“Palestine 36”: A palatable struggle against an unspoken enemy

“History shows no mercy, as the numbers of Jewish immigrants fleeing antisemitism in Europe kept rising...” A line from the synopsis of Annemarie Jacir’s “Palestine 36” (2025), as it appears in the press notes handed to European audiences before they enter the screening hall (notes usually prepared by the distributor and the production company). In another synopsis, on the website FilmAffinity, these immigrants are called “Jewish refugees.”

What strikes you first is how hard the published synopses are to follow; they jump from one subject to another with no thread connecting them. But the film itself explains this difficulty: it is a set of disconnected sketches the director tried to string together, separate images that caught her imagination, as she herself has implied, out of which she made a film.

Trailer for "Palestine 36," directed by Annemarie Jacir (2025)

One could overlook that deceptive line, and the absence of any mention of the Zionist movement in the film’s synopses, official or otherwise, as something imposed by the British production partner, BBC Films. But the film itself lays several traps, traps that erase the role of the Zionist movement in the destruction of the Palestinian people, before, during, and after the 1936 revolt, and before the rise of antisemitism in Europe, and that repeat one of its oldest lies: that the settlers came to Palestine as refugees, and that the conflict was confined to Arabs versus the forces of the British Mandate.

The missing Zionist angle

As Afra and her mother contemplate the walls of the Zionist settlement, what Palestinians used to call “Al-Kubbaniya,” the daughter asks who these people are and why they have come to their land. The mother, a martyr’s widow who will later become a mother of martyrs, answers that “their own country didn’t want them.” We never see the settlers’ faces up close, but this single line is enough to cast them as victims: people forced into migration, into refuge, because their homeland expelled them.

A viewer with no knowledge of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the settler-colonial state will not register the Zionist project or its role in the conflict unfolding on screen between savage British forces and Palestinians clinging to their land. And so that viewer will miss what is specific, what is irreducible, about the Palestinian question. Zionism, as an organized movement and an ideology, is spoken as a word at scattered moments in the film, but it is never explained, and it is never discussed by the very people fighting to hold onto their villages.

Nowhere in “Palestine 36” will we find any information that lets us grasp the historical partnership between the Zionist movement, the British occupation, and European capital, apart from a passing mention that Weizmann visited the Peel Commission six times at its headquarters, and that the murderous British captain is glad he will see, for the first time in two thousand years, a Jewish army.

And so the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, entangled with the Zionist project, gets lost along the paths of British cruelty, in the split among the occupiers between good men and bad, in commissions of inquiry, and in the divide within the Palestinian elite between traitors and patriots.

Just days ago, an argument flared up over the new Israeli-British film “NAZA” among Arabs who hadn’t even seen it. Some were pleased by its success at the Venice film festival; others were unsettled and suspicious. That same argument invokes Annemarie Jacir’s film, and with it an old question renewed by the current chapter of the genocide: for whom are these films made, and what do we expect from them?

Sometimes we delude ourselves into imagining that Yuval Abraham made “NAZA” for us, and that he therefore owes us his full adoption of our positions. And sometimes we delude ourselves into imagining that every Arab and Palestinian director makes films for us, and that they too owe us the full adoption of our positions. So we wait for any film touching the Palestinian cause to open with an outright rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and a declared hostility to the Zionist movement from its very first scenes, before we can accept it.

It’s true we expect more of Annemarie Jacir, because she is Palestinian. And it’s true we hoped Yuval Abraham would push his political positions further after his earlier film “No Other Land,” breaking entirely from his state’s Zionist project and exposing its essence.

But the more pressing question, in the case of the Palestinian director, is this: does securing production on this scale, enough to make a film that reminds a European audience of its historical responsibility for our catastrophe, sufficiently justify a bit of rhetorical pragmatism? Or, to put it plainly: does it justify softening the weight of historical truth, and setting aside the Western colonial essence of Zionism?

Broad segments of European society are willing to talk about the crimes of the old colonial era; it’s over, after all. But most of those same segments still refuse to speak of Israel as a crime of the present, one their own states manufactured to continue colonialism by other means. So will these “cunning” or “clever” dramatic devices, like portraying Zionist settlers as refugees, succeed in slowly occupying European consciences, in hopes of shifting their political positions down the road? Or should the priority be to tell the history as we, Arabs and Palestinians, see it, without diluting its substance, whatever that does to the film’s chances of reaching a global audience?

Supreme Palestinian beauty

Because we see no depiction of Zionism—its ideas, its plans, its crimes—we’re left searching the film for the crime the Jews committed after they “sought refuge” in Palestine, and we find exactly two: the burning of some land around the village of Nassma to make way for expanding the settlement/Al-Kubbaniya, and the shooting of the hero Youssef’s father.

