Return The Story of the Jews

Every year in the spring,

a country born from the ashes of annihilation

remembers a loss for which there are no words.

SIREN WAILS

SIREN CONTINUES

SIREN GRADUALLY FADES THEN STOPS

Everybody standing by their truck or their car or in the street

just knows it could have been us.

It's still heartbreaking.

And then life goes on.

Today, around half the Jews in the world live here in Israel.

Six million people,

six million defeats for the Nazi programme of total extermination.

I've always thought that Israel is the consummation

of some of the highest ethical values

of Jewish tradition and history.

But creating a place of safety and defending it

has sometimes challenged those same ethics and values.

How all this came about

and what the consequences for the world are

is the last chapter of our story without an end.

I was born in 1945.

Before I was out of short trousers,

I knew about those other boys,

the boys of the ghettos and camps,

the ones who never got to be Bar Mitzvahed.

My Bar Mitzvah party was just around the corner from here.

Back then, I hadn't heard of Szmul Zygielbojm,

a Polish Jew who lived in this part of west London

between the springs of 1942 and 1943,

the year when three million other Polish Jews were murdered.

Zygielbojm had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto

charged with the grave mission of alerting the Allies

to the brutal mistreatment of Jews in occupied Europe...

..to the massacres that followed Nazi arrival,

to the plans for a wholesale annihilation.

He spent 18 months in America

addressing rallies, trying to rouse the conscience of politicians

now that information about the Nazis' extermination plans

was becoming irrefutable,

and all to little effect.

Then Zygielbojm went back to Britain and spoke on the BBC,

saying things you don't usually hear on the BBC.

He said this - "It would be a crime and a disgrace to go on living,

"to belong to the human race

"unless immediate action is taken

"to stop the greatest crime ever known to human history."

In April 1943, an SS operation to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto

ran into fierce, armed Jewish resistance...

..the first major rising against Nazi rule in occupied Europe.

It took the SS a month to crush it.

Many of the leaders of the uprising

were Zygielbojm's friends and comrades.

And among those who perished were Zygielbojm's wife and son.

At exactly the same time,

British and American diplomats were meeting in Bermuda

to discuss the plight of wartime refugees.

The words "Jew" and "Jewish" were banned from the proceedings.

After ten days of talk,

the Allies decided to do...nothing.

But Szmul Zygielbojm acted.

He wrote a letter to the Polish government in exile

and to the world, saying,

"My comrades fell with their arms in their hands.

"It was not permitted to me to join them,

"but I belong to their mass grave."

The Holocaust put paid to the idea

that when facing annihilation,

the Jews had any reason to expect much in the way of protection,

succour or asylum from anyone.

Expressions of concern, yes,

but not what you'd actually call saving lives.

So it was not just what the Nazis did to the Jews,

but what everyone else failed to do

that made the moral case for Israel.

For the Jews who had somehow survived the Holocaust,

this is what salvation looked like

in the years immediately after the Second World War...

..the coastline of Palestine.

They came here in their tens of thousands

on dangerously overcrowded rust-bucket ships,

a desperate exodus from the blood lands of central Europe

where two-thirds of Jews had been wiped out.

There was no returning to that continent of phantoms.

Some who tried to go back to what had been their homes

in Poland or Romania were harassed, assaulted,

sometimes even killed.

But Palestine didn't want them either.

Since the end of the First World War,

it had been controlled by the British,

who for decades had struggled to keep a lid

on a vicious inter-communal war between the Arabs and the Jews.

The sudden influx of tens of thousands of Jews was,

from the British perspective,

impossible, threatening chaos inside Palestine

and Arab hostility outside.

So the Jews were taken off their ships, put onto cattle trucks,

unloaded a few miles further down the coast

and escorted to a camp surrounded by barbed wire

where men were separated from women and children

and everyone was directed towards a shower block

that dominated the centre of the camp.

For Holocaust survivors,

memory wounds, barely scarred over, opened again.

One of them was called Berele Wagner.

