Through incisive conversations with key experts in history, archaeology, international law, political science and media, | dG1fcDFBazVCbzBaTFk
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00:09 The Hebrew Bible is the blueprint
00:12 of Jewish civilization.
00:14 And it's the foundational document
00:16 of some of the best in civilization as we know it.
00:19 Jewish identity is born in a journey to the land of Israel.
00:24 It begins with two momentous journeys, one of Aram and Sarah
00:29 from Mesopotamia, another several centuries later
00:33 by Moses and the Israelites from Egypt to the pharaohs.
00:38 There's no question that the Israelites lived in this land.
00:41 It's supported by archaeology.
00:43 This is supported by the biblical text.
00:45 And this is supported by extra-biblical text.
00:48 We have much evidence to the fact
00:50 that in the Second Temple period,
00:52 Jewish pilgrims came to worship in Jerusalem
00:56 from North Africa, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Italy, Asia Minor.
01:02 All those people were united by the centrality
01:06 of the land of Israel and the major place of Jerusalem
01:10 and the Jerusalem Temple.
01:12 Throughout the Middle Ages until the modern period,
01:15 Jews were fundamentally organized
01:17 around the land of Israel.
01:18 That's where their memories lay.
01:20 That's where their entire education led them.
01:23 The word Zionism, which was quite a late creation,
01:26 it appears for the first time in the 1890s,
01:30 was nonetheless a phenomenon of the 19th century.
01:33 And it began really with religious thinkers.
01:37 The movement is essentially one of self-determination,
01:41 of the return to the land, return to the language,
01:44 and one of sovereignty.
01:46 A majority of the Jews who came home
01:49 came from one part of the Middle East to the other.
01:53 These were Jews who lived for centuries or even millennia
01:57 in Arab lands as second class, third class, or no class
02:02 citizens.
02:03 They knew from their religious beliefs, from their customs,
02:10 from their entire history and culture
02:13 that Zion was the place that they were destined to come to
02:17 as the fulfillment of a very ancient aspiration.
02:22 Herzl's idea of the Jewish state, more than anything else,
02:26 was the internal unification of the Jewish person,
02:31 of the Jewish man and woman.
02:33 He actually called it a return to Judaism.
02:37 Every Jew, by becoming a Zionist,
02:39 was saying, I'm going to devote myself wholly
02:44 to trying to understand what it means to be
02:47 a member of a great nation that contributes to the world.
02:52 But I'm going to contribute through my Judaism
02:54 to the rest of the world.
02:56 And in that, he said, we're going to become whole people
02:58 again.
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