I was brought up at school being told, um, that Israel was founded on a piece of empty space, and that they managed to make the desert bloom, and they built things when there was nothing there before. Anybody that studies the history of the region would know, at the end of the Second World War – 1945 to 1948 period – Palestine had media, had industry, had education, had universities, had a relatively high standard of living for the whole region, and was a coherent society and a coherent state. It was a denigration of that which enabled Western opinion to be, um, put together in support of Israel.
Palestine on the eve of Israel's independence was effectively a state, all right - a Jewish state. It was Jewish money, Jewish creativity, Jewish brains and Jewish sweat that built nearly all the institutions of Palestine that Corbyn is praising here.
And, yes, the Jews were the ones who made the desert bloom. And they did build cities like Tel Aviv on empty land. And they did drain the swamps. And they brought electricity to Palestine. And modern banking. And industry. And hospitals. And so on,
The British Mandate lasted 25 years, and the Jews - by themselves - built an entire state in that time period so it was ready to go as soon as it achieved independence. (Earlier in the full video Corbin talks about how much the British built in Jerusalem during the Mandate. They built some government buildings, but most of the interesting architecture came from Jewish, European and American sources.)
The Oslo process is now 25 years old, and the Palestinians - with billions of dollars of aid from the world - have not built a functioning state. The Palestinian Authority is barely a government - it is a fig leaf for Mahmoud Abbas' dictatorship. Nothing is decided without him. All the major hospitals and universities in the territories were built when they were under Israeli rule.
Corbyn, who claims Jews don't understand history, is literally making up history.
(h/t David B)