Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2016, pp. 73-74
Music & Arts
Nabil al-Raee of Jenin Freedom Theatre on “The Siege”
IF ALL HAD GONE according to plan, The Jenin Freedom Theatre’s production of “The Siege” would have been staged at New York’s Public Theater this past spring. Of course, for people living under a punitive occupation where every form of resistance is put down with violence, life rarely goes according to plan. Definitely not planned was a masked gunman’s assassination of the Freedom Theatre’s co-founder Juliano Mer Khamis just outside the theater. Five years later, the murder is still “under investigation.”
Nor was the middle-of-the-night arrest and detention by Israeli soldiers in June 2012 of Nabil al-Raee, Mer Khamis’ successor as artistic director. And he was one of six theater personnel arrested that year alone. The theater, situated in the Jenin Refugee Camp, also has been firebombed numerous times by persons unknown.
In the face of these non-theatrical challenges, this year the Jenin Freedom Theatre celebrated its 10th anniversary. In that decade, it has produced 24 plays, performed all over the West Bank, published 3 photography books, established a 3-year theater training program, and toured 15 countries, including the United States, where the company staged an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in 2011 and Athol Fugard’s “The Island” in 2013.
The Freedom Theatre’s biggest project thus far is “The Siege.” Al-Raee, passing through New York on his way home after participating on a panel appropriately entitled “Prevented Performances” at the Theater Communication Group’s (TCG) national conference in Washington, DC, spoke about the genesis of “The Siege,” calling it “our first complete project starting from zero.”
The play is based on Israel’s 39-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during its 2002 invasion of the West Bank. Resistance fighters, including from Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and members of the Palestinian Security Forces, along with some 300 civilians, monks and nuns, sought sanctuary in one of the most venerated sites in Christendom. They were without water, electricity or food and surrounded by Israeli tanks and troops. The siege ended when the 39 surviving fighters (eight were killed by Israeli sharpshooters in the course of the siege) agreed to self-exile. They were not allowed to say good-bye to their families, nor have they been allowed to return. Al-Raee and his colleagues spent a year and a half of research that included interviewing the deportees—the 26 sent to Gaza—by Skype, and in-person conversations with the 13 exiled to five countries in Europe.
Al-Raee drew on the Palestinian fighters’ memories and testimonies to create a script from their point of view. This is especially important for Western audiences, whose politicians and media conflate Palestinian resistance with terrorism, and never ask what they are resisting and why.
Audiences responded enthusiastically to the play when the Freedom Theatre toured Great Britain in 2015. A review in the May 21, 2015 Guardian deemed it a “compelling theatrical experience with a rough and ready energy, and, in the very act of its telling, speaks for the voiceless and forgotten.”
This, Al-Raee said, is the goal of art: to connect people rather than dividing them as a way of effecting change. Artists, he continued, should “not exclude ourselves as though we live on a different planet. We must make change with the people.”
Al-Raee was encouraged by the amount of interest in the Freedom Theatre and in “The Siege” from fellow actors and directors he met at the TCG conference, which left him feeling that “artists can make it happen if politicians cannot.” Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre are doing their utmost to bring “The Siege” to the U.S. in the fall of 2017.
—Jane Adas
