This is that phenomenal video I mentioned in replies last night, and it’s just an incredible lost film that was rediscovered and restored by luck.
It’s a film shot in 1913, recovered by Yaakov Gross, and it opens on a train crossing the countryside into Jerusalem. What it finds is a people the propaganda of the past three years has told us weren’t there. Shops, schools, signs in Hebrew, flags, prayers at the wall, and the towns already built along the coast. The propaganda was lies. The people were most certainly there.
Tel Aviv was four years old. Petah Tikva was decades old. The Technion was open. This is four years before Balfour, thirty-five years before 1948, a community large enough to have a documentary filmed about it at a time and place when cameras were still not too common.
The Declaration of Independence didn’t invent it. The boats didn’t invent it either. Neither did the state. The street was already there, bustling and thriving.
The Jews were always there. Many never left in the first place.