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Settler Colonial Studies
ISSN: 2201-473X (Print) 1838-0743 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rset20
Palestinian narratives of resistance: The FreedomTheatre’s challenge to Israeli settler colonization
Madalena Santos
To cite this article: Madalena Santos (2016): Palestinian narratives of resistance: TheFreedom Theatre’s challenge to Israeli settler colonization, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI:10.1080/2201473X.2016.1206698
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1206698
Published online: 13 Jul 2016.
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Palestinian narratives of resistance: The Freedom Theatre’schallenge to Israeli settler colonizationMadalena Santos
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine, toconsider the Theatre’s project and performances as practices ofcreative resistance. It theorizes creative resistance to examine theTheatre as a mode of narrative performance against the logicsand materiality of settler colonialism. In exploring this creativeproject, this study conceives of narratives as sites of struggle thatare significant in the contestation and transformation of dominantsettler colonial myths.
KEYWORDSSettler colonialism; creativeresistance; Palestine; TheFreedom Theatre; narratives
I started rethinking about the power of fiction, to really transform you and open up your heartto someone else. I realized that we might feel justice or recognize justice from facts, but wefeel something from stories. We’re moved to do something by stories.1
Storytelling is critical to our understanding of the world. The stories we are privy to andthose we choose to circulate shape how we come to know and accept what we consideras ‘truth’ as well as how we determine who and what is important to us.2 These storiesenable us to connect with others through notions of commonality, but also constructdistances between us and those we deem unworthy of our interest or concern. Oftenpremised along disparate social dimensions, the hegemonic stories of the imaginednation tell us who does and does not belong to our communities. In this way storiesfunction to validate the supremacy of the dominant group and normalize their hierarch-ical positioning to ‘remind [the group]… of its identity in relation to… [others], andprovide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen asnatural’.3 As Lorenzo Veracini states in his work on settler colonialism: ‘Narratives andtheir ability matter. Narratives are a fundamental part of everyday life and their construc-tion constitutes an act that allows nations, communities, and individuals to make senseof the world’.4 For the most part, public discourse on Israel/Palestine in the West has mir-rored the dominant governing Jewish–Israeli perspective. There has been little roomprovided in Western mainstream media or educational institutions for a Palestinianview on Israel as a settler colonial state; instead the Western media has presented a dis-torted perception of violence attributed to Palestinian resistance.5 Rather than callingattention to the fact that the Indigenous Palestinian population has been resisting itscolonial occupier for over 60 years, we are told that Israel is defending itself from the
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Madalena Santos [email protected]
SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1206698
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violent enemy other. In the context of resistance to settler colonialism, however, the verynotion of violence itself must be questioned.
In this article, I focus on the Freedom Theatre (TFT) located in Jenin, Palestine, as a site ofstruggle and a political-knowledge practice of creative resistance that works to expose,contest, and transform dominant settler colonial myths of Israel. My work is influencedby anticolonial feminist, postcolonial, and Critical Race Theory approaches to narrationwhich rest on the premise that storytelling functions both as a tool of collectivememory for marginalized and dominant groups as well as a method for opposing hege-monic power to challenge and transform dominant power structures. I begin by definingmy conceptualization of creative resistance and radical performance as a political-knowl-edge practice. I then provide a brief historical account of TFT to offer a contextual back-ground into the purpose and people behind this project. Following this, I detail some ofthe setbacks and challenges that the Theatre has recently faced to demonstrate howthese hindrances are connected to settler colonialism and the Theatre’s resistance tothese efforts. I subsequently discuss a selection of the major professional performancesand promotional materials by TFT both in Palestine and elsewhere using video excerptsand media coverage of: Animal Farm, Sho Kman?, Fragments of Palestine, and the Siege.Next, I briefly discuss The Freedom Bus as an integral part of TFT’s project and how itdemonstrates the potential for Theatre as creative resistance that engages Palestiniansin their everyday life.
