a reading from The Book of Joshua. Now after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, the Lord spake unto Joshua: Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan. 40,000 prepared for war went before the Lord unto battle into the plain of Jericho. So the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword. They burnt the city with fire and all that was therein. The Book of Joshua is required reading in Israeli schools today. The book holds an important place because in its pages, many people think that a precedent can be found for the establishment of Israel as a nation. The Book of Joshua provided the muscular and militaristic dimension of conquest and the annihilation of the Canaanites and other ancient peoples that populated the promised land. Hi, my name is gdf, and you can probably tell by the direction that this

video is going in that I'm not very Advertiser friendly for that reason. I Rely completely on my patrons subscribers and donations following the creation of the state of Israel biblical archaeology became an obsession. Israel's first Prime Minister David benan was as were almost all of the earliest contemporary zionists an atheist. Although many early Jewish zionists were secular socialists and atheists the biblical narrative was an appealing way of legitimizing the Zionist movement. Upon assuming his role as First Premier cementing his legacy as Israel's founding father beneran organized Bible study classes in His official residence and was instrumental in making the study of the Book of Joshua a major component of the school curriculum in Israel. It was this atheist socialist benguan who declared to the peel Commission in 1936 that the Bible is our mandate and was later quoted as declaring though I reject theology the single most important book in my life is the Bible. Using a nationalist interpretation the Bible came to become a course

material taught as immutable fact to school children. The Bible came to serve as the first history book to be studied by all school children within the Zionist community in Palestine, as well as under the auspices of the Israeli education system within the modern state of Israel, as well as being taken for granted by the scientific community and academia generally. From a collection of theological texts incorporating historical plots and divine miracles aimed at inculcating faith in its readers, it became a compilation of historiographic texts that bore only a smattering of optional religious meaning. So ingrained was the Bible in schooling by 1992 that Benyamin bade khaki, professor of psychology at the University of hia, could write, Most Israelis today, as a result of Israeli education, regard the Bible as a source of reliable historic information of a secular political kind, and it remained that way even into the 21st century to the point that under no circumstances is it permissible to skip over the Book of Joshua. Moreover

even though the teaching of this past has been proven ethically and pedagogically destructive, the Israeli education system refuses to exclude from the curriculum these shameful accounts of extermination. After all, David Ben-Gurion had repeatedly invoked the Book of Joshua to justify the massacres and ensuing ethnic cleansing carried out under the guise of the 1948 War. But even before 1948, the excavation of Palestine was underway during the mandatory period starting in 1917. Indeed, under British control, the first archaeological Crusader seeking to dig up the Holy Land, as told by the Bible, was none other than the American William Foxwell Albright. His legacy as one of the most influential biblical scholars of the 20th century makes his worldview all the more disturbing. As a fundamentalist, Albright did not doubt stories like the Book of Joshua and even justified them. In those days, warfare was total, and we Americans have perhaps less right than most modern nations to sit in judgment on the Israelites of the 13th century BC.

we have intentionally, or otherwise, exterminated scores of thousands of Indians in every corner of our great nation, and have crowded the rest into great concentration camps. It often seems necessary that a people of markedly inferior type should vanish before a people of superior potentialities, since there is a point beyond which racial mixture cannot go without disaster. Thus, the Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature worship, their cult of fertility in the form of serpent symbols and sensuous nudity, and their gross mythology, were replaced by Israel, with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism, and its severe code of ethics. In the words of revisionist biblical scholar Keith Whitelum of the University of Sterling, this justification by one of the great icons of 20th-century biblical scholarship of the slaughter of the indigenous Palestinian population is remarkable for two reasons. It is an outpouring of undisguised racism, which is staggering, but equally startling is the fact that this statement is never referred to or

commented on, as far as I know, by biblical scholars in their assessments of the work of Albright, there's just one glaring problem with Foxwell's analysis. And further, the foundational texts justifying the Zionist project and the creation of the state of Israel. It's all the slaughter. As Told in the Book of Joshua, never happened, and the stories of the Israelites in the Bible are not even remotely historically accurate. It was 1999 when Z. Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, who at one time was the director of their Institute of archaeology, wrote a piece for the Weekly Harats Magazine titled Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho. His words were difficult ones for biblical literalists. Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the land of Israel, archaeologists have found out the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt, did not wander in the wilderness, did not conquer the land of Canaan in a military campaign, and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of

