A very important film about Palestinian history has just come out.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Cross-posted from Chris Hedges’ Substack
In filmmaker Annemarie Jacir’s new film, Palestine 36, one of the most pivotal moments in Palestine’s history is brought to life for the first time through cinema.
In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges speaks with Jacir about the 1936–39 Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule — a mass revolt that laid the groundwork for the modern Palestinian struggle, and also the crushing of Palestine’s organizational infrastructure that culminated into the founding of the Zionist state a decade later.
Jacir explains that this period represents “the beginning of the national movement for liberation in Palestine,” emphasizing its scale and significance as “the first really mass uprising” that spread from “countryside to city” and “across classes.” For her, revisiting this moment is essential to understanding everything that followed, as “it sets up everything for the Nakba in 1948 and the loss of Palestine.”
Jacir explains how her film reconstructs not only the revolt itself but also the conditions that shaped it—British colonialism, offensive attacks on Palestinian labor, and the exploitation of the Palestinian elite’s fractured nature and ambitions for power. In her research, Jacir says she was struck by the extent of that brutality, noting, “I was really… surprised… I’d never really heard about that under the British,” only to later uncover detailed accounts in archival records, including testimonies from British soldiers themselves. In fact, “it’s the blueprint of military occupation that we live today,” she says.
But Jacir frames Palestine 36 as more than a historical drama. It is, she says, about “a moment of real possibility” and the moral choices faced by those living under oppression. Even during production—disrupted by the war in Gaza—the film’s themes felt urgently contemporary. “There is no past and present,” she reflects. “We’re still living the same thing.”
Transcript
Chris Hedges
The nearly 100 year colonial war waged by Jewish colonists to seize the land of the indigenous people of Palestine began at the end of World War I with the first infusion of European Jewish settlers and the 1917 Balfour Declaration where the British government promised to create a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. The British helped the Jewish colonists build a parallel Zionist para-state. This para-state created a separate Jewish controlled sector of the economy and banking industry and construction, one where Arab labor was excluded: an incipient apartheid. Zionists from abroad injected huge amounts of capital to buy up land and fund and expand this para-state. By the 1930s, the colonists, although a minority, dominated the economy. The British Zionist project to dispossess Palestinians of their land triggered what is known as the Great Arab Revolt, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. The uprising, brutally suppressed by 100,000 British troops, backed by air power and Jewish militias, which the British armed and equipped, saw 10 % of the adult male population of Palestine killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. The suppression of the revolt at the same time saw a huge wave of immigration from Jews fleeing persecution by Nazi Germany. The Jewish population rose from 18 % of the total in 1932 to 31 % in 1939, some 400,000 colonists. This, as the historian Rashid Khalidi Wright’s in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The expulsion then of over half the Arab population of the country, first by Zionist militias and then by the Israeli army, completed the military and political triumph of Zionism. Writer, director Annemarie Jacir in her new film, Palestine 36, captures this seminal moment in Palestinian history. For if the British had not birthed this para-state, crushed the revolt, and armed and equipped their Zionist allies, it is unlikely, Zionist militias would have been able to prevail in 1948 to establish the state of Israel. The film and international co-production shot in Arabic and English in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Jordan, where it was forced to film after the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, depicts the discrimination and oppression of Palestinians by the British that led to the uprising and a six-month national strike.
It dramatizes British counterinsurgency tactics, perfected in India and later adopted by the Israelis. The British indeed passed on to their Zionist allies the playbook, apartheid, collective punishment, the loss of legal and civil rights, censorship, economic discrimination, land seizures, the burning and dynamiting of villages, a network of paid informants, human shields, torture, and massacres. Palestine 36, visually stunning, skillfully directed and written with a cast of talented actors including Saleh Bakri and Jeremy Irons draws heavily on the historical record, not only using archival newsreels and other film clips, but at times the actual words of the principal historical actors. It masterfully captures the internal Palestinian tensions between landowners and Falahin, urban Palestinians and the residents of rural communities, radicals and accommodationists, the educated and the uneducated. The film is divided into chapters with titles such as “Rebellion Begins with Breath” and “Palestine is Not for Sale,” but at its core is about the quandary of moral choice, the risks that come with standing up for one’s dignity and freedom. Joining me to discuss her new film, which will be in theaters starting in New York on March 20th, is Annemarie Jacir.
