 The title of the topic is Israel's formation and independence, a nation on the crossroads. And to speak on this important topic, we have Mr. Jyoti Ranjan Pradhan, who is the director of Outreach and Initiatives at Young Diplomax Paris. He is a student of International Relations and Security. He holds an MA in Political Science, Security and Diplomacy Studies from Tel Aviv University. Israel, where he was a Tata scholar. His studies focus on Israel and its security, among other things. His thesis was in the field of security studies. He interned as research assistant at the Jerusalem Institute of Security and Strategy, working on Israel, Jerusalem, Iran. He has undergone a course on public diplomacy from Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and stand with his foundation. He has traveled extensively with Israel, Palestine, that is West Bank, Jordan and participated in the field visits to Israel's borders with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Gaza Perimeter. We have such a wonderful personality with us. Just to share one minute. Actually, I really had this topic in my mind and I was really looking for a speaker. And by God's grace, Mr. Jyoti, we got in touch and finally we were able to fix two lectures. So today he is going to deliver one lecture and the next lecture will be delivered in April. And we have dedicated his talks to the Israel special. And in this context, I really hope that we will get opportunity to have an insight in this complicated problem of Israel and also the Jewish nationalism and Israel's formation and independence. Mr. Jyoti, I again once again welcome you on behalf of Petso College, my students and faculty members. I request you to kindly please take a charge of this virtual stage. It is all yours and please do enlighten us about Israel, Israel's history, Genesis, how and what exactly the Jewish soul is yearning for, which we really understand from their national anthem. Sir, please over to you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Anuradha, for the gracious introduction. I'd also like to thank Dr. Aliridari, Dr. Vasaloran, Mr. Polo-Ronan, Loren and Pesoran, and also the Petso College as a whole, and Dr. Dots for giving me this opportunity to be with you all today. And I'm indeed humbled and grateful to you all for allowing me this opportunity today. So before we start, you can all just take a sip of water or something and just give us some time. And I'd like to request you all to feel free to ask me any question. Meanwhile, while this is going on, you can send me questions in the chat box, or you can DM me on Twitter. It's better to just leave it on the chat box or just write it on a pen and paper and we can start. But before we start, we will start the presentation first with history and we'll go through entirely what's all it's about. I'm sharing my screen. Please let me know if you can see my screen. Is my screen visible? Yes, very much. Okay, so you can see a PowerPoint? Yes, yes. Okay, so I will start presenting. So it's just formation and independence. But before we come to the present day, like always, we'll start from history and some biblical and ancient history first. So first, we all know there's Noah, not this one, our famous one, the one with the ark. And Noah has three sons. One of them is Shem. And Shem has a son called, many sons, but one of them being a Prashad and then there is Salah, who is his son. And then he has a son called Iber. Now, if we go down this line, several generations, we come up with Abraham. If you can see my pointer at the bottom of this timeline, the genealogy. And we can see that Abraham is the one with whom all the three Abrahamic religions start. So at first, we are talking about the biblical story. So Abraham the Ivory, as he was known, he was from the city of Ur, where my cursor is right now, in the Mesopotamia. And his house was not far from the Euphrates River's bank. And he was called Abraham the Ivory as in Abraham the Hebrew, where people Hebrew. And Ivory actually meant Abraham from the other side. So I believe that his house was probably on the other side of the river with respect to his friends, who used to meet regularly. And somewhere around 1900 BC, he gets to interact with God. And he is asked to move to the land of Canaan, which he does. His trail is shown on the screen in white points. And he goes there as instructed by God. But there's a famine and he has to go to Egypt. And the story goes on. He has a son by the name of Isaac. We all know him. The image is there for your reference. And then he has a son by the name of Jacob, who has to, at a time, he steals a blessing from his father under his mother's instruction. And then he has to run away to his uncle Laban's home. And one day he has to return after getting married to Leah and his second wife. He has to wrestle. And what happens is that it is that who is he wrestling with? Maybe he's wrestling with an angel. Some say he was wrestling with the spirit of Esau, whose identity he had stolen to get the blessing. But he is someone who's dealing with God, some may say. So he's the one who comes to be known as Israel, the name from which the state of Israel gets its name. And if you look at it from a more social point of view, the state of Israel will say that they have taken the name of the ancient biblical kingdom of Israel. Now, Jacob has sired 12 sons. One of them also sired two more. So there are actually 13 sons. But they're 12 tribes. The Kohen and the Levi don't get a kingdom of their own because they serve the temple and the people. And the other tribes, they get a kingdom each. And these are the 12 tribes, the 12 sons. And yeah. So on the right side of the screen, if you see, you will see the 12 tribes. And we know the story of Joseph and then the story of Moses. Moses is the one who brings the Jews back from Egypt, from slavery. He is blessed. And on the way back in Sinai, he gets the laws of God, the tablets. So Dr. Anirudha, am I clear? Am I audible? Can you see me? Yes, yes. Go ahead. So I guess some of you are lawyers, like Dr. Anirudha is. And you might have all seen these two bands, what's in Hindi is called Sanat. So those are the bands of Moses, the two tablets of laws. And the Moses actually, we get the first laws of men. And by 1020 BC, a person by the name of Saul, a warrior, he is anointed as the king because the Jews of the land are like, oh, all our neighbors have kings. We also want to be part of this party. But Saul is not exactly the king. For instance, it is King David upon whose ascendance Israel finally gets a state, you could say, a sociological state. And his and Solomon built the first temple. So this resurrection of the temple, the worship, organized bureaucracy, a ruling class, people who are the ruled. So we have some segment of a state, but not in the modern state sort of way, not in the Westphalian or the Montevideo form of state, but we have a sociological state, which has now finally taken place. And the rule of Solomon, we can actually say with full confidence that a state has been formed. The borders of that state are shown in the right side in the figure. We can see that it goes all the way from Aleppo Damascus all the way to the modern day cities of Acaba and Elah in the south. And we have also found out the seal of King David in 2015, the image on your screen. That's the seal of King David. It was found by a Russian teenager who had come to Israel and he was participating in an archaeological dig. And at first they thought it's a coin from King David's time, but it was a seal. So we have also archaeological proof that the state existed. And after sometime what happens is that the entire Jewish quality gets divided into two parts. The northern kingdom of Israel consists of the 10 tribes and the southern one consists of two tribes. And we see that the northern one for some time is kind of prosperous. It kind of has even relations, international relations, should we say, with the people in the north, the Syrians. But things don't always go as planned. What happens is that by 735 BC the Syrians, they are trying to meddle in the kingdoms of Israel and Iran, which are in the north. And what Israel wants is that Judah, the kingdom to the south, where the two tribes are ruling instead of 10 that are in Israel, the 10 tribes want the other two to join them should they have a fight with the Syrians. But Judah, the king of Judah, quietly sends a message to the Syrians that we would like to join you if you defend us. And the Syrians instead attack the kingdom of Israel. And the first time we see that the people of Israel are sent to exile under the Syrians. And later in 586 BC we see that Judah itself is conquered as well because this time the Babylonians, they have come to power and under Nebuchadnezzar they have take the siege the temple. The first temple is destroyed and 20,000 Jews are exiled for 70 years. And this gives us an idea of what the temple could have been by the time it was destroyed. And what we see is that after 70 years the Persian empires on the rise and their king Cyrus, he takes over Babylon. So he also gets to inherit all these people who have been exiled into Babylon if he sets them free. But now we see 42,000 return. So some of you can ask me the question, oh 20,000 people went into exile and after 70 years 42,000 return. Well, if someone has a question you can ask me later. And we also see this, we have evidence, archaeological evidence. There's the Cyrus cylinder that belonged to 538 BC that was found. It is already present in the British Museum. And it states that I, Cyrus, king of Babylonia, the great Lord, blessed me. And I built for them a permanent temple. He basically sends the people to go back and tells them, you are free, build your temple again. And he and his descendants, they sanctioned the construction of temple. But sometimes things don't always happen as you want. And we, if some of you are aware, most of you might be, become the story of Esther, the school of Esther. So what happens is that in the Persian Empire there's Mordekhai who works under the king and he's a cousin of Esther. And the king once decides to get married because his wife, his previous queen hadn't followed this instruction and his advisor said that you better leave her. And so Esther is chosen as the wife. But he has an official in the court by the name of Haman who is seen as one of the first anti-Semites of the time. Even today, if you have to go back in history, Haman would be seen as one of the earliest anti-Semites. And what we see is that Esther rescues the people when Haman is trying to kill the Jews of Persia. And finally Esther has a way and the king, Darius I guess he was, no it was King Xerxesia. So Xerxes what happens is that he says that okay, the Jews are free, no one will touch you. But back in the time rules could not, laws could not be rolled back. So he initiates new laws to ensure that the Jews don't suffer. And time goes on and those people who returned from Persia who had been started refurbishing the temple that had been destroyed in 586 BC. They