Annemarie Jacir’s film "Palestine 36" was released in 2025 but I only just got the chance to see it this summer on a rerelease in my local cinema in Afyonkarahisar. One striking overall impression that I took from it is its strong resemblance to Farah Nabulsi’s 2023 film "The Teacher." I found this highly disturbing. Not, of course, in that two films set in the same place have a similar subject matter, but rather that "The Teacher" is a contemporary film whereas "Palestine 36" is set in the interwar British Mandate period of Palestine, and that taken together, the two films show that the Palestinians have been enduring now severe oppression for generations.
In fact, in a sense, "Palestine 36" is a prequel to the whole long sad recent history and current condition of this poor benighted people. Because while it may seem natural to associate the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians with the creation of the State of Israel in 1947 and all that has occurred since, this film shows that the issue has even deeper roots. Indeed, it shows the creation of the conditions for the creation of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians is itself a handiwork of the British.
For though, as with "The Teacher," there is a scene in which a Palestinian is shot without consequences by Jewish settlers in "Palestine 36," the state oppression of the Palestinians is here actually carried out by the British occupying forces. While the British are destined to leave Palestine after the end of the film, the tactics that they use to oppress its native population are those that will be refined by their Israel successors including murder, collective punishment, judicial theft of land, proposals for the “forcible transfer" of the Palestinian population, the provocation of the Palestinians into violence and then tarnishing them as a violent people, mistreatment of women and children, the levelling of property, arbitrary imprisonment, censorship, curfews, and, encompassing everything, a refusal to recognize the political rights of this people, all of which is brought about through their simple dehumanization, the British viewing them “like animals.”