So much of Palestinian history has been thrust into a black hole intentionally, of course, by those who perpetuate the myth of Zionism. But this is a seminal moment in Palestinian history. And just explain why you chose this moment and what it is you wanted viewers to become conscious of.
Annemarie Jacir
As you said, it’s a seminal moment. It’s really the beginning of the national movement for liberation in Palestine. As you said, the British, of course, have already been in Palestine almost 20 years at the start of the film. Before that, it was the Ottomans. There had been many uprisings before and a resistance to that.
But this moment is really incredible because it was the first really mass uprising and it spread everywhere quickly from, you know, countryside to city, across classes. And I think it’s a really important moment to understand what happens later. You know, it sets up everything for the Nakba in 1948 and the loss of Palestine.
And also it’s a moment that, it’s part of that amnesia you’re talking about. I don’t know why it’s been so skipped over and it’s so essential and there’s a lot of – it’s a moment of real possibility and I’d never seen it on film. I’d never seen it, you know. There’s a lot written about it, but nothing really in, let’s say, popular culture.
Chris Hedges
I mean, one of things the film does, which I think a lot of people are not aware of, is show how brutal British colonialism was. The Indians certainly understood it. The Kenyans understood it. The Palestinians understood it. But even now, I think none of us quite are in, certainly, contemporary culture, we don’t grasp how savage British colonialism was. And this film, of course, illustrates that.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, I mean, I have to say that was also one of the things that, you know, when I started the research for the project, you know, I’d heard about it from the revolt of ‘36, from a lot of family and our Palestinians talk about it and talk about it with pride that this revolt that really the British—actually, there was a moment in the revolt that the British lost control, and it could have succeeded. And so this—this pride and the longest strike in history, this pride is there of organization, of resistance that almost succeeded. And that brutality is sort of skipped over by a lot of conversations. And then I had a friend tell me who she’s from, the village in the film, without doing a spoiler, the British enter this village and certain incidences take place. And when she told me about this horrible moment. I was really naively, I would say, surprised because I thought that, yeah, I this is before 48, you know, and we know about the massacres in 1948, but I’d never really heard about that under the British. And then I, you know, I found it in the archives, I found it British talking about it, and even the soldiers who participated in it talked about it later, the sort of revenge mission that took place. So yeah, that brutality is there and of course it’s the blueprint of military occupation that we live today is set up there at that point.
Chris Hedges
Well, there’s a character in the film, I can’t remember his name, but he’s brought in from India to kind of explain how it’s done or directed.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, Charles Taggart, who was brought in from India to, you know, and he was, you know, the character that Liam Cunningham plays. And funnily enough, he was Irish. So that’s why, you know, Liam was, you know, interested to play the role. And he says, we don’t want another Ireland on our hands. But Charles Taggart came up with the first concept of the wall. And he had these forts, called, they still exist in Palestine today, they’re called Tagart’s forts and he put, there were like military forts all over the country and he was praised for his, you know, military genius, counter terrorist tactics, whatever.
Chris Hedges
It was fascinating to watch the film. There’s a scene in there where they attack, I guess it’s a newspaper or a printing plant and of course destroy all the presses. But even though this is a film about 1936, there’s so much of it that is completely contemporary. And of course you’re actually filming during the genocide. And I want to talk about those parallels. I mean, it’s almost a century ago.