start doing more, they start building more. And the temple that we get is something as you can see on screen on the left side. It is built under the direction of Jerobo Bill, Jerobo Bill and the temple is decent enough, not grand as it would become in later days. And by 332 BC we say that Alexander the Great, Alexander of Macedon decides to conquer as much of the world as he can. And he also conquers the promised land, the Holy Land. And after his death, his successors, the Giardoti, the generals, they decide to divide up the kingdom. So here the Israel is stuck between the Ptolemy's who are ruling from Egypt and the Seleucids who are ruling all the way from India's border to Syria. And there's change of hands. And Jews are trying to play both sides. And finally, there is a king by the name of Antiochus III who is not that good, but he's followed by a ruler who is even worse, Antiochus IV. And when, because Israelis are under them, the Jews are, and then they are like, they have a bad time, you can say, because not only is the temple, how the temple matters being interfered with, the Jews and their way of living, that's been affected. And there are a lot of Hellenistic inroads being made into the temple life. So we see increasingly Greek pagan practices being introduced into the temple, the temple of Solomon. Now we have said in the temple now. So around 166 BC, there is a sort of a rebellion. This is known as the rebellion of the Maccabees. And it is led by a family known as the Hasmoneans. So what happens is that the kings men, they go around and they have their way everywhere. But when they come to this small place near Jerusalem, a little bit to the west, the Hasmoneans decide that they are not going to leave. And earlier also, others were not kneeling down, but they were willing to die for the cause of God, for the sake of their religion. They're willing to die. But the Hasmoneans decide that they are not going to die. They are the ones who are going to fight back. So they fight back. And they ensure that sovereignty of the Jews is restored. For them, sovereignty had been given to them in the form of laws to Moses. And they have restored it back under Maccabees. And the Maccabees stamp their coins. You can see the two images of the two kinds of coins there. And I'll show you later how these coins have inspired the coins that are being used today in Israel. They have the same image. You can see the coin and you can see the same pattern. And under Maccabees, they are known as Maccabees because the leader was Matatheus and his son was Judah, Judah the hammer. That's Judah the Maccabee. And he's the one who captures Jerusalem and restores the temple. The temple, which had been too Hellenized, is now back under Jewish control. But none of them declare themselves as the king. The guy who does that is Aristotle. And he declares himself as the king. And thus, Jewish sovereignty is restored. We have a state in the sociological sense. And this is a moment of pride for Jews because they are shown that they can fight back and they can stand their ground. And then in 26 years, the Romans, not the Greeks, they recognized Israel. And there is some kind of relationship between the Roman Empire and this nascent kingdom of the Maccabees. But there are civil wars as in any society of that time. And the Maccabees are fighting amongst themselves There's Salome Alexander the queen who tries to broker some peace. But things don't go as the plan. Finally, the Romans are knocking on the doors. There's a five-month siege, Rome wins. And we could say that the Hasmoneans have had their day in the sun and the sun has set upon the dynasty. Now what happens is that there is a guy who used to be a descendant of Amalekite or Edomite who had been converted to Judaism under the force of power of the Hasmoneans and he who has taken power under Roman tutelage and he builds a great relationship with Mark Antony later on. The same Mark Antony was famous for Judaism and Mark Antony. That one. And this guy is here at the great. He's the one who builds a relationship. He's the one who takes power under this. He is basically a suzerain of the Romans and he's started gaining all the power and he's someone who's famous. He's here at the builder, not here at a Greek pass or anti-pass or that one. So he builds these famous structures as you can see on the screen. It was the Caesarea city and he also builds the Masada. Masada is a very important thing in our story today that we are discussing. And these places still exist that you are seeing on the screen except the temple which is being destroyed. And the Romans increasingly have more feet within the shoe called Israel. And Israel, you could say, have lost its sovereignty because now it's a small province within the larger government rate of Syria and Syria has a governor and he is the whole lot for Israel, these lands, the Jewish lands and the governor is under the Romans. And you can see the evolution of the temple. The 70s, the Romans, they sagged the temple. They destroyed it. And this temple that they sagged is the one that was built by Herod, the amazing temple you can see on the right side. So the first one is the Solomon's temple and it was refurbished as temple 2 by Zerubbabel. And the Zerubbabel temple, the second temple is refurbished and made into this amazing temple, massive temple that you see on the right side. Now we spoke of some rebellions and all that. So we'll just put them on a timeline here and we see there in 66C, there's a great revolt that leads to Romans to destroy the temple and this is the big revolt. It is said that almost a million Jews died but there are debates on the number and the destruction of the temple life leads to a kind of pushback from Jews but not everybody pushes back. There's a group of people and Elisabeth Jair, who put up a last stand in this place. Yeah. In this place, Masada. You can see the second place. So it's a Mahailu hilltop fortress, not far from the Dead Sea in the Judean desert and this is where those people and Elisabeth Jair, around 1000 people it said, who stand, had the last stand, who for three years are able to maintain a figment of Israeli sovereignty on this hilltop at least. They even tried to win the coin and today with archaeological evidence, we know that they were not just fighters there. There were also a lot of refugees. So this was like a refugee camp being defended by a bunch of people but finally Rome strikes back. Rome comes back with power within two and half years, not us. Times have moved so fast these days. So within two and half years, Rome is back with its legions back and then they destroy them. They are all these people on Masada, they die. So as we said, Jerusalem is under siege, the temple is destroyed and the Romans even take away the menorah that was lit up in Shabbat. And yeah, this is the Masada siege. So what happens is that there's a path to reach to the top but the defenders of the fortress, they're guarding it well. So the Romans build a ramp and they go up. But 70 years from this time, what we see is that there's a second revolt but in between there's the revolt with the diaspora but it is not that significant. But in 132 C, that time we see that there's the Bar Kokfa revolt and that again, this name becomes Bar Kokfa. Bar Kokfa means the son of the star but he called himself the prince, the son of the prince. This is Masada. Today, as you see it, the fortress, you can visit it as a tourist, it's accessible and you can even see the ramp. If you see on the right side, there's some image, that's the ramp. On the left side, we have the serpentine path which is under the shadow of this mountain. Today also, Maccabees and Betar, the Betar we must remember refers to Bar Kokfa. Now, Bar Kokfa, I don't want you to get confused. Maccabees stood in the Masada hill and Bar Kokfa, the second revolt, that happened near Jerusalem in the Betar mountains. That's where they put the last dot and they died. So, both of them, they are popular in today's Israeli culture. There's a Tel Aviv football team, it's called Maccabee Tel Aviv and the football team of Jerusalem is called Betar Jerusalem. And also, there's a health insurance, one of the major ones. There are three big ones in Israel. One of them is called Maccabee and the Betar influenced the youth movement of the right wing under the Zeev Jeopardyne state was called the Betar. And also, before independence of Israel, Israelis had a nascent naval academy in Italy. That was also called Betar Naval Academy. As you can see the right side, there's a fortress and some harbor that belongs to that naval academy. And the small swoon or the yacht that you see, that used to be one of their training vessels. Now, the image that you see on the screen, this takes us to that of Bar Kokwa. Now, what do you see? There's a parallel with the present Israeli society. Now, back then Bar Kokwa, he was fighting. You see there's cavalry, there's infantry. Today, the IDF is fighting. You have their modern cavalry, their infantry. And both kind of represent, according to the Zionist way of looking at it, the same pattern. They're rustic soldiers who are willing to defend their beleaguered homeland, even though the enemy is much stronger. But the modern Zionist movement after the formation of Israel, it doesn't take the negative consequence into account. But this time, we will win. This time, we won't lose it. Like historically, we lost. And also, there's the Lag Bahamir Festival celebrated in Israel, where they just burn a big bonfire like people in Holi also in India. And we see that this is very much celebrated in Israel. It's, but you won't see it in other countries where Jews are present like in US or even in today's, let's say, France, where there's significant Jewish community even in other countries. But Lag Bahamir is not that celebrated, because what happens is that once the Zionist state comes into being, it celebrates these heroes and their past deeds. And the people they can, in Israel, can relate to what happened back then, because Israel in the wars of 47, 48, 67, 73 was a billy good nation. Similarly, the Hanukkah, it celebrates the triumph of the Maccabees. But for much of the 2000 years of history, Hanukkah was seen as a nice spiritual movement. But once the state of Israel comes into being, Hanukkah is celebrated because the Maccabees, after they had won their battles, there was no oil left to light the candles in the temple. They just had enough for one day or something, but that oil lasts for eight days, so miracle of God. But now it is seen as more in military terms that, oh, we won the battle. Thus we could light the lamps in the temple. And even today, there are several regiments, such as the one on the left, it's the calico regiment, and they often take the oath on top of the Masada mounted. What happens in the evening, they go on a trek, they reach the summit of before dawn, and then they take the pledge when the sun is rising. And the pledge is Masada shall never fall again. Oh, yeah. And the coins that I was telling you. The second coin from the