Israel, additionally, as opposed to the alleged claim of a sovereign United Kingdom of Israel, the United monarchy of David and Solomon, which was described in the Bible as a regional superpower, was at most a small tribal Kingdom. Herzog describes the ascent of William Foxwell Albright in the 1920s and later, following the establishment of the state of Israel, the founding fathers of Israeli archaeology including Benjamin Mazar, Naaman Avigad, Yigael Yadin, and others. Herzog writes that using the Bible as a literal guide to exploring the bronze and iron Ages was standard practice from the beginning, which would continue for decades. However, writes Herzog, little by little, cracks began to appear in the picture. To take one example, the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, wandering for 40 years across the Sinai. Many Egyptian documents known to us do not mention at all the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt or the later Exodus of an entire people, which was curious considering the Egyptians kept

highly detailed records, which included even small incursions. Many documents mention the prac of wandering Shepherds to enter Egyptian territory in times of drought or famine and to settle at the fringes of the Nile Delta. Or how about Mount Si where Moses was to receive the Ten Commandments. Generations of researchers have tried to locate the site of Mount Si and the encampments of the Israelite tribes in the wilderness. Despite the strenuous efforts, not even one site has been located that would Accord with the biblical account. And of course, the historicity of the conquest or rather genocide of the Canaanites was especially problematic. Here the most severe difficulties have Arisen. The Book of Joshua reveals that as the armed men approached Jericho, the city's walls miraculously collaps ushering in the slaughter. But Kathleen Kenyan, the excavator of Jericho, established definitively that there is no support for the conjecture that Jericho was fortified with a city wall during the late Bronze Age. In reality, excavations at all the sites

uncovered only unfortified settlements, while in many instances the site held only isolated structures of the ruler's Palace and no actual City. Urban culture in late Bronze Age Palestine was disintegrating in a process that lasted hundreds of years and was not the result of a military conquest. Herzog isn't revealing that big of a secret. He writes, these facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it. These issues and more were addressed by a colleague of Herzog at Tel Aviv University, emeritus professor of History, Shlomo Sand. In the 13th century B.C., the purported time of The Exodus, Canaan was ruled by the still powerful pharaohs. This means that Moses led the freed slaves out of Egypt to Egypt. Sand also took issue with the numbers. According to the biblical narrative, the people he led through the Wilderness for 40 years included 600,000 Warriors. They would have been traveling with their wives and children, implying a

party of around 3 million in total. Aside from the fact that it was utterly impossible for a population of such size to wander through the desert for so long, an event of such magnitude should have left some epigraphic or archaeological traces. The ancient Egyptians kept meticulous records of every event, and there is a great deal of documentation about the Kingdom's political and military life. There are even documents about incursions of nomadic groups into the realm. Yet, there is not a single mention of any children of Israel who lived in Egypt or rebelled against it or immigrated from it at any time. There's also another more uncomfortable fact: history can be ironic. Few people have noticed or are willing to acknowledge that the land of Israel of biblical texts didn't include Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, or their surrounding areas, but rather only Samaria and a number of adjacent areas. In other words, the land of the Northern Kingdom of Israel because a United Kingdom encompassing both ancient Judea and