He'd survived the liquidation of the Romanian ghettos and wrote this -

"Arriving at Atlit detention centre,

the British soldiers stripped us naked,

"threw our clothes in the laundry and then forced us into a disinfection room,

"which was just like the gas chambers

"in a German concentration camp."

"I'd thought the struggle was over

"and I realised that it had only just begun."

Of course, Atlit was no concentration camp.

The inmates were humanely treated

before being sent on to internment camps in Cyprus.

But how on earth had it come to this?

British squaddies forcibly deporting Jewish survivors of a genocide?

At the end of the First World War,

the situation had been very different.

Then, Jews around the world

had blessed the name of the British Empire

for an historic pledge freely given by its political leaders,

the Balfour Declaration,

67 bland words that committed Britain to support the creation

of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

The man who did more than anyone to bring this about was Chaim Weizmann,

"a Yid from Motol", as he described himself,

a muddy hamlet in the Pripet marshes between Pinsk and Minsk,

the usual combination of isolation and persecution,

poverty and pogroms.

Chaim Weizmann displayed all the combustible elements of a shtetl Jew -

passionately excitable, tirelessly argumentative,

earthily idealistic.

But he combined all this with the cool analytical precision

and dogged patience of his chosen metier - chemistry.

His journey from yeshiva school to laboratory

had been a remarkable one.

In the early 1900s,

he'd come to Manchester University as a lecturer and researcher

where he was perfectly placed to pursue his other passion,

as a dedicated and tireless campaigner for the Zionist cause,

ultimately becoming leader of the World Zionist Movement.

He never disguised his conviction

that a Jewish homeland could exist only in one place - Palestine.

His insistence on this point

would come as a revelation to British politicians

like Arthur Balfour or David Lloyd George,

who'd imagined Argentina or East Africa

might be more practical solutions to "the Jewish question".

What the establishment couldn't resist

was someone who brought the human reality of the Jews -

their terror, squalor, righteous anger and craving for Zion -

right into the corridors of power.

When Weizmann spoke, it was "Hear, O England",

and, having heard, the movers and shakers felt

mysteriously compelled towards an act of moral salvation.

What was the point, after all, of having the British Empire

unless you did something grand?

"Are we to have no more adventures?" asked Balfour.

And even hard-headed men like Lloyd George

felt good about giving the Jews what they wanted and needed.

When the world went to war in 1914,

the other side of Weizmann's extraordinary character came to the fore.

His discovery of a technique for synthesising a vital ingredient

for high explosives kept the British war machine turning

and cemented his alliance with the great and the good.

David Lloyd George would later claim that the Balfour Declaration

had been a reward to Weizmann for services rendered.

"I only wish it had been as simple as that," was Weizmann's response.

As the minutes of Weizmann's Zionist committee made clear,

the negotiations were long and hard,

the lobbying from Jewish anti-Zionists intense,

the outcome always in doubt.

When the civil servant brought Weizmann a copy of the declaration,

he said exuberantly, "It's a boy!"

Weizmann later wrote in his autobiography,

"Well, I did not like the look of that boy very much.

"He was not what I expected. All the same, I knew it was a great departure."

Why his slight reservation?

Well, the wording that Weizmann had wanted

talked about the reconstitution of Palestine

as a Jewish national home.

The wording he got talked about a Jewish national home in Palestine,

maybe in a very small piece of Palestine.

They were not the same at all.

All the same, this was so much more

than Weizmann or his colleagues could possibly have hoped for

even a few years before.

At that very moment, the moment of the declaration,

Jews in Weizmann's old home, Russia, were being assaulted and massacred,

pogrom after pogrom.

Now, courtesy of British imperial interests,

but also of genuine British enthusiasm,

they would have some sort of home in Palestine to go to.

The word "miracle" gets horribly overused in Jewish history.

For once, it seems like the right word.

But the Jews weren't the only ones being promised miracles.

Fired by the same spirit of idealism and adventure

that had inspired the Balfour Declaration,

and directed, in some cases, by the very same people,

the British had simultaneously been making undertakings to the Arabs

about their national independence.

