In addition to the sheer miracle that such a film exists at all, Palestine 36 deserves to be celebrated as a remarkably bold intervention in the current phase of the West’s ongoing war against Palestine and the wider region.[1] Along with the quality of the script, the acting, the detail of its historical references, the use of archival footage, and so on, it deserves credit, surely as much as any other recent work of art in any medium, for not only drawing attention to Palestinian suffering but for directly calling upon everyone and anyone to do something about it. It’s all the more remarkable, these days, that such a film might be made and distributed with the support of the BBC and the British Film Institute, since it openly considers issues, dilemmas and strategies that today can be hardly discussed in countries like Britain or the US at all.

Written and directed by Annemarie Jacir, Palestine 36 is composed as a collective existential drama, weaving together a number of initially-separate narrative threads to make and wave the flag of a single emancipatory project. Among many other things the film resonates with the work of incisive Palestinian writers like Mohammed El-Kurd and Abdaljawad Omar, writers who have criticised the ways that discussions of Palestine so often tend to frame their subjects as worthy victims and long-suffering objects, rather than as courageous actors making decisions and taking risks in enormously daunting circumstances. Jacir’s film doesn’t make this same mistake.

Released in the autumn of 2025, Palestine 36 enjoyed only a limited distribution in the UK and so far virtually none at all in the US, but it quickly attracted a large number of appreciative and informative reviews.[2] Although Jacir wrote a full first draft of her script back in 2020, its contemporary importance has only grown over the last couple of years, indeed the last couple of weeks, as the full implications of Israel’s genocidal plans to depopulate the Gaza strip and annex the West Bank become ever more clear for all to see.

I

As its title indicates, Palestine 36 is set during the great mass uprising against British rule and Zionist colonisation that began with calls for a general strike in April 1936, and if this clearly isn’t the place for any sort of historical overview it’s still essential to remember the basic contours of the situation.[3]

By 1936 the UK had ruled Palestine for almost twenty years. British conquest was enabled by military victory over the Ottoman empire and was guided from start to finish by the priorities proclaimed in Arthur Balfour’s famously terse declaration of 1917. Balfour’s public commitment (made in flagrant violation of promises offered over the previous year by the British High Commissioner in Egypt to Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca) to establish ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ on Palestinian land was qualified by the proviso that it should be ‘clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ Behind closed doors, however, within a couple of years Balfour was perfectly willing to admit that, unlike in Syria, ‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.’ As far as Balfour and the British empire was concerned, ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’

In these same decisive years, vanguard Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky (a key source of inspiration for later Likud maximalists like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu) understood right away that there could be only one reliable way of ignoring the wishes of Palestine’s present inhabitants. ‘Every native population in the world,’ Jabotinsky recognised in 1923, ‘resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”’ Given the obvious and obstructive fact of such resistance, Jabotinsky concluded, ‘Zionist colonisation […] can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.’[4] Early Zionist settlers could encourage the arrival of thousands of fellow colonisers but they would need first the British and later the Americans to help them fortify their iron walls.

Guided by the empire’s present needs and priorities (including widespread and often antisemitic support for emigration policies that might encourage the removal of Jewish people from the UK), the British duly oversaw rapid demographic change in their newly mandated territory. The historian Rashid Khalidi notes that in a few years ‘the Jewish population tripled as a proportion of the total population, growing from a low of about 6 percent of the whole at the end of World War I to about 18 percent by 1926.’[5] The rate of Jewish immigration temporarily slowed down in the late 1920s, only to accelerate and intensify, for obvious reasons, after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.

By the late 1930s the Jewish population had risen to around 30 percent of Palestine’s 1.5 million total, and the consequences for Palestinian farmers and workers were predictable and far-reaching. Overall, notes a helpful overview in Middle East Eye, between 1922 and 1940 ‘the Jewish population grew more than five-fold‘ while ‘Jewish land ownership more than doubled from 148,500 to 383,500 acres within the same timeframe.’ To make space for so many new-comers, by a variety of means the British and their collaborators among the local land-owning classes effectively expropriated or directly transferred the ancestral lands of thousands of villagers; growing numbers of dispossessed peasants then found themselves compelled to search for work in cities where more and more Palestinian workers were already losing out to incoming settlers who enjoyed the clear protection of the imperial state. By 1937, Ghassan Kanafani shows, these combined pressures ‘resulted in an almost total collapse of the Arab economy in Palestine, primarily affecting Palestinian Arab workers’ and landless farmers.[6]

Conventional protests and elite negotiations with British administrators proved fruitless and by the mid 1930s the situation was becoming intolerable. ‘The frustration of the Palestinian population at their leadership’s ineffective response over fifteen years of congresses, demonstrations, and futile meetings with obdurate British officials,’ writes Khalidi, ‘finally led to a massive grassroots uprising.’ Khalidi’s summary of this the ‘crucial event of the interwar period’ is worth citing in more detail:

Although the tactics of divide and rule were fairly successful until the mid-1930s, the six-month general strike of 1936 constituted a popular and spontaneous explosion from the bottom up that took the British, the Zionists, and the elite Palestinian leadership by surprise. [… When] armed revolt broke out in October 1937 it swept the country. It was only brought under control two years later through a massive use of force, just in time for crack British military units (by then there were a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, one for every four adult Palestinian men) to be redeployed to fight World War II. […] The bloody war waged against the country’s majority left 10 percent of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled […]. To quash the uprising, the British Empire brought in two additional divisions of troops, squadrons of bombers, and all the paraphernalia of repression that it had perfected over many decades of colonial wars. […] It took the full might of the British Empire […] to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.[7]

Matthew Hughes’ recent and comprehensive study of the day-to-day exercise of such imperial power in the late 1930s shows in painstaking detail how the British combined their systematic use of coercive force with remorseless ‘lawfare.’ As Hughes demonstrates (in terms that retain such obvious relevance for Palestinians to this day), emergency legislation allowed the British army to pacify their colony

through quotidian application of a crafted, all-encompassing legal system that restrained, detained, and impoverished Palestinians, hanged and killed them, and demolished their homes. It banned newspapers, interned people, fined and exiled them, censored their mail and telephone calls, took away livestock and crops, whipped them, imposed curfews and police posts, exacted corvée, and restricted travel […]. The British legally sanctioned exemplary, draconian collective punishments with house destruction, internment, deportation […], alongside which there were semi-legal and illegal acts of robbery, theft, vandalism, brutality, torture, assassination, and “shot while trying to escape” […]. Whole village populations walked miles and back every day to report their presence at a police station. [Such] legality gave repression the correctness demanded by the British colonial state.[8]

Hughes calculates, among many other things, that at least 11 percent of the male Muslim population of Palestine was dragged into the British detention system during the year 1938 alone.[9]

Despite the relentless reprisals and repeated searches of hundreds of villages, nevertheless by the end of 1938 the commanding officer Lieutenant-General Robert Haining still had to admit to the British cabinet that ‘practically every village in the country harbours and supports the rebels and will assist in concealing their identity from the Government Forces.’ Luckily for the British, they could bolster the mass of reinforcements who arrived over the course of that same year with the deployment of well-equipped Zionist militias like the Haganah and the Irgun, along with the notorious Special Night Squads organised by the British army captain Orde Wingate. ‘It was during the years of the revolt,’ Kanafani shows, ‘that British colonialism threw all its weight into performing the task of supporting the Zionist presence and setting it on its feet.’ Drawing on lessons learned in India, Ireland and other parts of their empire, ‘the British succeeded in achieving this in two ways: by striking at the poor peasant revolutionaries with unprecedented violence, and by employing their extensive influence with the Arab regimes, which played a major role in liquidating the revolt.’[10] In all, by the end of 1939 around 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and another 14,000 wounded.[11]

