 In the 1920s, with the wheels in motion for the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish Agency and its main backer, the World Zionist Organization, found themselves in quite a predicament. Hordes of Jews were being illegally shipped into Palestinian territories from various places across the world, Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Yemen. From 40,000 in 1900 to 720,000 in 1948, this newly introduced Jewish population had nothing in common with each other, nor with the existing minority population of Arab Jews that had lived in the Palestinian territories for many centuries, except for one single element. And that was a connection in faith. No genetic linkage whatsoever unified these peoples. And what also didn't exist was a more critical necessity when dealing with the creation of a nation, a national culture. What was the Israeli culture? This was the problem the Zionist leaders confronted. The Jewish past was anthropologically all over the place. Different languages, extremely varying cultures, traditions, and genetics all made the task of a unified national identity all that more challenging. And even an attempt that was unnecessary. One could say that Israel was perfectly positioned to replicate the whole melting pot theory of the United States of America and its immigration and amalgamation policy. But in the United States' case, such an outcome, even though yet to melt completely, needed at least several centuries left to simmer in order to get some semblance of a unified culture. Zionist strategists, on the other hand, had a mission to make Israel appear to have existed all along. A faith, a people, a land, and a culture. And this is where we go back to the title of this video. The forgetting, fabricating, and erasing of a culture. The Zionist plan was quite layered. The first point of that action plan would be the manipulation as well as the exploitation of the Jewish past. Zionists divided Jewish history into three periods, antiquity, exile, and return. And they saw themselves and particularly their children as the descendants of an ancient heroic past, rather than the continuation of wretched ghettos and terrible suppression that were experienced over what would be the longest period of Jewish history, almost a full two millennia. So the exile period of Jewish history had to go. The only remnant of which would carefully and religiously be maintained within the future Israeli culture was the element of victimhood and persecution that would serve the nation of Israel well, deep into its existence. Radically breaking with the past was one way of manipulating history to serve a national culture. By eliminating the various cultures that the various Jewish immigrants had brought with them, a vacuum was left in the cultural past of Israel to introduce something much more sacred, the history of Jewish antiquity. In their minds, the Zionists believed that their present shaped their past and hence antiquity needed to be shaped to serve the unity and culture of the state of Israel. And that brings us to the second element of the Zionist action plan, to create a new cultural narrative of Jewish antiquity, to embed heroism and pride within the newer Jewish history books so that the Jews of modernity can look up to the various role models, heroes and events of the past. Some examples of this great exploitation were the retelling of two events in antiquity. The first is the Bar Kochba Revolt, an event which history tells was a large-scale Jewish rebellion on the Roman Empire that resulted in total Jewish defeat. This event was usually commemorated on the Tisha Ba'av, a day of resounding Jewish mourning. But the Zionists were discontent at history's recollection of the event, so retold it. To best serve its present, the Bar Kochba Revolt became a tale of heroic deeds, military prowess and bravery. The remembrance of the revolt was shifted to Lag Ba'omer, a day of celebration which historically recorded the ending of a plague that hit the Jewish people in the second century CE. The other event that was retold to suit a new Israeli identity and culture was the siege of Masada in 73 CE, when the Roman Empire laid siege to the Jewish town. History tells that the Romans crushed the resistance of the Jewish population, which as prior to full defeat, their leader, Eleazar Ben-Yair, had convinced his people to torture the town and commit mass suicide. Again, this surrender narrative as an outcome didn't suit the Zionists. Suicide was forbidden in the Jewish faith. The other fact that the Jews who had held out were proven to be extremists and thugs didn't change things for the Zionists. A new cultural myth had to be constructed. When the defeated Jews became the patriotic zealots struggled and fought to their death, every single one of them till they all became martyrs. This is what is taught today and what was undoubtedly believed by the many generations of Israeli youngsters over the decades and up to this very day. One of the most fundamental elements of a culture is language and for Israel, being a nation for the Jews, this was Hebrew. But again, Hebrew falls into the