left, from the top, is the Tushekal coin. It is the same as the Hasmonean coin, which is based right next to it. The third coin from the top is the five agarot coin, like five cents. It is based on the design from the great revolt period. And the ten agarot coin, that's right beneath it. It is also inspired by the Hasmonean coins, or the Maccabee coins. On the right, if you see two big coins, the golden one is the 25 agarot coin. You could call it a quarter dollar. And it is inspired from Bar Kokhwa's coins, that Bar Kokhwa invented. So for the next, mark of next 2000 years, Israelis under foreign rule, Byzantine, Persian rule, Arab rule, Paternalist Saladin, then there are the Crusaders. You can see how the Crusaders were doing. A nice movie is The Kingdom of Heaven, though there is artistic exaggeration there as well. But yeah, it's a nice movie, nice entertainment. And finally we see that at the end of Crusades, Saladin takes over Jerusalem. And they are followed by the Ottomans who rule the land. Now once Ottomans start ruling the land of Israel, we see that there is some degree of stability. Not that much warfare has used to happen for the last 2000 years. But since the time of Crusades, there had been the strides of anti-Semitism in Europe, such as blood libel, and then there were also Catholic inquisitions. You can see there are resources given. So if somebody wants some details on the sources of this information, just let me know after the end of the presentation. I have them saved in the comment box, and I'll just copy it and paste it on the chat box. So anti-Jewish rights take place even during the Black Death, the Jews are praying for the Black Death. And much of Russian Empire, there's a strong deal of anti-Semitism. This increases especially when the Russian Empire and Zarina Katharina, she takes over her part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it's divided up between the larger parts. The number of Jews within the realm suddenly increases. So they create this pale of Jews, and Jews are restricted to this big land mass. It was bigger than Iran and Pakistan combined. And much of the attacks on Jews just continues unabated. And there's even a timeline of anti-Semitism. It was taken from Wikipedia, though not a reliable academic source. You can use it for some sort of information and you can verify the same from peer-reviewed journals and textbooks in the matter. And the Smithsonian also provides us some information of how anti-Semitism was going on in the context of poisoning of wells because they have this nice article where they describe the use of well-poisoning in warfare throughout the 2000 years, and it also shows us how often Jews are blamed for poisoning of wells. If you want a peer-reviewed journal article, and the source is here. But coming down to 1804, 1805, we have this term called pogrom, which has its etymology from Russian language. But that doesn't mean the pogroms didn't exist. They had existed for the last month or since the time of Crusades, but the term pogrom used to describe it, it comes into being, especially in Russia, because there are these large-scale incidents. And there's also forgery in 1903, a document called the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, which is a fake document created and the Jews are blamed as they are going to take over the world. And it's a sad reality, but you see, this is taken from the website of the Anti-Defamation League, which is a branch of the Vinay Brith, a Zionist organization in the U.S., and they have given us a list of anti-Semitic tropes. Now, things get murkier with the 20th century. As it comes, we see the rise of Nazism in Germany, and they go on systematic mass murder using a bureaucratic method to exterminate human beings. And they go on this killing march, and you see on the right side how, to a great extent, how they reduce the Jewish populations. Europe loses two-thirds of its Jews. They started in 1933 with Hitler coming to power. He enacts in acting laws followed by the Nuremberg laws, and Nuremberg laws reduces Jews first to second-class citizens, then as bad as non-citizens. And then, as time goes by, things get worse. There is the ghettoization, and in 1938, we had the Kristallnacht, when there is a program, a prepared program to kill as many Jews as possible, and there are similar activities taking place in Austria as well. But coming to 1941, they decide that we have to go all out. And in 1942, ONCE conference, not from Berlin, if you have seen this, this new TV show based on the life of ultra-orthodox people of Israel, I don't recollect the name well, but it's a new one. It came last three or four months. It tells the story of a girl who escapes ultra-orthodox life. And she goes and she is standing next to this ONCE conference building. And her friends say, this is where the planning was made to kill the Jews. And in 1945, 6 million Jews are killed. Now, you could say that anti-Semitism led to this, but it could be one of the factors that led to all this. These things were in stock perhaps because a lot of changes had happened. The enlightenment of Jews that had taken place after Renaissance led to far greater access for a particular segment of the Jewish population who now integrates into the society. They now become lawyers, professionals. And they take part of the social life as well. They are now increasingly more visible. And thus this leads to even further anti-Semitism because they say, because earlier the Jews were hidden. They were there, but they were hidden. So to be anti-Semitic, you have to find them. But now Jews are there in the public life. It is much easier to be anti-Semitic perhaps, 1500 onwards. And that's also the time when the increase of rights takes place. Now, coming to the state formation, as we showed you some segments of the state in the past, also we are trying to show you how the modern state is a state, but it takes inspirations from that day and era. So you all might be aware of the peace of Westphalia that gave us the concept of sovereignty. And a sovereign state, it is possible to have a sovereign state, but a sovereign state is not a full state by international law either because let's say you don't have recognition or you don't have diplomatic relations, then you are like a state, but not in the fullest sense. You want more. Maybe you are a full state, but you want more. You want recognition, you want embassies being achieved. And yeah. So coming to the 19th century towards the end of it, there's this gentleman by the name of Theodor Herzl, who sees anti-Semitism firsthand. He is a famous journalist of his time. He's writing for the free press, one of the most renowned newspapers of the time, and he's working out of Paris. And what he sees in 1894-1996 at that time, there's this Dreyfus affair. And before that, he believed that anti-Semitism can end if we all Jews leave this religion because then there won't be any Jews. But the Dreyfus affair, whereby a officer, military officer, Dreyfus, is blamed for spying in sabotage, though he's innocent. And he gets full blame. And Herzl sees that the reason is that his Jewish and he's being targeted. So he looks for a way to solve this problem of anti-Semitism. And he goes on, he writes these two books. One is the Jews in Stutt, that is often wrongly translated as the Jewish state. It actually means the state of the Jews. What the condition is right now. And some years later, he writes this book called Alt New Land, which in German means Old New Land. The Old New Land is a reference to Israel. It is the Old New Land. The Old Land that is new at the same time. So in this book of Alt New Land, he tells us the story of two gentlemen who are traveling to some remote island. They pass through Israel and they get down. They see that it's impoverished. And on the way back, coming back from the island to Europe, they again stop at Israel in 1923-24, in his imaginary novel. And they see that things have improved. They say it's so amazing because Jews have come and made things so much better. And then they ask the local Arab gentlemen, they say, aren't you worried that the Jews are taking over? And in the story, the gentleman says, why should I be? Today I have a job. I have a better job. We are integrated as a society. We are living in a better world today. So he understands that there are people already existing in this land. But at the same time, he doesn't believe that if the Jews come, there will be a conflict. So he hurts him. He's the father of the Zionist movement. And he works. He doesn't write books. He creates a movement altogether, the modern Zionist movement. He creates it as a political movement. And what happens is that he, his book, it doesn't get that much publicity where he is. But in the Eastern Europe, there's an organization called Lovers of Zion, Lovers of Israel. They latch onto this book and they really like it. They invite him to this first Zionist Congress to be held in Basel. Here, some few things I read about that the Jews need to strengthen their unity that they need to get together and they also need to go to the land of Israel or any land that's available to them and start agriculture to actually lay their foundations in the land and to create a state. And for that they would require a charter or legal document for other states. But Herzl, a friend, is not a Democrat. He wants his son Hans, the image is shown on screen, to become the ruler. And on the right side is an image from the group Lovers of Zion and the bottom. That's an image from the Basel conference. Herzl cries a lot. But at the end of it, he doesn't actually succeed at getting anything. But when he was in Basel, he had written that today when I say if I say I founded the Jewish state, people will laugh at me. But perhaps in 50 years, if not 5 years itself, there will be a state for the Jews. At that time it's not taken that seriously, but we see that within 50 years the state of Israel does come into being. But Herzl was just not all smooth. He did something as well. He created this newspaper there well, no longer in existence. There's this newspaper by this name, but it is not a Jewish or Zionist newspaper. He also creates the Jewish National Fund that buys land in Israel or the Holy Land. He creates the Bank of Yemen. Now this Jewish National Fund and Bank of Yemen are still in operation. What has started back then? Alongside these whatever Herzl is doing, in reality in the Promised Land as well. The people of this faith, the Jewish people, they are moving to Israel in slower numbers. So there are five major alias. You can see this is a very important point to note, the dates. How many people are moving in which year? And you see that the biggest movement was from 1929 to 1939 because anti-Semitism and Nazism had risen in Europe and were taking more and more territory also after 1939. And whoever could escape, they escaped. Even before that, people were escaping from Russia as well. And once the Jews start moving, there is some tension in the land of Israel itself. If you see the images on the top