Directed by Romed Wyder • Documentary • 2018 • 52 minutes

It’s so complicated. Thousands of years of history. Old hatreds. Both sides entrenched. No solution seems possible. These are common sentiments when it comes to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians—a conflict that seems to stretch back millennia, with no end in sight. A stalemate punctuated by rocket attacks, massacres, and uprisings.  But the birth of the modern state of Israel was far from inevitable. As AND THERE WAS ISRAEL compellingly shows, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the current crisis is rooted choices made in response to 19th century geopolitics, colonial imperatives, and the Holocaust. The 19th century was the era of the rise of the nation-state—a period rife with the invention of history. If every nation were to have its own state, what of the Jews? Early discussions of a Jewish state were not limited to placing it in Palestine. Argentina and the United States were both floated as possible locales. Not all Jews were Zionists, and not all early Zionists were Jews, with Christian Zionists split between those who welcomed a Jewish state as a precursor to the End Times and those who saw it as a way to decrease the Jewish population elsewhere. Even the partition of Palestine was far from inevitable, as many instead supported a single, federal state. And in central and eastern Europe, working-class, Yiddish-speaking Jews were far less likely to support Zionism than those who were better off. AND THERE WAS ISRAEL covers the history of Zionism from the writings of Theodore Herzl to the expulsion of Palestinians from hundreds of villages following the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. Political sociologist Riccardo Bocco argues the seeds of later conflict were in part sown by the contradictory commitments made by the British during...