As a documentary filmmaker I spend my life in archives, reading the paper other people have decided to forget. Most of it stays forgotten for a reason. Every so often a document comes up out of the box and stops you, because it is not describing the past. It is describing the room you are standing in.

I found one like that. It is called Truth about Palestine. It was published in January 1946 by the Christian Council on Palestine — a body of almost three thousand adherents, predominantly Protestant but including Roman Catholics — at the moment the ovens had just gone cold and the world was still counting. It is not a sermon. It is a rebuttal. Three American church bodies had circulated documents opposing a Jewish home in Palestine. The Council answered them. Thirteen arguments, taken up one at a time, and taken apart.1

I read the table of contents and I recognized it. Not as history. As this week.

The pretense that Palestine had been promised to Arabs and Jews alike. The claim that the Arabs of Palestine were the original inhabitants, indigenous, rooted, while the Jews were interlopers. The charge that Jewish settlement displaced the Arab farmer. The insistence that the land was full, its capacity exhausted. The accusation that Jewish nationalism was a form of racism. The insinuation, aimed at Jews who supported a homeland, of divided loyalty. Every one of those is being said today, in English, in classrooms and city councils and on the platforms where the young perform their conscience. Every one of them was answered in 1946, before the State of Israel existed, by Christians who had just watched what the refusal to answer had cost.1

I grew up under the Soviet system. I know how this works. The state does not need to invent a new lie every year. It keeps the old one and reprints it. It changes the letterhead. The script survives because nobody goes back to check whether it was ever true. I have spent five years filming the Baltic Holocaust, and the one thing I have learned that I did not expect to learn is that a lie, properly maintained, outlives every person who could contradict it. So when I tell you the antizionist script has not changed since 1946, I am not being rhetorical. I am reading the record.

Look at who signed this thing. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most consequential Protestant theologians America produced.........

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