The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.
Set during the 1936 Arab Revolt, the film does not have much to do with disputes between Palestinians and their Jewish neighbours (many just arrived from Europe). Palestine 36 is more concerned with a depressingly familiar post-imperial partition. “We don’t want another Ireland on our hands,” Liam Cunningham, playing the Anglo-Irish police chief Charles Tegart, growls menacingly.
The core story flits between several shallowly drawn Palestinian characters. Salid Bakri plays Khalid, a young fellow who secures a job as driver for a powerful newspaper owner (the grand Dhafer L’Abidine). This lets us into a privileged corner of Arab society that rarely figures in western considerations of the area’s history. In the later stages we discover the extent to which such media were secretly tangoing with the Anglo-Zionist experiment. Elsewhere, the great Hiam Abbas turns up as grand-matriarch to a threatened family. An ancient pistol looks to have the usual Chekhovian significance.
Annemarie Jacir, director of the fine Wajib, marshals the busy production with military efficiency. The talented cast make their presence felt over noisy, violent set pieces shot fluidly by Hélène Louvart and others.
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Palestine 36 is, however, at its best when in quasi-documentary mode. Making skilful use of colourised archive footage, the film drags up not just unavoidable pointers to the area’s current miseries, but also reminders of similar western interventions in parts as remote as Vietnam and (yes) Ireland.
Strong British actors pop up to illustrate the spectrum of strategies considered. Jeremy Irons is patrician and patronising as Arthur Wauchope, the ageing, complacent high commissioner. Billy Howle is frustrated as a liberal, concerned (and, significantly, fictional) young diplomat. Students of the second World War will agree that Robert Aramayo’s unhinged turn as Captain Orde Wingate – later known for his reckless heroics with the Chindits in Burma – is closer to the mark than others may think possible. Implacably ruthless in his suppression of Palestine resistance, he here comes across as a sort of anti-Lawrence of Arabia. Every colonial occupation had a zealot of that stripe.
