A few weeks after the Academy Awards, Best Actor nominee and likely winner Colin Firth is scheduled to take up his next role, playing a British officer in a film about the struggle between British authorities in colonial Palestine and the Jewish underground that aimed to dislodge them.

While The King’s Speech brought history to life, Firth’s new movie, The Promised Land, may portray a distorted version of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, as well as the British role in it.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, (Wonderland, The Road to Guantánamo), and partly backed by British taxpayers via the UK Film Council, The Promised Land presents a revisionist history of Palestine during World War II–one in which the British favor the Jews over the Arabs, the Jews repay British kindness with cruelty, and Arab violence against civilians and support for the Third Reich are airbrushed out of the picture.

The story centers around the real-life romance between two unlikely lovers, Shoshana Borochov and Thomas Wilkin. Borochov was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a left-wing Zionist who saw the creation of Israel as part of the proletarian struggle. Wilkin was a British police officer responsible for tracking down members of the Jewish underground, particularly the infamous “Stern Gang.”

Before he was murdered during his arrest in 1942, Avraham “Yair” Stern had led a sensational and violent campaign to oppose British rule. His organization, “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel” (Lehi, in the Hebrew acronym) broke away from other Zionist groups and targeted British officials and police. He was regarded as an outlaw by many Jewish leaders, including the leaders of other Zionist underground organizations in Palestine.

At the time, the Holocaust was accelerating in Europe, while the British refused to allow the tide of Jewish refugees into Palestine. Though Palestine’s Arab leaders had revolted against British rule in the late 1930s, and soon took an active role in Hitler’s war effort, the British–after crushing the Arab rebellion–attempted (in vain) to appease Arab opinion with the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration.

The Promised Land ignores much of that context. Instead, it portrays the Jewish underground as a fascist, even pro-Nazi movement. The screenplay–a draft of which I have read–calls for graphic scenes of Arab suffering at the hands of Jewish terrorists and British officers. Jewish victims are largely off-screen, mentioned in the abstract–if at all. The film even suggests, falsely, that Jews provoked Arabs to commit the Hebron massacre of 1929 by not hiring Arab workers, absolving Palestinian Arab leaders who incited the pogrom.

Michael Winterbottom

Though the screenplay makes some effort to show that Stern was not widely supported by Jewish leaders, it often uses his group as a symbol of the Jewish underground as a whole. Similarly, the screenplay draws facile connections between Stern and the Likud governments of Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, ignoring decades of intervening history. It also presents the Arab population as unique victims; they are the only concentration camp inmates portrayed in the story, for example.

The screenplay for The Promised Land was written by Laurence Coriat, who may bring an anti-Israel bias to the project. In 2006, she apparently co-signed an open letter accusing Israel of “violation of all international conventions” and “destruction of all the infrastructures…and the institutions of the Republic of Lebanon.” (No word from Coriat then, or now, about Hezbollah, it would seem.)

There are several glaring mistakes–errors of omission as well as commission, such as the familiar (yet false) claim that Jews were a minority in Jerusalem in the early 20th century. Early online chatter about The Promised Land reported that Winterbottom briefly consulted the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in researching the period. If so, he seems to have used its resources selectively, using key details to garnish a historical narrative that remains deeply flawed.

That is certainly how Israeli actress Mili Avital felt upon reading the screenplay. As she related to an Israeli newspaper last year, she had been approached to participate in the film, but refused after reading the screenplay: “…it was so anti-Zionist that I closed it after 20 pages. I read it and there were tears in my eyes…it pains me to read how [Winterbottom] describes the beginning of Zionism from such an extreme point of view.”

At the moment, The Promised Land seems to have run into funding problems, according to co-star Jim Sturgess, who signed on to play Wilkin (according to IMDB, Firth is cast as officer Robert Chambers, who narrates much of the film’s flawed historical background–not Stern, as originally reported by the San Francisco Sentinel). Production was apparently supposed to have begun last summer–and Firth might have good cause to be grateful that it didn’t, because the film could have overshadowed his outstanding performance in The King’s Speech.

It is not impossible to salvage The Promised Land. A rewritten screenplay–if it has not been rewritten already–could preserve the story and its characters, while correcting the factual errors and bias of the film. The question is whether the director and producers care more about the improbable romance between Wilkins and Borochov, or the false historical argument Winterbottom and Coriat seem to be making: that terror was, and remains, at the core of Zionism and Israel.

