Palestine 36

One of the essential characteristics of images, especially moving images such as cinema, is the powerful mnemonic relationship they maintain with reality. If we add to this the power that comes from fiction, we find in them a fundamental tool for understanding the world.

The film Palestine 36 fits perfectly into this framework of reactivating memory in times of absolute forgetfulness, such as those we are living in, marked unequivocally by the mechanical temporality of instantaneity.

In fact, it is no coincidence that the director deliberately included a date in the title: 1936 was her choice. One could think of other films; unfortunately, there are so many possibilities: 1948 (the Nakba), 1967 (illegal occupation of Palestinian territories), 1993 (Oslo Accords), 2000 (Second Intifada), 2014 (military aggression against Gaza). All these temporal references are the result of events which, as in the film, have shaped the history of a colonized people to the present day.

Dates are important contextual markers; they carry history embedded within them. Hence the director's wise decision to include the date in the film's title: in this way, necessary memory is joined by history and its trajectory. It is this association that allows the film to free itself from the constraints of a document that merely reaches us and presents itself to us. History, unlike memory, persists in time; it transcends our time. History has a past, a present, and a future. Hence its importance in the context of resistance to which the film wants to belong. Annemarie Jacir never wanted to make a “neutral” film; she could never do so. Her film is, rightly, biased. Resistance, history tells us, has a future; resistance, the story told in the film tells us, has a future. It is therefore not possible to be neutral in the face of history.

Understanding the world through the eyes of image makers and sharing it with us is therefore important for us to be able to think independently and informatively.

The director places Palestine 36 before the great catastrophe of 1948, the Palestinian Nakba, and in doing so, she gives us key elements for understanding the trauma that continues to this day. This cannot, therefore, be seen as a deferred action, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, that is, a look back free from trauma. The trauma is very much present and deeply ingrained in the Palestinian population, whether inside the occupied territories or in exile, where the majority live.

The Palestinian question is not, and never has been, a religious issue. It is a colonial problem. The film gives us important clues about the European colonial presence, especially in the period following the infamous Balfour Declaration and its repercussions in the area then known as Palestine, with the promiscuity that the colonizer maintained with the new Zionist organizations prepared to occupy the territory and expel its legitimate inhabitants.

And, strangely, the images that the film shows us are almost mild compared to the developments that 90 years of colonization, first by Britain and then by Israel, have brought us, in a spiral of increasing violence to the current ethical limit of genocide. The exceptional nature of the violence at that time, which was foreign to the inhabitants of the region, has now become normalized, unfortunately becoming commonplace for the current inhabitants of the illegally occupied territories. Grandchildren, parents, and some survivors who refused to leave in 1948 are witnesses to an aggression that seems endless.

There is a moment in the film when a Palestinian resistance fighter is violently assaulted and then killed because, in front of the British military, he maintains a smile of hope. It is a special moment, as it represents much of the form of resistance that this people has found. Never buried in nihilistic pessimism (which could well have overtaken them, given the harsh conditions in which they survive), but rather in a lasting and firm relationship with high-level forms of culture. Poetry, music, visual arts, cinema, and thought have always been companions on the path of resistance.


This people dignifies its culture by actively preserving its values. Let us remember the great poet Mahmoud Darwish, the indispensable thinker Edward Said, but above all, the poetry of Refaat Alareer (a poet murdered, along with his entire family, in one of the many bombings carried out by Israel in its current aggression against Gaza):

If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

Palestine 36 is exactly that. Its importance is great in a world that hypocritically refuses to see this. Perhaps cinema has the power to change this situation. When everything seems to be falling apart, utopia is always with us...

P.S.: As I write, I receive news that there is a “risk of death” for the eight hunger strikers, out of a total of 24 prisoners in England for peacefully opposing Israel's aggression against Gaza and the UK's military complicity. Their organization has been declared terrorist. As they enter their sixth week of strike action, they face the risk of irreversible health problems. It seems that the empire that forged the events of 1936 remains stuck in that condition and continues to act as such — even though history has since taken a different path.