Referencing the work of historians Matthew Hughes and Caroline Elkins, Lori Allen notes how Palestine 36 ‘dramatizes with great historical accuracy the ruthless cascades of violent repression and dictatorial power wielded by the British – most banally by young British soldiers demanding to see Palestinians’ identity papers, stealing Palestinians’ money at checkpoints, harassing women and most extravagantly in the collective punishment wrought through concentration camp detentions and home demolitions.’ ‘Anyone who’s been paying attention,’ Allen continues, ‘will recognize the parallels between the methods and attitudes of the occupiers portrayed in the film and more recent history. This is no surprise, since the British Empire laid the legal foundations on which Israeli repression was built, a point that Jacir wants audiences to understand.’[12]

The immediate upshot of the revolt, for the Palestinians and for their subsequent attempts to prevent the creation of a separate Jewish state in the years leading up to its unilateral proclamation in 1948, was profoundly discouraging. Kanafani opens his famous analysis of the uprising with this distilled summary: ‘Between 1936 and 1939, the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies that were to constitute together the principal threat to the nationalist movement in Palestine in all subsequent stages of its struggle: the local reactionary leadership, the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine, [and] the imperialist-Zionist enemy.’ By the end of 1939, he concludes, the British and their allies

found that the Palestinian nationalist movement had been pretty well tamed: its head was broken and scattered, its base had been weakened and its social fabric worn out and disintegrated as a result of the violent change that was taking place in society and of the failure of its leaderships and parties to organise and mobilise it and also as a result of the weakness and confusion of the left and the instability of the nationalist movement in the neighbouring Arab countries. Thus, the Zionist movement entered the 1940s to find the field practically clear for it, with the international climate extremely favourable following the psychological and political atmosphere caused by Hitler’s massacres of the Jews.[13]

‘Of all the services Britain provided to the Zionist movement before 1939,’ adds Khalidi, ‘perhaps the most valuable was the armed suppression of Palestinian resistance in the form of the revolt.’[14]

No small part of the calamitous 1948 war, in short, was lost back in 1938-39.

In the longer term, however, what is still widely known as the real ‘first intifada’ would also remain an indestructible source of inspiration and a foundational event for the Palestinian liberation struggle, one that would help over the 1960s to shape the strategic orientation of internationalist militants like George Habash, Leila Khaled and Ghassan Kanafani (whose The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine remains a classic study), to say nothing of the many thousands who would engage in the further intifadas that began in 1987, in 2000, in 2021, and so on. Today’s widespread calls to ‘globalise the intifada’ may have a particular urgency, in the face of accelerating genocide and annexation, but they reverberate across a long history.

II

Annemarie Jacir’s film charts a course through this complex political terrain by tracking the experience of several quite different but eventually inter-connected characters, who each in their own way are faced with the obligation to make a stark choice: either to accommodate themselves to the situation as it is, or to rebel against it. Most of the central characters initially try to avoid or deflect the decision that confronts them, but in exemplary existentialist fashion each confrontation soon proves ineluctable. Each time it is resolved in a way that contributes towards a single determination, converging towards a shared engagement with the situation as it stands.

This situation itself is given in advance, and over the course of the film the main parties contesting it do not themselves change so much as rally whatever forces they can muster to support their cause.

On one side of this divide, pre-Mandate Palestine is mainly represented in the film by a hill-top village called al-Basma (partly modelled on the north-western village of al-Bassa, located near the Sykes-Picot border with Lebanon).[15] The terraced fields that surround al-Basma have been farmed for hundreds of years, the different generations share common concerns, the elders speak for the village as a whole. The voice of the village, so to speak, is summarised by what an aging Hanan (played by Hiam Abbass) tells her young grand-daughter Afra: ‘Your land is where your people are buried,’ she says, and since ‘you come from a line of brave people who love this land’ you and your generation will also come to learn, in your own way and your own time, that you can draw on reservoirs of resistance ‘more powerful than the entire British Empire.’ The inter-generational link here, Afra’s widowed mother Rabab (Yafa Bakri), shares Hanan’s discreet but steadfast resolve – ‘the strength, courage and determination of these female characters,’ observes Lori Allen, ‘is echoed in scenes of women physically fighting British soldiers, which recall images from the First Intifada (1986–1993).’ Another resonant aspect of the village’s determination to resist their expropriation is proclaimed by Hanan’s husband (and Afra’s grandfather), Abu Rabab, when he faces his own either-or decision later in the film: in some situations, he tells his daughter, ‘as al-Qassam preached, it’s better to die a martyr’ than to live in submission.[16]

Against the Palestinian villagers or fellahin, the British rule with all the arrogance and brutality of an empire on the wane. Epitomised here by the notoriously ruthless captain Orde Wingate, British troops are deployed to protect the encroaching Zionist settlements whose kibbutzim are constructed like eerie inversions of concentration camps, complete with watchtowers, barbed wire and security fences. Though the point isn’t belaboured in the film, some of these troops are recruited from regiments based in Ulster, and the Irish connection isn’t trivial. Freedom fighters in the southern provinces of Ireland, led by a relatively united and well-organised Irish Republican Army, had fought their way to freedom from Britain in the immediate aftermath of the first world war; unlike most of Ireland, however, in their Palestinian colony the British could draw on a large and growing supply of local auxiliaries. Determined to ‘avoid another Ireland’ and incorporating the recent lessons of (temporarily) successful counter-insurgency in India (lessons briefly evoked in the film by Charles Tegart, played by Liam Cunningham), the Christian Zionist captain Wingate is here thrilled to anticipate what he calls the imminent mobilisation of ‘a Jewish army in Palestine for the first time in 2000 years.’ (Though Robert Aramayo’s portrayal of Wingate as a sadistic fanatic has been condemned as caricatural by hostile reviewers, if anything Jacir’s script downplays his role and project, along with some of his eccentricities. As Khaled Odetallah [a founder of Palestine’s Popular University project] notes in a recent discussion of the film, ‘Wingate was the engineer of the Zionist military doctrine during the Nakba, and he was the person who trained the Zionist militias in how to repress and depopulate Palestinian villages, to the point that he introduced Zionist militia men into his troop during his counterinsurgency campaigns in the Palestinian countryside’).

In between the villagers on the one hand and the British and British-backed Zionist settlers on the other sits or rather squirms a small urban group of collaborating Arab magnates and landowners, magnates who are doing their best to exploit the commercial opportunities provided by the evolving status quo.

The most fully developed characters in the film are the five Palestinians who have to decide where they stand in this conflict once any pretence of neutrality proves impossible, as much at the level of intimately lived experience as at the more abstract level of general principles. As you might expect, the more someone is invested in the situation as it stands, the more difficult it is for them to break with it. The temporality of progressive dis-investment sets the pace for the film as a whole, and no doubt it is also intended to encourage contemporary forms of disinvestment as well.

As a portrayal of the inaugural (and thus searching and uneven) moments of national liberation struggle, I think that Palestine 36 honours Kanafani’s insistence that any discussion of national liberation should avoid the demobilising consequences of ‘considering mass enthusiasm from the standpoint of spectators, as an alternative to fighting alongside them, in front of them, and in their midst.’[17] ‘National unity cannot be built from above,’ Kanafani knows, and an effective liberation movement must ‘be based on a joint and agreed-upon understanding of the tasks of the Palestinian revolution.’[18] Any such understanding, in the sort of conditions imposed upon the Palestinians in the 1930s, can only be hard-won and incomplete.

III

The first and most consequential conversion from compliance to resistance is undergone by the Jaffa dockworker Khalid (played by Saleh Bakri). His trajectory mirrors the arc of the wider rebellion, which in turn shapes the chronology for the film’s successive chapters.