To discuss how and why the Theatre community persists in its work and commitment toproject, I consider responses from interviews with members that are accessible online.Through the Theatre’s website, video excerpts, online and print news reports, and socialmedia posts I demonstrate how the TFT represents: (1) power relations between colonizedand colonizer; (2) psychological, physical, and epistemic violence connected with settlercolonialism; (3) resistance against occupation and colonization; and (4) counter narrativesof everyday Palestinian life within the West Bank and Gaza. I show that while the Theatre isprimarily a form of cultural resistance under occupation, it is also one of solidarity in itscontestation of race, class, and gender norms as well as its presentation of Palestinian refu-gees. The Theatre’s projects and performances reveal the complexity of the settler colonialproject which include challenges from Israel as well as from the Palestinian Authority (PA),in addition to threats from conservative minded Palestinians who oppose elements of theTheatre’s aims, such as the questioning of traditional gender roles. In challenging andaltering what Frantz Fanon refers to as the ‘colonized mind’, TFT exists as both a mechan-ism and a method for decolonial practices.6
Conceptualizing creative resistance
In conceptualizing creative resistance, I follow Lila Abu-Lughod’s reversal of Foucault’sunderstanding of power to employ the category of resistance as an analytic of power.7
Resistance understood in this light enables the study of intricate power relations, includingthe complex and at times contradictory ways in which social power is exercised. Beyondbeing a diagnostic of power, I consider creative resistance a form of political-knowledgepractice. To provide a working definition of creative resistance, I adapt Stephen Dun-combe’s definition of cultural resistance which creates a ‘free space’ to challenge andtransform the ideological and material hold of dominant power through novel ‘language,
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meanings, and visions of the future’.8 The telling of resistance stories or counterstories per-forms an indispensable role for groups who have been marginalized enabling the creationof group bonds, cohesion and ‘shared understandings, and meanings’.9 In what WalterBenjamin termed the ‘tradition of the oppressed’, the political-knowledge practice ofresistance narratives demands a reading against the grain from the perspective of theoppressed rather than the oppressor.10 In the situation of Palestine, the political-knowl-edge practices of creative resistance demand a reading against the logics of the Israelisettler colonial state.
Settler colonialism depends upon the destruction of knowledge and resources. Thesedestructive practices are key to what Nur Masalha refers to as ‘memoricide’ and includethe suppression of history, self-censorship, purposeful physical destruction as well asthe renaming of place.11 Social memory is constructed through ‘symbolic behaviourthat is socially standardized and repetitive’.12 According to Abu-Lughod and Jayyusi, nar-ratives of colonization demonstrate ‘patterns of iteration, repetition and accumulation’that form collective memory which enables the continued Zionist colonization of Pales-tine.13 The narratives used to transform Palestine into an ethno-nationalist Jewish statedepend upon a Zionist version of Israeli history made to appear natural and inevitable.14
Israel simultaneously invokes the past suffering of Jewish peoples through the ‘discourseof the sacred’ while claiming the divine biblical right to the land of Palestine.15 The moresecularly framed Zionist goal of an independent state, on the other hand, calls to mind themyth of a land ‘without a people’while it negates the historical presence of the Palestinianpeople by means of ongoing land appropriation, ethnic cleansing. Simultaneous relianceon religious as well as secular stories reveals a profound contradiction.
Despite the plethora of Zionist stories, however, narratives of Palestinian resistance alsoconstruct collective memory. Like Duncombe’s cultural resistance, D. Soyini’s concept of‘radical performance’ is helpful in illustrating the creative resistance of Theatre. Accordingto Madison, radical performances ‘create a means and space from whatever elements orresources are available in order to resist or subvert the strategies of more powerful institutions,ideologies, [and] processes’.16 Madison argues that radical performances change the peopleinvolved, the performers as well as the audience, to create in Bertolt Brecht’s words ‘a newreality’.17 In many cases, creative resistance requires that space be taken when it is notgiven/provided. Demanding change that is concerned with ‘the most vital cultural,social and political tensions of… [our] time’, radical performance is a tactic of humanrights and social justice.18 By challenging the ‘authorized vocabulary’ of the Israeli coloni-zer and (re)telling stories which have been distorted or left out completely, TFT is narratingPalestinian histories which are crucial to symbolic and material transformational possibili-ties on the ground.
The Freedom Theatre
Arts cannot free you from your chains. Art can generate and mobilize discourses of freedom.Art can create debates. Art can expose. (Juliano Mer Khamis, The Freedom Theatre)19
Approximately 16,000 people live in the Jenin refugee camp where TFT is located. The cre-ation of Israel caused the internal displacement of Palestinians from their homes andtowns or villages, mostly from in and around the Haifa area during the Nakba in 1948
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and following the Naksa in 1967.20 Forced exile is therefore significant to the realities ofPalestinian lives in the Jenin refugee camp and to their interactions with those outsideof the camp. Palestinians within Israel proper do not learn their own history in official dis-courses, such as educational institutions. Until recently, education within the OccupiedTerritories of the West Bank and Gaza was informed mainly by the history of othernations.21 The Theatre enables Palestinians to learn and perform their own stories,stories that counter Zionist claims, stories written by Palestinians in exile and within Pales-tine, as well as stories written and performed by young people related to their own experi-ences. While a great focus of the Theatre is on youth, professional performances by adultsare also central to the project.
