Annemarie Jacir’s epic drama Palestine 36 (Palestine, 2025) contributes to a long tradition of popular and revolutionary education by way of cinema. The film explains how a mass-driven Palestinian rebellion arose in the mid-1930s contesting increased land dispossession and labour segregation. Such policies were devised and enforced by the British colonial forces to support the building of a Zionist infrastructure in Mandatory Palestine, but they were also implemented with the complicity of a weak Palestinian landowning class. Palestine 36 exposes ‘the hard facts of History’ at a time when Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians questions the political valence of truth-claims. However, the film offers more than a simple exposé and invites us to read the persistence of 1930s colonial logics into the genocidal present.
It also raises important questions about popular culture and history: How can cinema convey historical knowledge? What is the role of popular education in anticolonial resistance? In my reading of Palestine 36, I trace a systematic citational practice of both historical and contemporary Palestinian visual, artistic, and intellectual knowledge.
In the words of Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi, there is no overstating ‘how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution’. Palestinian refugees forcefully expelled in 1948 and 1967 established makeshift schools in the camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). They campaigned to develop educational institutions on their own terms, through the offering of a relevant national curriculum. In parallel, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in exile elaborated its own philosophy of revolutionary education. In a personal account, the director of the education division in the PLO Planning Committee described it as a ‘matter of life and death for the Palestinian people’, and a necessity in order to preserve ‘the unique Palestinian character, heritage, unity of imagination, and efforts towards liberation and reconstitution of Palestinian society’. As the immediate possibility of return and self-determination waned, the goal of schooling focused on perpetuating the transmission of the history of Palestinian dispossession and resistance.
Revolutionary education aspired to liberate the minds of adults and children alike with a view to sustaining the revolutionary struggle—and militant 1970s cinema was one of its fronts. The UNRWA educational system captivated the internationalist cinematic imaginary during the revolutionary period of the armed struggle between Palestinian and allied guerilla groups and the Israeli military (1968–82). In her found footage film Perpetual Recurrences (2016), Palestinian artist Reem Shilleh edits together schooling scenes from 1970s Palestinian and solidarity documentaries. The montage highlights the motifs that testify to the making of educated Palestinian subjects in exile, such as raised fingers, sticks pointing to the map of Palestine, recitations of the names of Palestine’s cities and villages, and collective chants of Palestinian poetry. These films demonstrate that revolutionary education occurred in the classroom, but also beyond—in the alleys of refugee camps through graffiti and in freedom fighters’ (fedayeen) reading circles.
In addition to capturing such memories of the revolutionary every day, 1970s militant cinema itself served as a crucial pedagogical tool. It articulated complex ideas about the developing cultural and armed struggle which it documented. Palestinian filmmakers of the PLO film units and their Arab comrades experimented with form. They combined raw footage of armed confrontations, everyday life, and interviews with staged metaphorical dream-like scenes, musical assemblages, resistance poetry, still photographs, and drawings. Critical scholar Joseph Massad has illustrated how these militant films were exhibited to, and discussed with, the masses in refugee camps. In turn, the films were occasionally revised to incorporate the spectators’ feedback. Education through cinema prompted and channelled debates about how Palestinians could collectively represent themselves and how they could construct a new liberated subjectivity.
At first glance, Palestine 36’s adoption of a fictional and mostly conventional epic style of narrative proposes a radically distinct aesthetic strategy from the militant experimental documentaries of the 1970s. Yet, the film follows a similar purpose of recounting an unfolding revolutionary moment for pedagogical aims. In addition to narrating the everyday, it includes distinct audiovisual references reminiscent—if more subtle—of earlier experiments with various media forms. Its pedagogical strategy is not only to illustrate but to cite, and in doing so, to be in conversation with Palestinian forebearers through a cinema-led revolutionary education.
Palestine 36 most obviously seeks to educate by staging the tensions and solidarities across the various Palestinian social classes involved in the 1936–39 uprisings—such as the peasants, workers, and intellectuals. Elite women emerge as political actors who negotiate with colonial authorities and galvanise—albeit covertly—popular mobilisations. The narrative strategy of mapping out the political forces at play follows the construction of a key Palestinian text of political and materialist analysis that explains the background, causes, contradictions, and unfolding of the struggle: Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine (1972). Kanafani, a spokesperson for the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a founder of its political and cultural magazine al-Hadaf, and a recognised novelist, had previously been a teacher in an UNRWA school in Syria. There, he first developed a class consciousness which convinced him of the necessity of socialism to the anticolonial struggle and informed his later analysis.