And yet so much of what’s taking place in Palestine is rooted in what happened in 36. And I think one of the things that drove home to me was how generation after generation after generation of Palestinians, whether it’s the British or whether it’s the Israelis, endure the same kind of at the very least discrimination and intimidation and often terror.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was, you know, when I first started looking at the archives and I saw these archives of, you know, British soldiers physically searching Palestinians, Palestinian farmers, women carrying vegetables and fruits into the market, people that had books, checking their books and their bodies under their hats. Every day of our lives we are searched and we are criminalized. And it really struck me, this fact that for how many generations, this is my grandparents’ generation, being searched, being made to feel like criminals, my parents, my generation, my daughter, and what has really changed? Not much. And the destruction of the printing presses, you said, I mean, the fact that, you know, Palestinian lives are threatening, very threatening to some people, just the mere existence of our lives.
Chris Hedges
I thought what the film did really, really well, and I don’t think, I suspect it was easy to do, was capture the tensions and divisions, as I mentioned in the introduction, between Palestinian communities. I mean, you had that kind of figure of the wealthiest exporter of Jaffa oranges or something. But talk a little bit about those tensions and how, and I think there’s the one moment, I don’t want to destroy the, you know, much of the film for people. But there is that moment where you have the newspaper editor and this figure of his wife, and I’m going to let you explain how that worked. But you know, the number one, the tensions, but number two, how the British and the Zionists exploited those divisions in their own interests.
Annemarie Jacir
You know, the revolt was really a farmer-led revolt, and it started in the countryside. It was, I think, something that is—you know, when I say that the British almost lost control, they couldn’t figure it out. They couldn’t figure out how to control it.
And what was happening in the cities, of course, was something that was more their language. Palestinians, the upper classes, who played the game of the British and tried to sort of negotiate and confront them in their own language and make a case for independence, with their own language and thinking that if they, you know, that there was a possibility to, that they will understand and that we will be an independent people and conversations will eventually lead to that.
And of course, everything in hindsight, I don’t think people had any concept, even though it was planned. But I don’t think anyone had a concept that the Nakba, you know, 1948, what would ultimately happen. We watch the film as the audience today and with the hindsight of today. But that, you know, it’s a very big part of the, of the cake, of the puzzle, whatever it’s, you you want to call it, that there were also class tensions that the Palestinian upper class, landowners, a lot of Arab landowners that lived abroad, that the, you know, the villagers were, you know, working land and they had to pay taxes to the British and they couldn’t pay the taxes. So the landowners would say, we’ll, we’ll buy the land and we’ll offer to pay, we’ll pay the taxes for you so you don’t have to, and you can continue working, living here as you always have and you know with time all of these things you know come to a head but specifically about Amir, the character you’re talking about there’s sort of two things about that that first of all there were you know these, what they were called the Christian Muslim Associations. They were the Palestinian Christian Muslim Associations and these were organizations in the cities that were working towards independence. And the Zionists understood very well that in order to break it, course, divide and conquer is the only way, so they secretly created these Muslim organizations to break the solidarity of the Christian Muslim more secular organizations and create the Muslim organization and they were paying them. There was this, you know, found in the documents, you know, the Zionist Commission had the Office of Arab Affairs and they were giving checks, they were paying, there were mayors of various Arab cities who were receiving checks from the Zionist Commission. There was already this sort of, you know, reliance on, you know, if for these guys, they would get positions of power, they would have whatever benefits they had from, you know, working there. And I found that really interesting. And of course, this was, you very much kept quiet. And then the other part of it is the, you know, the press part, like how do you—it’s like today, it’s like fake news today. I mean, the fact that, you know, newspaper articles were written,
and then put in written translated to Arabic and put in the newspapers under Palestinian names in a way to sort of make people think that, you know, this was going to be good for them. And yeah, there were so many things happening and it does feel like you’re reading about today.
