it tried to erase outlived Rome and everyone who came after. For 2,000 years, this nation lived without a state, without an army, without a territory. They were expelled by Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders. They were burned at the stakes of the Inquisition. They were locked in ghettos. They were exterminated in gas chambers. Every one of these forces is dead. This nation is alive, and they returned to the same land, the same city, the same wall, and once again called that land Israel. No people in the history of humanity has ever achieved this.
How is that even possible? How did a handful of tribes on a sliver of land between the desert and the sea create a book from which three world religions grew? Why did those who gave the world the commandment thou shalt not kill become the most persecuted group of people in history? And what happened when, for the first time in two millennia, they decided that a book was not enough and picked up weapons? Welcome back to Meditative History. My name is Vlad, and I bring history to life through AI visualization. However, the script for this video was written entirely by me and reviewed by a professional historian. Before there was Israel, there was a
civilization that stretched from Greece to Egypt, and it collapsed so completely that people forgot how to write. The 13th century BC, two superpowers dominate the Near East, Egypt and the Hittite Empire. Between them, along the coast and in the hills of Canaan, dozens of small city-states are bound together by trade routes and diplomatic correspondence written in cuneiform, the international script that came from Babylon. And then, it collapsed, all of it. Around the turn of the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Near East was struck by a chain of catastrophes that historians call the Bronze Age Collapse.
The entire developed world had been held together by an intricate web of trade. Tin for bronze was shipped thousands of miles. Grain flowed from Egypt to Greece. Weapons traveled from Mesopotamia to the coast. When droughts and famines struck, those trade chains began to snap, and everything came down at once, one thing pulling the next. The Hittite Empire, which had stood for centuries, ceased to exist. The Creto-Mycenaean civilization was destroyed. Egypt was broken and would never recover its former power. Dozens of city-states across Canaan lay in ruins. People literally forgot how to write. Entire systems of script perished and were never restored. And it was on these ruins that the people we would later call the
Israelites appeared. Where exactly they came from remains uncertain. According to the Bible, they were descendants of Abraham who had come out of Egypt. According to archaeology, they were most likely Semitic tribes from the same region, part of the wave of peoples who flooded into the emptied lands of Canaan amid the chaos of the Bronze Age Collapse. They adopted the local language, local agricultural practices, even local cults, and gradually began to see themselves as a single alliance. We know this alliance was already calling itself Israel, or at least that is what
their neighbors called them. Around 1208 BC, the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah ordered a list of his victories carved in stone, and among the conquered cities and peoples appears one line, "Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more." This is the oldest known mention of the word Israel, and it was written as an obituary. The Pharaoh was certain he had finished this people off for good. The Bible describes 12 tribes of Israel, 12 kindred tribes that settled Canaan. But, the number 12 was sacred across the entire Near East, just as the number 40, which in the Bible does not mean literally 40 years, but simply a
generation. There were probably around that number of tribes, maybe 10 or so, and their historiography simply rounded it up to the iconic 12. But, that some alliance of related tribes came to this land and settled, that is confirmed by archaeology. Their early religion was far from what we know today as Judaism. Excavations have uncovered inscriptions like, "I pray to Yahweh of Hebron and his Asherah," meaning the god Yahweh apparently had a wife. Yahweh of Hebron and Yahweh of Samaria were perceived as different deities. This was not monotheism. It was more of a tribal cult with a chief god, but not the only one. True monotheism was still centuries away, and the path toward it would prove far more brutal than anyone could have imagined.