One day (evoking the ‘cement incident’ that took place in Jaffa in October 1935), Khalid’s crew discovers that the cargo they are hired to unload contains an illegal shipment of arms addressed to a group of Zionist settlers. An unnamed militant in the group tries to explain the implications. ‘Why do you think they are arming themselves? Four factories fired all the Palestinian workers this month. My friends, your country and jobs are being given away. They’re replacing us with Jewish labour. Either we stand up for ourselves or we sit back and watch. The choice is yours.’

When this resistance leader first tries to recruit him to the cause, Khalid isn’t interested and their exchange is brusque. ‘I work, and I send money to my family,’ says Khalid:

— And when you can’t?
— God provides.
— You’d make a strong fighter.
— I don’t want to fight.
— None of us do.

Khalid soon changes his mind, however, when his British employer kicks him into the street rather than pay the overtime he is owed. In a compressed scene, the crucial argument for a general strike carries the day. ‘The government refuses our request to demonstrate,’ the militant tells his fellows, while Jewish workers are encouraged to organise openly for better hours and higher pay. ‘Half [our] men were laid off. How do we feed our families? We strike! The choice is yours.’ Khalid’s mind is quickly made up. ‘The choice is theirs,’ he echoes. ‘Either bread… or bullets.’ Having chosen his path, Khalid spends the rest of the film in arms or on horseback, the most recognisable figure among the guerrilla fighters who start to camp out in the hills around al-Basma.

2. If the second figure to join the armed resistance has a longer road to travel it leads him to exactly the same destination. Yusuf (played by Karim Daoud Anaya) lives in al-Basma and works in the fields alongside his father and neighbours, but he has also taken on a job in Jerusalem, as a driver for the affluent and well-connected newspaper editor Amir Atef (Dhafer L’Abidine) and his wife Khuloud (Yasmine al Massri). At first Yusuf swallows the petty insults and indignities that accompany his role, and like everyone else he has every reason to want a stable income – but he too is soon forced to make his version of Khalid’s choice.

In quick succession, Yusuf’s father is shot by a settler, his younger brother is taken prisoner (and strung up as a human shield) by the British army, and his employer’s circle of landowners and businessmen dismisses his village’s protests against Zionist encroachment with contempt. Yusuf tries to explain: ‘We are losing land daily. Many farmers have been evicted from their lands – farmers who worked hard in these lands. Settlers have taken over.’ The editor Amir Atef and his associates remain more concerned with finding better ways to compel the now-destitute villagers to pay their rent. Soon the village of al-Basma itself is directly attacked by the British, and Yusuf returns home from a stint in the city to find his neighbours penned behind wire and deprived of water; when Wingate’s thugs beat him for sharing water they complete the process of recruiting a new rebel to the cause. Yusuf joins Khalid and the other guerrilla fighters in the hills, and he ends the film with rifle and grenade in hand.[19]

3. As far as the film’s own chronology goes, the last figure to be won over to the rebellion is the wife of Yusuf’s employer, Khuloud Atef, who is herself a journalist and a well-connected socialite. Though she hosts parties attended by British officers and wealthy Arab collaborators, she also supports Palestinian autonomy and petitions the British to accommodate moderate Palestinian demands. Over most of the months narrated by the film she tries to use her influence with more sympathetic members of the British administration (embodied here by Thomas Hopkins, private secretary to the High Commissioner) and their local allies, and she shares their hope that the Peel Commission, set up in 1936 to make recommendations during the early stages of the revolt, might address the obvious injustice of the situation. More than any other figure in the film, as the Iranian political activist Parisa Rafiei observes, Khuloud

operates at the intersection of intellectual intervention, class dynamics, and moral-political responsibility. Through journalism, she seems to mobilise her social privilege and networks to articulate Palestinian voices, making visible to villagers – who otherwise lack access – the debates and power negotiations among colonial authorities, wealthy Arab collaborators, and upper-class intellectuals. She thus becomes a mediating link between elite discursive and activist spaces and dispossessed peasants and Palestinian workers. Her engagement with a women-led urban demonstration presents a familiar image of the political interventions that female agents have historically organised, not only in Palestine but in societies like Iran, characterised by intensified mechanisms of repression.[20]

Elite urban demands for recognition are treated with the same indifference as those of the fellahin, however, and rather than equal rights for all inhabitants of the territory, in July 1937 William Peel recommends, after prolonged consultation with the Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann, its partition on terms that strongly favour the Jewish minority. After learning that her husband Amir and his collaborationist Muslim Association are themselves in the pay of the Zionist lobby, in one of the final scenes of the film Khuloud leaves him and joins a street demonstration in support of the resistance.

4. By now the colonial secretary Thomas Hopkins has also jumped ship, unable to endorse the raft of brutal counter-insurgency measures that Charles Tegart and captain Wingate propose to adopt in order to crush the rebellion once and for all. (Hopkins is played by the actor Billy Howle, who has himself become an outspoken British advocate for Palestinian rights; addressing a mass demonstration in London in support of Palestine in December 2025, Howle explained that after quitting his post in Palestine, Hopkins went on to become an anti-war activist in the UK, and a member of the Communist Party).

5. The story of the film’s fifth and final convert is also the most poignant and the most charged. Kareem (Ward Helou) is the young son of the village priest, Father Boulos (Jalal Altawil), who also conducts services in Jerusalem. Kareem serves as an altar boy in both churches, and when he’s not running about with his friend Afra in the countryside, he makes shoes for sale in the city.

Father Boulos is another finely drawn and complex character. On the one hand, he is a loving and patient father, and in one exchange with his son he spells out the central importance of that spirit of steadfast perseverance or sumud that has become virtually synonymous with Palestinian resistance – ‘you need to endure, so you can win in the end.’ On the other hand, Boulos also incarnates a near-saintly spirit of forbearance and accommodation, and is tacitly emblematic of the non-violent strategies so regularly urged upon the partisans of Palestinian liberation. In the face of injustice, we should turn the other cheek and follow Christ’s example, Boulos recommends; God will protect us, and only God can judge our oppressors. The British soldiers that Boulos and his son encounter are not impressed by these fine sentiments, however, and the priest’s fate dramatises the immediate price to be paid for accommodating such invaders. A dignified spirit of endurance only gets you so far, when confronted by people who are prepared to rob you of your wages, raze your village and murder its inhabitants.[21]

After the British kill many of the village elders, including his father (in a scene of vicious retribution closely modelled on the notorious massacre that killed scores of villagers in al-Bassa in September 1938),[22] Kareem faces his own moment of decision. The outcome is heavily anticipated, as much in the way the camera lingers over a fresco depicting the legendary struggle between (Palestine’s own native-born) Saint-George and the dragon as by the haphazard journey taken by the weapon Kareem will now pick up – an antique but fully loaded Turkish pistol, which is passed from one hiding place to another before its single bullet finds its eventual target. The moment fulfils a kind of prophecy, or recommendation: earlier in the film, in a street scene in Jerusalem, when a British soldier flicks a coin at Kareem in exchange for cleaning his shoes, a neighbour says ‘You should shoot him, not shine his shoes. God keep them far from us.’

6. This list of five existential decisions is neither complete nor self-sufficient, and each of them takes place against a backdrop of figures who are already committed to the liberation project. Khalid is won over to the cause by a militant organiser who is already recruiting fighters to the resistance. Kareem’s father shows him, in several different ways, what it means ‘to endure longer.’ Khuloud has a ready audience for her anti-Zionist articles and protests, while her employee Yusuf lives in a village whose residents are already determined to defend their ancestral lands. This determination is shared across the generations, and is expressed in particular by those leading female characters – Rabab and her mother Hanan – whose dignified but steely resolve provides a kind of centre of gravity for the film as a whole.[23] Rabab is the single most ‘connected’ character in the film: in addition to looking after her daughter Afra and trying to protect her own parents from the British, she is the person who supports Yusuf, Khalid, and the other fighters in the hills, who acts as a surrogate mother for Kareem, and who secures and transmits the weapon he will eventually use.