Chris Hedges
One of things that the film captures, which is also a parallel with today, is the utter misreading of the British, just in the same way that Palestinians, well, I don’t think Palestinians anymore have any illusions about the United States as a broker. But I think you can certainly go back, let’s say, to Oslo or something, or maybe Camp David or these kinds of things. It’s also a complete misreading of imperial power, not on the part of the radicals, but often on the part of the educated elite.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, yeah, I think that is absolutely true. And I think the British knew that and they were taking advantage of that and they were definitely playing both sides. And, you know the character of Jeremy Irons is, you know, he plays a high commissioner in the film. For me, those three scenes of Jeremy is very much sort of lay out this idea at the beginning with the inauguration of the radio. And he talks about, we’re going to bring the communities, the two communities together. And then in the next scene, we see him again. There’s the women’s demonstration at the High Commissioner’s office. And he says, you know, my hands are tied by London. I can’t really, I don’t really know what I can do. And by the third moment, you know, later in the film, it’s, he says, we have to completely separate. It’s the opposite of the first scene. Total separation of these two communities or else they’ll both eat us alive. And I think the British, of course, I don’t think, I mean, we all know they were playing a game. And they were playing everybody off of each other in a way to just remain in control.
Chris Hedges
Well, that scene where they open or inaugurate the radio station, I think you use verbatim from the historical record, what the commissioner said. And it is kind of fascinating in that this won’t be, I’ll let you say it because I don’t remember exactly what it said, but there won’t be anything political. It’ll be our culture and your culture. I’ll let you explain.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, he says it would be about music and culture and not politics. And then of course it’s always about politics. It’s okay when they’re talking about politics, but not when anybody else is. You know what you were saying also earlier about, know, that the British, you know, they understood that the Zionist movement, and the Zionist movement understood that the British, that would help them push forward and cement things. I think about that a lot. There’s the archival footage of Jewish refugees fleeing fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and coming off the boats. And I think about—
Chris Hedges
Which I just want to interrupt, which I interrupt you put in the film. It’s in the film.
Annemarie Jacir
Yes, yes, yes, of course, yeah. There’s the actual archival footage of the Jewish refugees on the boats. And there’s a scene in the film where the mother and the daughter are watching the settlers set up the settlement. And it’s interesting because Palestine has always been a place of many, many communities. Bosnian communities fled persecution and came to Palestine. The Armenians fled persecution and they came to Palestine. Christians fled persecution and they came to Palestine. I mean, Palestine is a very mixed, multi-religious, multi-ethnic place. And as long as those communities lived as everybody else lived, there was never any tension. Those communities were part of what makes up Palestine.
The Zionist movement, of course, wasn’t that. And I think about what, if Jews had fled and they came to Palestine for safety, and it wasn’t about Zionism, it was about being safe and becoming part of that, we would be living a very different reality today. But it was not that, it was a movement to control and dispossess the indigenous population.
Chris Hedges
That’s a very important historical point because, for instance, the Jewish community in Baghdad, pre-1948, was quite large and had been integrated into the Muslim community for centuries. This was also true in Egypt. And one of the things Avi Shlaim in his book writes about it, the Zionists had to create fear and terror and drive them out, as this great Israeli historian who’s Jewish, and he uncovers the fact that there were synagogue bombings in Baghdad carried out by underground Zionist groups to do precisely that, to disrupt the cohabitation that had been going on in this region for literally centuries.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, and it’s important to say there are native Palestinian Jews. There are indigenous Palestinian Jews. It was a small percentage of the population before the British came, but it was there. And then the Jews who came from Europe have been coming for hundreds of years and they livedt the Palestinians, they lived together. But yeah, it’s important that people understand that distinction of when it became something else.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about Christian Zionism. I thought the guy who played Orde Wingatewas great. But you can tell people who Orde, the nutcase of Orde Wingate, who was a Christian Zionist. Christian Zionism actually predates Jewish Zionism. I think you could make a good argument for that. But I thought that character was, you know, it was interesting who you selected and who you didn’t of the – like, Ben-Gurion’s not in the film. Talk about that character because that propelled so much of British policy.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, Orde Wingate was really unhinged. He was a Christian Zionist. He was not Jewish. He believed he was under some kind of divine mission to protect the Holy Land. I read a lot about him and it’s like he grows up reading the Bible and reading about very strict Protestant upbringing, and then he comes to Palestine and he thinks
Chris Hedges
He’s in the British Army we should be clear, he was an officer–
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah the British army and he he’s he’s you know he’s I think he’s like you know Jerusalem syndrome he he really thinks he’s in charge of protecting this place yeah okay
Chris Hedges
I’m going to interrupt you again because most people don’t know it – I lived in Jerusalem–what Jerusalem syndrome is, which is true: it’s actually really dark. It’s people who come to Jerusalem and think they’re like the Messiah or think that they, but it’s actually a, it’s it’s psychologically documented. So, but that’s what you’re referring to. Yeah. All right.