They'd even sent a British officer called Lawrence

to help the Arabs plan their revolt against Turkish rule.

It's easy to be cynical about these British strategies -

duplicitous, delusional, doomed - take your pick.

Even so, by the war's end, there was reason to believe

that the aspirations of Jew and Arab

could both, somehow, be accommodated

in a modernised Middle East

under the paternalistic eye of the British Empire.

You don't have to take my word for it.

Listen to the words of Prince Faisal,

later King Faisal of Iraq.

Well, here's what the military leader of the Arab Revolt

felt about Zionism in 1919.

Faisal writes to Felix Frankfurter,

senior American Zionist,

in the following way.

"Dear Mr Frankfurter,

"I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists

"to tell you what I've often been able to say to Dr Weizmann

"in Arabia and Europe.

"We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race,

"have suffered similar oppressions

"at the hands of powers stronger than themselves.

"We Arabs, especially the educated among us,

"look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.

"We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home."

Now, that, to me, is incredibly moving.

Yes, the historian in me knows Faisal had an interest

in recruiting Jewish influence,

even Jewish money, to the Arab cause.

Weizmann and the Zionists in their turn

had an interest in keeping people like Faisal happy

for the purposes of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

All the same, the cynic in me is banished at this particular moment.

This is a document, with all the reservations

and understanding of the complexity of the issue,

this is a document of what might have been

and, do you know, what might still be.

Chaim Weizmann never stopped believing

that Jews and Arabs could be reconciled

through the benevolent power of modernisation and progress.

But in the meantime, he got on with the hard slog

of building a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Land was bought, farms established,

Jewish immigration increased,

but always strictly controlled by the British.

They were realising far too late

that the Arab nationalism they had once encouraged

and thought could be managed by the likes of Faisal

had fostered a local Palestinian nationalism

that saw in the Jews the alien usurpers of their land.

Those Palestinians would find their opposite number in Ze'ev Jabotinsky,

a pugnacious, articulate Zionist from Odessa.

While Chaim Weizmann was schmoozing

the great and the good of the British establishment,

Jabotinsky was putting guns into the hands of Odessa Jews

so they could defend themselves against the repeated savagery of the pogroms.

He'd fought for the British in World War I,

but, unlike Weizmann, he was no Anglophile

and he rejected as sentimental delusion

the idea of harmony between Jews and Arabs.

These bleak, hard views he expressed in 1923

in a short, sharp essay called The Iron Wall.

"Apparently," he wrote,

"I'm considered an enemy of the Arab people

"and a proponent of their expulsion. This is not true.

"Expulsion in any form is impossible.

"There will always be two nations in this country,

"and that's good enough for me, provided we are the majority.

"Conflict is inevitable."

Jabotinsky's brand of so-called Revisionist Zionism,

born in the dark valley between the two world wars,

took on many of the trappings of the militant nationalism of that period -

the uniforms, the marching, the salutes,

the insistence that you were either for us or against us.

Jabotinsky died in 1940,

but his intransigent spirit did not.

But for some, Jabotinsky's Iron Wall was a negation

of what Zionism was supposed to be about -

the realisation of spiritual and cultural ideals

and a rebuttal of crude power politics and petty nationalism.

The most thoughtfully tortured of the idealists

was the philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber had known Weizmann and Jabotinsky when they were all young Zionists,

but unlike them, he didn't think Zionism

had to be mostly about matters of power.

On the contrary, if Zionism ended up merely reproducing

the power plays of the rest of the world,

all of its achievements would be merely self-defeating.

For Buber, a true Jewish national revival

had to be based on Judaism,

and the principal of Judaism that mattered most to him was simple -

do not do unto others what is hateful to you.

Now, the acid test of that fundamental Jewish principle,

for Buber, was how Jews treated the Arabs of Palestine.

For decades afterwards, whatever happened,

Buber would insist on the importance of that.

Chaim Weizmann was the diplomat-statesman,

Jabotinsky was the ideologue,

Martin Buber a moral philosopher.

What was missing if Zionism was really going to work

as a concrete, successful movement?

