review: Palestine 36

PART ONE: SHODDY HISTORY

Based on the trailer and a few other reviews that I read, I expected Palestine 36 to have some major historical inaccuracies, including:

  • The lie that Muslims, Christians, and Arabs peacefully coexisted in Palestine before Zionism and the British occupation.
  • The omission of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the first Palestinian Arab leader and Nazi SS member who led the Arab Revolt (just imagine, for a moment, a movie about the American Revolution that entirely ignores George Washington’s existence. Or a movie about Nazi Germany in which Adolf Hitler is not even a thought).
  • The omission of all Arab violence against Jews during the Arab Revolt.
  • Other historical falsehoods, like the claims that the British transferred lands to the Zionists (never happened).

What I (perhaps naively) did not anticipate was for a movie about the 1936 Arab Revolt to fabricate virtually every basic detail about the Arab Revolt altogether.

  • Most egregious is that the Arab violence (toward the British — as any violence against Jews is entirely omitted) is presented as a response to the findings of the Peel Commission. According to this movie, virtually anything the Arabs did prior to the Peel Commission amounted to boycotts and strikes. In reality, the Arab Revolt was not a response to the Peel Commission; rather, the British instituted the Peel Commission to investigate the unrest of the Arab Revolt.

    In other words, it was the Peel Commission that was a response to the Arab Revolt. As often seems to be the case in pro-Palestine propaganda, Palestine 36 entirely reverses cause and effect.

  • Arab violence against the British (because, again, no Arab violence against the Jews exists) is framed as justified anger in response to the findings of the Peel Commission; namely, the Arabs are rightfully indignant about Lord Peel’s suggestion that Palestine be partitioned.

    Naturally, in the fantasy world of Palestine 36, the reason why the British recommended partition is erased completely: Haj Amin al-Husseini’s testimony before Lord Peel in 1937.

LORD PEEL TO AL-HUSSEINI, 1937: Does His Eminence think that this country can assimilate and digest the 400,000 Jews now in the country?

HAJ AMIN AL-HUSSEINI: No.

 

  • Palestine 36 never once notes that the Peel Partition was never implemented precisely because it was rejected by the Arabs (and accepted reluctantly by the Zionists). Instead, the implication at the end of the film is that the partition in 1948 is the result of the Peel Commission. This is blatantly false.

You’ll notice this plan is very different from the 1947 Partition Plan. That’s because they’re two different plans.

 

  • Palestine 36 ignores the Arab Revolt’s underlying Islamist violence. Some of the earliest so-called acts of “resistance” during the Arab Revolt were actually attacks against Jewish civilians by the former followers of Izz al-Din al-Qassam (1882-1935), a fanatical Muslim cleric that founded the terrorist group the Black Hand, which carried out attacks against Jewish communities in northern Mandatory Palestine. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because Hamas named its military wing after him.

    The very leader of the Arab Revolt, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was an early member of the Muslim Brotherhood who justified the struggle against the Jews in Palestine in the name of Islam.

    But if you watch Palestine 36, you’d guess most Palestinian Arabs at the time were Christian. You’d have no idea that fellow Arabs, driven by religious fanaticism, brutally attacked the Christian villages who chose to remain neutral.

 

PART TWO: FALSE FRAMING

I noticed very quickly that Palestine 36 was intent on framing Zionism as an extension of or a tool of British colonialism. I actually know this for a fact because I had the pleasure of sitting through a Q&A with the film’s director, Annemarie Jacir.

 

"The blueprint...architecture of Israeli occupation is one that was set up in fact by the British, almost to the T, as they say."

ANNEMARIE JACIR, DIRECTOR OF PALESTINE 36

 

In fact, at one point, the movie goes so far as to suggest that the British supported Zionism as a last-ditch effort to save the crumbling British Empire.

That’s a very interesting (and false) reframing of history and of the British relation to Zionism. While it’s true that the British “promised” a Jewish national home in Palestine to the Zionist movement in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British promised a lot of things to a lot of different groups of people (including the Arabs). In reality...

