The Palestinian Ministry of Culture, an official body of the Palestinian Authority, has been submitting nominations for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film since 2003. Two out of 18 films have been nominated, Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), both directed by Hany Abu-Assad, though neither of them won. This year’s submission is Palestine 36, directed by Annemarie Jacir, whose earlier film Wajib was submitted, though not nominated, in 2017.

The world has become familiar with the phrase ‘History did not begin on 7 October 2023’ as a Palestinian riposte to Israeli outrage over the Hamas attack of that year. Indeed, Catherine Connolly, the newly elected Irish president, can be seen parroting this statement in YouTube clips. For Annemarie Jacir, Palestinian history began in 1936 with the first stirrings of organised resistance, when Mandatory Palestine, a territory created by the League of Nations after the First World War, was governed by the British Empire.

Palestine 36 purports to tell the origin story of the abiding Arab-Israeli conflict, namely the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 (sometimes known as the Great Arab Revolt or Great Palestinian Rebellion), but Jacir’s film is a somewhat crude confection of exaggerations and half-truths.

The film starts with some Arab labourers unloading barrels at a port. One barrel, marked for dispatch to a Jewish importer, tumbles and bursts open, revealing a cache of firearms. At the same time, the British High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope (Jeremy Irons), utters soothing words at the inauguration of the BBC-inspired Palestinian Broadcasting Service from a transmitter in Ramallah, alongside Arab and Jewish community leaders. (This service eschewed politics and played a mixture of western and Arab music as well as hosting discussions of Arab culture.) Within days, the Arabs declare a general strike and a tax boycott with the aim of halting Jewish immigration and land transfers to Jewish settlers, who built fenced encampments on land for which no records of title from Ottoman times existed.

Yousef, a young man from a rural village, works in Jerusalem as a driver for Amir, an affluent newspaper columnist. Back in his village, we meet Yousef’s family and that of a widow with her parents and her child. The village also has an Arab Christian priest, whose son plays with the widow’s daughter. The story moves back and forth between this essentially peaceful village and the more fraught environment of Jerusalem, where high politics are conducted.

Amir and his wife are at a dinner party when they hear the news about the report of the Peel Commission, which was formed at the end of the six-month-long Arab general strike and recommended the partition of the country into a small Jewish state and a larger Arab territory, with a neutral enclave around Jerusalem. The guests weep as angry gunfire rattles through the night air.

Conveniently overlooked in the film is the incident that initiated the unrest. There had been sporadic violence on a small scale between Arabs and Jews since 1920. The Revolt of 1936 began not with the general strike but with the murder of two Jews by Arab bandits who ambushed a bus, and this was followed by the murder of two Arab workmen by members of the Irgun, a Jewish guerrilla band.

There is an episode in the film when a torch-lit procession of Arab villagers with no malicious intention ventures too close to the wooden fence surrounding a camp of Jewish settlers. A settler guard atop a watch tower shoots one of the Arabs. The film ‘others’ the Jewish settlers, who are given no voice and are only glimpsed at a distance.

One ought to make some allowances for the fact that this period epic did not have a Hollywood budget and was shot partly in Palestine and partly in Jordan during the year or so following the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 – indeed, production was interrupted four times – but while the period costumes of the Arab characters are faithfully rendered, those of the British characters look ill-fitting and makeshift, as if hired from a theatrical costumier for an amateur dramatic production. Even worse, the slovenly standards of dress and appearance of the British officers would never have been tolerated. Captain Orde Wingate wears his hair long, curling up over the back of his collar, something that would not have passed muster under British military regulations.

In 1937 and 1938, Wingate formed night squads of mixed British and Jewish troops that harried the Palestinian rebels. Bands of Arab guerrillas would periodically cross the border from Syria into the hills of Galilee and attack Jewish villages, stealing cattle and destroying crops. British troops were ambushed and their bodies were often mutilated and the response of the authorities was to enforce a brutal repression. Buildings were blown up, livestock confiscated, personal property and possessions smashed, linen and clothing ripped, and foodstuffs spoiled during searches. Menfolk were savagely beaten and detained, curfews were imposed, and fines were levied on villages, which had to be paid promptly either in cash or produce. The rebels also levied food and cash from Arab villages.

It is important to realise that collective punishment and harsh retribution were not peculiar to the British. Such practices have been applied by the Israelis, and still are to this day, as well as by Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria.

