From Free Press January, 19, 2026
An Oscar short-listed film, funded by Qatar, Turkey, and the BBC, rewrites the past to serve a modern political fantasy.
f there is one darkly positive consequence of the horrors that have engulfed the Middle East since the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, it is the renewed public interest in the conflict’s origins. It is a history I know intimately. My book, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict, published just months before the attacks, chronicles a seminal chapter in the conflict and its enduring consequences until today.
That renewed interest is visible in the film industry as well. Of the 15 films short-listed for this year’s Oscar for Best International Feature, three center on Palestinian stories—two of them period dramas. One is titled Palestine 36.
Directed by Annemarie Jacir, with major funding from the British Film Institute (BFI), BBC Film, Qatar’s Doha Film Institute, and the Turkish state-run media outlet TRT, Palestine 36 defies—and at times invents—the historical record to rewrite the past in service of a contemporary political agenda. It presents the Great Arab Revolt as a morality play of colonial cruelty and Arab resistance, while rendering its primary targets, the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, voiceless pantomime figures at best. At worst, they are venal, behind-the-scenes figures, alluded to but scarcely seen.
It is an absence that erases the Jewish community—nearly half a million strong by the revolt’s end in 1939—in an act of historical revisionism verging on fantasy.
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The uprising erupted in April 1936 against both the Holy Land’s Jews and the British authorities, who for two decades had facilitated the creation of a Jewish national home as pledged by the Balfour Declaration and required by the mandate ratified by the League of Nations. The rebellion began in spontaneous, lethal attacks on civilians but was quickly matched by a monthslong economic strike and political demands.
The first demand was a complete halt to the immigration of Jews, which over the first half of the 1930s, spurred by rising antisemitism in Europe, had doubled their numbers to nearly 30 percent of Palestine’s 1.3 million people. The second demand concerned land ownership—a question, then as now, at the conflict’s molten core.
The film’s omissions greatly diminish the historical reality of the time period. (Philistine Films/Watermelon Pictures)
In Palestine 36, the British are repeatedly “transferring” land to the Jews. In one scene, Arab civilians lament that a British court had just “transferred” 35 dunams to Jewish buyers. The language is deliberate; terms like confiscation and settlers are deployed not merely to distort the facts of Jewish land purchases, but to collapse that imaginary past into the present.
In the film, Arab leaders demand to end such “land transfers.” The reality was that virtually all of the land the Jews possessed had been purchased, legally, from Arab landowners. The Arab leadership insisted the British ban not the transfer of land but its sale. Arab landowners were so keen to sell to Jews that their own leadership had to beg the imperial power for a prohibition.
Portraying the rebellion as directed primarily against British imperialism (with the Jews as the silent beneficiary thereof) is historical malpractice.
Who was this Arab leadership? That is difficult to discern by watching the film.
Palestine 1936 features three real-life British officials: High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope (played by Oscar winner Jeremy Irons), Captain Orde Wingate, and military adviser Charles Tegart. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, is also mentioned.
The Arabs, by contrast, are depicted as led by nebulous entities variously referred to as “the leadership” or an unspecified “national committee.” In reality, the leader of Palestine’s Arabs in 1936 was Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British, he had assumed the role of president of the Supreme Muslim Council and later chair of the Arab Higher Committee. Husseini was, throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, far and away the most powerful Arab and Muslim leader in Mandate Palestine.
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Wanted by the British for fomenting and perpetuating the revolt, the Mufti fled Jerusalem the following year. Eventually he made his way to Berlin, where he met with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, took up residence as a guest of the Reich, and became Nazi Germany’s chief propagandist to the Muslim world, fulminating against Jews on its Arabic radio broadcasts, and helping enlist two divisions of Bosnians for the Waffen-SS. In this film’s telling, he is conspicuously absent—by design.
By the revolt’s end, some 500 Jews lay dead—the vast majority civilian—and half as many British servicemen. At least 5,000 Arabs, perhaps more, were also killed, thousands by the British but likely even more in internal feuds.
Therein lies one the starkest flaws of Palestine 1936: the near-total absence of violence inflicted by Arabs. The film is keen to spotlight Jewish extremist attacks against Arabs—as I relate in my book, there was even a brief period in 1938 when more Jews were killing Arabs than the reverse. But the film inverts history to suggest it’s the Jews who draw first blood, and much more of it.
For a film centered on an Arab revolt against Jews, it’s a glaring, flagrant omission.
And yet the film’s gravest failing may be depriving the Jews of a voice. I don’t mean metaphorically; I mean there are precisely two words spoken by a Jew, in any language, in the entire film.
In fact, Jews appear on-screen only twice. Early in the film, a Jewish figure is briefly ushered to a microphone at the inauguration of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. Later, Jewish immigrants are seen in the distance, silently toiling behind a kibbutz wall.
And that’s it. For a film centered on an Arab revolt against Jews, it’s a glaring, flagrant omission.
It would have been easy for the screenwriters to have included two stock Jewish characters: The “bad” Jew who is arrogant, land-greedy, and patronizing toward Arabs, and the “good” one who respects their culture, learns their language, and is willing to limit Jewish immigration. I suspect that behind this choice lies the deep-rooted Palestinian and wider Arab taboo against “normalization” of Israelis—in this case, even before they were Israelis.
Nonetheless, wishing something away doesn’t make it so. Like it or not, the Jews were there, and their continued arrival was the key driver of the revolt. Portraying the rebellion as directed primarily against British imperialism (with the Jews as the silent beneficiary thereof) is historical malpractice.
The film’s last quarter is a crescendo of British brutality that bears only a patchy resemblance to the historical record. Soldiers detonate a home despite knowing an elderly couple is in their bed, embracing as they await the end. Wingate shoots a civilian in the head after gathering the townspeople to watch. In the climax, troops force civilians onto a bus and force it to drive over a landmine. Among the dead is a Christian priest whose young son then kills a British soldier in revenge. It’s essentially the film’s only moment in which blood is spilled by Arab hands.
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The British have much to answer for in Palestine—a handful of well-documented atrocities, like that at al-Bassa, are amply described in my book. They indeed demolished homes during the revolt, just not with people inside. Wingate did inflict collective punishment on uncooperative villages. But there is no evidence of him ever ordering an execution, much less conducting one himself, nor of the British murdering a priest (or imam), nor of any Christian Arabs (let alone children) taking up arms against them.
Only in the final credits, and only in minuscule type, does Palestine 36 concede that the movie is a work of fiction, merely “inspired by actual events and characters.” Such a disclaimer should have appeared prominently at the outset, not buried where few viewers would notice, although that would erroneously suggest that the spirit if not the details of the Arab uprising of 1936–1939 had been captured. It has not.
As publicly funded British institutions, the BFI and BBC Film should have insisted on transparency. Their failure to do so places them uncomfortably close to the film’s other state-backed co-producers, in Turkey and Qatar, which reliably promote their governments’ harmful, extremist agendas in the region. The omission raises an obvious question: whether the lack of candor reflects more than oversight, and instead a shared comfort with reshaping the historical record to suit a contemporary agenda.
All the world’s a stage, a British dramatist once wrote, and nowhere more so than the Holy Land. But it is an affront to history that a portrait of a revolt against Jews should treat the latter as silent props or erase them altogether. However the filmmakers feel about Jewish immigration, land purchase, and nation-building in mid-’30s Palestine, these too are part of the history. These too are “actual events” performed by “actual characters” in the century-long drama still playing out between the river and the sea.