Articles

The Freedom Theatre in Jenin - Yesterday’s Story

by: Elias Khoury date: 2007-06-13

I met Juliano Mer Khamis in New York. He had taken his film Arna’s Children and come to New York to collect an award at the Tribeca Film Festival. When I watched the documentary film I was stunned. The film was more than cinema was able to bear. It was an astonishing testimony of the children of Jenin Refugee Camp, for whom Arna Mer Khamis, the mother of Juliano, built a theatre. We saw the children acting, playing, having fun and being creative. Suddenly the children have grown up and become young men of the Second Intifada. Arna grew older with them, and was struck by cancer. The children themselves, who were wearing theatre costumes and having fun, had become leaders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, and we saw them opening fire and fighting. Then we saw how they died one by one, and saw Arna die of cancer without finding a place in which to be buried.

It was not an ordinary film. I do not know from where Juliano drew the courage and bravery to create this masterpiece, which appeared before my eyes as a testimony stronger than both life and death together.

However, Juliano Mer Khamis did not suffice with art, and did not consider compiling a montage of old scenes that he took of the children, with live footage of their resistance and their death years later, to be the end of the matter. On the contrary, the director followed up on his film. The film is scenes of life, and life has to go on. In order for life to go on, a plan was made to rebuild The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp. Today the theatre is being rebuilt, its halls welcome children once again, and Jenin Refugee Camp is filled with the love of life, in the midst of massive destruction and the huge amount of death created by the Israeli tanks and bulldozers.

Some days ago Juliano Mer Khamis came to New York and we met again. The dream that persuaded him after the film of the necessity of rebuilding The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp has begun to be realised. The theatre is there today. It represents a bastion of freedom and a decision to resist death with art and the love of life.

People listened to the Palestinian-Israeli director (whose mother was a Jewish Israeli and whose father was the Palestinian activist Saliba Khamis) speak of the joy that the children create out of art. The images of destruction and rubble which until today still occupy the camp’s alleyways and yards, give his words an air of implausibility. How is it that he and his colleagues are building a theatre, a library, and rehearsal and computer rooms in the middle of rubble? Juliano replied with a smile that this is the law of life. To resist means to love life and to create it, and to triumph over oppression with hope and love.

This theatre being built in Jenin Refugee Camp today is not a theatre for the freedom of the children of Palestine only, but a theatre for the freedom of us all. We feel solidarity with the Palestinians because they pay the price of life, because they are in misery and under siege. They have committed no sin except for being Palestinians, who are subject to brutal ethnic cleansing that has begun today to take on a new form which we can term cultural cleansing.

The Palestinians lived through ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, ensured by the Dalet Plan, the implementation of which was monitored by Ben-Gurion personally according to the great Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. However, what they are confronting in the West Bank and Gaza Strip today is ethnic cleansing of a new variety, which is called the total destruction of cultural and social life, in their country devastated by the Occupation. From the Wall to the checkpoints (mahaseem as they are known there) to the blockade and the loss of employment opportunities, the Israeli plan today is no less brutal than the Dalet Plan, and its goal is to transform an entire people into rubble.

Here, cultural cleansing plays a fundamental role in the achievement of the Israeli goal: hitting the universities, disrupting lessons in the schools, and turning all manifestations of life in the camps into a permanent funeral.

Today, resistance to cultural, ethnic cleansing constitutes one facet of the resistance to the Occupation, and could be the most imperative. Just as culture played a basic role in the restoration of the Palestinian name, and in the building of the awareness that paved the way for the Palestinian revolution that erupted in 1965, resistance to cultural, ethnic cleansing is today one of the ways of thwarting the Israeli occupation plan, which wants to transform the Palestinian people into rubble.

Herein lies the pioneering nature of The Freedom Theatre project, in a camp in Jenin. It stands on ground laid down by the child martyrs, who found that the meaning they learned in Arna’s theatre lead them in their early youth to create the epic of Jenin Refugee Camp, through its heroic resistance in 2002. These are the children who we watched in the film Arna’s Children, dying and their blood covering their dream of becoming actors and artists. They are the true owners of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp.

The reconstruction of the theatre is not only loyalty to them or an attempt to revive their memory; rather, it is an act of belief that resistance to cultural, ethnic cleansing is through culture itself. The scenes in which we saw the martyr children acting out a passage by Ghassan Kanafani point to this. Kanafani, who was one of the first Palestinian intellectuals to grasp that the rebuilding of the Palestinian cultural existence would occur through the rebuilding of its culture, confronted death before the children did. We did not find anything to cover his broken body with other than his words.

The question is not how The Freedom Theatre can be built in a demolished camp that is still exposed to the brutality of the tanks of the Occupation.

The question is rather when the experience of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin will be transformed into a general experience in all of the Palestinian refugee camps. Every camp and every town and village is in need of a cultural centre, a library, theatrical performances, cinema and literary evenings.

And so we say to the Occupier that its plan of social, cultural and ethnic cleansing will be defeated.

We are fostering hope and taming fear, and we are making our own freedom.

Juliano Mer Khamis and his colleagues in The Freedom Theatre are opening a small window of hope. Greetings and love to them.

Elias Khoury is a writer who lives in Beirut. His books include “Gate of the Sun”, “Yalo” and others.