right, that's some European Jews coming in a ship below it, you see some Middle Eastern Jews. Now you might say, are the Jews of Europe took so much time because they had so many problems, they moved it. Why didn't the Jews of Middle East or the Mizrahi, why didn't they move into Israel or build their own state? Now, one of the reasons for that is that these people who live nearby, for them Israel was not that much of an amazing place, their home was not far. They knew how this land is because Israel is most of its desert except for the Galilee region and the regions of mountains and the Galilee region is very high. You can't just move in and make in roads suddenly. So the Mizrahi, they were happy in their lands in Iran, in Iraq, in Syria and Egypt. There was some degree of antisemitism but it increases only in 19th and 20th century. Before that, there were occasional instances but things were not as bad as that in Europe and some places like Morocco had said that it wasn't that antisemitic even in 1930s. So in 1929, what happens, we see the first riot state base in Israel because the Arabs are angry that, oh, so many people are coming and they have become suspicious of the British rulers because they think maybe the British are indeed trying to create a state for the Jews. So first, there is a riot in 1929 and there are also further riots in 1936-39 period but the 29 riots, they are horrendous. People are killed in Hebron, you might know the city, the land where, the city where there are the caves of the patriarchs where Abraham is buried himself and on the right, the image shows you people of Hebron who have suffered the riots and in the year 1929 is also the year that divides the Arabs and the Jews that they have to fight against each other. The 1936 riots just reinforces that idea that, yeah, we are not safe, that we have to do something. While all this is going on the Balfour Declaration has been done in Europe in 1970 and we'll talk about all that as well and in response to the 1936 riots the British Institute, the Peel Commission under the former secretary of state of India and he comes up with of course British India and he comes up with his report and he says that the land needs to be partitioned. As you can see in the image on the right side most right, the green part should be given to the Jews the orange ones to the Palestinian Arab population and the red part should be kept in the British root because within the red part there is Jerusalem but this is not just Jerusalem this is Jerusalem, Bethlehem the region surrounding it with all the holy sites it would have included the Garden of Gethsemane the Mount of Olives all of that area which is very close to Christians as well, the region of Christianity as well and the British wanted to have all these lands they wanted people to know when they will study these parts as ok you are a British secretary but Arabs don't accept the Peel Commission they are angry because for them all the land belongs to them because for them they have been here for a long time and the Jews are just coming in but what are the benefits of partition because if this land is divided then the Arabs need not worry about the influx of the Jews because then they will be limited to their part of the territory and the Jews can bring in as many as they want they don't have to struggle to bring people in because once you have a state you can issue a passport and a visa and you can also create diplomatic initiatives whereby people of your faith can easily move in and the British could say ok see we had made a promise and a belt for declaration to give the Jews a home in the promised land but as I said the Arabs didn't accept it so there is a further report commission white paper is commissioned and the white paper says that ok we need to limit Jewish immigration 94th I guess there are connectivity issues we will wait for a few moments dear participants let us have patience our speaker must be facing some connectivity issues he will be back shortly thank you meanwhile we may reflect on the history of Israel which the speaker has just spoken on so that we may well prepare to ask questions oh I think I lost you since how long have I lost you few moments sir only few moments ok so where was I which part should I continue from you are you are supposed to share your slides I think it is not visible now ok just give me a second so have you were you able to see this part yes that one that one we saw maybe next one ok perfect this one no no before that ok so what happens that the commission report calls for partition of the lands it had been instituted in 1936 and it comes up with this report in 1937 this is Mr. Peel who used to be the Secretary of State for British India and it was held in response to 1936 rights and once the rights happened the Peel commission goes and tells that we can partition this land into two parts one for the Jews, one for the Arabs and Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Holyites and along with the small passage we are all the way to Jaffa the port it will stay on a British shore the Arabs are totally against it they don't like it they say all this land belongs to us it's ours anyway but the Jews are happy because for the first time in their history they have been offered a homeland no matter how small it is as they say half of it is better than no bread so they are kind of happy even though this land that you see it is the land of Israel it's very small but still they accept it because now they can admit as many Jews into the state and the British also get to save the face they can say that see we have kept our promise that we had made in 1970 under the Balfour declaration so now we will go back bit in time to 1917 but before we do that we must look at the context in which it is happening so what happens is that the British they have been in talks with the sheriff of Mecca the guardian of the holy site Mecca the holy mosque and also the Kaaba and he promises them the British promise the sheriff lands countries they promise them Jordan and even Syria to some extent and the sheriff from Mecca is glad to rebel against his Ottoman overlords who have kept him in check and for the first time he's been offered a country so he's happy to take it and for the British this is very important because otherwise the Ottomans just give me a second there's some noise I will just settle the noise part yes is my slide visible yes it is it is so what happens is that the sheriff and his family they decide to join the British side because they are going to get a nice piece of territory with their own country and the British also free now because now the Ottomans can't just say that this is a war between the believers and the infidel and it's much easy for the British to get to recruit Muslims and to also ensure that it is not seen the war is not seen in sectarian terms during World War I but also the British have made some agreements with the French and the Sykes-Picot agreement now Mark Sykes is a French diplomat and sorry a British diplomat and Picot is a French diplomat and in 1915 in the winter of 1915 all the way to the early 1916 these two diplomats sit down and they decide to carve up Middle East between the British and the French and this is a funny factoid that some say that when this boundary on the right sphere if you can see the blue line I don't know if it's true it's just a funny joke or it's an urban legend they say that in Egypt one of the British secretaries was apparently too drunk that day and so his finger was shaking a little bit that's why wherever the finger shakes to the right end is because it's an effect of alcohol and that's how the boundaries are much of orient for them these lands to which they didn't the white men didn't belong they were happy to divide it as per their wishes and it's very important to understand the Sykes-Picot because this not just divides the land when the children of Sheriff of Mecca they tried to claim the area A that I'm showing you on the right side screen the French are angry, the French say no way this is all and the British have promised it to us so the British had made multiple promises to multiple parties and they were supposed to keep those promises finally the French fight one of the children of the sheriff Faisal and Faisal is defeated and he has retreat but Jordan is offered to Prince Abdullah the son of the sheriff of Mecca and when he is about to defend his brother's rights in Syria by war the British convinced him to not do that because they will give Faisal another piece of territory that you can see on the right map there's some pink where my cursor is moving that's Mesopotamia Iraq so they offer Faisal Iraq so Faisal one creates the monarchy in Iraq and Abdullah creates the monarchy in Jordan so both these were two Hashemite kingdoms of the children of sheriff of Mecca but at the same time the sheriff faces trouble in his own lands of Hejaz around Mecca the south family today in Saudi Arabia they rebel against them so while the sheriff is rebelling against the Ottomans with British support we see that the swords also trying to fight out against the sheriff so while the sheriff and his family get Iraq and Jordan they lose the Hejaz part of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia comes up there it's two sons Abdullah and Faisal and in this context we should see the Balfour Declaration of 1917 so on the left side if you see that's the letter that Balfour had written to Lord Rothschild and now Rothschild he's saying if you go through this line Doctor Anirudha can you see my cursor mouse cursor yes yes it is yeah so you see establishment in Palestine of a national home so does it mean all of Palestinian territories or some part in Palestine it is not saying establishment when all of Palestine establishment in Palestine so it can be interpreted in multiple ways and also the Palestine back then was this big chunk of territory this was the initial mandate of Palestine in 1917 when this letter was written and this mandate was given around 1919 after the formation of the League of Nations and the League of Nations is the organization that gives the mandate but then the British in 1920 during the time of San Remo conference they divided along the Jordan river left side of the Jordan river is now the new Palestine and the right side is called Trans Jordan because this is the Jordan river in between so trans Jordan across Jordan so some in the Jordanian ruling house they say we will promote promised Palestine we should take the left as well but some in the Jewish right wing say we were promised Palestine the party that rules Israel not exactly ruling but Netanyahu is from the right wing liquid party and his this is the Kadima before that there was another party another right wing party and all these right wing parties are inspired by the ideology of Zeeb Jabotinsky Minakim Begin his air political air and there is slogan I will have land on this side of river as well as on that side of the river because Palestine back then used to be big the British divided up making it convenient to