“Was it worth it to rebel?.. They fought for national pride... to be free, to be independent... for the right to live here, in our land... In my opinion, it was all worth it.”
In a spectacular display of irony, Israeli tour guide and IDF reservist Naftali Chen crouches in a cave in the West Bank that he imagines to be part of an ancient tunnel system dating back to the 2nd-century Jewish Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman occupation of the land,, and asks if it was worth it. The devastating consequences of the rebels’ defeat, according to traditional accounts, included the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, the extensive forced displacement and mass enslavement of Jewish survivors, the annihilation of a thousand Jewish villages and towns, and more.
The self-proclaimed “history researcher” describes how the rebels fought from within tunnels and suggests that this very tunnel was built beneath a mikveh (Jewish ritual bath) as part of the revolt. Tunnels under a civilian facility? Sounds familiar.
Chen concludes that, yes, it was all worth it to live as a free nation in its own land. Yet, unsurprisingly, he is too blind to see that he and his so-called “nation” are the modern-day Roman occupiers, only far more cruel and genocidal toward the natives of the land.
Chen lives in the West Bank settlement of Otniel and is part of the Bishvil Yehuda (“For Judea” or “On the Judean Trail”) project, an “educational” initiative operated by the army (which also produced this clip) and established to promote Israeli tourism in the West Bank, in cooperation with numerous other official state bodies.
This video was filmed during an archeological excavation - illegal according to international law - taking place at the site of Khirbet Al-Rabiya, near Otniel, which Chen calls “Khirbet Arab” because Israelis never bother pronouncing non-Hebrew names properly.
The video was originally posted by Bishvil Project on 1 August, 2025.