Matthew Hughes, professor of military history at Brunel University and the pre-eminent historian of British military operations during the Palestine Mandate, has described the actual historical incident on which part of the story of Palestine 36 is based. Rebels had planted a landmine that killed four British soldiers near al-Bassa, a village near the Lebanese border in September 1938. Assuming that the villagers were complicit in the outrage, British troops responded harshly. ‘Within twenty-four hours’, Hughes has written, ‘al-Bassa was burned to the ground and at least twenty villagers were herded onto a bus that was forced to drive over a land mine buried by the soldiers, after which other villagers were forced to dig a pit and bury the bodies.’

Wingate, who went on to form the Chindits in Burma, where he died in a plane crash in 1944, was a peculiar figure. He was brought up as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a Christian sect that permitted no priesthood and held fast to a belief in the Second Coming of Christ. According to an article in the March 1952 edition of Commentary, by Edwin Samuel, Orde Wingate’s Jewish neighbour in the Christian Arab quarter of Jerusalem, Wingate learned Hebrew and would recite Psalms in that language. He knew his Bible well and was inspired by the story of Gideon leading a force of Jews against the Midianites. He was a Christian Zionist and wished to see Israel restored. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the military unit he led in Ethiopia against the Italians in the early part of the Second World War was called the Gideon Force. The only reference to his Zionism, as opposed to sheer villainy, in Palestine 36 comes in an offhand remark he makes about an Israeli army rising up for the first time in a thousand years. Without any contextual explanation of what he means, it leaves the viewer mystified.

In one scene, Wingate leads a punitive raid on Yousef’s village following the mining of an armoured car and shoots dead a rebel in the back as he tries to bolt. While the real Wingate certainly approved of harsh raids to mete out collective punishment on suspected rebel-sympathising villagers, there is certainly no record of him ever having committed an act of murder himself. (In the film, he even uses a German Luger pistol, which no British officer would have carried.)

As played by the young British actor Robert Aramayo, Wingate comes across as a pantomime villain. In that respect, he is reminiscent of a parade of sneering British officers in countless movies, but perhaps most notably Jeremy Isaacs as Colonel William Tavington in Mel Gibson’s epic of the American Revolution, The Patriot (2000). Perhaps Aramayo’s performance will appeal to the prejudices of cinema audiences on ‘the Arab street’.

At the end of Palestine 36, a male Palestinian newspaper columnist is revealed to be secretly in the pay of a Jewish settler organisation, while his wife, who discovers this and who has become gradually radicalised, walks out on him and straight into a dignified throng of street protest. It is intended as an uplifting moment of righteous self-assertion.

Palestine 36, therefore, offers a conventional narrative of victimhood resulting in a campaign of noble resistance to unreasonably draconian force. There is no acknowledgement of violence towards Jews, only violence by Jews. Nor is there any acknowledgement that Palestinian society was fatally riven between two rival clans, the Husaynis and the Nashashibis. Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, ordered various assassination attempts against Raghib Nashashibi, leader of his clan, and Raghib’s nephew, Fakhri, became a prominent collaborator with the British authorities, helping them to organise so-called ‘peace bands’ in different areas of the Mandate territory. Collaboration with the authorities was often bound up with local disputes and vendettas. Then, as now, there were many Palestinian Arabs who nursed yearnings for independence but had no time for terrorism.

Some peasant rebels resented urban Palestinians for continuing to wear the tarbush (as they had done under Ottoman rule), for using electricity generated by Jewish companies, and for listening to the radio or going to the cinema. Urban women, who chose not to wear the veil but wore make-up, were also sneered at by country dwellers. In one scene, a group of Arab rebels hold up a train and rob the passengers, some of whom give up their valuables without demur, even offering words of support for the liberationist cause. But the depiction of Palestinian society valiantly presenting a united front towards the occupying power in Palestine 36 is not consistent with the facts, and such failure to acknowledge profound divisions among Palestinians is a continuing theme today.

There are some things to savour in this otherwise deeply flawed film. Ben Frost’s score makes sensitive use of traditional Arab musical instruments and Jacir uses colourised newsreel footage from the 1930s to convey atmosphere and obviate the need for elaborate and expensive sets. The Palestinian actors acquit themselves well given the limitations of the script, especially the veteran Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass.

This year’s Best International Feature Film is a crowded field for submissions with Palestinian-Israeli conflict as their subject. Apart from Palestine 36, there is Jordan’s submission, Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You, and Tunisia’s submission, Kaouther Ben-Habia’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. The members of the Foreign Language Film Committee will decide the five films to be nominated early next year.

While airing his misgivings about its flaws of pace and characterisation, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, called Palestine 36 ‘a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools’. That may be true, yet it offers a disappointingly partial and waywardly remiss history lesson.