  • Many of the British officers stationed in Palestine were largely pro-Arab, often on account of their virulent antisemitism. Newspaper archives from the time period indicate Jews often issued complaints of antisemitic harassment and discrimination.
  • Time and time again, the British police were unable or unwilling to protect Jews from Arab violence, as was the case in the 1929 Hebron Massacre. In fact, the first Zionist paramilitary force, the Haganah, was formed in response to the Nebi Musa Riots, when the British left Jews unprotected.
  • The British began restricting Jewish land purchases and immigration in 1930, as outlined in the Passfield White Paper, six years before the Arab Revolt. The following 1939 British White Paper put the nail on the coffin on Jewish immigration and land purchases altogether.
  • How could Zionism be an extension of British colonialism if the Zionist militias carried out an insurgency against the British, with the right-wing militias going so far as to commit anti-British acts of terrorism? The Lehi, known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, even believed the British were a bigger enemy to the Jewish people than the Nazis.
  • Again, how could Zionism be an extension of British colonialism when the British abstained from the partition vote in 1947? When Sir John Bagot Glubb, commander of the Arab Legion and originator of the checkered Palestinian keffiyeh design, fought on the side of the Arabs in the 1948 war? When the retreating British personnel handed their weapons over to the Arabs, rather than the Jews? When it was British intelligence that prompted five Arab armies to invade upon Israel’s declaration of independence? When the British even threatened to attack the nascent State of Israel in 1948?

 

PART THREE: UNDERLYING MESSAGE

In one of the opening scenes in the film, a Palestinian Arab mother works the land with her daughter, overlooking Jews at a kibbutz. The pair have a conversation that sets the tone for the rest of the film. 

The mother points out that these are Zionist settlers who’ve come from Europe and are taking Arab lands. The little girl asks her mother why they’ve come to Palestine.

 

MOTHER: Their countries don’t want them.

DAUGHTER: Why?

MOTHER: (sighs). I don’t know.

 

The rest of Palestine 36 is an “answer” to this question.

Yep.

 

  • There is one speaking Jewish character in the entire film. He’s on the screen for a few seconds and says two words. He looks like an antisemitic meme, to the point that the girls I watched the movie with turned to stare at each other and burst out laughing.
  • The Jews cultivating the kibbutzim, on the other hand, could’ve passed for the Hitler Youth.

 

Both of these choices are intentional.

 

  • The kibbutzniks are constantly shown building fences and high towers, as though the keep the Arabs out. Zero context, because in the fantasy world of Palestine 36, Arabs never perpetrated an act of violence against Jews. At one point, a kibbutznik shoots at the Arab fellahin, just because, for no reason whatsoever.
  • In one scene, the Arab fellahin worry that the Zionists are smuggling arms, with the implication being that they’re doing so to hurt the Arabs. In the real world, the Zionists smuggled arms to defend themselves from Arab violence and because the British were unable or unwilling to help defend Jewish communities.
  • According to this movie, the way Zionists acquired land was not through legal purchase, as happened in the real world, but by burning down Arab crops and prompting Arabs to flee.
  • For a film that never gives Jews a voice, it sure has carefully curated shots listing all of the countries that Jews came from to build the kibbutzim, as well as a close up shot of the name “Jewish Colonisation Association,” the implication being obvious. Of course, anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty will recognize that at the time, the term “colonization” was used to refer not just to colonial policy but to the migration and development of new communities. For example, there was a Jewish Colonisation Association that helped Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire resettle in Argentina. That doesn’t mean they intended to build a colony there (they did not).

  • The Zionists are portrayed as deeply sinister and manipulative, going so far as to secretly create a Muslim association to infiltrate the Palestinian psyche and promote pro-Zionist views. Though the Zionists supported – ideologically and financially – the Muslim National Associations, in real life, the organization was started by Palestinian Arab Muslims (Hassan Bey Shukri and Musa Hadeib) that preferred a path to coexistence with the Jews. It wasn’t some nefarious plot.

 

THE IMPACT

Call me naive, but, based on the post-screening Q&A and a kind conversation she had with a friend, I do not believe Annemarie Jacir approached the making of Palestine 36 with ill intent. I believe that Jacir created this film, as she said, based on the stories of the Arab Revolt that she heard from her grandparents as a child. The problem is that she was sold a lie: in her grandparents’ retelling of events, the Arab Revolt was a glorious bid for Palestinian independence in which Arabs united across religion and class. In reality, the Arab Revolt was a violent response to Jewish refugee immigration on the eve of the Holocaust, with financial support from Nazi Germany, in which about a fifth of Arab fatalities – over 1,000 people – were the result of intra-Arab violence.

In the end, I have to wonder: do Jacir’s intentions, however pure, even matter? I sat in a full theater in which the audience grew increasingly worked up over alleged Zionist atrocities that simply do not exist in the historical record. They thought they were watching a historically accurate film, because that is how it is sold. And if the movie claims to be based on a true story, isn’t it Jacir’s responsibility to ensure that it is actually based on a true story?

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