Israel never existed a unifying Hebrew name for such a territory never emerged. As a result, all biblical texts employed the same fonic name for the region, the land of Canaan. If Israel without Jerusalem, indeed, the second book of Chronicles reveals with Israel once more intact, he returned to Jerusalem, though claims to the city have been the source of so much strife and suffering. Jerusalem's significance historically, especially among the Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is tentative, as explained in a helpful article for the New York Review of Books by Avishai Margalit, professor emeritus of philosophy at Hebrew University. Margalit points out that the founding of Jerusalem predates Islam, Christianity, and in fact, Judaism itself. It is thought that Jerusalem was founded about 4,000 years ago as a city of ritual worship by the Canaanites. Jumping ahead thousands of years, Zionism had ambitions to create a new Jewish society, but Jerusalem was the least

appropriate place for the founding of such a new Society. Most of the Jerusalem Jews were part of an ultra-Orthodox community, of the sort that the Zionists were rebelling against, a community that lived on donations and did not have the kind of productive life that the Zionist Revolution aspired to. It is no wonder then that the Zionists preferred to build the new Hebrew City in the Golden Sands of Tel Aviv. Most of the immigrants to Israel, about 80%, settled along the Mediterranean Coast, a region that had never been the historic homeland of the Jewish people. It appeared this ambivalence is a historic trend. Unlike Christianity, Judaism does not regard the pilgrimage to Jerusalem as an act of penance for transgressions or an act that can purify the believer, and we therefore find no recommendation that it be implemented. The data appear to illustrate this point further. We know of approximately 30 texts that provide accounts of Jewish pilgrimage during the 1700 years between 135 CE and the mid

19th century by contrast for the 1500 years between 333 CE and 1878, we have some 3,500 reports of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land. These words are at stark odds with the Israeli proclamation of independence issued at Tel Aviv on May 14th, 1948. The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remain faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never cease to pray and hope for their return. Exiled from their land is, of course, a reference to the story of the Roman Empire exiling Jews from their province of Judea. This foundational myth is the source of the theory that the Jewish diaspora the world over can trace their ancestry to Palestine. There and lies their claim to the land in the reason why Jewish immigrants wherever they may be are said to be returning to their homeland when moving to Israel. Authoritative experts on Jewish history take issue with this theory, to put it plainly, not least of which being Israel Yuval, professor of Jewish history.

at Hebrew University from his the myth of the Jewish Exile from the land of Israel the Romans like any Victorious Army customarily took prisoners but they did not have a policy of exiling conquered nations from their lands according to josephus's probably inflated figures 1.1 million were killed in Jerusalem and about 97,000 were captured many of these met their deaths in battles with animals and in Circus entertainments others died of hunger but otherwise the Jews were left in place they emmigrated from the land of Israel during the first centuries of the first Millennium in a slow and gradual process and not as the result of an intentional policy on the part of the Roman and Byzantine authorities the myth remained and was given Credence when in the 4th Century orosius reviewing the data found in Josephus regarding 90,000 Jews taken captive in Jerusalem concluded that these prisoners who according to him were scattered all over the world were the founders of the

Jewish diaspora in general. Tel Aviv University's Shlomo Sand further takes issue with Josephus's estimate of 97,000 captured. There was no such Metropolis in the little Kingdom of Judea. A cautious estimate suggests that Jerusalem at the time could have had a population of 60,000 to 70,000 inhabitants. But most problematic of all, nowhere in the abundant Roman documentation is there any mention of a deportation from Judea, nor have any traces been found of large refugee populations around the borders of Judea after the uprising, as there would have been if a mass flight had taken place. The University's Avishai Margalit's views of the supposed exile are also worthy of attention. The claim that a Palestinian Arab descended from the early Jews is no less probable than that of, say, Minah beIN or Gamer in the popular and a historic version of Jewish history. The destruction of the Second Temple is linked with the exile from the land, but

