A story of a 1930s uprising against British colonialism is key to understanding Gaza today

‘Palestine 36’ is a potent reminder that the blueprint for Israel's depraved war crimes in Gaza were laid down by a British empire whose tyranny the Palestinians tried - and failed - to end

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Anyone wondering why the British state and media, despite the latter’s pretension to serve as a watchdog on power, continue to cheerlead Israel’s genocidal slaughter of civilians in Gaza will find the answers in a new film.

It recounts not the current period of history, but a story from nearly 90 years ago.

Palestine 36, directed by the remarkable Palestinian film-maker Annemarie Jacir, illuminates more about the events unfolding for the past two years in Gaza than anything you will read in a British newspaper or watch on the BBC – if, that is, you can find anything at all about Gaza in the news since Donald Trump rebranded the killing and dispossession of Palestinians as a “ceasefire”.

And Palestine 36 does so, unusually for a Palestinian film, with a budget worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster and with a cast that includes names recognisable to western audiences, from Jeremy Irons to Liam Cunningham.

This is a major episode of British colonial history told not through British eyes but, for once, through the eyes of its victims.

The “36” of the title refers to 1936, when Palestinians rose up against British colonial tyranny – more usually, and deceitfully, referred to as a “British Mandate” issued by the League of Nations.

The problem for Palestinians was not just the systematic violence of those three decades of tyranny. It was that Britain’s role as a supposed caretaker of Palestine – an “arbiter of peace” between native Palestinians and mostly Jewish immigrants – served as cover for a much more sinister project.

It was British officials who ushered Jews out of Europe – where they were unwanted by racist governments, including Britain’s – to implant them in Palestine. There, they were actively nurtured as the foot soldiers of a coming “Jewish state” that was supposed to be dependent on Britain and assist in strengthening its imperial, regional agenda.

In effect, an overstretched British empire hoped over time to outsource its colonial role to a “Jewish” fortress state.

Anti-colonial struggle

One of Britain’s top priorities was crushing an Arab nationalism sweeping an area of the Middle East known as the Levant in response to British and French colonial rule.

Arab nationalism was a secular, unifying political ideology that sought to overcome the arbitrary borders imposed by the colonial powers, and strengthen Arab identity in opposition to foreign occupation. It was profoundly anti-colonial, which is why Britain and France were so deeply hostile to it.

The Palestinians were critically important to Arab nationalism because their homeland served as a geographical bridgehead between the powerhouses of Arab nationalism in Lebanon and Syria to the north, and Egypt to the south.

For the British, the impulse for liberation in Palestine had to be snuffed out at all costs. However, the increasing brutality of British despotism simply fed an insurgency that by 1936 solidified into what westerners term a three-year “Arab Revolt” and Palestinians call their very “First Intifada”, or uprising.

Later, there would be years-long, large-scale Palestinian uprisings – this time against Israel’s even more repressive brand of settler colonialism – that erupted in 1987 and again in 2000.

The 1936-39 Revolt grew so large that at its height, according to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, Britain briefly had more British soldiers stationed in tiny Palestine than in the whole of India.

This is the story recounted by Palestine 36 – one that British schoolchildren are never taught, and one that the British media never offer as context for today’s crimes in historic Palestine.

Which is why Britons watching the film are likely not only to be shocked by the extent and nature of Britain’s colonial violence but to see in those savage events a premonition of what is now unfolding in Gaza.

War crimes training

There are small sections of the Palestinian solidarity movement quick to condemn Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians as something exceptional, as something peculiar to Israel and its rationalising ideology of Zionism.

Jacir’s film is a potent reminder of how foolish this approach is.

Israel’s current colonial violence is simply a more sophisticated, more hi-tech version of the techniques employed by British colonialism nearly a century ago. The Israeli military learnt from the British – quite literally.

One of the main characters in Palestine 36 is the British officer Orde Wingate, who carried out night raids on Palestinian villages to terrify their inhabitants. Wingate organised punishment squads, comprised of British soldiers and recently arrived Jewish militia members, to conduct these raids.

The training he offered to the Jewish militias in British military colonial strategy and hybrid warfare would later serve as the Israeli military’s playbook.

The death of Wingate in 1944 in a plane crash in Burma was lamented by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father. He commented that, had Wingate survived, he might have served as Israel’s first military chief of staff.

