Have you ever wondered what Palestine looked like before the Zionist cancer brought racism, hatred, bloodshed, mass land theft and ethnic cleansing to the country?

Thanks to Lobster Films, a Paris-based film preservation company, we can have a brief glimpse of the country in 1896, brought to our attention by Alan White in Buzzfeed.

The date is significant. It is one year before the inaugural congress of the Zionist Organization, held in Basel, Switzerland, and chaired by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionism movement. The congress formulated a Zionist platform, known as the Basel programme. Just one year before the onset of the Zionist cancer.

The film below shows a bustling Palestinian society, “much like that of Cairo, Damascus or Beirut, in an Arab city much like any other”.

In 1896, Palestine had a population of 500,000 people, of whom 30,000 lived in Jerusalem.

Jews formed half the population of Jerusalem, but in Palestine as a whole they comprised less than 5 per cent of the total. Christians accounted for 10 per cent and Muslims 85 per cent. This, according to the big lie of the Zionist racists, was the “land without a people for a people without a land” – that is, the British, French, German, Polish, Russian, American and other Jews  of various nationalities.

In the film below, you can see Arab Muslims and Arab Jews coexisting peacefully: a veiled Muslim woman, a camera-shy Orthodox Jew, and another Jew reciting a prayer at the Western Wall, wearing a fez, and although he prays in Hebrew his everyday language is Arabic.

You can see, too, Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy places scattered across a few hundred square metres. No occupation troops pushing, shoving, insulting and humiliating the indigenous inhabitants. No Jewish Übermenschen, the gun-wielding settler thugs whose very existence in the Holy Land is a war crime.

Little did the innocents shown in this film know that, just a year later, the plot for their eventual dispossession and ethnic cleansing would be hatched in faraway Switzerland.