Palestine 36

With the British Empire trying to reconcile it’s own Palestinian agenda with those of the indigenous cotton farmers and a burgeoning, homeless, Jewish population arriving with expectations of their own homeland, this film follows events through the eyes of “Yusuf” (Karim Daoud Anaya) as he finds himself drawn into the conflict. He comes from a rural village but works part-time for a local publisher whose wife (Yasmine Al Massri) is a clandestine writer of articles on freedom for the Palestinians. These commentaries become more pertinent as the frequent theft of traditional lands for…

By Oren Kessler, author of the book 'Palestine 1936'> I have a number of quarrels with this film but I’ve limited myself to three of its most egregious failings: > > The utter distortion of how Jews acquired land (whatever land they owned was paid for – not “transferred” over by perfidious Brits) > > The complete absence of a guy named Hajj Amin al-Husseini (maybe you’ve heard of him) > > The silencing of the nearly 400,000 Jews who lived in Mandate Palestine in 1936. I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean there are exactly two words spoken by a Jewish character in as many hours of film. > >…

It is difficult to imagine that it's been about 90 years since the events depicted in this landmark historical film, yet the evil Zionist acts depicted in it have only gotten more evil, in both their scale and intensity. In a mood reminiscent of some of the more striking scenes in Braveheart (1995), Annemarie Jacir (writer-director), herself a Palestinian, takes a down-to-earth semi-documentary approach to recount to us the events surrounding the rise of one of the earliest large-scale organized Palestinian revolts against colonial occupation by Zionist settlers in Palestine. In doing so,…