The answer is organisational politics,

and no-one was as good at that as David Ben-Gurion.

Ben-Gurion was the vital force of hard-headed politics.

He came from Plonsk in Russia,

but he always said he'd never really suffered very much

from anti-Semitism directed at him personally.

So it gave his vision, which he certainly had,

a Bible-saturated vision,

a kind of flinty optimism,

a sort of element of rejoicing in it

as well as a fierce sense of political calculation.

And it was this kind of complex moral decency

inside this human machine of political cunning

that won David Ben-Gurion respect,

both before and after Israel's independence.

But the decades that lay between the Balfour Declaration

and the Declaration of Independence proved to be bloody ones.

Despite the high hopes expressed in Prince Faisal's letter,

opposition to a Jewish national home among the Arabs of Palestine

had quickly turned violent.

Arab attacks on settlements and towns were met

with swift Jewish counterattacks.

Hunkered down in pillboxes and fortified barracks,

the British had brutally suppressed Arab revolts.

But at the same time,

they were slamming the door on Jewish immigration to Palestine

in the hope of appeasing Arab opinion,

provoking mass protests from the Jews already there.

And at the same time,

all over the rest of the world,

other escape routes were being closed,

condemning to death the Jews trapped in Nazi Europe.

The Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem

bears testimony to the human cost to Britain

of the "adventure" begun by Balfour and his colleagues -

soldiers and policemen who died on active service,

some of them victims of Jewish terrorism.

By the time the last man died,

Britain had handed responsibility for Palestine

over to the United Nations.

In November 1947, the UN recommended partition.

A viable, independent Jewish state covering 56% of Palestine

had been voted into existence

by the international community.

On May 14th, 1948,

at a hastily arranged ceremony at the Tel Aviv Museum,

David Ben-Gurion turned the United Nations vote

into an historic reality.

TRANSLATION OF DAVID BEN-GURION: The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.

Here, their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed.

Exiled from their land,

the Jewish people remained faithful to it

in all the countries of their dispersion,

never ceasing to pray and hope for their return

and for the restoration in it of their national freedom.

But national freedom had to be fought for.

The Arabs rejected the UN partition plan

as they had rejected every previous attempt to divide Palestine.

The bitter civil war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine

now became a war between Jewish and Arab states in 1948

when armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq

simultaneously attacked Israel.

One of the crucial battlegrounds was here

at the kibbutz of Yad Mordechai, where a small group of Jews,

inspired by comrades who had fallen in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,

held out against Egyptian tank divisions for a critical six days.

For Yad Mordechai, the heroic deaths in Warsaw

had made their own battle to survive in Palestine a sacred obligation.

After the war, an armistice agreement

allowed Israel to expand its boundaries,

redrawing them along the so-called Green Line

and putting Israel in control of nearly 80% of Mandate Palestine,

including West Jerusalem.

The biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria

and the old city of Jerusalem, site of the Western Wall,

were not part of this new Israel.

But for secular Zionists,

this was an emotional, symbolic issue rather than a practical one.

The centre of gravity of the new Jewish state was not Jerusalem,

burdened with the aura of its history,

but Tel Aviv, which by the 1940s

had grown into a modern, secular, breezy metropolis by the sea,

a cafe-happy cultural powerhouse of creativity,

boasting the latest in modernist architecture and modernist thinking.

A new home for new Jews in their new old land.

For the Arabs of Palestine,

Israel's war of independence had meant Nakba - catastrophe -

the displacement, sometimes violently,

of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from towns and villages

like Lifta on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

By the time of the 1949 armistice,

around 700,000 Palestinians had left, some fleeing in fear,

some obeying the orders of village elders or Arab guerrillas,

some driven out by force and terror.

Their towns and villages became part of Israel,

and they have never been able to return to their homes,

except occasionally as visitors.

House door keys are the icons of their loss

and their hope of an eventual return.

It killed us,

but this life outside Lifta shaped our mentality.

They lost everything. Only the hope to come back.

So always I bring my son to come to Lifta.

I tell them, "Here is my father's house,

"here is your father's house,

"here, here, here, here."

