193: Palestine 36 Chambers, with Annemarie Jacir

In a powerful episode of *Bad Hasbara*, host Matt Lieb and guest Annemarie Jacir, director of the groundbreaking film *Palestine 36*, confront the erasure of Palestinian history and the deliberate distortion of colonial narratives. Jacir reveals how her epic, 10-year labor of love—filmed under occupation, with a Palestinian crew building tanks and buses from scratch—was made possible only through sheer will and defiance. The film, set in 1936 during the first major Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule, reframes history not as a tale of two peoples in eternal conflict, but as a story of British complicity in laying the blueprint for modern occupation. Jacir dismantles Zionist critiques that accuse her of 'erasing Jews,' pointing out that the film is explicitly from a Palestinian perspective—and that the absence of Jewish characters is no more problematic than excluding Hitler from a film about the Holocaust. She exposes the historical reality of Zionist-led manipulation, including fake news campaigns and the creation of Muslim associations to fracture Palestinian unity. The episode culminates in a searing critique of today’s settler violence, where even Israeli officials now condemn 'Jewish terror'—a rare moment of internal Hasbara alignment with global outrage—while the IDF continues to protect settlers.