Annemarie Jacir
Yes, that’s exactly right. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. then, and you know, he, you know, all the accounts of him, you know, he was, he was violent. He was awful to the local population. was awful. He hated, he detested Palestinians. And he was doing his own thing out there in the countryside. mean, there’s all the accounts of him. His uniform was always dirty. He had wore garlic around his neck. He wore an alarm clock. He was naked half the time with his troops, who were very loyal to him, by the way, because with them, didn’t have his hierarchical thing. Those were his boys, and they were important to him. But he was really… I mean, the film, actually, he’s a lot… toned down in my film than the reality. And I wanted to sort of indicate a little bit the cheat I make in the film is that I have his hair a little bit long and unkempt and dirty. Wingate’s hair later was that long, that was after he left Palestine. He didn’t leave Palestine, he was dismissed by the British Army. That’s how bad he was, and even the British dismissed him from Palestine because he became so… (gestures cuckoo) But for me, the hair was like an indication that he was not exactly, he was really out there doing his own thing and functioning in his own way. And he was a terror for us. He’s an absolute terror. And the Israelis consider him the godfather of the Israeli army.
Chris Hedges
Yes, that’s right.
I want to talk a little bit about some of the tactics. Human shields, I mean this is in the film. The mass roundups, the torture, the destruction, because that’s happening as I speak in the West Bank and Gaza, what’s left of it.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, actually, ironically, that day that we shot that very scene of the human shield in the film, which with the British was a very common practice–they would come into the villages and then when they felt that the villagers or the women in the film start throwing stones at them and try to get them out and protect the boy, they tied people to the front of their vehicles so they could get out and use the person in the front to be unharmed. They would be unharmed and they would use that person and then dump them off somewhere.
And the day we shot that scene, the exact moment, it was in June of, everything is a blur, 2024, that incident happened in Nablus and it was all over the news–there was a, the camera had caught the Israelis tying somebody to the front of their army vehicle in Nablus or Jenin, I think it was Nablus.
And it was, you know, of course it happens a lot to us because, you know, there is no past and present. It’s all blobbed together. We’re still living the same thing, but it was pretty interesting that the day we shot that scene, the same thing happened and it was all over the news. And many times sort of the, it’s when, know, when art imitates life.
You know that it’s it’s very present and very real and none of it ever felt–nothing in the film unfortunately feels something like something of the past to us.
Chris Hedges
But you shot part of it in Palestine, which I found amazing, at least before 2023. Is that correct?
Annemarie Jacir
No, after 2023. What happened is that, you know, I live in Palestine, the crew is mostly in Palestine. We had prepared, this was the most ambitious thing we’d ever done. We prepared for one year. Normally with film, you spend about three months prepping for a feature, two to three months, depending. Three months is like comfortable. We spent one year prepping because it was so huge and so epic. And it was, you know, period and it was like nothing exists of any of this anymore. You know, was, you know, like, you know, the village doesn’t exist. We planted crops. We restored the village. We built all the British, you know, machinery and all of that stuff. So it really, it was like a year long of work despite being under occupation. You know, we were, every day was challenging, you trying to find ways, you know, how are we going to actually do this film?
You know, people said, you guys are crazy. There’s no way you can do this. And we said, no, we’re going to do it precisely because everybody thinks we can’t. And let’s do it. Let’s pretend we are like everybody else and can make a film.
