‘The Freedom Theatre’: How Palestinian culture is staying alive
Resistance has changed its shape throughout the course of Palestine‘s subjugation, but one way in which it was never silenced was in art.
In the northernmost city of the West Bank, a group of performers is making sure the rumble never ceases, and is training the next generation of creatives to pass on the message of the oppressed Palestinian civilisation.
Since its inception in 2006, the Freedom Theatre initiative has planned to bring theatre and visual art to Jenin’s refugee camp to alleviate the struggles of displaced children through workshops, training, and exhibitions.
As well as publishing books and producing short films, the project offers training in acting, pedagogy, photography, stage management, theatre technology, filmmaking and the instructing of others. They mainly stage professional theatre productions for children and adults, which have adapted known books such as Animal Farm as well as original plays narrating the Palestinian struggle, such as Stolen Dreams, Return to Palestine, and The Siege.
Zakaria Zubeidi, an early member of the Freedom Theatre, deemed their work “cultural resistance” for there was no other form of protest that would work. “We tried the rifle, we tried shooting. There’s no solution,” he told the New York Times last year, and in search for another tool in the struggle for freedom, “we founded a theatre”, while the attempts to silence it never stopped.
The theatre’s co-founder, Juliano Mer Khamis, was assassinated in 2011. Before his creation of the Freedom Theatre, his Jewish-Israeli mother had created a children’s theatre above a home in the West Bank, which was bulldozed in 2002 by the Israeli army. Now, in the years following October 7th, 2023, the Jenin refugee camp has been subjected to large-scale Israeli attacks, displacing 42,000 refugees in the northern West Bank and emptying the camp.
The theatre was moved to a temporary location in central Jenin, but its core team was neutralised, the artistic director arrested, as well as many of its trainers and management, and only around a third of the staff working before October 7th still come to the theatre, but its work is still a success.
A film featuring Freedom Theatre graduate Moataz Malhis won hearts all over the world, immortalising the Palestinian struggle onscreen with the Grand Jury Prize-winning ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’. The film, depicting the tragic death of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza while surrounded by the corpses of six of her family members, received a record-setting standing ovation at last year’s Venice Film Festival, walking as just one example of the many successful works that have made their way out of Jenin’s theatre with the message of its people, notwithstanding the efforts of Zionist groups to contact venue spaces with threats.
What has become one of Palestine’s largest cultural centres has become an important safe space that has allowed children and vulnerable groups the agency to reclaim their own narratives, and mostly, a place to just play. On their website, they explain that “through play, we can deconstruct an oppressive reality and make it comprehensible, which is the first step towards changing it”.
In an age in which Palestinian identity is being systematically and genocidally eradicated, any step to save its culture would be a treasure cherished by the future generations of its uprooted diaspora all over the world.