Around the turn of the second and first millennia BC, the Israelite tribes unite into a state. The Bible links this to three kings, Saul, David, and Solomon. The material culture of the period confirms that a significant political entity with its center in Jerusalem did indeed exist at this time. Why Jerusalem? Not because of holiness, that would come later, because of water. Jerusalem sits on rich freshwater springs in a region where every well is worth its weight in gold. On top of that, the city lies on a trade route through the hills, one of only two passages
between the coast and the east. Geopolitics and hydrology, not mysticism, made this city a capital. David builds an army, and it is important to understand what era this is. The Bronze Age Collapse had destroyed the old empires with their chariots and professional armies. In the new world, the world of the Iron Age, war had changed. The expensive chariot core had vanished, replaced by infantrymen armed with iron swords. A sword was cheaper than a chariot, and iron was more accessible than bronze because it did not require tin, which had to be shipped thousands of miles. The Bible reflects this fully. The word sword appears everywhere in it, and wars end in the total annihilation of the defeated, men killed, women taken
as slaves, cities burned. The entire Near East lived by these rules, and the Israelites were no exception. The Assyrians, for example, did the same, only on an even grander scale and with meticulously documented pride. Solomon builds the first temple, the Jerusalem Temple, dedicated to the god Yahweh. And this was not simply a place of prayer. It was the only point on Earth where sacrifices to God could lawfully be made. And the sacrifices of that era were far removed from what we imagine today when we hear the word worship. On major holidays, the altar was sprinkled with the blood of sacrificial animals seven times over. Their entrails were hung in strict ritual order. The walls, the
hands and ears of the priests, all were smeared with blood, and the smell of burning meat was, as the text explicitly states, food that was offered to God. He fed on it. All of this was conducted by a closed cast of priests, the Kohanim, who passed their knowledge of the ritual from generation to generation. The entire religious life of an entire people was tied to one building and to one group of people who knew how to perform the rite correctly. This is important to remember because when that building is destroyed, the entire system will collapse with it, and the people will have to invent an entirely new way to believe. But, the destruction of the temple is still far off. First comes the split.
After Solomon's death, around 930 BC, the United Kingdom broke apart. In the north, the kingdom of Israel formed with its capital in Samaria, larger, wealthier, but less attached to the Jerusalem Temple. In the south, remained Judah with its capital in Jerusalem, smaller and poorer, but home to the temple. Both kingdoms worshipped Yahweh, but differently. The northerners built their own altars on their own sacred mountains. The southerners considered this heresy. Over time, the hatred between them became absolute. The northerners were called traitors, half-breeds, heretics. When, a thousand years later, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, his listeners were horrified. A Samaritan and suddenly
good? That shock was precisely the point of the parable. The two kingdoms would exist side by side for roughly 200 years. And then, from the east, a force would come that would destroy one of them forever. 22 BC, Assyria, the greatest military machine of its time, came crashing down on the northern kingdom of Israel. The population was deported deep into the empire. This was standard Assyrian practice. Tear a people from their native land and scatter them among strangers so they could never reassemble. The 10 northern tribes vanished forever. Later, in 701 BC, Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, also went on to conquer Canaan. He laid siege to Jerusalem in an attempt to subdue Judea.
This event is cross-referenced in both the Bible, in the Second Book of Kings, and in the Annals of Sennacherib. The Jewish source has Sennacherib scared away by angels blowing horns, while he himself states that the Judeans presented him with gifts to be spared. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Southern Judah held on for another century and a half, but in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II arrived. The very same king who built the Ishtar Gate and possibly the Hanging Gardens. Judah had been rebelling, refusing to pay tribute, seeking allies against Babylon. And Nebuchadnezzar decided to put an end to it once and for all. He destroyed Jerusalem, burned the First Temple, the very building on which the
entire religious life of the people depended, and deported the Judean elite to Babylon. Not everyone, ordinary peasants remained on the land, but the priests, the scribes, the aristocrats, those who carried the knowledge and traditions, they were taken into captivity. And here is where the turning point occurs, one that would change the entire course of human history. Picture the situation. A small people, stripped of everything, their kingdom, their capital, their temple, their land, finds itself in the heart of a colossal civilization. Babylon, at this point, is the heir to millennia of Mesopotamian culture. Its heritage, rooted in Sumerian and Akkadian traditions, had absorbed all of its Mesopotamian counterparts, including Assyrian. Its
myths were older than anything the Jews knew. Its libraries were vast. Its cities were magnificent. Any other people would have dissolved within a generation, and many did. The Assyrians deported dozens of nations, and not one of them preserved its identity. The Jews were the sole exception. Finding themselves in Babylon, stripped of their temple, stripped of their priesthood, stripped of every familiar pillar of their faith, they did something unprecedented. They began to write. To gather into one body the oral traditions, genealogies, laws, prophecies, the history of their kingdoms and wars, everything that made them a people. They wrote not to impress their conquerors, and not to adorn a palace, but so that a generation later, their children would
still remember who they were. It is most likely in Babylon that the body of texts we know as the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, reached its final form. These texts had been developing for centuries before that. Fragments and earlier versions were written and circulated on the territory of Israel itself, as later confirmed by discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls. But, it was in exile that they were compiled, edited, and shaped into the unified work we know today. Modern textual scholarship shows it to be a compilation of several documents, written at different times by different authors with different conceptions of God. In some sections, God is anthropomorphic. He physically enters the tabernacle, sits down, demands that the smell of sacrifices be