a considerable part, perhaps even a majority, of the Jewish people already lived in the diaspora before the temple was destroyed. And after it was destroyed, the size of this diaspora did not increase very greatly. Most of the Jews who survived the Romans' destruction of the country remained in Palestine. It is not particularly far-fetched to conjecture that they were the ancestors of those inhabitants who accepted Islam many generations later, a conclusion echoed by Nor Masalha, formerly the director of the Center for Religion and History at St. Mary's University. Now with the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, it would not be unreasonable to argue that the modern Palestinians are more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Israelites and Canaanites than Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom were European converts to Judaism. Certainly, historically, in contrast to the myth of Exile and return, many of the original Jewish inhabitants of ancient Palestine had remained in the country but had accepted Christianity and Islam many generations

later, a view at one point held by Israel's earliest leaders, including David Ben-Gurion himself, if it can be believed. Writing in collaboration with Yak Ben-Zi, Israel's longest-serving president, the pair published a book-length study titled The Land of Israel in the Past and in the Present. Speaking of the Palestinian farmers or fahin, the fahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors who captured the land of Israel and Syria in the 7th Century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement even in their former habitations. The Arabians did not engage in farming. They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious, and material - to rule, to propagate Islam, and to collect taxes. Further, despite the repression and suffering, the rural population remained unchanged. Indeed, the erasure of history

regarding the myriad kingdoms, namely Hurite, Khazaria, and Adin, whose rulers converted to Judaism, was essential to the Zionist project from the very beginning. I would be remiss not to observe how this notion of the global Jewish community as a single ethnicity resembles the darkest days of European nationalist thinking. Daniel Goldhagen, ultra-famous for Hitler's Willing Executioners, notably addressed European and especially German anti-Semitism head-on in the book's first chapters. Notions of Jews being a nation were bandied about in the anti-Semitic literature. The definition of the Jews that was to emerge in the second half of the 19th century from the confusing fray of conceptualizations, namely that the Jews were a race, were given voice already in the first half of the 19th century. If the claim to the so-called Holy Land isn't a religious one, as the secular Zionist movement and its progenitors claim, then the alleged historic claim lies firmly with the idea of an ethn-nationalist claim via blood.

and soil. The claim, as we've seen, is predicated on an array of falsehoods used to justify the violent dispossession of the land of Palestine. The word used continuously for the land for thousands of years, first documented in the late Bronze Age about 3,200 years ago. The name Palestine is the conventional name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands. The name festine was widely used by the most important ancient Greek historians, photographers, writers, philosophers, and scientists, including Herodotus, Aristotle, and toomy. The Greco-Roman Byzantine name Palestine is commonly found in major classical Greek texts, especially the histories of Herodotus written near the mid-fifth century BC. Further, Palestine existed as a distinct administrative unit and a formal province for over a millennium beginning in the 2nd century Common Era with the Roman province of Syria Palestina. Emperor Hadrian chose the

thousand-year-old name Philistia. The most common geopolitical designation for Palestine used by Greek geographers and historians long before the Old Testament stories were put together. With the advent of the Byzantine Empire, Palestine was separated into three provinces: Palestina Prima, Saunda, and Salutaris. Moreover, these three provinces were effectively governed politically, militarily, and religiously from Palestina Prima as a 3-in-1 polity from the 4th Century until the early 7th Century. As was Iraq under British rule following the First World War through the three provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. As the Rashidun Caliphate began their rule in the 7th Century, the name remained as the province of June Philistine for 4 and 1 half centuries before being interrupted by the Crusades. With the Crusaders defeated by the Mamluks, the name was revived where it was the land of Philistine throughout the Middle Ages and well into the 20th

century to provide you a wul incomplete timeline. A map containing Palestine by the Cartographer Muhammad Al Idrisi exists Circa 1154. We have additionally a map of Palestina from 1320 by Marino Sanudo. Jumping ahead to 1450, Fra Mauro completes the most detailed map in the world up to that point, showing Palestina. The map of Palestina Modna Etas Santa is published in 1480. Jumping further to the 18th century, for Palestina ex monumentous vus illustrate published in 174. In The Next Century 1803, we see the Ottoman Jazid Adlas Tessa. In the 15th century Mamluk literature, Muir Alin Ali refers 22 times to Philistine in his glorious history of Alud and Al Khal. By the 18th century, we can see that Palestine as a distinct country was common perception in Europe. In 1747, Thomas Sammon describes Palestine for the modern gazeteer of