element of forgetting a past I spoke about earlier. One would think that Hebrew was a commonly spoken language throughout history. This would be a very inaccurate assumption. The Hebrew version as spoken now amongst the Jews of Israel, as well as by Jews across the world, has indeed only been around for just over a century. It had been almost 22 centuries since Hebrew was a spoken communal language for the average Jew. With the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, a full scale revival that was spearheaded by Eleazar Ben-Yahuda took place and introduced a more common spoken Hebrew to fit into the larger reinvention of the unified Jewish identity that was pushing the establishment of its own nation in the Palestinian territories. One of the main reasons for the necessity of a new common Hebrew language was to educate and unify the new influx of Jewish immigrants from around the world who during the British mandate for Palestine were allowed into the lands in great numbers. Consequently, replacing all sorts of Jewish dialects such as Yiddish and languages such as Russia. To complete the process of a cultural construction of an Israeli culture, any competing and established culture had to be erased. And that leads us to the third and final point of the Zionist Action Plan, eradicating the incumbent Palestinian Arab culture either by deletion or assimilation. As per the famous words of Moshe Dayan, Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages. And I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. And as documented by the film The Great Book Robbery, at least 70,000 Palestinian books and other cultural expressions were stolen from the Arab owners and labeled as abandoned property by the Zionists. Today, these books are hidden deep in the vaults of the Israeli National Library. This was no byproduct of the war in 1948, but a deliberate and systemic strategy in wiping out any factual and expressive documentation of Palestinian history and literature. Beyond literature, language, art, music, cuisine, dress, religious rituals, history and social standards are some of the components that are typical of a national culture. And if we take each component, close our eyes and try to visualize what the Israeli version was, it would be an absolutely impossible task to behold. What was the unified Israeli ethnic national dress? None existed. It reflected a westernized attire that had no substantial history. Yet when it came time to host the Miss Universe pageant in Elat in 2021, Israel had no problem appropriating Palestinian handcrafted costumes to serve the narrative of a longstanding cultural Israeli national dress. The same goes with music. There was no catalog before 1948 to represent this element of an Israeli national culture. Arab musical instruments, scales and rhythms all of a sudden happened to be Israeli and were claimed to have been so for centuries. Regardless of no Ashkenazi Jew had ever seen a Qanun or a Oud prior to their immigration. What belonged to the appropriate land had now belonged to them and their history. A quick contemporary example of this musical usurpation of culture comes with the extremely passionate and moving nationalistic song by Medasaf named the Demi Palestinian. My blood is Palestinian. And now the stolen version Demi Yahudi. My blood is Jewish. There are many more significant examples of how Israel has and is simulating Palestinian culture. Cuisine is a big one. Agricultural prowess and success was another. The same goes for the destruction or disappearance of Palestinian institutional buildings. I will leave it to you, the viewer to maybe share and engage for more in the comment section. There's a very powerful culture to the Jewish faith. It comes with history and tradition that is as rich and long as many civilizations around the world. But this history, let me clarify is strictly from the mid first millennium BCE to the first century CE when the Jews were expelled by the Romans in Palestine. For virtually the next two millennia, there was no collective memory or unified culture of the Jews. Each people took on the identities of their regions and became subsets of that culture. Jews in Arabia took on Arabian culture, Jews in Europe, European culture and so on. And since 1948, when the nation of Israel was established, it claimed that its unified culture, history and heritage never ceased to exist and was indeed protected and carried in the collective memories and hearts of those who had immigrated to Palestine during the 20th century, completely ignoring the fact that the Jews who did come were obviously of different ethnicity, language, culture, tradition and expression. Believe what you may, but I just never bought into it. Thank you for watching. It would be absolutely amazing if you joined the Kennedy Chronicles. Helping us grow through subscribing will definitely lead to major improvements on both a qualitative and quantitative front. We'd appreciate it greatly if you click the like button as well as the notification icon so you don't miss any of our upcoming releases. I'm very grateful for your time and your patience. Bye bye.