pleasing to him. In others, he is abstract, bodiless, speaking from somewhere beyond the heavens. Scholars still debate the exact number of source documents, but that the text is composite is beyond dispute. And here is what is truly remarkable. The Jews did not simply compile their own traditions. Living side by side with the Babylonians, they absorbed the most ancient Mesopotamian myths and reworked them. The Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, describes how the gods created the world in six days, and on the seventh, held a feast. In Genesis, the order is the same, day by day, only instead of many gods, there is one. The Babylonian flood myth, Utnapishtim builds a ship, releases a raven, then a
dove, became the story of Noah. The biography of Sargon the Great, an infant placed in a basket, set adrift on a river, and found by a gardener, became the biography of Moses. Even the Garden of Eden, which in Mesopotamian tradition was not a metaphor, but a real place, an island somewhere in the Persian Gulf, possibly modern-day Bahrain, found its way into the Bible as the starting point of all human history. And here is a detail that almost everyone misses. In Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, God says, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. And now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the
tree of life and eat and live forever." God does not banish man for disobedience. He banishes him because man, having gained knowledge, might now reach immortality. And in the Sumero-Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero seeks precisely the tree of life, eternal youth. One myth is about the search for immortality. The other is about why it can never be reached. Both were born in Mesopotamia. Both reached us through the Jewish Bible. Sumerian myths outlived Sumer. Babylonian myths outlived Babylon. And this happened only because a small captive people melted them into their own text and carried that text through the millennia.
Without this link, the oldest stories of humankind would have been lost. In 538 BC, the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon and issues a decree. All captive peoples may return to their homelands and rebuild their temples. The Jews are freed, but far from all of them go back. Over 50 years, an entire generation has grown up in Babylon with families, livelihoods, and established life. Many choose to stay, and the Babylonian Jewish community would endure for another 1,500 years. Those who did return to Judah found a scene that sent them into a fury. The Jews who had remained on the land had over 50 years intermingled with the surrounding peoples. Men had married Canaanite, Moabite, and Ammonite women. Women from neighboring tribes who
brought their own gods into the household. Beside the altar of Yahweh stood figurines of Asherah and Baal, the very deities the prophets had fought against for centuries. For the returnees from Babylon, hardened by exile and consumed with the idea of preserving their identity, this was betrayal. Under the leadership of the scribe Ezra, harsh reforms began. Foreign wives, along with the children born to them, were expelled from the community. Marriages with non-Jews were forbidden. For the first time in history, a clear line was drawn defining who counted as a Jew and who did not. And this boundary ran along both blood and faith. It is in this period, no earlier and no later, that Judaism finally becomes what we recognize today,
a strict monotheism with a rigid set of rules separating its people from everyone else. The monotheism that had begun as a tribal cult among dozens of others was tempered in exile and returned home as a sealed, impenetrable system capable of withstanding any external pressure. But, the trials were only beginning because from the west a new conqueror was already approaching, and he was bringing not just an army, but an entire civilization. In the 330s BC, Alexander the Great, having conquered the territory from Greece to India in a decade, destroyed the Persian Empire, the very empire under whose protection the Jews had lived since the time of Cyrus. In the wake of his armies, Greek culture swept across the Near East.
Gymnasia, theaters, philosophical schools, and a process historians call Hellenization began. For the Jews, this meant a new choice, accept the Greek world or resist it. Many accepted. In Alexandria, Egypt, the greatest city of the Hellenistic world, a large Jewish community grew up speaking Greek and no longer understanding Hebrew. It was by educated Hebrews and other scholars that the Bible was translated into Greek. This is the Septuagint, the text that would later form the basis of the Christian Old Testament. And it was this translation, a synthesis between Jewish and Greek thought, that would quietly reshape the future. The Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, said, "In the beginning,
God created heaven and earth." Greeks interpreted this as a creation by word, by logos, in accordance with the Gospel of John. "In the beginning was the word." And logos in Platonic philosophy means not simply a word, but the fundamental law by which the universe operates. This philosophical reshaping gave Christianity, as a future world religion, the language with which it would speak to the Greco-Roman world. But, Hellenization also provoked fierce resistance. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV attempted to install an altar to Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple and banned Jewish rites, the Maccabean revolt erupted. The rebels achieved the improbable. They recaptured Jerusalem and established the independent Hasmonean Kingdom, which lasted nearly a century. But, in
63 BC, Rome arrived and independence came to an end. Judea became a Roman province. Judaism at this time was undergoing a deep internal crisis. Dozens of movements, Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and many others argued over how to believe correctly, how to interpret the law, how to relate to Roman authority. It was in this atmosphere of schism and occupation, in a Jewish family in Nazareth, that Jesus was born. His teaching was initially one of many reformist sects within Judaism. There were dozens of such sects at the time, but after his execution by the Romans, the Apostle Paul took a step that changed everything.