So they will never forget.

But there are other memories and other catastrophes

dating to these same fateful years.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews,

living in Muslim countries for centuries,

discovered suddenly their home was no longer their home.

This is the Eliyahu HaNavi,

Elijah the Prophet's synagogue in Alexandria.

In its day, it could swallow 1,000 worshippers without blinking.

This was a deeply rooted community with clans of families,

inevitably some richer, some poorer,

the older of them sitting in their family pews.

You showed up on Shabbat

and you knew exactly where the Shamas would be sitting.

But all of that became suddenly irrelevant

following the establishment of Israel in 1948

and the war that followed.

It hadn't always been easy to live as a Jew in a Muslim country,

and long before Israel was created,

it was getting harder to avoid charges of Zionism

in countries like Egypt and Iraq.

But after 1947, the gloves came off.

Assaults, riots, murders,

arrests, show trials,

public hangings, expropriations,

expulsions.

Did you have any sense that there might be trouble?

I knew nothing. I was only ten years old.

So all of a sudden, at midnight,

ten Egyptian officers in our house, searching everywhere.

I don't know what they were searching after.

They opened closets, drawers,

they cut mattresses.

I didn't know what they wanted, and they left.

They found nothing, they left.

They did the same to my uncle upstairs,

but they took him to prison.

For me, it was a trauma, a shock,

because prison, for a child ten years old, is a criminal.

My uncle was a criminal?!

I asked my mother if that's true. "Is he a criminal?"

She explained to me that he went to prison because we are Jews.

The same story was repeated all over the Muslim world,

not just in Egypt, but in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon,

Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

At least 700,000 Jews left or were expelled,

many reduced to destitution,

taking with them only what they could carry.

Some went to America,

others in the North African world to France, Iraqis to Britain.

But many came to Israel,

most of them Zionists by necessity rather than choice.

The exodus of Jewish communities from Muslim lands

almost doubled the population of Israel in just a few years -

the first, but not the last, demographic tidal wave

to engulf this tiny country.

In the decades that followed,

millions more would come when they could,

from places as far apart as India, East Africa,

the Caucasus and Russia.

This was a country for Jews,

but it also became one of the most diverse in the whole world.

The state did all it could

to forge a common identity for these new arrivals.

Hebrew was the armature

around which a Jewish-Israeli identity would be built.

The ancient language of the Bible

adapting itself to the demands of a modern state.

Israel exploded the stereotype

of Jews as weak, rootless victims.

Here, the Jews were enterprising, muscular and vigorous.

Those born here were nicknamed "sabra" - prickly pears,

tough and uncompromising on the outside,

soft and sweet on the inside - and the rest of the world

would just have to get used to dealing with them.

And this is when I played my own modest part in the miracle.

In 1963, I worked for two months on a kibbutz called Beit HaEmek.

Returning nearly 50 years later brought it all back.

Freddy Kahana, Beit HaEmek's resident architect and planner,

who's been on the kibbutz for more than 60 years, showed me round.

These are the original houses of Beit HaEmek.

You probably remember them. I do remember.

I remember the lawns very well and I remember the olive trees.

The trees have grown up,

and a bit of the landscape has changed. Yeah.

But these are the original houses of Beit HaEmek.

Maybe some of these trees are 200 years old, 300 years old.

They're very beautiful.

It looks like a comfortable enough kind of place, but in its day,

Beit HaEmek and the other 270 kibbutzes of Israel

were once the scene of a radical new departure in the Jewish story.

The kibbutz blended the Zionist dream

of building a new Jewish country

with a secular, socialist vision of building a better world.

For a Jewish teenager like me, it was an irresistible blend

of romance, social idealism, adventure and sunshine.

The reason I came to Beit HaEmek was

I was a member of a Zionist youth group in London, Habonim,

being drawn to the ideals of, um...

communalist and socialist Zionism

pretty much as an alternative to a religious life.

I wanted a different kind of Jewish

from the Judaism that the Synagogue offered.

The kibbutz movement, when it came, had...

