• Interview by
• Ed Rampell

Bethlehem-born writer-director Annemarie Jacir is at the cutting edge of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers breaking through to Western audiences and beyond with undeniably powerful movies. Jacir’s 2008 Salt of this Sea received two nominations at the Cannes Film Festival, while her 2012 Palestinian refugee drama, When I Saw You, costarring Saleh Bakri, won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Now, her latest feature, Palestine 36 — which also costars Bakri as well as Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons — is having the national release Jacir’s epic richly deserves.

As its title suggests, Palestine 36 — which was Palestine’s official selection for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards and winner of the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Best Film Award — fictionalizes a key period in the ongoing Palestinian liberation struggle. According to Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by 1939, the British military dispatched “a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, one for every four adult Palestinian men. . . . It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in 1938 . . . to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.”

In this candid conversation, Jacir lays out the historical context and framework within which she dramatizes the mass uprising that began when Yasser Arafat was only seven years old — a revolt that shook the mightiest military in Europe. Jacir was interviewed for Jacobin by film historian and critic Ed Rampell.

Tell us about your personal background and how you got into filmmaking?

My parents are Palestinians from Bethlehem. My father is turning ninety, he was born in 1936, the first year of the revolt. My mother was born in the last year of the revolt in 1939.

Your family is Christian?

I am an atheist.

But you were born into a Christian family?

Yes. After Palestine was occupied, the West Bank was occupied in ’67, they stayed there for a couple of years, they decided, they found work abroad and didn’t want to bring up a family under occupation. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. I came to the US after that and my undergraduate was political studies and literature, at the Claremont Colleges in California, at Pitzer.

I graduated from Pitzer with a double major, I was interested in film my final year and thought of switching majors. And my father said, “You just did a double major. Get out of school and finish.” So, I moved into LA where I lived a few years trying to learn about how to make films. I was contacting everybody about a job, production assistant, whatever. Those were very rough years and I found that LA really wasn’t my kind of city. I didn’t have the connections, couldn’t get into the film industry, so I was doing crappy jobs that were not really teaching me about filmmaking.

I ended up at a literary agency representing screenwriters and started reading lots of scripts. I still didn’t feel like the whole machine of Hollywood was the kind of cinema I wanted to make. Then I went to graduate school in New York at Columbia and studied film. After that, I went to Palestine and have been living in Palestine ever since.

Palestine 36 brilliantly dramatizes history, especially events that few Westerners have ever heard of. Americans tend to think that between the two world wars, Britain was at peace, until it went to war with the Nazis in 1939. Your film shows otherwise. So, what happened in 1936 in Palestine?

In 1936, the British have already been in Palestine for almost twenty years. There’s already a lot of disgruntlement to begin with. The early years of British control [as a League of Nations Mandate], there was probably some kind of feeling that things were going to get better. But they didn’t. It was a project to control the resources and people.

Also, there was, and I’m surprised how few people know this, there was Jewish emigration. But it was before the Holocaust. Yeah, because there was antisemitism, pogroms, and fascism, and Jews were fleeing Europe way before the Holocaust. Everybody thinks it happens later, when Palestine is flooded with refugees. Jews were emigrating — of course, there’s an indigenous Jewish population in Palestine, it was very small. Palestinian society is Jewish, Muslim, Christian, very mixed.

So you look at the numbers of [Jewish emigration], and you see this influx. These things were all coming together and creating a tense atmosphere. There was the beginning of the first mass revolt against British colonialism in 1936. It included a national strike that was really the longest strike in history at that moment, a six-month strike.

The revolt was really in two phases. It begins in ’36, and the British are losing control. Because it’s a farmer-led revolt. They couldn’t figure it out and began to lose control. Then there’s the Peel Commission, and they’re trying to figure out a diplomatic solution. And it becomes clear that there’s going to be no resolution.

Then there’s the second phase of the revolt, which begins after the Peel Commission in 1937. That’s when the British brought in thousands and thousands of troops, weapons, tanks, planes — they were strafing the countryside. The purpose was to crush the revolt as quickly as possible. Many historians feel that was done as quickly as possible because World War II was on the horizon, so they had to crush this revolt and get out of there, basically.

That’s the historical background for the real-life events that you dramatize in Palestine 36, largely through focusing on at least two Palestinian families. Amir and Khuloud are urban intellectuals in Jerusalem, and the villagers of rural Al Basma. The two families are connected by Yusuf. Tell us about these characters and how fact-based they are?

The heart of the film is the Palestinian villagers. Yusuf and his family, and Rabab [Yafa Bakri] and her daughter Afra [Wardi Eilabouni, with Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who was Emmy nominated for the HBO series Succession, playing the grandmother Hanan], and the little boy Kareem [Ward Helou] and his father, the priest [Jalal Altawil plays Father Boulos]. These are our villagers.