He removed the barriers that had for centuries separated Judaism from the rest of the world, circumcision, kosher laws, complex ritual rules, and opened the doors to all peoples. Christianity ceased to be a Jewish sect and, over several centuries, became a world religion. For the Jews themselves, this produced a tragic paradox. They had given the world God, prophets, sacred scripture, and the new religion that grew from their own tradition declared them the greatest villains in history. The accusation of Christ killing, that the Jews were to blame for the crucifixion of Christ, would become a brand that pursued them for the next 2,000 years. And what made the position of Jews in
the Christian world especially agonizing was this, the church simultaneously needed them and despised them. Needed them as living proof of the Bible's truth, a witness people whose wretched existence demonstrated what happens to those who reject the Messiah. Despised them because they stubbornly refused to accept that role and went on believing in their own way. In 70 AD, Rome destroys the Second Jerusalem Temple, the one rebuilt after the return from Babylon and later magnificently expanded by Herod the Great. In 132 through 135 AD, the last major revolt, Bar Kokhba's, is crushed. The Romans rename Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and Judea Syria Palestina. On the Temple Mount, where the Temple of Yahweh once
stood, a temple to Jupiter Capitolinus is erected. Jews are expelled en masse from Jerusalem and its surroundings, forbidden even to approach the city. Those who were not killed or sold into slavery scattered across the Roman Empire, to Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, Carthage, later to the Balkans, to Spain, to the Rhine. The Temple is gone. The priestly Kohanim who conducted the services are gone. The sacrifices, around which religious life had been built for centuries, are gone.
Everything this people had lived by for 2,000 years has been destroyed, and so they reinvented themselves. What happens next has no parallel in history. A people stripped of their state, their territory, and their army survives for two millennia and does so by replacing the Temple with text and the priests with teachers. In place of the destroyed Temple comes the synagogue, a place where sacrifices are not offered, but scripture is read and discussed. In place of the hereditary priest Cohen comes the rabbi, a teacher, a scholar of the law chosen for learning rather than lineage. The oral Torah, commentaries on the sacred text the tradition had forbidden to write down, is written down after all because
otherwise, scattered across the world, they would simply be lost. Thus, the Mishnah appears, brief interpretations of each verse. Then, for every two or three lines of Mishnah, five to 10 pages of additional commentary, debate, parable, and legal analysis are added. The whole of it together is the Talmud, a vast body of texts codifying rules for every occasion in life, from how to divide a found cloak to whether one may light a candle on the Sabbath. Every boy is taught from childhood to read and interpret text, not simply to memorize, but to argue, to find contradictions, to build arguments. This is not education in the modern sense. It is a training of analytical thinking that lasts an entire
childhood. When, centuries later, Jews emerge from their communities into European society, this skill will prove a devastating competitive advantage. But, that comes later. In the 7th century, a new force erupts from the Arabian deserts, Arab armies carrying Islam. They conquer the entire Near East, North Africa, and then Spain. For the Jews living in these territories, the change of rulers initially brought greater protection than they had known before under the early Islamic government. The so-called Constitution of Medina granted Jews a protected status within the new order. Arab rulers classified them as people of the book, dimmi. They paid a special tax for religious tolerance, were forbidden to
pray loudly, or build houses of worship taller than mosques, but beyond that, they were left alone. In Muslim Spain of the 9th and 10th centuries, what historians call the Golden Age begins. This was also the Golden Age of Arab-Islamic civilization itself, and Jews occupied a prominent place within it as scholars, commentators, and translators. Writers like Maimonides and Ibn Ezra played a major role in scrutinizing the legacy of Greek philosophers, translating their works, and contributing to grammar and linguistics. They wrote in Hebrew, but also in Arabic script. It was a genuine cultural synthesis. At the same time, Jews became intermediaries between civilizations. Buying textiles in
Cordoba, swords in France, slaves in the Balkans, spices in India. A Jewish merchant of the 8th century could, in a single journey, travel a route from Spain to China through a network of communities scattered across the known world. They had their own internet long before the internet. But, the Crusades change everything. When in 1096, tens of thousands of Europeans set out for Jerusalem, the first victims were not Muslims. The logic of the mob was simple. Why march 3,000 miles to fight the enemies of Christ when the enemies of Christ are right here, across the street? Pogroms in the Rhineland wiped out entire communities. From this point, a spiral begins.