They were secular, they weren't religious, they didn't pray,

but they were Jewish. And this raises the question,

what is then Judaism under those circumstances?

And the kibbutz movement, in effect,

at some stage, decided that they were the new Judaism...

..and started to define, redefine Judaism in its own image.

And all this created in Israel a new way of being Jewish,

and it's a secular way.

And if there's a secular... community in Israel today,

it owes a great deal to the foundations of the meaning of it,

which was created in the kibbutzim.

Kibbutzniks were never more than a tiny percentage of the population,

but their influence was enormous.

They were the elite of the new social-democratic Israel,

a progressive bloc who, for decades, would dominate

the country's political, social and cultural heights.

But even these irreproachably liberal, right-minded,

left-leaning Jews had to struggle

to come to terms with the historical reality

on which their bright new future was being built.

In the case of Beit HaEmek, an Arab village called Kuwaykat.

I must admit, I was not happy

about the fact that this was sitting on an Arab village.

I didn't feel good about it, but I accepted it. It wasn't that.

The problem was simply not that,

and over the years, we expanded the kibbutz.

We took down the Arab houses,

we expanded the kibbutz on top of the Arab village

and, looking back now, we can say, OK, we didn't think about it,

maybe we should have thought about it. But that's not the point.

It's important to remember where we are

and also why we're here.

I have no regrets, personally, but it's not an easy subject.

The dream of a Jewish state

was always going to be rather different from the reality.

In Israel, ideals and aspirations are challenged every day

by the complexities of survival

in a world that mostly remains hostile.

Photographer Micha Bar-Am has been recording the struggle

between aspiration and reality for more than 50 years.

It's a kind of a witnessing,

observing and trying to leave your little scratch

by the way you look at things.

This is one of the first settlements in the Negev,

which is the southern part, the desert part, of Israel.

What is this? That is trenches.

Oh, they're trenches?

They are trenches, and you can see them in many settlements.

This makes it even more fantastic.

So you have this really rather innocent image of the halutz,

the pioneering house, very... you know, kind of honest, virtuous,

sense of home and hard work,

and then you have the military reality of it around it.

It's something like a rift...

..like a rift dividing, even now, the Israeli society.

In June 1967, Israel was once again fighting for its existence

with Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies massing on its borders.

But with a series of bold, pre-emptive strikes

and swift forward actions,

a war fought initially for survival became,

just six traumatic days later,

a military triumph for Israel that few had foreseen.

THEY SING

Israeli forces pushed over the Green Line,

south into Sinai, north into the Golan Heights

and east to the banks of the Jordan,

occupying cities and territory steeped in biblical history.

But it was the capture of the old city of Jerusalem,

the religious heart of Judaism, that caused

even the most secular-minded Jew to be swept away

by a sense of the miraculous.

Micha Bar-Am was there when Israeli paratroopers arrived

at the Western Wall,

the last remnant of the high temple destroyed 1,900 years before

by the Roman legions, the start of centuries of exile from Jerusalem.

This is a... ..prayer shawl of bullets.

Yeah, exactly.

That was the day the Western Wall in Jerusalem

was liberated by the paratroopers.

It was such a moving moment for everyone.

You didn't have to be a religious Jew,

but it's a historic moment when the messianic spirit

and the military power have merged

and brought upon us what is now...

..the spirit of Israeli society.

It changed Israel.

That's the simplest way to say it, don't you think?

All of a sudden, you could visit biblical scenes

that were part of the history of the Jews

from the River Jordan,

from Joshua crossing into...

Hebron. Hebron and Nablus - Shechem, you know.

All of a sudden, the feeling of people was that maybe it is right

to go back to all those historic sites.

But going back was just the beginning.

For some, the victories of the Six Day War

were a clear divine summons

to reclaim not just biblical-historical acreage

but what they now thought had been the true Zionist ideal all along.

Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel,

for them was a place of messianic redemption.

This was the start of the so-called settler movement,

a hybrid of religious and nationalist zeal

flourishing under the umbrella of Israeli military power

and taking its authority from the Bible

rather than its permission from the UN.