London in the ubiquitousness of the name Palestine to describe the region is apparent. Certainly in the 19th century, as these titles show. Of course, Queen Victoria sponsored the Palestine Exploration Fund to explore biblical locations and obtain a foothold in the Strategic location. The turn of the Victorian era coincided roughly with the descent into European nationalist conflict, which culminated in the First World War. After which the League of Nations universally accepted the name Palestine for the region now under British control. And so the British military Governor, Sir Ronald Stores, established the Palestine Archaeological Museum. The British mandatory government of Palestine produced Palestine passports, currency, including the Palestine pound, and postage stamps. The colonial police force was named the Palestine Police Force. The government-owned railway company would be Palestine Railways, as well as the Palestine Sport Federation and Broadcasting Service. It wasn't just the British, of course, but also the First Zionist Congress with their Basel program calling for the establishment of a publicly and legally secured home in

Palestine for the Jewish people back in 1897. The Zionist settlers established the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Palestine post, the Palestine office, the Palestine Orchestra, the Anglo Palestine Bank, the Palestine electric company, the Palestine water company, the Palestine mortgage and credit bank, automobile Corporation. Of course, later on, a systematic renaming of the destroyed Villages, a result of the nakba or catastrophe of 1947 to 1949, entailed the renaming of place names, often arbitrarily, using a revived modern Hebrew language. Indeed, a 1956 committee report of the official government names committee, set up in 1949 by Borian to rename Palestinian towns, states that a decisive majority of the names were determined by mimicking the sounds of the Arabic words, a partial or complete mimicking, in order to give the new name a Hebrew character following the accepted grammatical and spelling rules. Said longtime defense minister Mosha Dian, Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages.

even know the names of these Villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only the books do not exist, the Arab Villages are not there either. There is not a single place built in this country that didn't have a former Arab population. Detractors of Palestinian history, who apparently totally dominate The Western Narrative of the Region's history, will challenged the legitimacy of the Palestinians' indigenousness to The Land by claiming that there was no sovereign Kingdom of Palestine before 1948, or that there was no such thing as a Palestinian, a claim made famous by prime minister golden Mayer birth Nam mavich, an immigrant from Ukraine. But not all states, it seems, are held to the standard. After all, the term Ukraine was apparently first recorded in the year 1187, or 16 centuries after Herodotus' histories. Additionally, the use of the term Ukrainian, according to the Ukrainian research Institute at Harvard University, was a term of relative obscurity as late as the 19th century. Ukraine, at various points in its

history enjoyed only brief and fleeting periods of relative autonomy, though under the thumb of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and especially Russia. Though in the Western World, the sovereignty of Ukraine is very much not in question, their claim to nationhood and their right to live free of foreign domination and destruction are seldom challenged. The reality is a grim one that a modern European ethno-nationalist ideology utilized religious mythology and symbolism unfounded by the actual historical record. The shift from a deeply unpopular fringe group to a powerful entity with the backing of the British Empire culminated in the bloodshed that erased hundreds of whole towns, literally wiping them off the map and depopulating the area of the new state of Israel of some 750,000 people. More were to come in subsequent blood baths that the religious and furthermore empirical justification of the slow ethnic cleansing and ongoing genocide of the indigenous people, the Palestinians, is fraudulent is one of history's most cruel insults. Regular viewers of my work will

know that recently, I've been hard at work producing a series on the Israel Lobby. This volume you're watching now is the first of a series on Zionism. The Nakba and all its horrors will be the subject of the next one, and it will be my most important video yet by far.

Debunking the State of Israel

Debunking the State of Israel

Scripts