The film’s careful interweaving of characters and places, notes Parisa Rafiei (drawing on her own experience of student-led and women-led protest movements in Iran during and after 2018), evokes a robust and emerging sense collective coexistence, and

what mediates this coexistence is above all an effective yet understated force: it is above all female agency, articulated through practices of care and relational mobility, that sustains and undergirds the revolt. Rabab, the daughter of Hanan and the mother of Afra, embodies a form of ongoing radical care work that tries to keep the resistance materially and effectively alive. Her role exceeds the conventional, naturalised perception of motherhood within an enclosed domestic sphere; she emerges instead as a mobile political agent who becomes the nodal point at which villagers, resistance groups, and individual actors are brought into relation. Hanan herself, as the grandmother figure, functions as narrator and custodian of the inter-generational continuity. She transmits the ideals, aspirations and experiences of earlier generations who endured British rule, attempting to bind past struggles to the present and to the future of the younger generation.[24]

IV

Grounded in this trans-generational sense of community, Palestine 36 doesn’t draw its several protagonists into a single fighting organisation so much as align them in an emerging common cause. If there is a climactic moment of the film, or at least a moment that brings most of its protagonists into a single field of view, it’s the scene that sees many of the al-Basma villagers running through their fields to meet a group of armed rebels on horseback. The scene stages a merging of grassroots enthusiasm with militant resolve. The leading rebels, including Khalid, exhort the villagers to commit to the revolution. ‘We must continue to unite to defend our lands,’ they call out:

Our collective unity will lead to the end of British and French imperialism in our lands. We fight for our independence! You are the descendants of this land! If they shoot me, if they arrest me, if they deport me, who will take my place? With every one of us they shoot … our numbers grow! We are one free people!

The people of Syria stand with you! The people of Lebanon are with you! Iraqis, Druze, all Bilad al Sham, we stand together. We say to the colonisers: the Arab Nation is one nation, and Palestine is a part that won’t be cut from us.Long live the revolt!

Victory to the revolt!

The villagers cheer the rebels on, but the very next scenes evoke the complexities of the bigger picture. On the one hand, archival footage recalls the moment when the British are pushed out of Nablus, allowing some to conclude that ‘the resistance is winning. We’ve taken back control not just here, but also in Hebron, Bir Al-Saba, and Jerusalem.’ Other voices note, however, that ‘the villagers are getting worn down by the raids. Some don’t want to be involved anymore. That’s exactly what [the British] want.’

It’s impossible to hear the rebel exhortations and calls to solidarity, of course, without also remembering that in reality, in the face of Zionist aggression combined with promises of British support, the actual leaders of the Arab nation never united to back the Palestinian villagers with sufficient force. As Kanafani’s materialist analysis points out, this lack of transnational unity was also mirrored by a lack of sufficient class solidarity. If in Russia in 1917-20 (to risk an unfair comparison that Kanafani himself doesn’t make in his book), urban workers and mutinous soldiers, organised by the Bolshevik party, were in a position to lead a sufficient fraction of the peasantry to victory in their civil war, this was preceded by a whole raft of exceptional circumstances – by the revolution of 1905, by the epoch-shattering effects of World War One, and by widespread elite disenchantment with autocracy in general and with the hopelessly inept and reactionary tsar Nicholas II in particular; by contrast in colonised Palestine the mostly rural insurgent forces of 1938-39 were simply too dispersed and too outgunned to prevail against British lawfare and Wingate’s strategy of combined UK-Zionist counter-insurgency.[25] Matthew Hughes draws on brief comparisons with Mao’s China to suggest that in Palestine the ‘absence of vanguard leadership was corrosive. […] Palestinian elites lagged behind popular leaders such as al-Qassam,’ Hughes argues, and the lack of unity, direction, weapons and organisation ‘fatally weakened Palestinian resistance to the well-oiled British counter-insurgency campaign that descended like a fury on Palestine after 19 April 1936. In effect, a ground swell of populist Palestinian anger sustained a leaderless insurgency.’[26] The actual village of al-Bassa would itself suffer the full consequences of the looming dénouement: ten years after the murderous British assault in 1938 the ethnic cleansing of al-Bassa was completed by the Haganah during the Nakba and the ruins that remain are now mostly buried under the Israeli town of Shlomi.

Jacir’s film has been criticised in some quarters for failing to do enough to dramatise and explain the reasons for the revolt’s defeat. It’s true that the scenes which narrate the recruitment of both workers and farmers to the rebellion are very compressed, and the ringing calls for unity are not matched by strategic discussions of how best to conduct the military campaign itself. As Khaled Odetallah observes, although Jacir deserves credit for tackling the sensitive subject of elite collaboration with the British, a fuller portrayal of the way many wealthy ‘families and groups […] openly acted against the revolution […] could have more deeply captured the class dynamics of the times.’ The sheer ferocity of imperial repression, in other words, does not by itself fully account for the outcome of 1939. No inventory of the causes of defeat, moreover, can register the full and ongoing extent of its effects. For Mohammed El-Kurd and Abdaljawad Omar no less than for Kanafani, it remains essential to address the full-spectrum ‘psychological warfare’ that imperial power continues to wage against the Palestinians. ‘We must be cognisant of the state of war that we are in, of the enemy’s methods at all levels,’ and do everything required ‘to prevent the infiltration of the enemy’s toxins into the minds of our people.’[27]

Overall, however, I think Jacir’s priority is less to explain a past historical defeat than to recall an old call to arms in our ongoing present. Her film is less about the specific achievements and limitations of 1936-39 per se than about the wider sorts of commitment or engagement that might link something like Khalid’s opening resolution with Khuloud’s eventual change of heart or Kareem’s final sacrifice. I saw it less as historical judgment and more as an invitation, for anyone who watches it, wherever they might be, to think about the sorts of action we ourselves might take to address the situation, now and in the near future. As Lori Allen puts it in an especially informative discussion, Jacir’s film is best understood as a ‘portrayal of the revolt that never ended.’

Hughes’ detailed historical account of the pacification of 1936-39 tends to treat the Palestinians’ lack of a single or nation-spanning revolutionary organisation simply as failure or lack. ‘The Palestinians never organised effectively,’ Hughes writes, ‘whether as a revolutionary communist force in the style of Mao’s guerrillas, as conservative nationalists as EOKA did in Cyprus, as urban guerrillas in the mould of the IRA or ETA, as Castro-Guevara revolutionary chic, or religiously as with Islamic State today.’[28] The lack of a single national organisation commanding disciplined mass allegiance and wider regional support was certainly a major weakness in the 1930s (as it would again be in 1948, in the late 1960s, or during and after the 1990s). Nevertheless, as everyone knows Palestinian resistance has never ceased, even in the most discouraging circumstances. Any strategy of resistance has to be considered and assessed through ‘the lens of calculus, of end and means, of its rational and declared aims,’ acknowledges Abdaljawad Omar, but it’s equally important that we ‘learn to see resistance not as failure when it does not “win,” but as an event – as events that scatter the colonial order, that make visible the cracks in its presumed inevitability, and that gesture toward a different horizon altogether.’[29]