My initial aim in studying TFT was to get the perspective of the Theatre performers inrelation to their work. I wanted to know if participants in this project saw their work as aform of resistance against settler colonization, but I also wanted to learn about thestruggles they faced daily to be able to perform in the Theatre. My goal was to establishthe connections between the Theatre as an institution of memory and resistance and theeveryday challenges which are part and parcel of the settler colonial present in a particularplace in Palestine. While I received a positive response to my request to conduct a narra-tive study with members of the Theatre, there was no reply to my follow-up.22 Soon aftermy second email correspondence to confirm the Theatre’s commitment to participate inthe project, news stories surfaced about the arrest and torture of two members of Jenin’sFreedom Theatre. Only slightly over a year since the murder of the Theatre project’s co-founder, Juliano Mer Khamis on 4 April 2011, the arrest of co-founder Zakaria Zubeidiand artistic director Nabil Al-Raee in May and June of 2012 made it evident that thetype of narrative research that I was trying to conduct would be impossible given theeveryday realities of the people involved in the project combined with the fact that Iwas trying to do this from such a distance.
Yet in tracing the news stories and press releases of the arrests of Zubeidi and Al-Raee,the emerging story is significant in demonstrating the complexity of power relationsinvolved in acts of resistance and liberation struggles in what appears to be an attackon the survival of the Theatre project. In documenting both the clampdown on theTheatre and the continued Theatre performances, I record the ways in which peopleinvolved in struggle and resistance narrate their stories. The narratives of TFT are con-cerned with social justice and demanding change. TFT offers numerous symbolic andmaterial spaces and avenues ‘to resist or subvert the strategies of more powerful insti-tutions, ideologies, processes’.23 Taking up space that is not given, TFT reveals how apart-heid functions within the Israeli state. Working against the settler colonial processes ofmemoricide identified by Masalha, the Theatre provides avenues to counter the destruc-tion of history, the slippage into self-censorship, and the erasure of place and name. TFT(re)tells stories which have been distorted or left out completely – all of this is crucial tosymbolic and material transformational possibilities on the ground.
The history of TFT
The idea for the establishment of a Theatre in Jenin refugee camp was born out of thework of Jewish Israeli activist Arna Mer Khamis during the First Intifada.24 A. MerKhamis’s life and work illustrates some of the complexity of the relationships between
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Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. As a young 18-year-old woman, Arna Mer had advocatedand worked towards the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.25 She worked with Palmach,known to Palestinians as a Zionist ‘mobile striking’ group.26 Later she married SalibaKhamis, a Palestinian man from Nazareth who was a member of the Israeli CommunistParty. Within Israel, the Communist party has historically represented interests of Palesti-nian as well as Jewish members of the state.27 In 1989, A. Mer Khamis began working withPalestinian children in the Jenin area using theatre as a method of therapy. She began atheatre group and moved on to fund the construction of a theatre in Jenin with moneythat she received as part of the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the AlternativeNoble Peace Prize) by the Swedish government;28 the family of Zakaria Zubeidi – one ofthe co-founders of the existing Freedom Theatre, and one of Arna’s former theatregroup students who was later to become an armed resistance fighter – donated the build-ing used to house the theatre which became known as the Theatre of Stones.29 The orig-inal theatre was destroyed by the Israeli military in 2002 during the Second Intifada, andthen rebuilt in 2006 as TFT by Arna Mer Khamis’s son, Juliano Mer Khamis and Zubeidi.30
According to TFT’s mission statement, the Theatre seeks to provide a space for artisticlearning and activity, connect Palestinian communities that have been isolated from eachother, empower youth, and promote societal change.31 TFT offers a variety of programmesto fulfill its mandate including a professional theatre school for training in theatre andcinema, drama workshops aimed specifically at youth, productions within Palestinewhich engage contemporary social and political issues, performances and screenings ofother art projects from Palestine and abroad, and Hakawati (storytelling) which plays animportant cultural role in the Arab and Mediterranean world emphasizing ‘oral histories,improvisation and mythmaking’.32 TFT project also provides education in multimedia,involving filmmaking, creative writing, and photography. Meanwhile, the Freedom Busis a mobile form of theatre and activism which brings together Palestinian and inter-national artists and activists to tour Palestine. The 2016 Freedom Ride! which took placein April served marginalized areas of Palestine where people are particularly at risk offorced expulsion from their ancestral homelands including Jenin city and refugee camp(where the Theatre is located), Nabi Saleh, the Jordan Valley, Hebron, South HebronHills, Aida Camp, Al-Azzeh Camp, Dheisheh Camp, and Bethlehem. The fifth annualFreedom Ride was part of TFT’s 10-year anniversary which