keep two promises because they are promised almost the same land it might say and also if you read the letter if you have been reading till now while I was describing it you would see that it says that from the bottom if you see it's the fifth or sixth line the religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine shall be defended so they are anyway saying that the existing population can stay there and it's all fine and many things don't always go as planned and worse and yeah this 1920 San Remo conference happens all that I just explained now and yeah the left side is a document by the League of Nations granting the mandate of Palestine but by the time this proper mandate comes the British slip in the article 25 within it stating the partition of this land now I have just left one part in this discussion the basic rights take place I told you first there was the Peel Commission report but it is disregarded by the Arab population, their leadership the AJC and what happens is that there's another report drafted by the British because the Woodhead Commission says that this Peel Commission is not implementable it's not acceptable to the majority population because Arabs till that time were majority all the land between Mediterranean sea and the river Jordan and the white people that comes out as a result published in 1939 says that the immigration of Jews would be restricted it's kind of pandering to the Arab population because they need their support because if you may ask why the Jews can't be supporting the access paths in World War II Hitler is killing Jews on the other hand the Arab side can decide which side to go with even though they might not implement it on the ground but politically they might side similarly the leader of the Palestinians Hajal Amin Hussain he sides with Hitler and during the World War II he is in Germany getting a nice salary and even one of his generals I think it was Abdul Qadir al-Hussain not sure about the second name but yeah one of his leading generals also had a rank in the German Army and so after the 1939 white people report which is implemented Jews cannot legally move into Israel after 1939 23rd May and there are illegal movements through clandestine both movements or charters but the British are blocking these ships and this is also the time when many other countries refuse to accept Jewish refugees now after the World War II ends there is this land still the League of Nations has to be replaced by the United Nations and the British say in 1946 that they would be leaving these lands and the UN decides on a plan to partition so what it does it sends a UN scope United Nations special committee on Palestine to visit these lands and they go ahead and prepare booklet and they have chapters and they have a report and in that report what happens is they come up with two plans we will just talk about one of those one of the plans is put to vote and finally that plan you can see on the right side these are the members of UN who are going out and talking to the Jews and Arabs the Arabs in fact initially boycott them but secretly several Arabs they go and talk to them and they put for their views and what they want now once this resolution is brought in it is brought in as resolution 181 first but when it is passed it is passed as 181-2 with some modifications now it says that the land can be partitioned along these lines you can see on the map so there are Jewish population that will live in the blue and the Palestinian population that will live in orange Dr. Anirudha, am I audible you can see everything so you see on top where my mouse cursor is that's supposed to be an interchange like a four-way road the crossroads so the Jewish population from the left to right can move and the Palestinian population from north to south can move similarly Gaza and West Bank were to have a kissing point and the Jews could move from north to south and Arabs could move from west to east again but this is not acceptable to the Arabs because they say that all of this land belongs to us so they summarily reject it but it is put to vote in the UN General Assembly it clears with 33 votes and in November November 29 the UN says that there will be a state the Jewish population the Zionist population is overjoyed for the first time in the last 2000 years they are being offered sovereignty a state a land where they are not foreign where the law would suddenly change and say that send all the Jews to the ghettos or where the ruler would suddenly take steps to pander to the majority to kill Jews so first time they have this segment of security that we are secure finally we can live like any other people and also Herzl back in the time when he had Jews coming with his theories one of the reasons he gave for why Jews are being hunted and killed everywhere is that he says that maybe it is because we are still alive we are still existing why are we still there so people they were but people without a land finally they are being promised a land when this proposal comes in the US supports it the US department of state doesn't exactly support it but the British government doesn't support it either the position of British government is the reason one of the reasons why Stalin wants to support the Jewish state and also the founders of the state designers they lived in kibbutz and the communists in the Soviet Union said oh people who live in kibbutz just like our communes people who are socialist way of thinking and looking at things and they believe that these people will anyway go towards society that is something along the lines of the Soviet Union there were a lot of Marxists as well among designers but what happens is that the Arabs don't like it and on November 38 1947 while Jews are celebrating the Arab side which has summarily rejected the UN proposal to partition the land their attacks on Jews in several places and the Jewish side knew that designers knew that there would be attacks and they had also made some preparations but nothing was enough because they were not a state we must understand from 30th November 1947 to May of 1948 it's still the British mandate that's going on the British are still the overlords but they have made their mind to leave so the civil war starts the civil war can be divided in two phases from November 30th 1947 to March 31st of 1948 the next year the first phase what happens is that the Jews are losing you might say in the first of these months and they try their best to defend themselves but even they are not well prepared because without a state they did have self-defense forces like the Haganah and they had militias like the Palmak or the Irgun and the Lehi but the Irgun and the Lehi were not under the control of the government of this pre-state entity called the Yishuv now you might say what is the Yishuv so I take you back to the slide where the Aliyah is taking place you see these Aliyahs all these people who come to Israel over those several years and Tel Aviv the city of Tel Aviv is formed around 1990 it is created and built by the people who come in the second and third wave of immigration and when they come here they form their proto-state structures and this form of governance is called the Yishuv it has its own security called the Hashem there it later on builds its own militia called the Haganah which sometimes stays underground sometimes it cooperates with the British rulers and this Yishuv is the one which is fighting for the existence and the state that is going to come but to ensure that they are still alive when the state of Israel is formed they have to fight so in the first phase they lose and for the Arabs under the Hajj Al-Seni Khawagji what they do is that they ensure that Jewish settlements are cut off so the roads that are connecting the cities and towns of major Jewish populations those roads are where they put up their guns and gunmen and they engage in sort of guerrilla warfare and they do it pretty well in the first phase because the Jewish side has Ahmad Qas the Arab side does not have but the Ahmad Qas are battered in the first phase Zionist Yishuv they kind of lose all of the Ahmad Qas and they are almost on the verge of losing one might say but they do not give up and the kibbutz which have been created all these years are placed in the front areas and the kibbutz men and the kibbutz women they are like farmers they are doing their work they also carry gun with them and they defend themselves but by the second stage when it is April of 1948 there is a new stage and a defensive plan or plan D is put into place it is also called plan Dalit the Hebrew character for D that makes a sound D and for that they say that ok we will be more offensive in certain areas and in certain areas we will not interfere and in the second phase the Haganah took the initiative and in six weeks the tables have turned one of the major reasons for this turning of tables is also because there are a lot of volunteers from Europe and United States who come in to fight to defend the issue and there are all these people who are coming to join them with experience with military experience many of them have fought in the world war 2 and they know how things work out they bring with them the knowledge of using communication, radios and even some rudimentary radars and much of those early Israeli innovation and military technology is based on this people bring in that new or how do you say and also many of them are not Jews yet they are fighting and you could say the immigration also suddenly increases after 1945 and lot of these immigrants are young able-bodied people who can fight who can pick up weapons so in the phase two from April 1st to May 14th the tables turn and Israel kinds of sweeps up and the defeat large numbers you see the gun on the left it's a mortar, the Arabs didn't even have mortars this mortar that the Jews used it wasn't very good one, it's called the Davidka you visit Israel in Jerusalem from the old city along the Jaffa road you can see a model of it, it's called the Davidka square and there's Davidka place it wasn't accurate but it made a lot of noise it was good at scaring the enemies on the right side it's not a tank it's an Ahmadka that was used the person on the left most and the middle one are his generals the people who fought for him but there were always some tassel even within the Arab camp they were not always cooperating there were several militias for instance Hajar Hussaini had his own army and he wanted weapons to go to them and the other militia men they wanted weapons to go to them there are also this family photo that you see on the left most top they are the Nashashibis they were rivals to our Hussaini clan and there were these rivalries and there are also several Arab and Bedouin clans who prefer to support the Jews because they had all scores to settle and the bottom most picture you see the gentleman in the middle is a Druze, this gentleman so the Druze at first were fighting from the Arab side but when they lose to the Jews in some of the battles and they want the safety of their families their villages