If emphasis on the lack or absence of an adequately organising and ‘mobilising force helps to answer the question of “why the uprising was defeated,”’ notes Parisa Rafiei, ‘a more intriguing question would be: how do forms of social mobilisation occur in the absence of this vital factor?’ Jacir’s film addresses this crucial question in subtle and suggestive terms. ‘What forms of latent but structurally woven links,’ Rafiei asks, ‘exist between the various protagonists and the social forces embodied within Palestine 36’s narrative?’ As Rafiei explains, the film presents ‘forms of resistance that share common historical roots and motivations but whose organisational interconnection is not fully articulated to produce a nationwide uprising. Instead, the narrative gestures toward an interactive coexistence among diverse social groups and individual agents,’ a coexistence cultivated above all by those central female characters in the film – Rabab and her mother Hanan, along with the mediating figure of the journalist Khuloud. Women’s agency in particular helps to address ‘the structural gaps between disparate actors,’ while their courage and care helps to ‘keep the resistance materially and effectively alive.’[30]

Sustained by such trans-generational forms of community and commitment, in some ways Palestinian resistance has managed to compensate for (all too familiar) weaknesses at the national level with (quite exceptional) strengths at the global level. It’s no doubt true that what became the PLO may not compare well in some ways with other national liberation fronts, armies, or organisations – but has any other national liberation project ever enjoyed the kinds of prolonged international solidarity that Palestine enjoys to this day? However remote the prospect might remain for the time being, has any national uprising ever yet managed to articulate demands for its extension and prolongation as forcefully and as emphatically as today’s embattled calls, which can be heard all over the world, to globalise the intifada? If in so many ways ‘what we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future,’ as Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro recognised in late 2023, in all its dimensions this future concerns the world as a whole.

What imperial power fears above all ‘is not our liberation per se,’ explains Abdaljawad Omar in a 2025 interview, ‘but that resistance might become thinkable again. That it might circulate. That it might take root in other zones of abandonment. That the Palestinian, no longer the mute emblem of suffering, might become the figure through which the question of emancipation re-enters the political imagination’ – not only in Palestine, not only in Iran, but everywhere and anywhere.

This is why Palestinian resistance, when it dares to speak in its own name and not through the ventriloquism of legality or pity, becomes intolerable. It is not the violence that terrifies – it is the lucidity. The refusal to be disciplined into victimhood. The insistence on meaning, on strategy, on the political imagination as something other than mourning. […] It is this potential – the portability of resistance – that must be buried under rubble, that must be reduced to criminality or madness, that must be managed through rituals of condemnation and exceptionalism. Because once resistance becomes thinkable, speakable, nameable on its own terms, it ceases to be local. It ceases to be containable. It becomes a mantle. It becomes a question. […] What is feared most is not just Palestinian speech, but the thought it carries. A thought that decolonizes not only land, but sense. A thought that dares to say: the world must be otherwise.[31]

Palestinian resistance and the various forms of transnational solidarity it inspires, in short, deserves to be understood as both a specific national liberation movement and as an emphatically world-making effort. In that sense it should be honoured both as one of the few continuing expressions of the original Third World project and for its path-breaking role in helping to inspire an altogether new and emerging internationalist project.[32]

We should all remember, in any case, as Kanafani himself observed in his 1969 novella Return to Haifa, that ‘the greatest crime anybody can commit is to think that the weakness and the mistakes of others give him the right to exist at their expense.’ ‘What I really know,’ Kanafani added in an interview the following year, ‘is that the history of the world is always the history of weak people fighting strong people – of weak people who have a correct case, fighting strong people who use their strength to exploit the weak.’[33]

Like Omar, Mohammed El-Kurd is rightly scathing about most contemporary portrayals of Palestinian weakness and suffering. He shows that in one case after another, whether ‘on the screen or on the page, we are represented as victims, not as protagonists or complex characters. We are not history makers; history stomps on our bodies.’ Instead, El-Kurd calls for ‘a practice that is rooted in dignity […], where the Palestinian is not just a strategic object in a film or an article but a sovereign protagonist whose real story, no matter how it is received by foreign audiences, is reported accurately.’ He calls for a practice which acknowledges, ‘above all, [that] the Palestinian struggle for liberation is heroic – no qualifiers needed.’[34] Palestine 36 is one work of art that has very much taken this call to heart.

V

To narrate a story through to its conclusion is one thing, of course, and to make arguments which might openly justify that conclusion is another. To avenge his murdered father, Kareem ends the film by shooting at a British soldier. The fact that an act which any British or American government would assuredly denounce as terrorism is here undertaken by a young and traumatised boy no doubt modulates its impact, as does the rebels’ pointed insistence that ‘our duty is to serve and fight for a free nation – we defend civilians at all costs, understand?’ It’s nevertheless remarkable that such an uncompromising plotline can be shown at all, in a work sponsored by institutions that are themselves ultimately answerable to a state that is so profoundly complicit in the Israeli-American war of genocidal conquest and expulsion in Palestine.[35]

To add a little more anecdotal detail on this point, I should explain that I watched Palestine 36 when it was screened at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), on 5 February 2026, at an event co-sponsored by the university’s student union and Centre for Palestine Studies. Although originally set up as a school to train colonial administrators, SOAS has long been well-known as a broadly pro-Palestinian and anti-colonial fixture of London’s intellectual landscape. In 2025, however, in a context heavily shaped by the ‘present needs’ of empire today, SOAS first suspended and then expelled the head of their student-run Palestine Society, Haya Adam. A second-year Law and International Relations student, Adam had played a leading role in a remarkably durable student encampment, one set up like so many others to protest a university’s alleged complicity in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. SOAS administrators decided to expel her in August 2025 on what look like remarkably flimsy grounds, accusing her of ‘harassing’ a student union officer in ways this officer herself didn’t recognise.[36]

On 26 January 2026 (i.e. two weeks before SOAS screened the film), this same Haya Adam, along with her mother and another person, was charged by London’s Metropolitan police for ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour intending thereby to stir up racial hatred.’ What did Haya Adam and the others allegedly do to warrant such an accusation? The police explained that their decision to press charges followed arrests made during a demonstration outside the Ministry of Justice on 17 December, when the defendants were ‘identified as being allegedly involved in chanting calling for an “intifada.”’ More specifically, adds the BBC, the arrest and charges follow the Met’s announcement that ‘they would now start arresting people for chanting “globalise the intifada”, the Arabic word for “uprising.”’[37] A few days later, at another mass demonstration in London on 31 January 2026, the prominent gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was also charged with the same crime.

In London as in Sydney and New York and a great many other places, the question has been called: are we to let our genocide-enabling governments define and criminalise the standard Arabic word for a legitimate civilian uprising, yes or no?

Meanwhile, at the time of writing it remains illegal in the UK to express any kind of public support for the non-violent campaigning group Palestine Action. As is now well known, over the last year in particular Palestine Action and their supporters have arguably done more than any other organisation to raise awareness of, and organise direct opposition to, the ways in which Israeli arms manufacturers like Elbit Systems are interwoven with the UK’s own sprawling military-industrial complex. Incredibly, between July and December 2025 more than 2,700 people were arrested just for holding signs that read ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.’ In other words, rather than act on the UK’s solemn and binding obligation to ‘prevent and punish’ crimes against humanity, the current government has instead deployed massive amounts of police resources in a sustained effort to intimidate or arrest many of the country’s most dedicated opponents of an ongoing genocide. It should go without saying that none of the UK-based corporations producing the drones and bombs that have helped to kill so many thousands of Palestinians have faced any sort of legal pressure at all, and the same goes, so far, for the politicians (Starmer, Cooper, Lammy, Mahmood…) who have so directly implicated the UK in the most grievous imperial crime of our age.

