Review of Palestine 1936

A drama (rather than a documentary) about the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936. As a young teenager I watched Exodus, and Cast A Giant Shadow - Hollywood Zionist films about heroic Jews fighting against the British and the Arabs (not Palestinians then) to establish the state of Israel. I'd been previously sort of unconsciously Zionist - my Zionist Jewish education made me feel that Israel was to do with me, and in some sense "my country", but I didn't think much about it until then. Those films made me a proud, conscious Zionist, and they had a similar effect on some of my non-Jewish friends - particularly the bits in which the nasty British prevented Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine.

This film is in some ways a mirror image of those, and even though I don't identify at all as a Zionist any more, it's still a hard, gruelling watch. It's not intended as a neutral, balanced history but as a tribute to the struggle of the Palestinians against British rule and Zionist expropriation. It manages to slip in some early references to why the Jews were coming to Palestine, and it does capture some of the conflict within Palestinian Arab society about how to respond to Zionism, but it's mainly about the bravery of the resistance. There are some very romantic looking freedom fighters with horses, keffiyehs and big moustaches. We see some sabotage on the railways but not much footage of the struggle in the cities, or of the general strike - that's covered mainly be visuals of newspaper headlines. 

The British are rightly depicted as brutal and cruel. After the film I went home and read the Wikipedia article about the revolt, and realised that I hadn't appreciated the scale of the casualties. Wingate is depicted as a cruel bully. It would probably come as a surprise to lots of British Jews, for whom he is still something of a hero - football clubs are named after him, for example.

There are a few weird historical anomalies and errors. One of the Palestinian elite - the newspaper owner/editor - is found to have been receiving payments from the Zionists; his wife finds cheques from the "Zionist Commission for Palestine" in his desk drawer. But the Commission was a short lived body, soon replace by the Palestine Zionist Executive, and then in 1929 by the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This isn't very important, except that it's part of a wider tendency in the film not to show any Jews at all. We do see a few people in European dress in some early street scenes, and they might be Jews, though there are plenty of Arabs in European dress too. We see some refugees arriving by boat in a very short segment, and we see a long distance shot or two some pale people working in the fields of a kibbutz.

But there's not much sign of the Zionist settlement, though it's talked about often enough by the characters. There's a scene in which Palestine Radio is launched, and the Jew at the joint British-Arab-Jewish ceremony is a long-bearded, hatted orthodox man. There's a shot of Jerusalem railway station devoid of Hebrew, even though the real station most definitely had trilingual signage - you can see it in old photos, and Hebrew was one of the three languages of the British Mandate authority. Like I said, almost the mirror image of my teenage Zionist movies. It does seem as if the film wants to minimise the existence of Jews in the country, even as part of the colonial apparatus. 

The final scene, after most of the credits, shows a silhouette of a Palestinian bagpiper playing what seems to be a Scottish lament. I've asked a Palestinian friend what's the thing with Palestinians and Scottish bagpipes.