Il aura régné seul, en maître absolu et durant près de vingt ans mais, mardi 20 janvier, le Néerlandais Geert Wilders a dû concéder que son Parti pour la liberté (PVV) vivait « un jour noir ». Sept des 26 élus de son groupe parlementaire ont, en effet, décidé de quitter sa formation d’extrême droite et de rejoindre un nouveau groupe que dirigera Gidi Markuszower, 48 ans, qui fut longtemps l’un des alliés fidèles du dirigeant populiste et islamophobe.
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M. Markuszower et ses comparses ont, par ailleurs, reproché au chef du PVV d’avoir refusé tout dialogue avec les trois partis (centriste, libéral et chrétien-démocrate) qui tentent actuellement de négocier un programme gouvernemental. Menées par M. Jetten, ces tractations visent à la mise en place d’un gouvernement minoritaire qui tentera d’obtenir, au cas par cas, des soutiens extérieurs. Le nouveau groupe se dit ouvert au dialogue avec tous les autres partis mais, jusqu’ici, seule Dilan Yesilgöz Zegerius, dirigeante du Parti populaire pour la liberté et la démocratie (VVD, libéral) a entrouvert la porte à une éventuelle discussion avec lui.
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Gidi Markuszower a, en tout cas, une réputation assez sulfureuse. Sénateur, puis député depuis 2015, il a été soupçonné par les services secrets néerlandais (AIVD) d’entretenir des liens très étroits avec le Mossad israélien et de représenter dès lors « une menace pour l’intégrité » du royaume, ce qui lui valut, en 2024, d’être privé par M. Wilders du poste ministériel qu’il convoitait.

“What we did for Israel was amazing…We did it for Israel. And by the way, I told Bibi, ‘Bibi, stop taking credit for the dome. That's our technology, that's our stuff.’ But they had a lot of courage, and they were good fighters, and they did a good job.”

Allez voir "Palestine 36" !!!
Où l'on apprend que posséder la terre était un concept étranger aux paysans palestiniens qui la cultivaient pourtant depuis toujours... Comme au Groenland encore aujourd'hui d'ailleurs tiens tiens...
La loi Yadan y prend un bon coup dans les dents, et ça fait du bien. A moins qu'elle corrige sa copie et propose que les gens qui pensent que les Anglais se sont comportés comme des gros dégueulasses avec les Palestiniens en organisant leur calvaire devraient eux aussi être poursuivis pour antisémitisme? Anglais, antisémite... les deux mots commencent par les les deux même lettres, ça se tente Caro...
Magnifique film d'Annemarie Jacir

La menace permanente de violence, combinée à la destruction des biens juifs et aux incendies criminels qui détruisent les maisons juives, contraint 12 000 Juifs à fuir Jaffa en tant que réfugiés.

Directed by Annemarie Jacir, with major funding from the British Film Institute (BFI), BBC Film, Qatar’s Doha Film Institute, and the Turkish state-run media outlet TRT, Palestine 36 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 pantomime figures at best. At worst, they are venal, behind-the-scenes figures, alluded to but scarcely seen.
 
It is an absence that erases the Jewish community—nearly half a million strong by the revolt’s end in 1939—in an act of historical revisionism verging on fantasy.

In Palestine 36, the British are repeatedly “transferring” land to the Jews. In one scene, Arab civilians lament that a British court had just “transferred” 35 dunams to Jewish buyers. The language is deliberate; terms like confiscation and settlers are deployed not merely to distort the facts of Jewish land purchases, but to collapse that imaginary past into the present.
 
In the film, Arab leaders demand to end such “land transfers.” The reality was that virtually all of the land the Jews possessed had been purchased, legally, from Arab landowners. The Arab leadership insisted the British ban not the transfer of land but its sale. Arab landowners were so keen to sell to Jews that their own leadership had to beg the imperial power for a prohibition.

Who was this Arab leadership? That is difficult to discern by watching the film.
 
Palestine 36 features three real-life British officials: High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope (played by Oscar winner Jeremy Irons), Captain Orde Wingate, and military adviser Charles Tegart. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, is also mentioned.
 
The Arabs, by contrast, are depicted as led by nebulous entities variously referred to as “the leadership” or an unspecified “national committee.” In reality, the leader of Palestine’s Arabs in 1936 was Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British, he had assumed the role of president of the Supreme Muslim Council and later chair of the Arab Higher Committee. Husseini was, throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, far and away the most powerful Arab and Muslim leader in Mandate Palestine.
 
(...)
 
Eventually he (Hajj Amin al-Husseini) 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, fulminating against Jews on its Arabic radio broadcasts, and helping enlist two divisions of Bosnians for the Waffen-SS. In this film’s telling, he is conspicuously absent—by design.

And yet the film’s gravest failing may be depriving the Jews of a voice. I don’t mean metaphorically; I mean there are precisely two words spoken by a Jew, in any language, in the entire film.
 
In fact, Jews appear on-screen only twice. Early in the film, a Jewish figure is briefly ushered to a microphone at the inauguration of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. Later, Jewish immigrants are seen in the distance, silently toiling behind a kibbutz wall.
 
And that’s it. For a film centered on an Arab revolt against Jews, it’s a glaring, flagrant omission.
 
It would have been easy for the screenwriters to have included two stock Jewish characters: The “bad” Jew who is arrogant, land-greedy, and patronizing toward Arabs, and the “good” one who respects their culture, learns their language, and is willing to limit Jewish immigration. I suspect that behind this choice lies the deep-rooted Palestinian and wider Arab taboo against “normalization” of Israelis—in this case, even before they were Israelis.
 
Nonetheless, wishing something away doesn’t make it so. Like it or not, the Jews were there, and their continued arrival was the key driver of the revolt. Portraying the rebellion as directed primarily against British imperialism (with the Jews as the silent beneficiary thereof) is historical malpractice.

The British have much to answer for in Palestine—a handful of well-documented atrocities, like that at al-Bassa, are amply described in my book. They indeed demolished homes during the revolt, just not with people inside. Wingate did inflict collective punishment on uncooperative villages. But there is no evidence of him ever ordering an execution, much less conducting one himself, nor of the British murdering a priest (or imam), nor of any Christian Arabs (let alone children) taking up arms against them.
 
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.” Such a disclaimer should have appeared prominently at the outset, not buried where few viewers would notice, although that would erroneously suggest that the spirit if not the details of the Arab uprising of 1936–1939 had been captured. It has not.
 
As publicly funded British institutions, the BFI and BBC Film should have insisted on transparency. Their failure to do so places them uncomfortably close to the film’s other state-backed co-producers, in Turkey and Qatar, which reliably promote their governments’ harmful, extremist agendas in the region. The omission raises an obvious question: whether the lack of candor reflects more than oversight, and instead a shared comfort with reshaping the historical record to suit a contemporary agenda.