HEBREW ON RADIO

The international community regards these settlements,

some now the size of cities, as illegal.

To the Palestinians, they are part of a Trojan Horse annexation policy

orchestrated by the government and the military.

To many Israelis, they've become simply

a source of affordable housing.

But Tzvi Cooper, like many Israelis

who choose to live in the settlements,

is still driven by the ideals

of the founders of the settler movement.

This is Tekoa, halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.

It's a relaxed kind of place where everyone knows each other's names

and looks out for each other's kids.

This is the very heart of what the world calls the West Bank,

but to Tzvi and thousands like him, this is Judea and Samaria,

the biblical home of the Jews thousands of years ago

and now their home once more.

One of my beliefs is that

there's not going to be peace if Jews can't live anywhere,

especially in their homeland.

A Jew can live in Berlin, a Jew can live in Cairo even,

but many people believe that Jews can't live

in the ancient biblical homeland, which includes Tekoa, my home.

Tell me what... You're suddenly, Tzvi, into power

and you had a map, what would that map look like?

I mean, how would you redraw the Green Line?

The Green Line, in my opinion, doesn't really exist today.

OK.

A dream would be a return to the larger borders,

or at least the ability for Jews... Where do the larger borders end?

Well, Solomon's kingdom or David's kingdom.

And today I wouldn't necessarily imagine

that we would ever return to those borders,

but it would be nice that a Jewish family could move in

and build a homestead in some of those villages.

Mm-hm.

There are amazingly rich archaeological sites

that are evidence to the contribution

that Jews made to this world in this area.

The ancient Jewish settlements in Jordan.

There are ancient Jewish settlements in Syria

up to the River Prat, the Euphrates.

I think it's a lie to humanity

for us not to be able to inhabit this land and these places.

And it would be a disaster...

'Meeting Tzvi was not easy for me.

'I recognise the sincerity of his views,

'but profoundly disagree with them.

'A sense of territorial entitlement prescribed by the Bible

'is not a development of the Zionism of necessity

'but a threat to it, for the Bible is many things,

'but a blueprint for peace in this land, it is surely not.'

If, in fact, settlements have to be part of the Jewish state,

you're going to be a minority presiding and ruling over a...

you know, an unemancipated majority.

You know, you will genuinely be in the imperial situation

which Zionism has never wanted to be.

Um... I think that the history is unfolding,

and people like me and others are making that history,

and it's up to us to bravely look at where we live

and understand that there is no dividing up this country.

There's no dividing of Jerusalem.

There's no handing over of the biblical homeland,

Tekoa and other villages like that.

We're going to have to find a different model,

a model that may not exist, in Europe anyway.

So the conventional logic that's applicable to the entire world

may need some adjustment for the Holy Land.

It always has.

All the rather beautiful things you speak eloquently about

may indeed be felt, if not with a biblical text,

by the Palestinians as well.

So I don't know what to say.

It seems to me like, yeah, we're arguing roots.

Whose roots are deeper?

I'd just like to say my roots are here too.

There's been a dramatic shift in Israel over the past decades.

The secular, outward-looking Israel I remember

from my days in Beit HaEmek

has been eclipsed by one that insists, in the name of religion,

nationalism or security,

on separation and difference.

'The Israeli novelist David Grossman has tackled these issues

'throughout his life as a writer.

'He believes they stem from the very roots of Jewish experience.'

..Euphrates to the sea.

I mean, we talked to a settler from Tekoa the other day

who got a kind of dreamy look in his eye when he said,

"Of course, you know,

"where the tribe of Gad was, one day..." and so on,

and those borders are kind of set out

very extravagantly in Genesis.

But they're not the borders of a defensible home.

Do you think that's part of the problem?

These are borders of a dream. Yeah.

Of deep religious belief.

In the years that Israel exists,

in the 65, almost, years of our sovereignty,

our borders have moved and shifted.

We invaded others.

There was all the time this ambiguity

of where the border is.

I wonder, I ask myself, why it is like that?

Probably it has to do something with our attraction

as a people to the abstract.