The film shows Wingate committing routine war crimes: using a Palestinian child as a human shield; rounding up Palestinian women and children to put them in an open-air, barbed-wire camp, depriving them of water in the midday heat; burning Palestinian crops; blowing up a bus of Palestinian men he had arbitrarily detained.

Meanwhile, British colonial police officer Charles Tegart imported into Palestine militarised forts of a type he had earlier devised and constructed across India to put down the uprisings there.

These forts would become the blueprint for Israel’s series of steel and concrete walls and checkpoints that have fragmented historic Palestine, and caged much of the Palestinian population into prisons – including the largest, Gaza.

Watching Palestine 36, it is hard not be reminded – as we see Palestinians ritually humiliated, abused and killed by the British, supposedly to instil obedience – why each Palestinian generation has grown more radicalised and more desperate.

Britain’s vicious, colonial repression of the three-year uprising of 1936 led ultimately to Hamas’ violent one-day jail-break on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s genocidal, colonial rampage in response.

Israel’s genocide will no more pacify this generation of Palestinians than Wingate’s crushing of the Arab Revolt did to an earlier generation. It will simply deepen the wounds – and a collective will to resist.

Ideological zealotry

Importantly, the film also grapples with – if more obliquely – Britain’s contribution to an ideological zealotry usually attributed to Israel.

Wingate’s fervent subjugation of the Palestinian people and his view of them as little more than animals, as well as his passionate attachment to the Jewish people, were rooted in the ideology of Zionism.

All too often overlooked is the fact that Zionism long predates its modern-day incarnation as Jewish nationalism.

Wingate followed in a long tradition of influential European Christian Zionists, who believed that Biblical prophecy would be advanced by “restoring” the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. Only then, in a supposed “end times”, would the stage be set for Christ to return and establish his kingdom on earth.

Lord Balfour – he of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine – was another prominent British Christian Zionist.

Today, such views are shared by many tens of millions of Christian evangelicals, who are the support base for US President Trump.

The Palestinian people – many of whom, genetic studies suggest, are descended from the ancient Canaanites living in the region thousands of years ago, and who subsequently converted to Christianity and Islam – were viewed by Christian Zionists like Wingate as little more than an obstacle to the realisation of divine prophecy.

If they would not obey God’s will by clearing themselves out of their own homeland to make way for the Jewish people, then they would have to be forced to do so.

The Zionism of Israelis, as poll after poll shows, has led them in a similar, racist direction to Wingate: large numbers support ethnic cleansing and the genocide of Palestinians.

Social media posts by Israeli soldiers openly revel in their depraved treatment of Gaza’s people.

‘Not fully human’

Which brings us back to the present day.

Film reviews in the British press of Palestine 36 have been, at best, lukewarm. Even the supposedly liberal Guardian damns it as “heartfelt” – as if mollifying a child over a second-rate school essay.

That should not surprise us. The British establishment – just like the US one that took on the mantle of global policeman from Britain after the Second World War – still treats Arab nationalism as a threat.

It still views Israel as a vital colonial outpost. It still regards Palestine as a testing ground for techniques of surveillance and counter-insurgency. It still views the Palestinians as not fully human.

Which is why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer – sounding like a modern version of Wingate, reinvented as a politician – was unabashed in defending Israel’s decision to deprive the people of Gaza, including its one million children, of food, water and power. That is, to starve them in violation of the fundamentals of international law.

It is why Starmer and the British establishment keep shipping arms to Israel and supplying it with the intelligence it has been using to target civilians. It is why Starmer welcomed to Downing Street Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, who rationalised the genocide by stating there were no “uninvolved” civilians in Gaza.

It is why the British army is still training Israeli military officers in the UK, just as Wingate did with their predecessors. And it is why British officers still head to Israel to learn from its genocidal military.

It is why Britain still offers Israel diplomatic protection, and why it has threatened the International Criminal Court for seeking to hold Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to account for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza.

And it is why Starmer and his government have changed the definition of terrorism to criminalise Britons who express opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

The truth is we cannot look to our government, schools or our media to educate us about British colonial history, whether in Palestine or in any of the other places around the globe Britain has tyrannised.

Instead, we must start listening to the victims of our violence, if we are ever to understand not just the past, but the present too.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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