they join the Jews because they understand that the Jews are going to win perhaps or maybe they have a change of heart and they decide that this is the side they are going to stick with and even today the Druze in Israel are loyal and patriotic citizens of Israel and we see that along with Landi what happens is that in several places there were offensive strikes one of the most important ones that we can look at is that in Derya Sin the right side image shows you the village of Derya Sin so what happens is that I told you about the two militias they attack I think it is Urgun that attacks this village but they didn't expect any opposition any resistance but when they are going and they just make a declaration kindly surrender, get down leave the village we are taking over or something along those lines instead there is bullet sprays from those houses in the village and a lot of the men lose lives and they decide to avenge it and they go house to house throw in grenades and even get people out and they even kill several people with the spray bullets and there is something of a massacre and this becomes like how do I say it for the Palestinians it was like oh they have killed and killed so many of us and the people who leave this village and go to Jerusalem they then tell them see we were killed and the Jewish commission and the Arab they decide that Arab leadership decides that we are going to make maximum of it and we are going to ensure that everybody knows that what happened but they tend to exaggerate similarly the Jewish side wants this exaggeration to go on to show that yes we were ruthless because the message goes out to others that the Jews are going to they are fighting hard and you better leave and it's not good to pick a fight with them so in the civil war this instant also leads to the Jews winning many battles because the Arabs just recedes they just withdraw because they think oh we might as well lose and also before this happened the Arab side was always on the withdrawal because many of the Arab states the Arab League and they all said that see the Arab people you just come move away our soldiers and the militiamen will go and wipe out the Jews once our Jews are killed or they leave then we can go back and we can take back the lands our Arab lands so the forces of the issue state you can see there is a chronological of order of the formation while one also several Jewish people they joined the Jewish Legion under Ziv Jabotinsky who later on was one of the founders of Irgun the militia and also 1941 another militia out of the Irgun arises called Leche because they want to leave they are going to create their own and the Leche members used to call their members terrorists we are terrorists and Yitzhak Shamir one of the future rulers of Israel was a Leche member and the British had even come out with a poster of him and during Oslo and all that when the PLO was fighting with the Israeli government in 1980s in one of those meetings the Palestinian side shows one of the posters see it is not us who is the terrorists it is you who are the terrorists because they show a poster of Yitzhak Shamir as terrorists wanted and yeah so the leftmost is the barricade batch of the Jewish Legion the second one is the logo of the Jewish Brigade World War II so these were Jewish people formed in 1944 who fought with the British and so they get a lot of training but the first Jewish Legion is very influential and it is revolutionary because in 1917 when the Jews first fight in World War II as wearing menorah on their hat it is a statement that yeah Jews are fighting as Jews and many of the people who come out of this war as hardened men with military training the Israeli army which then goes on to form the Israeli army the IDF Israeli Defense Forces and even the name today's name of the IDF in Hebrew it is Zwa Haganah the Israel so there is the Haganah word Israel Defense Force so the Palmak is formed in 1941 it is more like a more egalitarian army like a crack troop and the Palmak they are formed and they don't salute usually later on they are assimilated but see during all this time the issue of government was very clear that the government is the one who is supreme we can't have so many rag tag armies so once when Irgun had come up with the ship called Al-Talina and they had brought a lot of weapons and they were just trying to bring in all those weapons to Israel and the Haganah under the leadership of the future Ben Gurion the leader of Israel they would say you stop there you give us all the weapons and then we will talk we will first bring in the weapons then we will talk so Haganah under the order of Ben Gurion they blow up the ship even though it is bringing valuable weapons this happens in June of 1948 so yeah there is the Kibbutz movement also because of which all this happens and the earliest Kibbutz had started as the Deganya near the lake of Kalili so yeah the Kibbutz movement they were like 8-10% of the Jewish population but they were like the elite Ben Gurion was himself from Kibbutz as well and yeah this is how it goes from 1946 to 2000 this is how the Jewish expansion begins so this third map on the left this is instrumental for us it shows us how Israel becomes a state after 1948 war of independence we haven't discussed it today we have just spoken to the formation of Israel the civil war period and in the next lecture perhaps webinar we will talk about it so any questions I am kind of done for my part and I look forward to hear from you Mr Jyoti thank you so much I mean I was really lost in your presentation because this is something that I believe that people should really know because there are so many misconceptions woven around this particular topic theological aspects are there religious aspects are there political aspects are there even the international law also plays an important role in understanding the entire whole lot of situation see the state formation is a different thing and the nation formation is a different thing so when we think about the evolution of the Jewish nation into the state I think we have to really understand distinctly and you have given complete justice to your presentation and this wonderful topic now I open this floor for questions please go ahead and shoot your questions thank you yes I guess please turn on your mic and you can read out your questions yes yes that would be great can you just turn on your mic we would really like you to ask this question please go ahead sure thank you sir congratulations Jyoti it was very informative and insightful presentation so the question that you would like to put across is maybe not directly related to your I mean within the scope of your discussion however I just want to like you know brought about this question out of my curiosity where sociologists use the example of kid boots of Israel to be the most egalitarian society in the world so how could you highlight how egalitarian it is when it comes to gender okay so to be honest I don't think I'm qualified to answer that but I'll make an attempt so in the earlier days what we see is that in relative terms it is very it's time you may say because in kibbutz women are not restricted okay just a second so in kibbutz basically many women are not restricted many of them find freedom for the first time and it is perhaps not because they are women but because they are part of the kibbutz so just by belonging to the kibbutz many of them are able to move up because even today if you go to Israel the kibbutz system is no longer as realistic as it used to be back in the day but even today the salary difference between someone who is let's say at the bottom of the pyramid and let's say someone who is the director of a company because today many of the kibbutz they run steel small steel forging like in India we get buy some weaponry like right from Israel a lot of the weaponry so some of the weaponry the missiles bottom part the marriageing steel is made in a kibbutz small kibbutz factory and the director of the kibbutz his salary difference compared to let's say someone who is a small mechanic or someone whose job is to ensure the cleanliness of the premises that salary difference is not like say in any other simplistic society and back in the day when you must be honest women under the patriarchal system were kept backward we can say on purpose and Jews even though enlightened Jews they had a different life but not all Jews were enlightened the enlightenment process created some Jews who enlightened and they then we can say they were the ones who came in and created the kibbutz because most of the initial kibbutz like Ben Gurion were from the Russian empire we can say and many of them were from central Europe also but the ideas were ahead of their time and yeah women kind of get pay they also get education and they also get to serve in the military now while serving in the military may not seen as a feminist tendency it might be seen as more empowering because when in a society the men have guns and you don't have guns you are creating one more layer of difference but many of the I might have a picture of the same as well let me just see in my slide if I have kibbutz yeah so you see this okay let me put the present okay yeah can you see the screen yes it's showing up yeah the left bottom you see these are the kibbutz people in this image there are men and women you can see some girls holding guns can you see the young girls holding guns yes yes I could yeah so but to be honest that cannot be the sole way of looking at where the progress has been made of course there is gender difference and even Israel society today there are a lot of movement for gender equality and there is a lot of progress to be made but for their time and in their society because the moment we look at Israel the Israeli side even many other people will say then the comparison should be made with the neighborhood and they will compare you with ask you to compare Israel with Jordan, Syria Saudi Arabia, Egypt and if you want to look at a comparison of Jewish society and Egyptian society I say Egyptian society because back in the time Egypt had the university Al-Azir it was seen as the high ground of Arab civilization that's where Nasir came up from and there's a movie called Jacobian House and there's even a book of that name House of Jacobia if you watch it it shows how the Egyptian society is and the Israeli society because of much of the time their immediate enemy or the biggest threat was Egypt they compared their society with them and they said see our society is at least much better and in kibbutz what happened is that the children they don't get to make the gender difference past because once you are a kid the kids they are not sleeping with their parents they have their own small kindergarten where all the kids sleep where people allotted the job of taking care of kids so they are growing up there is less a sense of gender compared to some of the society where they grow up in a family and also as they grow up I think at the teenage level they get their own rooms in a small colony or a