Pogroms, expulsions, accusations of poisoning wells, the blood libel, the myth that Jews kidnap Christian children for their rituals. England expels the Jews in 1290 for 350 years. France in 1306, but nine years later invites them back. It turns out that without Jewish money lenders charging 8%, the monasteries had begun issuing loans at 40 to 60%. Spain expels them in 1492, the largest and wealthiest Jewish community in Europe. Rabbis, in response to the pogroms, formulate a doctrine of non-resistance. If they come to slaughter you, do not fight, pray. If they try to convert your children, it is better to kill them yourself than to hand them over to a foreign faith. A thousand-year culture of martyrdom, martyrology, sinks so deep into
the Jewish consciousness that it will echo even in the 20th century. Expelled from everywhere, the Jews find refuge in Poland. Casimir the Great, and later Sigismund the Old, view them as an economic asset. Where Jews go, trade follows, along with account books and tax revenue. For the first time in centuries, they're allowed to buy land and build their own towns, shtetls. A demographic explosion begins. But, in 1648, a revolt led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky erupts in Ukraine. Cossacks and peasants, who despise the Polish nobility, turn on those who were closest at hand, the Jewish middlemen who managed estates, collected taxes, and traded in vodka. The slaughter was so thorough that on the left bank of Ukraine, no Jewish communities remained
at all. Chroniclers describe wells filled with children's bodies, disemboweled corpses, and the slave markets of Constantinople overflowing with captives from Ukraine. For the Jews, it was a catastrophe on the scale of the destruction of the Temple, and from that catastrophe, madness was born. In 1665, a rumor swept across the entire Jewish world, from Amsterdam to Yemen, that the Messiah had come. A man named Sabbatai Zevi, from Smyrna, declared himself the savior. People sold their possessions, abolished fasts, married off nine-year-old children so that all souls might be incarnated before the end of the world. When the Ottoman Sultan summoned the Messiah and offered him a choice, Islam or death, Sabbatai
Zevi donned a turban and recited the Shahada. The greatest religious fraud in Jewish history ended in a single minute. Thousands took their own lives. Thousands more followed him into Islam. But, from the wreckage of that disillusionment would emerge Hasidism, a mystical, emotional movement that would say, "What matters is not scholarship, but sincerity." By the 19th century, three quarters of all the world's Jews live in the Russian Empire. Their language is Yiddish, a blend of medieval German, Hebrew, and Slavic borrowings. Their world is closed, bookish, and deeply religious. And then, that world explodes.
Many of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in Ottoman lands, including the European part of the empire. Cities like Salonica in modern-day Greece. Under the Ottoman millet system, Jews held a recognized status as one of the empire's religious minorities, and for a time lived more securely there than anywhere in Christian Europe. But, the real transformation came from the west. In 1791, revolutionary France became the first country in Europe to pass a law granting Jews equal civil rights with the rest of the population. For the first time in a thousand years, they could leave their communities for universities, courtrooms, medicine, science. And they do, with such force that Europe shudders.
Centuries of Talmudic training, endless debates, interpretations, the passing of subtexts within subtexts, prove to be the perfect preparation for academic and professional careers. Jews fill law offices, medical faculties, the banking sector. And the result is paradoxical. Rather than extinguishing anti-Semitism, emancipation breeds a new and even more dangerous form of it. In the Middle Ages, a Jew could be baptized and formally become part of society. The hatred was religious. But, by the end of the 19th century, racial theories are gaining ground across Europe, and now a Jew is hated for his origin, for his blood, and blood cannot be baptized away. In 1894, in France, the very country
that first granted Jews their rights, the Dreyfus Affair erupts. A Jewish officer is convicted on fabricated charges of espionage. The crowd on the streets of Paris screams, "Death to the Jews." Among those who hear it is an Austrian journalist named Theodor Herzl. For him, it is a moment of revelation. Assimilation does not work. The only way out is their own state. In 1896, he publishes The Jewish State. In 1897, he convenes the first Zionist Congress in Basel. In his diary, he writes, "In 50 years, this will be reality." He will be off by one year. Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, pogroms. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II is assassinated, and a wave of violence against Jews sweeps across the south of
the empire. Mobs loot shops, set fire to homes, kill regardless of sex or age. The word pogrom enters every European language. The new emperor, Alexander III, a committed anti-Semite, not only fails to stop the rioters, but tightens anti-Jewish laws. Millions of Jews are confined within the Pale of Settlement, a strip along the empire's western edge, beyond which they are forbidden to travel. For a Jewish girl, the most accessible way out of the Pale is to officially register as a prostitute and obtain a yellow ticket. With it, she could travel to the capital and enroll in school. Such was the Russian Empire.
