1936: Palestine in revolt
The new film Palestine 36 tells the story of the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. The uprising saw Palestinians battle against both the British occupation and Zionist forces. Arthur Townend spoke to author Phil Marfleet about how the revolt set the precedent for both resistance and repression today
Sunday 23 November 2025
Palestinian Arabs rally in Abou Ghosh during the 1936 strike
What was the context of the Arab Revolt?
First of all, the Palestinians are facing a large British military occupation. The British are in Egypt and Iraq as well. The French are in Syria.
There is a European imperial presence across the region—everywhere there’s resistance. In Egypt, for example, there was a revolution that started in 1919.
So there’s a very high level of consciousness about the meaning of imperialism—and the Palestinians are part of that resistance.
Into the 1920s, the Zionist settler movement is picking up very quickly. There are large-scale evictions of Palestinians, mostly peasants, from their land.
Thousands of families have got nowhere to go except to Palestinian cities such as Jaffa and Haifa. The Palestinian Arab urban population increased by 40 percent between the First World War and the mid-1930s. They’re forced to live on the fringes of those cities.
As Palestinians resist this process, they’re facing not just the British but also Zionist militias protecting new settlements, who are, of course, backed by the British. The British established caches of arms for the settlers to use.
By the 1930s, the British are supplying arms directly to Zionist militias and providing training of various sorts.
Throughout this, organisations from below are developing. The Young Men’s Muslim Association, which organises right across Palestine, is very important. While the Palestinian working class is very small, it’s very real and mainly organised by the Palestinian Arab Workers Society.
In the early 1930s, for the first time there’s evidence of armed resistance. An organisation called the Green Hand appears, which starts to attack British forces and Zionist settlements.
What shape did the resistance take? In particular, what was the role of the working class?
In April 1936, the Intifada begins with a general strike—I would describe the Intifada as one of the great mass movements of the 20th century precisely because it engages really everyone in Palestine.
Of course, there’s a Palestinian land-owning class which dominates the leadership of the national movement. It’s conservative, seeking compromises with the British.
But the movement from below is very compelling. It is based on what the Palestinians called “national committees”. That really means local committees and direct democracy.
So the shape of the resistance is dictated by rank and file organisation at the base. This is what makes it distinct from other national liberation movements—there wasn’t overall national coordination.
Now we mustn’t overstate the role of the working class—it was small and marginalised by the Zionist settler movement. That movement demanded Hebrew labour. In effect, they wanted an economy entirely populated by Zionist migrants.
So there were campaigns at various points to exclude Arab labour. The effect is that the Palestinian working class is small. There are workers on the railways, in quarrying, construction and in a big olive oil industry making soap.
It’s a working class under pressure, but not one large enough to make a profound effect on the national movement. The striking feature is that the revolt was a movement of all Palestinian Arabs.
These are the key features of the Intifada and they explain why it lasted so long. The British couldn’t put down the Intifada for three years, because it was an anti‑colonial movement organised from below.
What role did women play?
A key feature of the revolt is the vibrancy of the movement from below, and women are very much part of that.
Some took up arms and were killed. Others were very active in village and neighbourhood defence groups. They would play the sort of role of lookouts, issuing warnings about likely attacks. In this sense, they were an integral part of the resistance.
There were also young women organising school strikes. Actually, this is a feature of all the three great Palestinian Intifadas—1936, 1987 and 2000. You go to school in the normal way, and then you mobilise the school to go out and strike. This was done in particular by young women.
The British found it enormously difficult to deal with women’s resistance. In the British Military Archives there’s a lot of references to “rebellious women”, and, “what on earth do we do with them?”
What was the repression like?
The British have got centuries of experience of dealing with anti‑colonial movements all over the world, especially in India.
A whole series of British officers who served in India were mobilised. In effect, the British have rehearsed the subordination of colonial peoples for generations, and now they apply that to the people of Palestine.
In Palestine they not only raised a police force that had recruited from the Black and Tans—a British paramilitary force—they also recruited from settler communities. The British had really considerable forces, something in the order of 30,000 men. And they use the most extreme brutal methods to put down resistance.
Palestinian ‘freedom struggle will win’: interview with author Phil Marfleet
One author, Matthew Hughes, calculates that the British forces arrested around 550,000 Palestinians during the course of the Intifada. In a society of only 1.3 million, it’s quite extraordinary. The British also built 13 concentration camps—that is what they actually called them.