housing area within the kibbutz where the teenagers can live their own life and the parents cannot interfere so the ability of parents to impose pre-existing culture pre-existing gender difference upon the new generation is of course it is reduced to a great extent and the kibbutz people originally the Zionist socialists they were not very religious and recently TV series has come up called the value of tears it shows the 1973 war I guess it shows the 1973 Yom Kippur war it shows a girl from kibbutz she doesn't believe in God she is free to marry whomever she wants she decides to marry a man from Tunisia, Mizrahi now in Israeli society there used to be this racial difference for much of the early 30 years, 40 years because the elite were the Ashkenazim from Europe who had migrated from there and the Jews of Middle East who were for a little bit darker screen and even Jews of India they were seen as the Mizrahi and they were seen as not sophisticated maybe not advanced enough not educated enough and there is a differentiation and in this TV series value of tears it is shown that there is a girl who lives in a kibbutz and she is free to leave her Ashkenazim boyfriend and go for a boy who is from Tunisia originally but the guy says during one of the conversations with another person it is very difficult for me to see that she could accept me because you know where we live where we live our houses are like ghettos and slums and she is a kibbutz she doesn't even believe in God how do I take her to my parents so those who live in kibbutz they have a very egalitarian life for society compared to other sections of Israel, Israeli society as well as in the neighboring area I know I have not answered the question but I have made an attempt thank you very much Jyoti in fact you have answered almost everything that I really expected from you thank you so much thank you ma'am alright, thank you Aviva for your interesting question and also equally interesting answer so now see Aviva inspired me to ask another question from a sociological perspective and my question would be you know the history of the Jewish people has always been full of swings, up and downs violence, brutality success, failures so basically when you look at the Jewish population we also recognize the contribution that has been made by them to the world at last especially the science and technology mathematics, physics and the other sciences now here my question is that considering the kind of history that the Jewish population has their contribution from the ancient world to the medieval and the modern world right so how does the Jewish population look at themselves because see on one hand they have Ashkenazi Jews then they have the Ben-Israelis from India and what my observation since I have some people in my family got married into the Jewish community I know that very well that they are very liberal people, very sweet people those who have suffered a lot historically but at the same time there are some issues which is going on since time immemorial in their communities as well so as a independent observer who has done a participative research in the field so how do you observe this social dynamics and don't you think that it really needs to be done to breach the gaps that has been created by those notions the specific notions and the understanding that comes with the notion, what do you think about it I understood that enlightened Jews and them having scientific achievements I can answer that and the second question I could understand are you talking about the differences within the society within the Jewish community very much because before you penetrate their society since you have done a participative research you lived among them, you must be having friends also, you must have lived in their houses so definitely this must have occurred to you you must have observed that because I personally observed that so that is why I really want to know your view on that thank you so much so for the first question I will give you I will try to give a nice answer and the second one I will try to give a more anecdotal and less of a social scientific data based answer so the first I would say that the enlightenment of Jews started after the enlightenment revolution of Galileo, Darwin and other that was the time when some Jews had decided that rather than just following the religion we will also live like a human being should live and try to explore our maximum potential and to reach our greatest we will ensure that whatever we have we will try to explore it to our greatest extent so some of the Jews in Central and Western Europe not that much in Eastern Europe they go on this path of enlightenment what happens is that there is the saying be a Jew at your home and be a Goe outside so when you are outside you are a scientist, you will be a good scientist you are a lawyer, you will be a good lawyer you are a professor, you will be a good professor you are a workman, you are a goldsmith, you will be a goldsmith and when you see you are at home then okay, you are now a Jewish person and fulfill all the duties accordingly and many of these Jewish people who come from this enlightenment they were not a big chunk of the Jewish society also, they were not the entirety of the Jewish society also, it was one section and this one small section I think they have contributed more than one fourth of all the Nobel Prizes like their overall population in the world might be less than 0.001% but they have taken more than quarter of Nobel Prizes in the world that's because of what we call the rise of scientific and political freedom now we believe that in any society you give people scientific freedom, that's enough not exactly so why? there is scientific freedom in many autocratic countries also in an autocratic country you can study engineering, you can study physics and in fact those governments will even encourage you they will say, study science, physics and all this because then the people cannot oppose the government there is nothing, there is no content that they are reading in everyday life which tells them that the state is oppressive or something or it tells them that those who are ruling, they have taken up all the resources there is nothing in those disciplines that tells them but let's go on that mode of development there is a limit to which you can reach but if you have political freedom then only you will be able to have scientific freedom in a way because once you have political freedom total freedom of course, I am not just saying just having political freedom is enough you need to have both and once you have political freedom you can think out loud, you can do as you may then you can prosper more so they enlighten Jews because they are living a part of the world but despite the anti-Semitism of that era anti-Semitism was there but it increased more in 18th and 19th century in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe it was there but there is also a gradient where it is more, where it is less and when you are rich, it affects you less and many of the enlightened Jews they become rich also but also we have a stereotype that Jews are it's a racist stereotype because the moment we categorize people as good or bad or anything that means we are sanctioning that categorizing is acceptable but the reason some Jews are able to do well is because they accept the scientific and political freedom so even today in US or even in UK you will find a lot of intellectuals amazing intellectuals who happen to be from Jewish parentage or who happen to be from Jewish origin that is because they have this great sense of freedom and also even if you take out the freedom component aside the conservative part also Jewish religion has this debating culture like we once went along with the class to the house of an Orthodox family very rich Orthodox we asked them how much someone asked them what about the wealth and money he just pointed out towards his library of books and said this is my wealth I don't need anything else and they are conservative people and also there is this Talmudic debate system because once the Jews were exiled after the destruction of the second temple there is no temple to worship at so it's more like a congregation they have synagogues and they have scrolls they are writing and debating and discussing and during the second temple period also right after the temple was broken even after that there is this academy in Yavni in Israel where the sages and all they are able to get some they tell the ruling Romans like see please don't destroy us don't kill us we just want to do our discussion and religious discussion so there is this tendency to discuss debate to learn that is there and once you have political and scientific freedom I think then first of all you have the skill and now there is no limitation to use deploy that skill of course this is very stupid of what I am saying it's not an exact answer but yeah I put the onus on the scientific and political freedom that they have thus they are able to achieve this also in the Technion the most important engineering science technological university in Israel is built some many of the academics say okay so the language of instruction should be because all the German Jews are coming up they will teach they will teach in German or maybe even English but the native movement language movement say no the language of instruction should be Hebrew they said how can we teach scientific stuff in Hebrew we will need to create a new jargon in Hebrew altogether but they said no make it Hebrew or else no the course will go ahead so finally Technion starts with Hebrew medium education and well we don't know whether back then what they were thinking but now we know that physics and chemistry can be done in Hebrew because many of the professors who are teaching today in Technion they are Nobel prizes they are Nobel laureates and they are teaching in Technion University and they are scientists, chemistry so we do know that chemistry and physics can be done in Hebrew so it is not about language it is about scientific and political freedom you set the people free let them take care of themselves but also the surrounding circumstances matter to a great extent and regarding the discrimination part so yeah so how do you say this during the first 30-40 years the elite and the ruling party of Israel was the labor party and the majority it was dominated by the Ashkenazim and when the Mizrahi the Jews from the Arab world they are coming at first they have a very bad life because they don't speak the language English or Hebrew and they speak Arabic and in 1950s and 60s Arabic is considered the language of the enemy who is about to kill you so there is double discrimination and there is one more TV series that I mentioned here there is a new TV series called The Spy which are not new anymore it shows the story of Ali Cohen and it takes you back to those days of 50s and 60s it shows that Ali Cohen goes to a party with his wife and his wife's boss's husband he asks him can you get some wine thinking that he is a