There’s Khuloud [Lebanon-born Yasmine Al Massri, costar of the ABC-TV FBI series Quantico] and Amir [Tunisia-born Dhafer L’Abidine] in the city. And there’s Khalid [Saleh Bakri, a frequent collaborator with Jacir and star of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You], a dockworker.

These characters all link up. For me, it was important, I didn’t want to have a hero — the one hero to do this classic story; you follow this person from here and there’s one hero. There’s no hero, they’re just regular people that are living through this very intense moment and they make a decision. All of them make a decision, whether it’s very small or big, wrong or right. They’re all confronted with history and they do something, they make a decision about how to move forward.

The Palestinian characters are all fictional, they all come from different places. Khuloud, for example, the female journalist, she’s sort of a mix of upper-class female journalist, a socialite that was living in Jerusalem at the time and she was known very much for her parties with the British. The Palestinian elite was mixing with the British a lot. And women who were journalists at the time and founding printing presses — and not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon and Egypt — they’d write under male names, for two reasons. Yes, to be taken seriously in a patriarchal world, but also because these places had colonial governments and to write under a name when you were being critical, actually it’s protection.

And when we first see Khuloud, she’s cross-dressing. Why?

Yes, exactly. Why not? [Laughs]

It’s surprising. My interpretation is that as a woman in patriarchal society, she was assuming male roles that were denied to women.

Yeah. She’s writing under a male name. She’s having some fun with it, takes Amir’s suit. Who’s wearing the pants? [Laughs]

The four British characters in the film are all based on actual historical characters. Wingate [a British officer and Christian Zionist played by Robert Aramayo] was a real guy, a really violent, unhinged man. They just released some papers with some new stuff about him; he was really much more crazy than my film shows. For me, his long hair was my poetic license but not historically accurate.

He was always dirty, his uniform was always dirty, he never showered. He was known for being that way. Later, he had long hair, after he gets dismissed from the British Army, he was dismissed from Palestine actually. For me I wanted to indicate he was outside of the system, doing his own thing in the countryside. His unkempt hair was a way to signal that — but you can’t smell him onscreen.

Thomas, the secretary [to the high commissioner], is based on a real guy who actually quit and became a Marxist. It’s an amazing story. He went there thinking there were good intentions, that they were doing something for the native population and it was helpful, then slowly, in his diaries, he realizes it is a failed project with an agenda, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it. He ends up quitting and becoming a Marxist and anti-colonial activist for the rest of his life. In my film he’s Hopkins [played by Billy Howle], but his real name was Hodgkin.

Oscar winner Jeremy Irons portrays Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, Britain’s high commissioner for the Palestine Mandate. How did you manage to cast such a high-profile movie star?

Because he has an Irish wife, and we were on the Berlin film festival’s jury together. Irons was president of the jury. So we spent a lot of time together and became friends. I was writing this project at the time and telling him about it one day over breakfast and [his wife] was like, “This is amazing! Jeremy, you’ve got to be in this!” He was like, “Is there a role for me?” I was like, “Yeah there’s a role for you!” And he said, “Let me read the script. And if it’s helpful, I’d like to be part of it.” It was a beautiful role.

Liam Cunningham, costar of Ken Loach’s 2007 drama about the Irish War of Independence, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and of HBO’s Game of Thrones, plays [Charles] Tegart, the real-life counterinsurgency expert who explains to the high commissioner and other British officials in your film the necessity of extremely brutal counterterrorist tactics to suppress the Arab Revolt.

Is this scene a direct reference to the scenes of the pacification specialist in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers?

People have brought up The Battle of Algiers a lot with this film. But you’re the first person [to connect it to] that scene. Yes, you’re the first person to put your finger on it.

Charles Tegart was Irish. They reference Ireland in the dialogue. That’s why Liam got such a kick out of playing that scene. This expert, he was in India, then they brought him to Palestine. He made a whole career out of this. He was the first one to come up with the concept of a wall, not the Israelis — they did it later. Everything the British did, the Israelis just copied the blueprint of it. And there are military forts all across the country, in order to create this system of control, called “Tegart’s forts.” They still exist.

Is that similar to the Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam?

Yeah. Absolutely.

Are the period clips actual archival footage?

Yeah. Every time you see the [original screen ratio], that’s real archival footage — it’s not manipulated. We restored it and I colorized it; I didn’t want black and white.

Your film seems to suggest that two peoples were victimized by the Holocaust. Obviously, the Jewish people; but also, the Palestinians were impacted by the immigration of more and more Jews fleeing Nazism. Many came to Palestine. Especially as other countries around the world, including the US largely —

Shut their doors. Absolutely.

