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 the British colonial military officer Orde 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 in the 1930s. 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.

This is an extract from my latest article. Read the rest here: