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Source: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-bad-history-of-palestine-36
A Film Funded by Qatar, Turkey, and the BBC Rewrites the Past
(Free Press) Oren Kessler - The film "Palestine 36" - funded by the British Film Institute (BFI), BBC Film, Qatar's Doha Film Institute, and the Turkish state-run media outlet TRT - is short-listed for this year's Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. However, it 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 - alluded to but scarcely seen. It erases a Jewish community nearly half a million strong by the revolt's end in 1939 in an act of historical revisionism verging on fantasy. The film claims that the British are repeatedly "transferring" land to the Jews. The reality was that virtually all of the land the Jews possessed had been purchased, legally, from Arab landowners who were keen to sell to Jews. The leader of Palestine's Arabs in 1936 was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, president of the Supreme Muslim Council and later chair of the Arab Higher Committee. Wanted by the British for fomenting and perpetuating the revolt, he eventually 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. 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." The writer is author of the book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (2023).