Nearly a century before the present devastation in Gaza, before checkpoints carved through Palestinian cities and military towers defined daily movement, the essential architecture of domination had already been built. It was not first designed in Tel Aviv or by the modern Israeli security state. It was forged under British colonial rule.
That buried history stands at the center of Palestine 36, the sweeping new historical drama by Annemarie Jacir that returns to the 1936 Palestinian revolt against British occupation and accelerating Zionist settlement. In her conversation with Chris Hedges, Jacir makes clear that this is not simply a period film. It is an excavation of the political origins of a system that remains violently intact.
The revolt of 1936, often reduced to a footnote outside serious historical scholarship, was in fact the first mass Palestinian uprising of the modern era: a nationwide strike, rural rebellion, urban mobilization, and anti-colonial movement that spread across class lines and geographic divisions. Farmers, workers, intellectuals, merchants, and local organizers confronted a colonial order that had already spent nearly two decades laying the institutional groundwork for dispossession.
That groundwork began with the Balfour Declaration, when Britain pledged support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine while ruling over an overwhelmingly Arab population. Under British protection, Zionist institutions developed into what historians have described as a parallel state—its own economic structures, land networks, labor systems, and military formations. Palestinian labor was increasingly excluded. Capital flowed in from abroad. By the 1930s, despite remaining a demographic minority, settler institutions held disproportionate control over land acquisition, banking, and infrastructure.
Jacir’s film dramatizes the moment when Palestinians understood that this was not temporary administration but permanent transformation.
The result was revolt.
British authorities responded with overwhelming force: tens of thousands of troops, air power, curfews, mass imprisonment, torture, and village raids. Entire communities were subjected to collective punishment. Homes were dynamited. Agricultural land was destroyed. Informant systems were built. Printing presses were seized. Civil rights were suspended. In the film, these measures feel eerily familiar because they are.
That familiarity is deliberate.
Jacir and Hedges both emphasize that many of the tactics commonly associated today with Israeli military rule were first refined under British command. The use of human shields, depicted in the film and drawn directly from archival accounts, was one such method. The destruction of media infrastructure, routine body searches, punitive demolitions, and militarized surveillance all emerged not as improvisations of modern conflict but as inherited tools of colonial governance.
One of the most striking figures in the film is Charles Tegart, brought from colonial India to suppress Palestinian resistance. Tegart designed fortified police compounds—many of which still stand—and developed counterinsurgency strategies later absorbed into Israeli security doctrine. His arrival in Palestine symbolized the transfer of imperial knowledge: methods tested in India, then exported westward.
Another figure, Orde Wingate, appears as a portrait of fanatic colonial zeal. A Christian Zionist and British officer, Wingate trained armed Jewish units and advocated aggressive retaliatory violence. Revered later within Israeli military mythology, he embodied the fusion of religious mission and military experimentation that shaped the coming war.
Jacir does not treat history as abstraction. Her film insists on the social tensions inside Palestinian society itself: between urban elites and rural fighters, between landowners and tenant farmers, between those who believed Britain could still be negotiated with and those who understood imperial power as structurally deceptive.
This internal fracture becomes one of the film’s most politically important themes.
British officials and Zionist institutions exploited those divisions relentlessly. Archival research cited by Jacir reveals payments to Arab intermediaries, political manipulation inside local organizations, and efforts to fracture Christian-Muslim unity through manufactured sectarian channels. Newspapers were influenced. Narratives were planted. Loyalty was purchased where possible.
The methods again feel contemporary because they are foundational to colonial management everywhere: divide, fragment, isolate, neutralize.
Yet Palestine 36 is not merely historical indictment—it is also cultural restoration.
As Jacir explains, this period has been largely erased from popular memory, despite its centrality to understanding the Nakba. The suppression of the revolt devastated Palestinian political and military capacity just years before 1948, when mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing became possible on a far larger scale. Historians such as Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, argue that crushing the revolt effectively cleared the ground for the later triumph of Zionist military forces.
The film’s power lies in making that argument emotionally legible.
It was also made under extraordinary circumstances. Jacir and her crew spent a year preparing locations inside Palestine—restoring villages, planting crops, building British military equipment—only to see production collapse after October 2023. Much of the project shifted to Jordan, yet Jacir ultimately returned to film crucial scenes in the West Bank and Jerusalem under occupation.
That decision matters politically as much as artistically.
To stage British tanks at the gates of Jerusalem while modern military control remained active around them became its own act of cinematic defiance. Jacir describes it not as symbolic but necessary: Palestinians, she says, do not accept impossibility easily.
The result is a film where history does not sit behind glass. It breathes against the present.
That may explain why distribution itself has become political terrain. Jacir notes that screenings have faced obstruction, including bans in Jerusalem and detention of projection staff. Even a film centered on pre-1948 British rule is treated as dangerous.
Because the underlying argument is dangerous: that what exists today did not emerge suddenly, nor accidentally.
Empire wrote the first script. Others inherited it.