But of course, it wasn’t the Palestinians who perpetrated the Holocaust.

The European Aryans did it. They did the most vile thing: the Holocaust. Then didn’t want to take responsibility for it. And instead of dealing with their own racism, they threw it on Palestinians, who have no history of antisemitism. We are Semites also [laughs]. That was the [Westerners’] way of dealing with it: that we would deal with it. They shut their doors, the US shut their doors, and thought, “OK, the way we deal with our racism is to put these people somewhere else.” Which is just ridiculous.

The Zionist project considered many other places besides Palestine: Argentina, Uganda, Palestine. There were many proposals. I think it would have been the same thing in Uganda, if the Zionist project was about dispossessing the native population. Palestine ended up being what was chosen.

Palestine has never been closed to Jews. Jewish pilgrims have been coming to Palestine — I said there’s an indigenous population. There are also Jews who have been coming to Palestine for hundreds of years, as well as Muslims and Christians. Bosnians fled persecution and came to Palestine. Circassians fled persecution and came to Palestine — I’m talking about in the 1800s. Armenians fled persecution and came to Palestine and lived among the Palestinians and became part of the fabric of life.

And if Jews had done that — escaped, had nowhere to go, needed to be protected, and they came like so many communities — we would be in a very different place today. The Zionist project wasn’t about that. It was about control and dispossession.

Which the British facilitated for their own imperial interests?

Of course. They played both sides.

Earlier, you mentioned the Peel Commission. One of the most dramatic, pivotal scenes of your entire film is a dinner party where the Peel Commission’s results are announced over the radio at the Jerusalem home of the intellectuals Amir and Khuloud.

Palestine 36 clearly shows that the British, under the mandate as the colonizers, gave preferential treatment to the Zionists to pursue London’s own colonial interests. In retrospect, considering the massive suffering of Palestinians with the events in the 1930s depicted in your film, continuing with the Nakba, and most recently with the Gaza genocide and the ongoing persecution in the West Bank, do you think that even though it was a bad deal, that in retrospect the Palestinians would have been better off if they had accepted the partition offered? As the British radio announcer says when they’re broadcasting the Peel Commission’s results: “Half a loaf is better than no bread.”

I think it would have led to exactly the same thing. I don’t know why anybody would agree that a colonial or outside power would decide. The British and French partitioned the whole Arab world and all of Africa. They had no right to do so. So why anybody would accept that — it’s never going to happen. Now, you’re asking would we be in a better place today had they accepted that? The Peel Commission and that announcement that’s on the radio is word for word the conclusion of the Peel Commission, it’s not my creative writing.

The Peel Commission was not giving Palestinians independence. It wasn’t just partition, it was also that the Palestinians would not be ruled by Palestinians —

And they’d be forcibly removed.

Yes, but they’d be ruled by Transjordan. Even if they split the Palestinian part, it wouldn’t be run by Palestinians — it would be run by the Transjordanian government, a pro-British creation. It wasn’t even independence in that way. It’s very important. Arabs aren’t this big blob, twenty-two countries are not all the same. It’s not monolithic.

Where did you shoot Palestine 36?

We shot in Jordan, Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Bethlehem. This film was made under such difficult conditions. We had to stop shooting four times. It was terrible. And we continued. What was supposed to be three months ended up being almost two years struggling to make this film, because we made it during the genocide. This film is really a testament to what Palestinian creativity is and what Palestinians can do, even in the worst of conditions.

We almost died making it. Now we give it to the world. We hope they can meet us; we make films to connect. It’s all about connecting. That connection cannot be severed. We’ve got to fight for it.

[Laughs] I don’t think it’s happening now. It’s been happening for a long time. There’s a new wave of Palestinian directors, there have been lots of films over the years. I think there are less now. However, it’s because of Watermelon [Pictures] distributing the films — that has always been the obstacle in America, it has always been difficult for our films to be seen in the US, to be shown.

We have been left out of the distribution in the US. We’re blocked from reaching our audience and we’re prevented from being in cinemas. There are the gatekeepers — now, because of Watermelon, there is distribution of those films that others have been afraid to touch. Or if they did touch — I have had distribution with my other films but getting them into cinemas is a battle. You have to have a distributor ready to take on that battle. Watermelon is committed to doing that.

At the Academy Awards this year, presenter Javier Bardem said: “No to war. Free Palestine!” What did you think of that?

I loved that and I thought it was so much needed. I was wondering why, in general, the Oscars were so quiet and nobody was saying anything. And not even just about Palestine. The state of the world is beyond awful. It’s the darkest times everywhere. Thank God for Javier, that he said something. And I wonder why more people didn’t say anything.