servant because he is brown skin maybe Mizrahi's are not good enough to rise up but see this is an exaggeration of reality maybe but there was such a reality where there was so much discrimination when they first came in they had very bad living conditions they faced discrimination in everyday life as well but with the coming of time what happens is every person has to do the military service and it has been there like that especially for men women do it for 2 years wasn't always compulsory and once you go in the military the first thing you do is you learn Hebrew language so it becomes a melting pot and the nation is actually formed you might say in the army in the IDF and this breaks many barriers so today the level of discrimination is almost very very very low but yes we do see demonstrations like say from the Ethiopian Jewish community who have in recent years been protesting that they need better rights and also this discrimination of Mizrahi has reduced almost to very too great extent because today the Mizrahi are the majority or the Shafadi along the Shafadi and the Mizrahi Shafadi are the Jews who are expelled in the Spanish Inquisition from Spain and many of them are from Turkey because many of them left Spain and went to Turkey and North Africa and Mizrahi and the Shafadi they form the majority if you put them together and consider all of them as colored Jews then they form the majority and the ruling party of Israel for 2-3 years ago election after election after election used to be liquid and liquid is supported as support in these sections of society they are liberals very liberal you can say some of them have supported the Labour Party because the Labour Party is a socialist party and the liquid is seen as a little bit trite do you want me to go further or answer anything further no no no thank you the kind of dynamics you have expressed that is very true it is a ground reality of ever evolving Jewish society so thank you so much for that is there any other question maybe anyone from a theological angle also we can take up from biblical aspect also if anybody wishes to raise any point ok one more question from my side well what is your view about the living and development of Indian Jewish people in Israel specifically from Bombay who have migrated from Bombay who has mother tongue Marathi they are living there they are prospering there but what is your observation how are they living are they happy are they equally contributing to the political and economic growth of the nation are they getting good opportunities there what is your take on it so I don't have a social scientific concept but yeah anecdotally yes so I have met people just walking into for instance I was walking through the beach of Caesarea and what happens is that I show you on the map yeah maybe it is coming away from the answer interesting thing yeah ok now I am going to click on the present button just let me know once you can see the screen ok can you see the screen yeah it is coming up yeah ok so you see right now I am looking at Caesarea it is a small city like a private city not far from the north of Israel and I was walking on this beach once and I saw these structures they tend to cut off you see the structure on the beach can you see it little bit of the beach this one yes yes yes yes it is like a wall like thing in the middle of the water so I asked the gentleman there like there is a beach and in India we have beach which is open to the sea and there is a small embankment like thing I am trying to find a good one where it is very evident so yeah the person replies to me in Hindi I am shocked because you are shocked because he answers me he tells me it is to prevent kids from being taken away by the tide the currents and he explains it to me pretty well how do you speak Hindi and he says so he says that his mother is from Mumbai and I couldn't tell the difference when I meet an Israeli Jewish or an Indian person from India the fact that I cannot tell the difference between an Indian Jewish person and the non-Indian Jewish person I think the discrimination is not as hard today but in the early days of state formation 4748 there was discrimination many of them returned back and the complaint was that it is very difficult to adjust to that life and also as I mentioned earlier there was much more discrimination in the early days today it is much less and many of the people in India Indian Jews have seen that they have worked in India in the corporate sector they are 30 and then they take a chance and they have moved there and there was time right now there is an electioneering going on right in Israel and then there is a party led by Shalit just a second I forgot her name there is a party led by Naftali Bennett and Naftali Bennett and there is just give me a second I want to find the exact name and let you know so there is this politician and she had an event and you might say the Indian Jewish population especially the Bennett from Maharashtra, Gujarat that area and one of them rose up and he asked the question now they constitute a very small population of Israel very small, very tiny yet it is not that they are totally invisible you can see them they are there for you to see and of course they might not have prospered as much as we might have wanted for instance many of the major industries and all of that you might not find that many Indian owners, Indian entrepreneurs or even in politics but if you look at their life you can see that they are living as good as any other Jewish person but yeah there is scope for improvement a lot of them are concentrated around the towns of Ramle I think and yeah there are Indians in Dimola as well and also south of Tel Aviv Rishon Lezion, Hulon Bathiam, there are significant Indians living there also there are settlements there is the Benjamin Ashi tribe as well and they are living in some settlements and they are also living in the north do you want me to elaborate on any particular point regarding this if I haven't answered that part you can ask me. No, not at all the purpose of raising this question is so that the people will be enlightened because this entire talk is being recorded, it will be broadcasted on YouTube and somewhere I personally feel that people do not have much knowledge about the Jewish population forget about the Israel forget about those Jewish population scattered all around the world but specifically in India for example we have people like Nizim Eskil the poet he is basically a Jewish people have no idea about it so thank you for putting light on it now that you mention that is there anything you want to ask no, no, go ahead like you might have heard of Mehta Mehta the musician Zubin Mehta Zubin Mehta he is of Indian Jewish origin and the person who there are several well known Indians also of Jewish heritage but many of them have made it large internationally like many of them go to Israel and then their children maybe go to US and there are many amongst them and there is also a famous singer in Israel who is of Indian heritage and they are there it's just that it's very difficult to point out are they Indian because Israel is such a melting pot like I'll give you an example there are individuals there mother is from Uzbekistan father is from India then wives father is from Poland and wives mother is from maybe from US she came as volunteer in a kibbutz and decided to stay so it's very mixed for instance my neighbor there her mother was Indian I never made it she had to show me a locket which said a name in Hindi and she said see I have a locket my mother is from India it's then that I could say oh ok and you will find Indians in my dorm during college I met so many Israeli Indians but I could never tell that they were Israeli Indians till they opened and they spoke in Hindi or they made it known so it's not that easy for me to make out like who are the Israeli Indians but I can tell you they are making it they are rising and especially in the field of arts like music or but it's very difficult to pin down their identity because it's a mixed family and and also the food of India is popular and there are famous Indian chefs also there like the Modi Prime Minister Modi when there is an Israeli chef in his hotel in Benjamin Netanyahu Turk and they are late so there are other Israeli Indians who also make it but more than an artist and it's nice that's true that's really true and since you have taken up the name of the Prime Minister Rina Pushkarna oh ok that's really great and there is also another chef like may not be as well known but you might know there is a famous academic in Kolkata called Yael Cilliman no she is a specialist I think so yeah there is also someone called Lawa Cilliman she is a chef very good chef and then there are other people collecting grains but yeah there are people who have done big but yeah you must also we have also taken into consideration that their percentage of population is very low and in Israel it's a very assimilative culture once you go there you become Israeli first these days at least you are Israeli and rest all identities take a back seat oh and how can we how can we forget the 71 war yes yes yes so his uniform can be seen even today in the war memorial yeah so there is a museum there the ammunition hill museum in Jerusalem and recently the Indian Jewish community had held an event also where they celebrated Indian military generals and officers who are of Jewish heritage and who had made a big contribution so recently they held an event I think it was in the month of February or March yeah it came in the news yes yes okay and any other question well Mr Jyoti will be coming back again on 10th of April yes 10th of April 9th I guess yeah yeah so we are going to publish the information very soon about his talk and the brochure and all as usual but still I can give you one more minute if anybody has any question I am glad the question answers the best part yes of course of course this is a learning process I see this entire event as a learning process for all of us now I know what any questions are asked and I am going to google most of those now so I guess there are no more questions okay Jyoti Ranjan Pratamjit thank you thank you so much for your time and most importantly the knowledge that you have shared with us and most probably in the next lecture we would really love to know that what inspired you to reach to Israel what inspired you to get back to the roots of the most persecuted people and explore their pain, suffering and also celebrate their successes but not today certainly not today but maybe in the next lecture so thank you so much for helping us to connect Jyoti Ranjan Pratamjit and it's really a wonderful experience so with these words I as the coordinator of the DOT conclude this session thank you so much for coming and we will meet again thank you so much and thank you all of you the participants thank you so much thank you yeah and happy Pesach, Palm Sunday Holy and coming Sunday oh yes, we are colourful people we Indians are really colourful people that's the best thing about India