VI

Needless to say, most of the people living in countries like the UK or the US are far removed from the sort of life-and-death dilemmas faced by the main characters in Palestine 36, to say nothing of their descendants enduring indescribable conditions in Gaza and in so many other Palestinian refugee camps. Jacir’s film is a timely reminder, however, that nobody in these countries can avoid taking a position on the current phase of the prolonged Anglo-American war on Palestine. Her characters undoubtedly figure as representatives of broader social groups, but if some of their emblematic qualities ‘typify’ their portrayal they also reinforce and widen the contemporary political points that so urgently need to be made.

To resist, or not to resist – in today’s blood-soaked circumstances, the question is even more pressing and unavoidable than it was in 1936. The most harrowing scene in the film shows or rather hints at the death of perhaps some thirty people, on the day in September 1938 when British troops subjected the inhabitants of al-Basma to collective punishment; it’s hard to fathom that over the two years that followed 7 October 2023, using weapons manufactured or supported by the US, the UK and their other accomplices, Israel’s occupation forces killed an average of well over a hundred Palestinians every single day.

It’s not hard, by contrast, to transpose the dilemmas dramatised by this film. A hard-pressed worker tries to balance his immediate need to support a family against collective demands for present dignity and future security. An ambitious and well-connected writer has to weigh up the allure of influence against her moral integrity and sense of national solidarity. An embattled villager has to choose whether to keep his urban job or risk everything by joining the resistance. A well-meaning administrator has to determine what side he’s on. A boy who loses his father has to decide what to do next.

Back over here in the country that initiated this ongoing war against Palestine the stakes may be nothing like as high, but the responsibilities entailed by imperial collusion are still ineluctable. Jacir’s challenge to a Western audience is as inescapable as the decisions her film narrates. Are we to accept the terms of our governments’ policies and repressive laws, with all their calamitous consequences? Or shall we organise the kinds of action that might defy them, and by opposing, end them?

3 March 2026

 

 

Notes

[1] Spoiler alert – what follows is less a review aimed at future audiences so much as an appreciation intended for people who have already seen the film, or who might want to remember some specific parts of it. As will quickly become clear, this article doesn’t attempt to do justice to the film as a work of cinema, let alone try to see the film through Palestinian eyes; I’m trying only to think through its political implications, in particular its implications for Anglo-American audiences. I’m very grateful to Victoria Araj, Parisa Rafiei and Tiger Liu for their insightful suggestions and comments on an initial draft of this text.

[2] A partial script of Palestine 36 (consisting of the film’s sub-titles and chapter titles) is posted here. Some of the most substantial and informative discussions published so far include Imran Mulla, ‘Palestine 36 is a Masterpiece on the 1936 Arab Revolt,’ Middle East Eye, 31 October 2025; Jim Quilty, ‘Birth of an Occupation,’ The Markaz Review, 31 October 2025; Phil Ross, ‘Palestine 36 – Film Review,’ Louder Than War, 10 December 2025; Lori Allen, ‘Palestine 36 and the Hard Facts of History,’ Middle East Research and Information Project, 17 December 2025; Qassam Muaddi, ‘When Palestinian Peasants Brought an Empire to its Knees,’ Mondoweiss, 15 February 2026. Relatively brief, bland and disengaged reviews also appeared in the Guardian and the Financial Times. Writing in the Daily Mail, meanwhile, the conservative columnist Peter Hitchens derided Palestine 36 as ‘a bitter, biased film that paints British troops as little better than Nazis’ (and the parallels are indeed hard to miss); a somewhat more nuanced condemnation of Jacir’s work as a ‘deeply flawed, disappointingly partial and waywardly remiss representation of British rule in the Holy Land’ was published by Christopher Silvester in Engelsberg Ideas, 19 November 2025.

Annemarie Jacir’s own several interviews about the film include those published by Markaz Review, the Guardian, and Frank Barat’s podcast. As Jacir told the Markaz Review, she has always been ‘fascinated by the Palestinian uprising of 1936. I think it’s the critical moment in our history that is almost never talked about, because we always start with the Nakba for some reason. It’s really important that we talk about this moment more than a decade before 1948, because of course it sets the stage for everything that comes after; for the loss of Palestine. It’s amazing to me that the British were doing then what the Israelis are doing now.’

[3] Helpfully compressed online accounts of the 1936 uprising can be found via Middle East Eye and Socialist Worker, and Ghassan Kanafani’s landmark study of The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine is both posted online and available in a new translation by Hazem Jamjoum. By far the most detailed explanation of how the British colonial army crushed the uprising is Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt 1936–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), while the most widely read recent survey of modern Palestinian history remains Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (London: Profile Books, 2020, new ed. 2024).

[4] Ze’ev Jabotinsky, ‘About the Iron Wall‘ [1923], cited in Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 12-13.

[5] Khalidi, Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 40.

[6] Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 13; on the ‘expanding class of dispossessed peasants’ see 21-23.

[7] Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War, 43-46.

[8] Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 35, 22. ‘British imperial systems of pacification were still being used decades later,’ as Hughes observes on the final page of his book, both in Israel, in its occupied territories, and in Jordan: ‘plus ça change’ (350). At the same time, Hughes writes, ‘the considerable military power used in 1936 proves that force was at the root of the British operational method against insurrection. The marriage of military power with the colonial state’s legal-administrative structures made pacification devastatingly effective’ (349; cf. 31, 179). If in 1930s Palestine the British congratulated themselves for the ‘fair application’ of their unfair laws and could proudly contrast their legalism with the more ferocious kinds of terror that had cemented e.g. French rule in Algeria or German domination in South West Africa, John Newsinger is also surely right to point out that in Palestine the occupying army could exercise ‘comparative restraint’ simply because the relatively disorganised and under-armed rebellion didn’t pose a sufficiently ‘serious military challenge’ and ‘was never going to result in British defeat even though it took more than three years to suppress.’

[9] Hughes, Britain’s Pacification, 247.

[10] Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 43. See also John Newsinger’s useful review of Hughes’s book, which compares it with Kim Wagner’s exhaustive analysis of Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale University Press, 2019).

[11] Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 55.

[12] Cf. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Penguin, 2023). Hughes’ analysis of Orde Wingate and the SNS was published initially as ‘Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish Collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Palestine during the Arab Revolt, 1938–39,’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43:4 (2015), 590–610.

[13] Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 59. And Khalidi: ‘The savage British repression, the death and exile of so many leaders, and the conflict within their ranks left the Palestinians divided, without direction, and with their economy debilitated by the time the revolt was crushed in the summer of 1939. This put the Palestinians in a very weak position to confront the now invigorated Zionist movement, which had gone from strength to strength during the revolt, obtaining lavish amounts of arms and extensive training from the British to help them suppress the uprising’ (Hundred Years’ War, 47). ‘The refinements of callousness and cruelty employed’ to crush the rebellion, Khalidi continues, ‘went well beyond summary executions. For possession of a single bullet, Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an eighty-one-year-old rebel leader, was put to death in 1937. […] Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops. Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armoured cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921. Demolitions of the homes of imprisoned or executed rebels, or of presumed rebels or their relatives, was routine, another tactic borrowed from the British playbook developed in Ireland. Two other imperial practices employed extensively in repressing the Palestinians were the detention of thousands without trial and the exile of troublesome leaders’ (44).

[14] Khalidi, Hundred Years’ War, 44. Hughes arrives at the same conclusion: ‘the punishment of Palestine in the 1930s shattered the Palestinian community for the existential war of 1948 with Israel. The British Army had inadvertently done the Jews’ work for them, defeating one of the main enemy forces that the Arabs could array against Israel in 1948, and before the war had even started’ (Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 348).

[15] ‘The village in the film is definitely inspired very specifically by [the British massacre] in Al-Bassa,’ explains Jacir, ‘but it also references Lifta village outside of Jerusalem because Al-Bassa is of course way in the north and I was interested in a village that was near Jerusalem – walking distance from Jerusalem, where women could walk to the market or you could take a bus. Where there was a sort of back and forth between the two places and there was a relationship between city and village. Lifta is also one of the few villages that’s still partly intact, architecturally.’

