This film about the Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936 is unlikely to gain a mass audience, but it very much deserves to be seen. It’s a major work that dramatises events before the Second World War when Britain was still in charge of the territory.
Following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Jews were starting to arrive in increasing numbers, fleeing persecution in Germany and eastern Europe. They were given protection by British imperial forces as they began to take over land for their settlements, displacing the indigenous Arab farmers.
Balfour had promised the Jews the right to “a national homeland.” At the same time there was a vague caveat that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” We are shown how this worked out in practice in the 1930s.
The central character is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a village boy who gets a job in Jerusalem as chauffeur for a wealthy Arab newspaper editor. His master is a liberal who is not averse to making an accommodation with Zionism. He is part of the Arab landowning class who are used to negotiating with the British military rulers.
As land disputes escalate into violence, a hierarchy emerges, with the European Jewish settlers receiving more favourable treatment than the Arab villagers. The brutal responses of the British military eventually convert Yusuf into one of the rebels.
A key figure in the drama is Orde Wingate, an intelligence officer in the British Mandate of Palestine. He was a convinced Christian Zionist, and gained permission to set up “the Special Night Squads” with the Jewish armed group Haganah. These used surprise terror tactics and collective punishments to deter Arab farmers from supporting the rebels.
Some reviewers have suggested that the character of Wingate and his violent methods are exaggerated. In fact this part of the film is almost a documentary of what is known to have happened. The British Empire faced a mounting challenge from Germany and desperately needed a reliable Jewish ally to help maintain its hold on the Middle East. Wingate was the man for the dirty job required.
An oddball, daredevil character, who was often in conflict with his own military establishment, Wingate went on to become a British war hero in Burma, where he set up the Chindit guerilla units to attack the Japanese.
The film has a huge cast and brings alive the almost forgotten last days of the British Empire, when the white man with shorts, pith helmet and rifle ruled the roost over the natives. There are fascinating political and moral subtleties in this story, with some colonial officers struggling to see fair play.
Large parts of the film centre on Palestinian peasant families who speak in Arabic, with English subtitles. This alone creates a huge shift in emotional emphasis. We no longer see the Arab characters as the mysterious “other” – the angry funeral mourners shown in newsreels, shaking their fists and chanting in a language we can’t understand.
Palestine 36 displays colonialism in action, inevitably clinging to control by dividing its subject people into hierarchies of power and human rights. When a small number of colonial troops are threatened by an angry population, the response is almost bound to be disproportionate violence and routine intimidation.
Finally we are led to realise that the aggressive, racist tactics of the British Empire led on directly to the actions of Jewish paramilitary groups at the end of the Second World War. The Haganah officer Moshe Dayan, who served in the Special Night Squads, said that Wingate “taught us everything we know.”
The pattern has continued to the present, and in even more extreme form in Gaza. That is why British people who are searching for a new identity need more understanding of our colonial past. And it is why this is an important film today.
It’s important to remember that the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine. So the establishment of a Jewish homeland had the backing of the international community in the 1920s, and again in the 1947 UN Assembly vote for a two state solution. It was a response to the growing lethal threat to Jews. Essentially, all the Jews who migrated to Palestine were refugees, not colonial settlers, and they were returning to their own ancestral homeland. My understanding of the initial process is that they purchased land in a perfectly legal way. The existence of Jewish paramilitary groups was a response to Arab paramilitary groups. The Hebron massacre of Jews in 1926 was particularly heinous. I don’t know what this film is like or what its sources are, but we need to strive for a balanced account.