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Gegen die Selbstbestimmung der Deutschen.
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.
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.
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.
Husseini was, throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, far and away the most powerful Arab and Muslim leader in Mandate Palestine. 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,
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.
Who was this Arab leadership? That is difficult to discern by watching the film.
Palestine 36 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.