Neither can be counted among the great crimes. The European viewer is used to hearing every summer about parts of their own country’s forests burning for the sake of future investment projects, whose scale and corruption they’ll only discover years later. And the second crime is easy enough to explain away: Arab men, possibly armed, approach the walls of a settlement by night, a settlement inhabited by these poor, frightened people who fled a homeland that didn’t want them. The guard in the watchtower shouts a warning, “Stop!” then fires a single shot that kills one of them.

The man killed is Palestinian, and the victims of the British occupation forces are Palestinian too, so as we leave the screening we might imagine the director has settled for telling Europeans: “There was a people in Palestine before the Jews arrived. A people who resisted, who were elegant and handsome and civilized. They had the region’s second radio station, after Cairo, and for some reason, the British forces decided to unleash the utmost savagery against them.” But we no longer need to prove that a people existed in Palestine before Zionist settlement, genocide, and ethnic cleansing: the whole world already knows that.

It’s worth pausing on this “image of a beautiful people,” as the film presents it. And “beautiful” is used here in its literal, physical sense. Every character in “Palestine 36,” man or woman, is marked by a beauty and allure close to the European/Mediterranean ideal. The villages, with their churches, have a striking loveliness.

There are advanced, contented ways of life on display, and Arab mansions in Jerusalem where whisky is poured and the residents speak fluent English. There’s a well-off woman who fights culturally on her people’s behalf, hiding behind a man’s name; she is the only character who utters the word Zionism, but without ever explaining it. She enters into press debates with Zionist ideas, as though those ideas deserve to be argued and discussed for the sake of Palestinians, who will read both sides and choose among the different views on offer.

The beautification of the Palestinian people’s image on screen runs parallel to the beautification and restoration of the archival footage used in the film, polished into something more elegant, more attractive, to match the people it depicts. Even though the features of the people in that archival material differ, visibly, from the features of the actors cast to play them.

The presence and absence of history

Among everyone, the hero Youssef stands out. But who is Youssef? He is everything: the point where every sketch and every visual fantasy Annemarie Jacir wanted to embody all meet. He is a farmer who speaks fluent English, a driver, a temporary member of the Muslim association funded by Zionist money, a waiter, a resistance fighter, the son of a martyr and the brother of a prisoner, and, among all the resistance fighters, the most luminous, and perhaps the bravest.

There’s no need to dwell on this individualist framing, which contradicts the very idea of collective revolution at its root. But it forces itself on us, embodied not only in Youssef/Karim Daoud Anadeel and the journalist Kholoud/Yasmine Al Masri, but also in Khaled/Saleh Bakri, the symbol of resistance: the gentle thief who robs a train to fund the revolt, handsome, brave, smiling defiantly at the moment of his arrest, and perhaps his death.

 Yet the individualist problem reveals itself in Khaled’s own character: he joins the revolution and the armed struggle by chance, after initially refusing, and changes his mind only because he wasn’t paid for his overtime hours as a dockworker.

Let's return to the essential question linking “No Other Land” to “Palestine 36”: what do we want, or expect, from film content in a time of genocide and battles for survival? 

The answers will differ. But perhaps everyone can agree that the sheer scale of the Palestinian tragedy demands a certain rigor in how we read the films and narratives that take it up, whatever their source. It demands vigilance against the absence of any radical Israeli self-reckoning, and against the possibility, present ever since October 7, 2023, that a state built on ethnic cleansing and genocide might cleanse itself of its own nature by pinning the blame on a few of its politicians and generals. And it demands vigilance against the slackening of Arab and Palestinian discourse in order to get films past the gate and ensure their reach, by softening the facts of history.

Cinema, especially narrative cinema, is not bound to the letter of historical fact and record. That much is obvious. But rifling through history’s wardrobe merely to select a few of its pieces, in order to build sketches and scenes that brush past the essence of the Palestinian calamity from a safe distance, is a thorny business. Take, for example, the director’s invention of Thomas Hopkins, the good-hearted Briton in the High Commissioner’s office: a character who never existed, drawn instead from a figure belonging to the nineteenth century, not to the historical moment the film actually depicts.

Many were unsettled by the wave of European enthusiasm for “NAZA” despite how significant it is when the perpetrator acknowledges his own crime, because this historical moment demands that we stay alert to the danger of diverting attention from the essence of the Zionist state. And that same moment demands unease at the success of Arab films that dilute the origin of the tragedy, and that redirect the European audience’s response, a response we genuinely need, whose sympathies we genuinely need. An audience that might, perhaps, feel a pang of regret on the way out of the theater after watching “Palestine 36,” at how the poor Jewish victims turned into today’s executioners. But it will quickly remind itself that the Palestinian victims turned into executioners too, on that infamous 7th of October. And so the scales even out.