In a recent Crossing the Line podcast, Seth Porcello interviewed Juliano Mer–Khamis, a director of the Freedom Theater in the Jenin refugee camp, a theater for children. Mer–Khamis gives us these solemn words of wisdom:
The Palestinian people are going to be cut into fragments, which has already been done. They are gonna be surrounded by walls and fences, electric ones, with tanks around, and a lot of missiles from Apaches, like happening in Gaza. There are gonna be massacres in the future because people are not going to sit quit, they are going to march to the fence and try to break down the checkpoints…I see no future, I see no hope, I see no even bits of light in the coming, I believe, three, four, five years. What I see is bloodshed of suicide bombers and massacres like happening in Gaza and much worse.
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There’s two ways to deal with this conflict: either you surrender or you struggle. Struggling is not something that you can discuss upon the results or make speculation how it will come out, you just struggle. Because if you don’t struggle you surrender…I think, the Palestinians, one of the main phenomena, they are still struggling and not surrendering and I want to be part of this struggle, in my tools. There struggle is my struggle. I’m not a good person who is going to help the “poor Arabs” or the “poor kids.” I’m joining them hand by hand, because Zionism is also my enemy, my dream is to live together, Arab, Jews, in one free democratic country and Zionism is exactly the opposite. Zionism is all about ghettoing people into walls, it is about separation, it is about ethnic racism.
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What happen in Jenin, in Palestine, which does not happen elsewhere is a culture of death which is growing. And what is culture of death? Because of the imbalance of powers between the Israelis and the Palestinians the main tool of the Palestinians against the Israelis…is their ability to die. Now this is a very dangerous thing, to build a resistance on the ability to die creates a very hopeless perspective…We have a whole generation who wants to be shahids, not because they are incited or because they are brainwashed, no, no, no, this is the Western interpretation. Because they know that if they want to resist the occupation they will face death. And this imbalance between the Israelis and the Palestinians everyone who will resist the occupation will die and either he suicide inside Israel or either he suicide outside Israel.
Any kind of resistance, today, the name of the game in this region; as long as the Palestinian puts a gun on his neck, hangs a gun, even if this gun doesn’t shoot, the Israelis have the OK to kill him. This is the concerns within Israel, this is the concerns within the world. They call it “militants, armed people were killed.” Once you are armed you are a terrorist once you are a terrorist it is OK to kill you.
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I do believe in guerrilla fighting. I don’t think the pen and the camera and the stage can replace the gun. They are both legitimate tools against the occupation…Guns has no value against Apaches and tanks. Guns has value when they shoot at the right targets and this can be only where those fighters and where those guns are backed withe knowledge, with culture, with discourse, with free discourse, with theater, with music, with revolutionary songs as we saw in different places in the world. And Israel knows that and Israel is working very hard to eliminate any kind of different resistance: destroying networks, computers, libraries, has one purpose, one purpose, to push those people into only the guns and the mosques because it is very easy to fight this kind of enemy…And that’s why I think the culture resistance or the struggle for culture for basic humanelements of life are very important today.
Words of wisdom indeed! Thanks for this.
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I, too, don’t see much light or hope in the future – but I don’t see hope for Palestine for the next 50 years.
I don’t like Zionism, I thought 1948 was a tragedy, but the Palestinians need to do something else – they’ve been doing this resistance for over half a century, and Israel has ONLY got STRONGER over the years. Whatever the Palestinians are doing, it’s not working. Of course, I accept the right for Palestinians to resist the settlements and strike military targets (but not civilian ones), but they seriously need to put their thinking caps on – on their current trajectory, Israel will outlast them, and slowly demolish them, as they are doing.
Maybe the Palestinians should elect to join Jordan, or give up Gaza and put all their resistance and efforts into the West Bank.
It’s sad – no one will help them. The UN is controlled by the US, UK, China, Russia and France – and those 5 countries either support Israel or care nothing for Palestine. Other Arab nations can’t spare the money to fight Israel, and the EU isn’t going to lift a finger against Israel either.
I don’t have the answers for Palestine – but all I can say is that doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, is one definition of insanity. The way they are going – they can’t win. Israel constantly researches and improves its weapons, while Palestinians have to make do with old, aging soviet hand-me-downs which are becoming more and more obselete by the day.
Juliano is a wealthy, influential actor, a Palestinian-Arab-Jewish prince of the system, whose mother (Arna Mer-Khamis) was one of the more interesting Communist anti-Zionist activists. His extensive involvement in community theater in Jenin, Palestine, (documented in the film “Arna’s Children”) was a road not taken, with many of his child actors later joining (and dying in) Islamic resistance movements in Jenin and as perpetrators of terror attacks in Israel.
He does have the problem that the people he effectively nurtured made the effortless transition to slaughterers of poor Arab Jews, people without his connections, wealth, and influence, and he is seen–by anyone outside the Israeli “Palestine-in-place-of-Israel” ‘peace’ camp as an exceptionally dangerous man. I expect that the next time he meets with one of his former students, he will be jailed for supporting terrorism or incitement, and the fact that he continues to do so openly is a sign of his contempt for his country, an effect of his largely ideology-driven reading of the situation which he inherited from his mother.