[16] ‘In any discussion of the 1936-1939 revolt,’ wrote Kanafani, ‘a special place must be reserved for Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam. In spite of all that has been written about him, it is not too much to say that this unique personality is still really unknown, and will probably remain so. […] There is no doubt that his movement (12-19 November 1935) represented a turning point in the nationalist struggle and played an important role in the adoption of a more advanced form of struggle in confrontation with the traditional leadership which had become divided and splintered in the face of the mounting struggle. […] According to a well-known Qassamist, al-Qassam programmed his revolt in three stages: psychological preparation and the dissemination of a revolutionary spirit, the formation of secret groups, the formation of committees to collect contributions and others to purchase arms, committees for training, for security, espionage, propaganda and information and for political contacts, and then armed revolt’ (Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 37-8; cf. Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 6-11).

[17] Ghassan Kanafani, ‘The Resistance and its Challenges’ [1970], in Kanafani, Selected Political Writings, ed. Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi (Polity, 2024), 141.

[18] Kanafani, Selected Political Writings, 266, 273. In the post-1967 situation in particular, Kanafani warned, if the various ‘Arab regimes, national parties, factions and formations’ fail to align themselves with ‘the relentless, onward movement and strategy of the armed struggle’ then they are likely to remain divided and evasive. In the wake of defeat in 1948 and 1967 (but also following victories in China, Cuba and Vietnam), Kanafani and the PFLP argued, only a disciplined and well-organised armed struggle can ‘set the horizon for the Palestinian cause in the Arab mass struggle, [and] push it – by presenting an example, an argument, and a programme – to fulfil its historic role’ (Kanafani, ‘The Resistance and its Challenges’ [1970], in Kanafani, Selected, 157). Given the obvious risks of armed struggle, Kanafani continues, ‘it is incumbent upon us to face the facts with a frank, courageous and revolutionary scientific mentality. A clear perspective of things and of the real forces taking part in the struggle leads to success, while impetuosity and spontaneity lead to failure.’ In the immediate aftermath of 1967, the PFLP’s perspective was demanding and clear: ‘The encirclement of Israel with the strategy of the people’s liberation war from every side – from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and inside the territory occupied before and after 5 June 1967 – is the only path that leads to victory’ (PFLP, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine [1969] [Foreign Languages Press, 2017], 24, 69-70; cf. Kanafani, Selected, 97, 110).

[19] ‘A variety of conflicting factors played a role in inducing the Palestinian then-leadership to adopt the form of armed struggle,’ Kanafani notes. ‘Firstly: the Izz al-Din al-Qassam movement; secondly: the series of failures sustained by this leadership at a time when they were at the helm of the mass movement, even with regard to the minor and partial demands that the colonialists did not usually hesitate to yield to, in the hope of absorbing resentment (the British took a long time to see the value of this manoeuvre; however, their interests were safeguarded through the existence of competent Zionist agents); thirdly: Zionist violence (the armed bands, the slogan of “Jewish labour only”, etc. ) in addition to colonialist violence (the manner in which the 1929 rising had been suppressed)’ (Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 36).

[20] Parisa Rafiei, email to the author, 24 February 2026. Aspects of Khuloud’s character resonate with a historical figure like Sadhij Nassar, who as Jane Hardy and Katie Coles note, was ‘co-editor and writer for the El-Carmel newspaper established in Haifa in 1908 […]. Her articles ranged from focusing on equality between the sexes to the need for revolutionary struggle against colonialism. Her name crops up frequently in the British archival record as an organiser of demonstrations and as a strike enforcer. She was a thorn in the side of the British, who described her newspaper articles as “incendiary” and the marches that she organised as being particularly “virulent and dangerous.”’

[21] The London-based PhD student and Palestine solidarity activist Tiger Liu proposes an illuminating reading of the ambiguities of Father Boulos’s role in the film. In one sense, ‘Father Boulos is indeed emblematic of the typical non-violent strategy, and also its limit and defeat, but I think he also allegorises more than that. The confrontation with the three British patrol soldiers who rob the Father and Kareem on their way home is shaped by an utter imbalance of power: soldiers with guns confront a defenceless man with a child, and if either the priest or Kareem were to act rashly there would have been severe consequences. It is precisely Father Boulos’ ability to bite his tongue that allows them to survive that moment. So, in some sense, while Father Boulos is indeed pacifistic to the point where it becomes costly to Palestinian survival, dialectically his pacifism also contains a side of perseverance, patience, and obstinacy, qualities which various Palestinian resistance factions later on would themselves embody’ (Tiger Liu, email to the author, 24 February 2026).

[22] Hughes describes the actual historical incident referenced here. ‘Before or after destroying the village [of al-Bassa], almost certainly the latter, RUR [Royal Ulster Rifles] soldiers with some attached Royal Engineers collected approximately fifty men from al-Bassa and blew some of them up in a contrived explosion under a bus. Harry Arrigonie, a British Palestine policeman at al-Bassa at the time, recalled what happened in his memoirs, with the British “herding” about twenty men from al-Bassa “onto a bus. Villagers who panicked and tried to escape were shot. The driver of the bus was forced to drive along the road, over a land mine buried by the soldiers. This second mine was much more powerful than the first [i.e., the rebels’ mine] and it completely destroyed the bus, scattering the maimed and mutilated bodies of the men on board everywhere. The villagers were then forced to dig a pit, collect the bodies, and throw them unceremoniously into it.’” (Matthew Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,’ English Historical Review 124:507 (March 2009), 337).

[23] When the revolt broke out in 1936, as Jane Hardy and Katie Coles explain in a helpful overview, ‘urban elite women took part in demonstrations, collected significant amounts of money to fund the rebellion and formed women’s committees in the villages. They held secret meetings to support militants and barraged the government with written protests and condemnations. Women’s committees sprang up in regions of the country that had previously seen little organised activity,’ and ‘outside of formal organisations, peasant women played a crucial role in the revolt. These women withstood the worst of the British suppression of the revolt as it was their communities in rural areas that came under physical attack. They hid guns in their clothing or in the fields and traversed the terrain, sharing information with guerrillas, such as the location and supply routes of British troops, and were often caught in crossfire. […] Unlike urban women, some peasant women joined the revolt in a military capacity, for example Fatma Ghazzal, who was killed in the battle of Wadu Azzoun in 1936. The frequency with which peasant women were arrested for arms smuggling or possession suggests that women had a greater military role than has been assumed or recorded. Overall, women took substantial risks, and when prosecuted on weapons charges, they were given heavy prison sentences of seven to ten years’ (Hardy and Coles, ‘Palestinian Women’s Resistance: From the Great Revolt to the First Intifada (1936 to 1993),’ ISJ 184, October 2024). Matiel Mogannam’s 1937 text, The Arab Woman and the Palestine Problem, as Mariam Karim shows in a recent study of its publication history, is an especially pertinent point of reference here, and I’m grateful to Victoria Araj for pointing me in her direction.

[24] Parisa Rafiei, email to the author, 24 February 2026.

[25] As for Palestine’s own small Communist Party, notes Kanafani, after initially ‘working exclusively among Jewish workers’ in the 1920s it ‘remained isolated from the political reality until 1930’ and subsequently ‘proved incapable of carrying out the task of mobilising Palestinian Arabs’ (Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 18). ‘This failure of the Communist Party, the weakness of the rising Arab bourgeoisie, and the disunity of the Arab labour movement meant that [older] feudal-religious leaderships were cast to play a fundamental role as the situation escalated to the point of explosion in 1936’ (19; cf. 51-53; see also Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 11, 18-19).

