Documentary Review: ‘The Spring of Judea and Samaria’ (2013)
As I recently reviewed the anti-Zionist documentary ‘The Iron Wall’; I thought it only fair to review a pro-settler documentary. The one I chose is called ‘The Spring of Judea and Samaria’ and was produced by the Jewish Heritage Project in 2013.
Its production values are fairly low and it is seemingly affiliated – officially or unofficially – with Israeli Channel 7 aka Arutz Sheva, which is Israel’s pro-settler media outlet that occasionally makes the kind of propaganda boo boos that would be make Islamic State’s media gurus cringe.
True to form; it takes seconds for the documentary to make cringe worthy assertions like ‘Israel is the renewal of ancient Hebrew civilization’. This is problematic precisely because modern Judaism is not a continuation of either First or Second Temple Judaism, which was the basis of the so-called ‘ancient Hebrew civilization’. Modern Judaism is based on the Mishnah which was composed by Judah the Prince decades after the fall of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. based on an assortment of oral traditions.
Nor is secular Israeli culture with its burgeoning homosexual porn industry combined with a general irreverence towards religion anything recognizable as comparable to the ‘ancient Hebrew civilization’ which was superstitious in the extreme and believed that non-jews only deserved immediate extermination.
The assertion that Israel is the ‘renewal of ancient Hebrew civilization’ is like claiming that modern Norway is participating in the ‘renewal of ancient Norse civilization’. Norway clearly isn’t, but if you apply the same logic as the documentary is using for Israel to Norway: it is.
The documentary goes on to claim that the West Bank belongs to the jews and was promised to the jewish people by God in the Bible. It fails to mention however that the Bible clearly qualified this in two ways: (1)
Palestine is the property of God not the property of the jewish people.
Palestine is only granted to the jews on condition that they adhere to God’s commandments.
This is why a significant minority of the ultra-Orthodox jewish community reject Zionism, because God threw them out of Palestine for disobedience to his commandments (mitzvoth) and it is forbidden – according to Judaism until circa the middle of the twentieth century – for the jews to reoccupy Palestine until the jewish Messiah – whom the settlers openly express their desire to see soon - comes to lead them in its re-conquest and the resultant war to exterminate and rule over the goyim.
The documentary claims that the jews of Judea and Samaria – meaning the settlers – have been ‘slandered for forty years’ and claims they are ‘pioneers’. While the latter is certainly arguable; the former is not. The settlers are notorious to be fanatics who regard non-jews as sub-human and deliberately put themselves on the land owned and occupied by another people with the view to provoking a fight then playing the victim. (2)
This is quickly proven by the settlers lionising and praising Menachem Begin – as genocidal a jewish supremacist as you ever likely to find outside of the Kach movement – and the open admission that the settlers turned up, set up camp on other people’s land and then got upset and screamed about ‘anti-Semitism’ when people – including the Israeli army no less – turned up to ask them to vacate the land they were squatting on.
This further evidenced by the claim that the settlers chose ‘Biblical sites’, and the assertion that ‘wherever jews have settled they should own the land’, which would therefore mean that Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria among others are ‘jewish land’. This is buttressed by the vague assertion made by settler representatives in the documentary that ‘the creation of Israel is incomplete’ (i.e., Israel isn’t big enough yet) and that ‘the land of Israel doesn’t belong to anyone else but the jews’.
Why isn’t this the case? Well, the European Union is apparently part of a massive ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy’ against the jewish people and desires to exterminate every last member of the self-chosen people.
And the settlers wonder why people don’t like them…
In essence it comes down to that infamous proverb: the jews cries out in pain as he slaps you.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/do-the-jews-have-a-biblical-claim
(2) Demonstrated beautifully by Elliot Horowitz, 2007, ‘Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton and Israel Shahak, 1994, ‘Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years’, 1st Edition, Pluto Press: London