Much of the criticism of Zionism rests with a perception that during the 1948 war, they defeated a broad-based Palestinian national movement. The 2025 documentary, 1936, claimed that the three-year revolt that began then crystallized these aspirations. The actual reality is strikingly different.

The documentary totally misrepresents the uprising. It leaves out its leader, the grand mufti, who, after his exile in 1937, goes to Iraq to foment pogroms as he had in Palestine in 1921 and 1929. The grand mufti then fled to Germany and became a trusted collaborator, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Arab world, enlisting Bosnian Muslims to fight with the Third Reich.