Eurosabra:
Could you provide some more details/a link or two to more details? Thanks.
It’s pretty well documented in “Arna’s Children”, the film about the initial children’s theater in Jenin. Juliano is pretty forthright about how his charges ended up, has continued to meet with the survivors, and is probably the best-placed individual besides the Gazan psychiatrist Eyad al-Serraj to do post-terror intervention and rehabilitation.
http://www.geocities.com/lawrenceofcyberia/palbios/pa13000.html
(extensive biographies of the child actors turned terrorists/resistance fighters.)
Eyad al-Serraj in Gaza also faced the same problem, with the caveat that al-Serraj’s Gaza Community Mental Health Program (as documented by Shulamith Hareven in _The Vocabulary of Peace_) was explicitly intended to provide rehabilitation to individuals with a terror/resistance past: conditions worsen, people fall out of touch, the resistance provides a support network and social prestige, the IDF eventually kills your client/patient.
Juliano must be intensely frustrated by those developments and his (admittedly risky) continuing contact with Jenin part of an effort to forestall a similar disaster in the future. His interview made no allusion to the past for obvious reasons, things are discouraging enough as they are.
Incidentally he does engage in incitement (under Israeli law) in the interview and he has the potential for a real cause célèbre.
Eurosabra, thanks for the link. However, it doesn’t support your contention that “many” (plural) of the child actors have become terrorists and “slaughterers of poor Arab Jews…”
According to your link, one of the actors attacked unarmed civilians in a suicide terrorist attack. The others are described as fighting armed Israeli troops.
Now, maybe that page is incomplete and you’re correct. Nonetheless, you haven’t provided a citation that supports your claim.
Overall, your statements seem to imply that his (and his mother’s) teaching is making these kids into fighters and terrorists, although maybe that’s not the impression you intended to give. The biographies you link to don’t give that impression; rather, they suggest that events like having a child who has been shot by Israeli troops die in your arms, or having your mother killed by a sniper, combined with the lack of any believable hope for the future, are the primary motivations driving young Palestinian men into armed resistance and into terrorism.
Sorry about the ambiguities, Juliano has the problem of getting it from both sides as an anti-establishment gadfly. He subscribes to a radically Socialist interpretation of the dispute which means that he engages in fairly subversive action for which lesser lights (cf. Tali Fahima) are routinely jailed, while stymied in his activism by the attraction of the resistance for “his kids”. Islamic Jihad offered them a social support network as well. Freedom Theater is one of the few totally Palestinian-run cultural organizations to come to prominence on the Israeli scene, and Juliano is “staff”, in a supporting, advisory role.
There are lots of Israelis working with Palestinian cultural organizations who *don’t* handicap themselves by calling for armed resistance.
No problemo my friend. Love the blog, by the way.
When he sets up this dichotomy
How is he defining “surrender?” It seems odd to make (or promote) a choice between surrender and struggle when you don’t define the first and you claim the results of the second are impossible to predict (well, he predicts lots of people getting killed in the struggle, but that’s about it.)
That the current situation is untenable is widely understood. But this makes an argument in favor of armed guerilla resistance while simultaneously stating that such a resistance isn’t going to work. Am i reading this right?
The sole survivor — Zakaria Zubeidi — is an interesting case. On Israel’s most-wanted list for years as a top leader of the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade (a terrorist organization under any description), Zubedi accepted amnesty from Israel in 2007 (a decision for which he was harshly criticized by, among others, Hamas) and has renounced military struggle in favor of theater. He also has re-established links with the Israeli peace movement — important, given both that he felt they betrayed him when they didn’t contact him after his mother died in an Israeli operation, and because he at one point said that he could never countenance peace with Israel. See here.
I hope that Mr. Zubeidi’s commitment to achieving a peaceful solution sticks. Each of the children in the theater mentioned above, as Eurosabra indicated, was embroiled in violent activity against Israel in one way or another. Without getting into whether violent conflict with Israeli soldiers (as opposed to terrorist activity, which some of them engaged in as well) is justified, I do not consider a program successful when it seems to push all of its participants into violence of any sort (likewise, I might not think serving in the IDF is per se bad, but I’d consider quite tragic a program whose made product was Israeli children who were itching to join the IDF and fight Palestine).
Yet, in a roundabout way, Mr. Zubeidi has returned to theater as a replacement for violent means of achieving Palestinian self-determination. It will be difficult for him, I imagine, to restrain the rage he understandably feels at those Israelis he holds responsible for the deaths in his family and the tribulations he’s faced (just as I imagine it will be quite difficult for the victims of the al-Aqsa Martyr’s brigades terror attacks to restrain their understandable rage at him). But I hope he is successful. And I hope his theater, unlike the one he experienced as a child, inspires his own children to look towards peace.
Each step on the road to peace is difficult and painful in the midst of conflict. But that, I think, makes it all the more important that we stand in support of those who have willed themselves — amidst terrible circumstances — to walk that road.