This is Jerusalem in 1896. The Lumière brothers filmed the railway station, and a count published that year put the city at 45,000 people, of which 8,500 were Muslims, 8,700 were Christians, and 28,000 Jews. The camera moves to the Western Wall and the people standing there are Jews. This is a year before Herzl, twenty-one years before the Balfour Declaration, forty years before the boats of the 1930s, fifty-two years before the state. The old yishuv at that wall wasn’t waiting on a congress in Basel. The prayer at the wall was already the claim. The haters keep moving the date because the date is their whole claim. First it was Balfour, then it was the boats, then it was 1948, as if a people can be talked out of a city by starting the clock after they were already the majority in it. The film doesn’t argue. It counts. Twenty-eight thousand Jews in a city of forty-five thousand, at the wall, before any of those dates existed.