Britain “tutored” the leaders of the Zionist movement in how to put down Palestinian resistance.
It’s not true that the British and the Zionists agreed about everything. And the Zionist leadership was always attempting to extract more from Britain.
But as the British face a mass Palestinian resistance, they increasingly work with Zionist militias. By the 1930s, these were very well established. Most important is the Haganah—the Defence.
It’s not just about concentration camps. It’s about the destruction of villages, the despoiling of the land, the destruction of trees and crops, the blowing up of neighbourhoods.
They are precisely the techniques that were subsequently used by Israeli governments—curfews, exile and banishment, occupation of villages, arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, assassination, torture, concentration camps, covert operations, the use of collaborators, construction of walls, the use of military law against civilians—it’s endless.
The British invented the techniques of dropping leaflets from the air, saying, “This is an evacuation order,” and then they would bomb the village. We have seen this a thousand times in the genocide in Gaza.
Perhaps most notorious are the special night squads under British officer Orde Wingate, which attack Palestinian villages and urban neighbourhoods without warning. He recruits leading figures from the Zionist militias, including Moshe Dayan, who later becomes a leading figure in Israeli politics.
So the Intifada comes to an end because of sustained repression by the British and the Zionist militias. The Palestinians are eventually exhausted by the scale of the violence.
The state of Israel, which comes into existence in May 1948, is unthinkable without years of British repression of the resistance.
Are there lessons that can be applied to the liberation struggle today?
The key takeaway is that Palestinian struggles have got a very long history.
The Intifada demonstrated how people resist vigorously, and that the movement from below is critical.
But it also set precedents for Palestinian resistance which reappear. The Intifadas of 1987 and 2000 don’t make sense unless we think about the struggle of 1936. There’s the Arabic term sumud—steadfastness or fortitude. The Palestinians have demonstrated that type of fortitude since the 1930s. Against overwhelming odds, the resistance continues.
Despite everything, despite Israel’s alliances with the world’s most powerful nations, and the United States in particular, the Israelis have not been able to evict the Palestinians.
Why? Well, Palestinians, in one sense, are not unique. They’re like other people around the world who resist colonialism. It took Irish activism 300 years to get rid of the British from most of Ireland. In Algeria, it took 150 years of resistance.
In the case of Palestine, you know, you’ve got over a century now of resistance. And neither the British nor the Israelis have been able to destroy that resistance because people fight back—and sometimes they use revolutionary means.
This film is not just ‘history’
The new film Palestine 36 is set in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt—the conveniently forgotten Palestinian uprising against British rule and accelerating Zionist colonisation of Palestine.
The film had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival where it was given a 20-minute standing ovation.
The story unfolds against the backdrop of a Palestinian general strike that rapidly escalates into a full blown revolt.
The British forces use mass arrests, house demolitions, collective punishment and repression. All these are tactics the Israeli military will later use.
Archival footage, beautifully restored and colourised, is sewn seamlessly into the narrative. We see Jewish immigrants disembarking from boats, fleeing European antisemitism yet at the same time displacing Palestinians.
There are big names in the cast. Jeremy Irons delivers a chilling performance as the British high commissioner Arthur Wauchope, portraying the epitome of imperial arrogance.
But it’s the lesser known actors playing the Palestinian workers who carry the film most with their emotional weight.
Palestinian society is rarely depicted in Western storytelling, so it was interesting to see a portrayal of the Arab bourgeoisie. Here we are shown what the British do best—divide and rule. We meet wealthy landowners and businesspeople who see Zionist immigration as a business opportunity.
The film shows how they collaborate with the British. So the “liberal” newspaper in Jerusalem takes bribes to publish faked, pro‑Zionist Arab opinions.
Through the character of Yusuf, a young worker who takes a job with the paper, we see how naivety evolves into a revolutionary outlook as the brutality of British rule radicalises people.
The film is powerful storytelling, weaved in through hard facts and the legacy of British colonialism. It shows how the 1917 Balfour Declaration—Britain’s promise of a “national home for the Jewish people”—set the stage for the 1930s.
We see how Jews fleeing genocide in Europe are used to prop up Britain’s Zionist project. The film contrasts British people sipping tea as Jewish people open their passports with Nazi stamps while Palestinian people have their homes and crops destroyed.
Palestine 36 is a sweeping historical epic, but it is not just a reminder of history—it is the very root of what’s happening in the present.
Maryam Tariq