The first Aliyah begins. A wave of migration to Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. World War I redraws the map. The Ottoman Empire collapses. Palestine passes to a British mandate. In 1917, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, writes a letter endorsing the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. When he wrote it, 90% of Palestine's population was Arab. The British promised everything to everyone. A homeland for the Jews, independence for the Arabs. But, at the same time, they severely restrict Jewish immigration through quotas, the White Paper of 1939, and outright naval blockades of
ships carrying refugees. They promised a homeland, and then locked the door to it. Fulfilling both promises is impossible. The conflict is preordained. In 1933, Hitler comes to power in Germany. Over 12 years, the Nazi regime will murder 6 million Jews, 1/3 of the entire Jewish people, the Shoah. A catastrophe for which words do not exist. The people who had given Europe a significant share of its intellectual elite were destroyed by that very same Europe. After the war, the question is urgent. Jewish survivors across Europe are desperate to reach Palestine, but the British are keeping the borders sealed.
Jewish paramilitary organizations, the Haganah, the Irgun, the Lehi, wage a guerrilla war against both Arabs and British. In 1946, the Irgun blows up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British headquarters are located. 91 people are killed. Britain, exhausted by the Second World War, can take no more. The matter is handed to the United Nations. On November 29th, 1947, the General Assembly votes to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. Jerusalem is to be placed under international control. The Soviet Union, seeking to weaken Britain's position in the region, votes in favor with three votes, the USSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Byelorussian SSR. Czechoslovakia begins
secret arms shipments to the future Israeli army. Among them, in a twist of historical irony, captured German weapons. The Arabs reject the plan. Palestinian Arabs consider it unjust. The Jews are offered 55% of the territory, despite making up only a third of the population. On May 14th, 1948, just hours before the British mandate expires, David Ben-Gurion, a left-wing politician born in the Russian Empire, stands in the hall of a Tel Aviv museum beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl and declares the independence of the state of Israel, exactly 51 years after Herzl predicted it. The next day, the armies of five Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, invade the newborn country. Israel, with an army assembled from partisans,
underground fighters, and Holocaust survivors, prevails. The war exacts a heavy toll on both sides. Approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs flee or are expelled from their homes. The Arabs call this the Nakba, the catastrophe. They will not return. More wars follow. In 1956, the Suez Crisis, when Israel, alongside Britain and France, attacks Egypt. In 1967, the Six-Day War, in which Israel, in six days, defeats the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and captures the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and, for the first time in 2,000 years, all of Jerusalem. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War, when Egypt and Syria attack Israel on its holiest religious holiday, and nearly breach its defenses
before the Israelis push them back. Every time, the threat of annihilation. Every time, survival. A people forbidden to carry weapons for 2,000 years built one of the most formidable armies in the world within a single generation. And one more miracle that is rarely spoken of, Hebrew, a language used for the last two millennia only for prayer and the reading of sacred texts, was resurrected as a living, spoken language. This is the only case in the history of humanity in which a dead language became alive again. Today, people argue in it on buses, write code in it, curse at football matches in it. The language of the Bible became the language of startups.
The Sumerians invented writing and vanished so completely that for 4,000 years, no one knew they had ever existed. Babylon built wonders of the world and turned to dust. Rome gave the world law and fell. Persia learned to absorb its conquerors, but never returned to Zoroastrianism. The Jews lost everything, their temple, their land, their kingdom, 6 million of their people, and survived. But, survival came at a price that is still being paid. Two peoples now lay claim to the same narrow strip of land between the desert and the sea, each with their own truth, each with their own catastrophe. One calls 1948 independence, the other calls it the Nakba.
One remembers 2,000 years of exile, the other remembers being exiled 70 years ago. And there is no court on Earth capable of adjudicating two truths, both of which are real. Today, there are 15 million Jews, 2/10 of 1% of the world's population. Yet, one in five Nobel laureates is Jewish. Three world religions grow from a single root. Myths inscribed on clay tablets in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago reached us through the Jewish body of texts, and through nothing else. 3,000 years ago, Pharaoh Merneptah carved into stone, "Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more." Since then, everyone who tried could have repeated that phrase. No one succeeded.