Then October 7th happened and it was one week before our official first day of shooting October –14th was the first day we were supposed to shoot October 7th. We lost everything and we were in the West Bank West Bank was complete lockdown very soon, you know the genocide, know the beginning of the genocide started, e had to evacuate people–ou know people trying to get home Youssef who plays the main character took about three weeks to be able to get from Bethlehem to his village of Qalqilya in the West Bank
It was, you know, and we lost everything, and we lost those locations. So then we eventually, after a few months, went to Jordan and found another village up near the Syrian border and filmed there. But I – all the time insisted that we come back to Palestine, and I didn’t know how, but I, it’s again, it was that mentality where we have to do it, we have to find a way to do it.
And we did. So we actually shot the Palestine parts, you know, in November of 2024.
Chris Hedges
And didn’t get interfered, the Israelis did not interfere with your work?
Annemarie Jacir
We have our ways.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I know I live I covered Palestine for seven years that’s very true
Annemarie Jacir
Palestinians don’t accept no. We don’t, we find this way and that way, and you know, that scene in the film at the end, which is in Jerusalem with the, you know, the little girl without giving anything away, I don’t know if you noticed in the background, there is a huge British tank parked up against the walls of the old city. That tank, we made that tank in Nablus and we managed to get it into Jerusalem, into the old city. And I remember that they brought it like, you know, a wench brought in the tank and we placed it and we thought, this is like so crazy. And it’s incredible. You know, we were all like, nobody could stop smiling in the crew, like how insane this is that we have this British military vehicle from the 30s built in Nablus now stationed at the gates of the old city.
Chris Hedges
Was there anything in your research that, I mean, you’re Palestinian, you know the history, was there anything that just shocked you or surprised you as you were, because that film is, I mean, of course, it’s a piece of fiction, but you’re, as far as I can tell, honing pretty closely to the historical narrative?
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, yeah, the violence shocked me. I got to say the Office of Arab Affairs, you know, the Zionist Commission having an office of Arab Affairs, I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that room and hear some of the conversations. But it’s like, you know, the first time I read Ilan Pappe’s, you know, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. And I’m sure your audience knows who he is, but he’s an incredible Israeli historian. That book in particular, for me, it really hits you how well planned all of this was. There’s a sort of a feeling that things just happen and there’s wars and there’s this, but when you really understand the planning and the thought that went into all of it. It’s really overwhelming.
Chris Hedges
The only irony is that some of the best work on that has been done by Israeli historians, by Ilan Pappé and by Benny Morris, Avi Schlaim. In terms of distribution, we’ve seen with the voice of Hind Rajab, they have tried everything possible. Have you encountered that, those kinds of roadblocks?
Annemarie Jacir
We encounter those kinds of roadblocks all the time. We have to just keep acting and getting by any way possible the films to our audience and letting our audience discover and have the right to discover the cinema and to hear these stories. Palestinian voices have always been blocked in this country. In the United States they’ve always been erased and left out. And so it’s something, you know, we’ve been dealing with all our lives, but I think now, especially today with what’s happening in the United States, and of course, all voices of dissent are being silenced. And we are the majority.
And it is so important that we get these films out. We find each other. We find our audience. The audience finds us. But those obstacles are real and they’re very much there. And not just in the United States, of course, in other countries, in Europe, in mainstream distribution, in the big name festivals. There’s definitely a part of the story that people, they don’t want to hear. And they certainly don’t want to hear it from our point of view. this, you know, Palestine 36 was even, you know, the Israelis have banned it in Jerusalem. They shut down the theater. They detained the projectionist and forbade us from screening the film. They’re not even in the film. It’s pre-state.
Chris Hedges
You were nice to him, you didn’t even put the Irgun in the film.
Annemarie Jacir
Yeah, I was nice to them. Exactly. Thank you.
Chris Hedges
Well, it is a fantastic film. And as Emma Goldman said, the importance of art is that it makes ideas felt. And that’s what you did. And everyone should see it, not just because we have to support great works of art like this, but also because it’s just a great, great film. I hope everyone watches it. Thank you very much. And I want to thank Sophia and Victor and Thomas and Max who produced the show you can find me at chrisedges.substack.com
Annemarie Jacir
Thank you so much. It was an honor to be with you.
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