[26] Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 28, 11. In particular, Hughes continues, ‘the Palestinian insurgency never bridged the gap between urbanite leaders and the peasantry, a point that Frantz Fanon made more broadly in 1961’ (348). ‘Rich, elite town- based Palestinians, many of whom decamped during the revolt, looked down on the peasants who led the revolt as “riffraff”‘ (27); many also continued to collaborate with the British (28-29, 260-273). As a result, according to Hughes the mainly rural Palestinian rebels remained too parochial for their own good: they ‘stuck to local clan territory and were unwilling to combine to spread the rebellion. […] It might have been different if al-Qassam had lived. His followers furnished many of the most committed, effective rebel band commanders in the revolt. Other rebel leaders who impressively organised and mobilised, such as Fawzi al-Qawuqji, rated highly by British soldiers and supported by the fellahin, either served only intermittently in Palestine (in al-Qawuqji’s case for just two months in 1936) or as with Fakhri ‘Abd al-Hadi, switched sides and later fought for the British’ (348, 18, 20). See also Hillel Cohen, An Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism 1947-48 (University of California Press, 2009) and Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford University Press, 1988).

[27] Kanafani, Selected Political Writings, 244. As El-Kurd shows in vivid terms, the mainstream media offers only suitably ‘docile’ and ‘defanged’ Palestinians a chance to speak (Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal [Haymarket, 2025], 81, 89). ‘We are implored to be peaceful (or submissive) and forbearing, and we are tolerated when we are. We are meek and we shall inherit no earth. What we are not allowed is the future: we cannot be ambitious or cunning; we cannot aspire to sovereignty or revenge. We are robbed of the right to complexity, to contradictory feelings […] The only thing we are permitted to look forward to is the day’s end’ (78). What Palestinians are ‘systematically denied,’ Omar adds, ‘both by their enemies and, crucially, by their sympathizers, is the right to understand their own resistance. Not just to feel it, not merely to survive it, but to think it. There is a deep structure at work here, one that insists the Palestinian must always remain the sufferer, the testifier, the exhibit.’

[28] Hughes, Pacification, 20.

[29] Abdaljawad Omar, ‘The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear’ (2025). On this far-reaching point see also the forthcoming book by Baraneh Emadian, Lament and Revolution: Iran between Politics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

[30] Parisa Rafiei, email to the author, 24 February 2026. First and foremost, Rafiei continues, ‘the film grapples with the challenge of representing the dynamic and often fragmented social life of an oppressed society on the brink of large-scale revolt. Rather than offering a definitive explanation of how disparate forces organise themselves in the absence of a unifying leadership capable of consolidating them, it resists closure. In this indeterminacy, female agency – not fully thematised yet historically resonant – appears as a bridging force. This, I would argue, is not merely a narrative device but reflects a deeper historical reality that deserves recognition as one of the enduring foundations of the Palestinian resistance against occupation. What has often sustained collective struggle in such dark times is organic forms of social interaction and mobilisation. These, too, must be brought into analytical focus if we are to understand history not only from the standpoint of organisational structures, but also from the social mechanisms embedded within material and communal relations. Such mechanisms may not, in themselves, secure decisive victory; nevertheless, when recognised and carefully cultivated they can develop into more radical and transformative forms of resistance.’ Rafiei is developing her remarks on the film and on the interactive dimensions of political organising more generally in a forthcoming article.

[31] Abdaljawad Omar, ‘The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear’ [interview with Pasquale Liguori], Monthly Review, 1 September 2025.

[32] See in particular Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2008), xv-xvi, 221 and passim; Prashad, ed., Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (Verso, 2015); Prashad, ‘My Heart Makes My Head Swim,’ Tricontinental Institute, 16 May 2024; ‘Palestinians Will Not Let the Genocide Kill Their Hopes,’ Tricontinental Institute, 20 November 2025. See also Bayan Haddad, ‘On World-Building: Lessons From a Martyred Teacher,’ Protean Magazine, 8 December 2025, and Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019).

[33] Kanafani, ‘A Conversation Between the Sword and the Neck’ [September 1970], Kanafani, Selected Political Writings, 195.

[34] El-Kurd, Perfect Victims, 162, 167. Abdaljawad Omar explores similar themes in a number of texts written over the past several years, including for instance ‘Hopeful Pathologies in the War for Palestine: a Reply to Adam Shatz,’ Mondoweiss, 8 November 2023; ‘An Unyielding Will to Continue,’ Ebb Magazine, November 2023; ‘Palestinian Joy is a Direct Challenge to Those Who Would Rule Over Us,’ Mondoweiss, 24 January 2025; ‘The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear’ [interview with Pasquale Liguori], Monthly Review, 1 September 2025; ‘Death Has Died in Gaza,’ Communis Press, 9 September 2025; ‘The Anxiety of Liberation,’ Salvage, 8 September 2025. Analú María López maintains a helpful list of Omar’s writings on her blog.

[35] In the post-show discussion that followed the screening I attended at SOAS on 5 February 2026, one of the film’s producers, Nils Åstrand, confirmed that there was no editorial interference of any kind from the BBC or any of the film’s several funding bodies.

[36] Middle East Eye summarised SOAS’s main reason for expelling Haya Adam in August 2025: a disciplinary panel ‘found that Adam breached the university’s code of conduct over her appearance in a video posted on 16 January to the student encampment’s Instagram page. In the video, which remains on Instagram, Adam criticises a SOAS student union co-president, stating that her tenure had ”only served institutional oppression”, and calling her a “careerist”. The university disciplinary panel ruled that the Instagram video constituted harassment, despite the student union officer in question herself refusing to call the post harassment in a recorded panel discussion.’

[37] Given its current and far-reaching implications for whatever remains of freedom of speech in places like Australia and the UK, this point needs to be developed a little further.

Perhaps forgetting that his own government ostensibly considers it antisemitic to conflate Israel in particular with Jewish people in general, on 14 October 2025 Keir Starmer told parliament that the slogan “internationalise the intifada” is “a call to attack Jewish communities around the world.” Following the Bondi Beach attack on 14 December, the premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns was also quick to condemn the slogan as “hateful, violent rhetoric”: “You’ve seen what the consequences of globalising the intifada are. It’s the deaths of 15 innocent people on the beaches of Bondi beach simply for practising their religion in a peaceful way.” On 17 December the London Metropolitan police likewise responded to the ‘horrific terrorist attack in Australia,’ and took the opportunity to clarify their domestic policy on freedom of expression: ‘We know communities are concerned about placards and chants such as “globalise the intifada” and those using it at future protest or in a targeted way should expect the Met and GMP to take action. Violent acts have taken place, the context has changed – words have meaning and consequence. We will act decisively and make arrests.’

Neither Minns nor the Met, however, bothered to address a couple of obvious problems with their proclamations. As Daniel Tester points out in Middle East Eye, ‘the Bondi Beach attackers did not use the slogan “globalise the intifada”, nor are they Palestinian.’ In reality, the Australian ‘police say the attackers were inspired by “Islamic State ideology.”’ Given the obvious and emphatic differences between Palestinian resistance groups (including Hamas) and ISIS it’s hard to see what might justify these attempts to conflate them, apart from Islamophobic racism pure and simple. As Ben Jamal (director of the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign) explains, in reality people use the slogan ‘globalise the intifada’ simply in order ‘to call for worldwide support for an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people through all means of legitimate resistance. That’s not a call for violence against civilians or Jewish people – and to say that is actually, in my view, a form of anti-Palestinian racism.’

Featured image: Palestine 36. A 2025 film by Annemarie Jacir. Still frame courtesy of British Council / UK Films Database.

Peter Hallward