Long before a Palestinian activist/agitator has confronted a busload of tourists to an Israeli “Plant a Tree in Israel” forest with “Just think of the refugees they keep out of your news,” viewers of the new film “Alam” have figured that out.

If nothing else, Palestinian filmmaker Firas Khoury’s dramedy about coming of age Palestinian under the Israeli “Alam” (flag) underscores the vast disparity in whose story gets told and whose point of view is almost invisible there, in that fractious sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean.

Whatever efforts to balance coverage and explain the endless conflict within Israel and the Occupied Territories by journalists, virtually the only movies anybody sees or has ever seen about that corner of the world and about Israeli history are celebrations of its founding, from “Exodus” and “The Juggler” through “Cast a Giant Shadow” and the recent “Golda.”

That’s even the history that teenaged Tamer (Mahmood Bakri) and his mates are taught in high school in their corner of Israel, named Al Safa here, after a “depopulated” village erased from history. With Israeli Independence Day coming up, their history teacher is taking a deep dive into the specific events that led up to what Palestinians mark as Nakba, a day of mourning recalling a “catastrophe.”

But it is a history written or at least approved by the winners. A tattered Israeli flag flies over the Palestinian school. The students are labeled “Arab Israelis,” not Palestinians. Israeli soldiers occasionally drop by. And the kids have heard from their parents and grandparents of the land they lost, the villages “erased” via “ethnic cleansing,” and the sugar-coated version of all that served up to the world, always wrapped in Israeli spin, often tagged with “Plant a Tree in Israel” funding or foreign aid appeals.

“Alam,” set in an a Palestinian town within the boundaries of Israel proper, had to be filmed in Tunisia.

Khoury — “Maradona’s Legs” was his best known film — packages this condmened-by-history drama in a coming-of-age dramedy about being smitten by an activist girl, and a comically hapless group of argumentative friends getting caught up in a symbolic attempt to do something about which “Alam” is flying over their school.

Tamer and his buddies Rida (Ahmad Zaghmouri) and the hustler-goof nicknamed Shekel (Mohammad Karaki) debate who if off-limits to date and which relatives must be consulted before dating on their surreptitious smoke breaks between classes, which get them into trouble.

Tamer, trying to ensure his parents allow him to continue to live by himself in his late grandfather’s empty but un-air-conditioned house, is already on thin ice.

And then he spies a new beauty in their midst, a girl “kicked out” of her last school. Maysaá (Shereen Khass) is a mystery to them, but the argumentative Safwat (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) seems to know her. Tamer pumps him for information as they sit outside the principal’s office, each getting another demerit of warning for some bit of malfeasance.

Safwat is always tardy and always determined to debate the teacher who won’t let him join class already in progress.

“The bus is late,” he protests (the film is in Arabic and Hebrew). “It’s an ARAB bus, not a German one!”

That little crack about Palestinian People’s Time gets a laugh in class, and earns another trip to the principal’s office. Safwat is always arguing, often worked-up about something. But Tamer has to befriend Safwat to learn more about about the mysterious Maysaa’.

That’s how he gets caught up in Safwat’s plot to secretly replace the Israeli flag with the Palestinian one flying over their school. Because confident, mature and radicalized Maysaá is already on board.

Khoury has a little fun with this scheming in the midst of his film’s serious messaging. Tamer’s beliefs are influenced by a crush. And God forbid Safwat notice Shekel’s sister.

“That girl is your sister? She’s beautiful!”

“Your MOTHER’s the beautiful one!”

Shekel likes his Arabic hip hop, loves to impose it on everybody else, and as he’s the getaway driver in this after-hours flag-switching scheme, he’s a key figure in their plot. It’s a pity he’s such a screwball.

These kids have to placate their parents, especially Tamer, whose father doesn’t want him to “ruin your future” like Adel, the local agitator who organizes protests and makes that speech about Israeli “forests” to enraged, don’t-want-to-hear-it Jewish tourists.

It’s no wonder they’re always looking for weed. An older bald dude named Lenin is their dealer.

That communist icon is sort of a running gag in the film. Photos of the Marxist leader (and from the famed Soviet revolutionary drama “Battleship Potemkin”) decorate the house Tamer is staying in. There’s even a coffee cup music box that plays “The Internationale” every time you pick it up. Tamer’s dad knows his family’s history of activism, and what it’s gotten them. Not that most of those kids know that tune or what it’s about.

Khoury’s light touch with a serious-minded script keeps the stakes low but intensely personal in what is essentially a story of a kid who risks his scholastic career, his good relations with his family and his “future” to impress a girl.

And then Khoury lets us see that the stakes are indeed high, that everything Maysaá, Safwat and Adel is saying is true and that speaking out against injustice is a civic duty, even in places where it isn’t a civil right.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Mahmood Bakri, Sereen Khass, Muhammad Abed Elrahman, Mohammad Karaki and Riyad Sliman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Firas Khoury. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:46