You know, we have invented the abstract God.

But it's not only that.

For 2,000 years, you know, Jews lived in Spain and Morocco

and Egypt and Yemen, and they had their concrete, everyday life there,

but at the same time, the essence of their life,

the essence of the meaning of their being,

was in a totally different, remote place.

In the end of the east, there in Jerusalem, in Zion.

And in the Torah. In the Torah, in the Talmud,

they created an enormous body of existence that was all imaginary,

all in the mind, and I think part of our tragedy is

that when we already came here to this place,

to our home, we still flirt with this abstraction.

We still... We are here,

but it's always possible for us to be out of here.

You know, it's always possible for us to exist

in the sphere of the imagination, of spirituality.

Peace can...root our being,

can make it more solid.

Today in Israel, the distance between dream and reality

can be measured in hundreds of miles of barbed wire and concrete.

The separation barrier was a response

to a devastating wave of suicide bombings

unleashed a decade ago,

in which more than 500 Israelis died.

Today, it cuts Israel off from the West Bank,

except where it snakes deep into the occupied territories

to protect some of the larger settlements,

shredding Palestinian territory

and making life for the Palestinians a daily ordeal.

I don't know why, but walls are big in Jewish history, aren't they?

Walls of lamentation, walls of the temple, ghetto walls...

this.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the militant nationalist

Jewish Zionist leader in the '20s and '30s,

talked about the necessity for an Iron Wall

as a condition of there being any realistic chance

of a Jewish state surviving.

Well, he got it in this, didn't he?

I want to say that nobody, including me,

ultimately has the moral right to say that shouldn't have happened,

the wall shouldn't have happened.

Before the wall happened,

hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks.

After the wall happened, very, very few.

In some senses, if you don't live in Israel -

I don't live in Israel -

you're morally obliged to be nearly silent, nearly silent.

All the same,

I also want to add to that huge moral caveat this -

the Bible is full of encounters between men and God,

between men and other men,

between even enemy brothers.

It's very difficult for me to sort of stand here

and say that that kind of Judaism,

the Judaism of openness, of encounter,

has a chance of a true life here.

This is a Judaism, a Jewishness, that looks...

scurries beneath the shadows of these towers for safety.

It's not ultimately a Judaism of bravery.

It's not ultimately a Judaism of life.

But there are gaps in the wall where a little light gets in.

At the Hand In Hand school in Jerusalem,

Jewish and Arab students are taught in Hebrew and Arabic

by Arab and Jewish teachers.

The kids here are no starry-eyed Utopians.

Bitter divisions, long inherited and deeply felt,

crowd in on their teenage lives.

But growing up together must do something

to immunise them against the habits of hatred.

Where others see enemies, they see friends.

The duel between raw power and ethical idealism

has been at the heart of the Jewish story for thousands of years.

It's what the historian Josephus meant

when he said that Jews had become

the teachers of men in the greatest of things.

It's what flowered in medieval Spain

when Jews and Muslims shared the same space and culture.

It's what enabled Moses Mendelssohn to use thought and language

to build a bridge between the Jewish and non-Jewish world.

It's what made the songwriters plant a conscience

into the hard-bitten money-makers of Tin Pan Alley.

# Once I built a railroad

# Now it's done

# Brother, can you spare a dime? #

Ultimately, it's about the victory of humanity over force,

a victory enshrined in this copy of the Talmud,

that bottomless treasure house of all things Jewish.

It was printed in Heidelberg in 1947 on German presses

under the authority of the liberating American army,

to whom it's movingly dedicated.

But it was produced and published by Jews,

who, having survived the death camps, wanted to proclaim,

"Like us, our culture has survived destruction too,"

which is why it's known as the Survivors' Talmud.

This is a vision of the eternal dialogue of the Jewish story,

the dialogue between lament and rejoicing,

between history and hope,

between the earthly world and visionary possibility.

It's an argument as well as a dialogue,

an argument which no-one is supposed to win,

because if we know one thing for sure about the Jewish tradition,

it's that the chapter is written,

but the book is not finished.

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