If the latter, The Promised Land risks becoming agitprop instead of art. That may be what Winterbottom and the producers at Revolution Films intend: after all, they made The Shock Doctrine in 2009, based on the book by Israel boycott enthusiast Naomi Klein. But fans of Colin Firth–myself among them–should hope that he is able to convince his colleagues to revisit their screenplay, to make a film that is worth of his talent and integrity, and true to the facts.

I want that to be perfectly clear so that when I declare my concern for Israel, nobody will simply assume it’s because I’m Jewish.  I am on the side of Israel because it’s a western democracy, an ally of America, and because I regard her enemies to be our enemies, people dedicated to our mutual annihilation. 

Israel’s foes believe in targeting women and children just so long as they’re Jewish or Christian.  They are not only intolerant of the freedoms we take for granted — speech and religion — but they are polygamous, treat their women as chattel and encourage their children to achieve martyrdom as suicide bombers.  Moreover, so-called honor killings are part of what passes for their culture. 

In order to realize what a paternalistic society they have, you need only look at a photo of an Arab mob carting a corpse through the streets of Gaza; even when it’s the corpse of a child, I challenge you to find a woman anywhere in sight.  So far as the Arabs are concerned, the mother, grandmother, aunts and sisters, are of absolutely no consequence, unless, of course, they can be persuaded to strap several sticks of dynamite to themselves and pay a visit to an Israeli pizza parlor. 

Yet here in America and even more so in Europe, you will find millions of presumably civilized people, particularly in Hollywood and on our left-wing college campuses, who theoretically find a moral equivalence between Israel and her sworn enemies — while actually favoring the Islamics. 

In a recent Rasmussen Poll, 62% of Republicans in America sided with Israel, while a mere 31% of Democrats favored the Israelis in their life-and-death conflict. 

As you may have noticed, the world’s media rarely if ever remarked about the thousands of missiles Hamas fired into Israel over the past few years.  However, once Israel finally got around to announcing that enough was enough, and went on the offensive, Condoleezza Rice and the European Union didn’t waste a second before crying “Foul!” and throwing a penalty flag.  Going them one better, the present administration has earmarked nearly a billion dollars for Hamas, while they distract us over the $165 million in AIG bonuses. 

This same pattern is followed each and every time that Israel responds to unprovoked attacks.  You can invariably count on the nations of the world agreeing that Israel is out of line.  While it’s nice they can agree on something, it’s a shame that “something” never seems to be Islamic terrorism, Arab barbarism or slavery and black genocide in modern-day Africa.

Can you imagine anyone in his right mind 68 years ago claiming that America was over-reacting to Pearl Harbor?  Would anybody but an idiot have suggested that once America had sunk an equal number of Japanese battleships or killed an equal number of Japanese soldiers and sailors that we should have ceased hostilities and turned things over to European diplomats, especially after seeing how well those fellows had kept Hitler and Mussolini in check? 

The fact is, only Arabs would continue referring to the folks in Gaza as refugees.  The only reason that there were any Arab refugees back in 1948 was because Egypt, Jordan and Syria, promised to exterminate the Jews and divide the spoils, not because Israel had exiled its Arab population.  Once Israel fought off the invaders, no Arab nation would open its doors to the refugees, and to this day no Arab nation ever has. 

But that was 61 years ago!  Who ever heard of people being refugees for six decades?  How can people who have never lived in Israel, whose fathers and mothers never lived in Israel, continue to lay claim to a place where they’ve never set foot — and which, according to Arab textbooks, doesn’t even exist?  They might as well insist they have a claim to Oz, Atlantis or Brigadoon.  

For those who would claim that the Jews weren’t entitled to their own state, the truth is that most of the land that is now Israel was purchased from Arabs, at exorbitant prices, over several decades by Zionists who began settling there in the 19th century. 

Frankly, I marvel at Israel’s spiritual fortitude, at her reluctance to seek Biblical retribution.  Even one missile would be enough to get me riled up.  To absorb 10,000 missile attacks strikes me as verging on the masochistic.  I honestly think Israel continues to be far too concerned with world opinion.  After 61 years of hearing one’s enemies parroting Hitler’s plans for the final solution, collateral damage would be the least of my concerns.  

I understand that civilized societies are expected to worry about the deaths of women and children.  But in civilized societies, parents don’t raise their youngsters to be suicide bombers, they don’t elect their leaders from the ranks of a terrorist group and they certainly wouldn’t dance in the street when 3,000 innocent Americans were incinerated on 9/11.