In apparently taking inspiration from Kanafani’s writings, Palestine 36 participates in the re-circulation of his thought alongside two recent publications, the English translation of the above cited text by Hazem Jamjoum (1894 Books, 2023), and the collection of Selected Political Writings (Pluto Press, 2024) gathered by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi. The renewed visibility of Kanafani today further raises questions about the current political conjuncture of ‘defeat and reorganisation’ of anticolonial resistance, as Layan Sima Fuleihan notes in her introduction to Jamjoum’s translation. Where Kanafani uses the context of the 1930s to reflect on the historical moment of the 1970s, Jacir suggests that, today, we can learn from both the 1930s and the 1970s.
Palestine 36’s practice of citation is not about highlighting Shilleh’s ‘perpetual recurrences’ as historical inevitabilities but rather as processes of learning from previous generations and methods of analysis. Palestine 36 reflects on the longue durée of the struggle by tracing the colonial techniques of repression trialled in these years—such as human shields, raids, executions, mass imprisonment and collective punishment through the destruction of houses—which continue to be used today. The 1936–37 Peel Commission, presented by the British as a diplomatic solution to the uprising and conflict, serves as another tool of subjection of the Palestinian people and an attack on their sovereignty. The more recent diplomatic process of the 1994 Oslo Accords, waved by American negotiators as a promise of Palestinian self-determination, has similarly led to increased colonial control. Conversely, we witness the various forms of resistance Palestinians developed which have informed the struggle over time. These include general strikes, steadfast occupancy of threatened villages, stone throwing on the occupying army, sabotage of colonial industrial infrastructures (here the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline), and grassroots armed resistance.
Annemarie Jacir is not new to cinematic citations. In Lamma Shuftak (When I Saw You, 2012), which recounts the exile of the young Tarek and his mother Ghaydaa in 1967 and their hope for return, she draws from various Arab militant solidarity films from the 1970s and their attention to everyday life in refugee and fedayeen camps. As observed by Nadia Yaqub, the film reproduces a scene of children playing from the short film Ba‘idan ‘an al-Watan (Far Away from Home/Far from the Homeland, Qais al-Zubaydi, Syria, 1969). Similarly, depictions of the quotidian of Palestinian combatants in their campground, who receive letters of support from refugees, follows the idea and composition of a similar scene in Laysa La-hum Wujud (They Do Not Exist, Mustafa Abu Ali, Palestine, 1974).
Palestine 36 offers a distinct citational experiment from Lamma Shuftak. It cannot reference militant images that only started emerging in the 1970s, decades after the revolution the film represents. Here, the images cited are the colonial ‘views’ produced by British Movietone and British Pathé, now preserved in institutions like the Imperial War Museum or the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive. Jacir and her team restored this archival footage and coloured it, reappropriating evidence of Palestinians’ historical presence as Palestinian history and giving it a new life. Whereas Lamma Shuftak reproduced the 1970s films through shot composition, Palestine 36 absorbs the reworked colonial footage. The film subtly draws attention to the archive’s historical materiality by conserving its distinct 4:3 aspect ratio as well as the eerie glittering colour palette. If the archival footage visually stands out, it is nonetheless blended in the narrative. Rather than simply pointing to an uncontestable historical reality, we can read this visual strategy as another citation of Palestinian cultural production. In fact, the film is replete with historical quotations that testify to the existence of the Palestinian people and tradition, including songs, articles in newspapers, paintings, and oral histories.
Palestine 36 goes further by rebuilding the world of the Nahda, a transnational cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement which aspired to building an Arab modernity both enmeshed with and alternative to colonial modernity. Through the circulation of ideas and people enabled by a thriving printing economy, transregional communications networks—including through the establishment of the British-operated trilingual English-Hebrew-Arabic Palestine Broadcasting Service depicted in the film—and the expansion of public transports like the train with which the film opens, Palestinians imagined and enacted their belonging to the wider cosmopolitan Arab and Southern world. Exemplary is the film’s sonic citation of ‘El Huerfanito’, a 1930 song by Black Cuban Spanish musician Antonio Machín. More than a decade later, it would be adapted into Arabic as ‘Ya Habibi Taala Elhaani’ by the Syrian Egyptian singer Asmahan.
Alternating archival citations and fictional reconstructions with more or less explicit nodes to present stakes, Palestine 36 insists on the longue durée of the struggle and what can be learnt from the past. The film concludes with the citation of a poem by Saleem Al-Naffar (1963–2023), a prominent Palestinian poet assassinated in Gaza by Israel a couple of months into the genocide: ‘Even if skies crush our land /our songs sing on’.
Palestine 36 was met with resounding success across the world but also in Yaffa, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, where recent screenings were sold out and additional dates had to be scheduled. In late January 2026, a screening of Palestine 36 at the Yabous Cultural Centre in Jerusalem was raided by the Israeli police and the projectionist detained, leading to the de facto banning of the film. Like Israel’s ongoing attack on Palestinian educational life, this, as well, is proof of Palestinian cinema’s potential for popular and revolutionary education.