gathered activists, scholars and artist from around the world who travelled to key areas ofoppression and resistance within the occupied West Bank… . The ride offered a gatheringpoint for people from diverse movements who engaged in mutual exchange with local resi-dents through storytelling, guided walks and tours, improvisational theatre, discussions andother cultural actions.33
Setbacks and challenges
Both in spite of as well as due to its success in Jenin, the Theatre has had to deal with manychallenges in continuing its work. From the onset the then Theatre of Stones, faced set-backs from the Israeli forces. The First Intifada brought numerous difficulties to the phys-ical realization of the project. But by the time A. Mer Khamis had passed away from cancerin 1994, many Palestinians had come to support the theatre and understood the project asa helpful way to channel youthful frustration and anger. The Israeli military destroyed the
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theatre during Second Intifada. Since its reincarnation as TFT in 2006, the project continuesto deal with the burdens of living under occupation with an oppressive local governmentwithin a settler colonial state. According to Theatre staff and performers, the Israeli stateand the PA have hindered the ability for the Theatre to continue, most evidently throughthe arrests of Theatre members. There has also been opposition to the Theatre voiced bysome Palestinians who believe that the project goes against their beliefs in permitting girlsand women to perform, and in its cultural and religious representations.34
The murder of Juliano Mer Khamis on 4 April 2011 dealt a severe blow to the Theatre.Theatre members and actors understood Mer Khamis’ killing as an attempt to silence thevery crucial work of the project as a tool of resistance and social memory. Mer Khamismade Jenin his home and considered himself both a Jew and a Palestinian.35 This is impor-tant because of the role that Mer Khamis played as both a leader and a mentor in establish-ing the Theatre and the subsequent professional theatre programme. He viewed theTheatre as a mode of resistance to the various forms of violence that Palestinians experi-ence inside and outside of home such as gender violence, class discrimination as well asmilitary and police violence, and also as a method and tool for liberation. Following hismurder, the PA and Israeli forces repeatedly raided the Theatre, and beat and arbitrarilyarrested employees and actors.36
On 13 May 2012, the PA arrested and imprisoned TFT co-founder Zakaria Zubeidi amida wave of about 150 arrests following the 2 May 2012 shooting at the home of the Pales-tinian Governor of Jenin, Qaddura Musa who later died in hospital of a heart attack.37 Inaddition to being denied access to newspapers, television, and other informationsources, Zubeidi alleged that he had been severely maltreated and tortured during hisincarceration.38 This includes being kept in solitary confinement for 50 days, having inter-rogators force him to drink toilet water, having his arms tied together and raised in apainful elevated position for two days at a time, requiring him to stand and preventinghim from sleeping, and tying him to an iron door outside in the heat of the day. Theseallegations were reported in a Human Rights Watch Report, numerous Freedom Theatrenews posts, as well as in the Toronto Star, and in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.39 Zubeidiwas released temporarily between 19 August and 22 August 2012 to spend Eid with hisfamily, but his lawyer’s attempt to obtain his release on bail failed on 26 August.40
Although Zubeidi had been able to return to his family during Eid and returned toprison as required by law, the prosecutor argued on 27 August that Zubeidi’s detentionshould be extended for another 45 days since he posed a threat to public security.41
While waiting for the judge to look over his request for bail, Zubeidi began a completehunger strike refraining from any food or liquids on 9 September 2012.42 TFT issued anurgent call for action including a form letter to advocate for Zubeidi’s immediaterelease from prison.43 Zubeidi was finally permitted bail in 4 October 2012 and acquittedlater that year.44
A little short of a month after Zubeidi’s arrest, the Israeli army entered the home of TFT’sArtistic Director, Nabil Al-Raee at approximately 3:15 am on the night of 6 June 2012 andtook him to an unknown location.45 It was later disclosed that he was kept in Jalameh(Kishon) prison in Israel proper. In his bail release statement, Al-Raee highlighted the suf-fering and injustice of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israel and noted howhis arrest illustrates Israel’s use of the law against Palestinians:
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Constantly shifting charges and long detentions without access to lawyers is a hallmark of theIsraeli occupation and is a fate suffered by the thousands of Palestinians who are detained andimprisoned by Israel. It is also an indication of the extent to which the Israeli government iswilling to go in order to repress nonviolent freedom of expression.46
Al-Raee was initially taken in for questioning in connection with the murder of MerKhamis.47 According to Al-Raee’s lawyer, Smadar Ben-Natan, these allegations werefound to be groundless after the first two weeks of detention. Nevertheless, the Israelisecurity service continued to ask for his prolonged detention, and meanwhile tried toobtain evidence on other issues. This proved to be fruitless and on 28 June 2012 a militaryjudge ordered Al-Raee’s release after no evidence had been obtained against him.However, an appeal by the Israeli military prosecution was approved by the militarycourt of appeals.48 He was subsequently charged with ‘aiding a wanted man’, and
pleaded guilty to amended charges [on July 29, 2012 in an Israeli military court] of assistingZakaria Zubeidi [… ] in 2010 with food, cigarettes and car drives, and once answering Zakar-ia’s question about the presence of the Israeli army in the camp.49
As TFT news post states, the ‘kafkaesque farce’ of Al-Raee’s arrest is underscored by thefact that Al-Raee’s assistance to Zubeidi occurred when Zubeidi was no longer wanted byIsrael.50 Zubeidi had been ‘granted amnesty in 2007’. Al-Raee had ‘pleaded guilty to assist-ing a previously wanted person’.51
From 19 March until 22 November 2015, Mustafa Sheta a former TFT board memberand now general manager of the Theatre was held under Israeli administrative detentionwith very little information about his case available for months. He was subsequentlyaccused of political activism.52 On 29 May 2016, Israeli border authorities denied Shetaexit to Jordan to attend a visa appointment at the US Embassy in Amman. The numerousactors and staff at TFT who have been arrested and imprisoned by both Israel and the PAdemonstrates a complex relationship between colonizer and colonized in acts of resist-ance and liberation struggles wherein silencing practices of confinement and restraintmeant to suppress dissent and erase Palestinian stories are justified under the pretenseof ‘security’. I have highlighted the above instances of arrests as examples of Israel’s regu-lation and control of Palestinian life as well as the PA’s collusion with the Israeli state. Theregulation and control of Palestinian bodies through arbitrary arrest, detention, release, re-arrest as well as torture tactics and physical maltreatment, including the denial of basicmedical needs, is well documented by human rights groups and scholars.53 Al-Raeepoints exactly to this in his statement concerning the thousands of political prisoners inIsraeli detention centres.
Performances
The performances of TFT, such as their adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – anovel about revolution and corruption – critiques Israel as a settler colonial state whichutilizes apartheid practices but also importantly points to the collaboration between thePA and Israel. In the video clip of TFT’s performance of Animal Farm, we see the characterof Pig calling on his fellow comrades to revolt against their oppressive state of poverty andtorture. His oration moves the other animals to act. They are ready for revolution. In thesescenes, the animals represent the Palestinian people. The abusive farm owner represents
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the Israeli state. The animals organize and successfully overthrow their oppressor, butinstead of distributing wealth and work more evenly, the revolution leads to corruptionand the once leader of the revolution becomes a tyrant in his own right. The play offersa critical perspective into what has occurred within the Palestinian leadership sinceOslo. The PA took on many of the security enforcement practices that were previously per-formed by the Israeli military with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The strength-ening of the PA’s control within the Occupied Territories has intensified already existingdivisions and led to more surveillance of Palestinian resistance groups.54 Moreover,while Oslo exacerbated class divisions between Palestinians, it masked the ongoingsettler colonization of Palestine and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As Hilalstates:
Since Oslo, the division between the Palestinians living in the occupied territories on the onehand and those living in Israel and the diaspora on the other has become more keenly felt.When the leadership was based in the Arab diaspora, and even though its focus was historicPalestine including the occupied territories, the Palestinians in al-shatat [the Diaspora] (notonly the refugees in the camps, but in general) continued to feel part of the nationalproject. The Oslo accords created separate political fields for Palestinians in the West Bankand Gaza Strip, within the Green Line, and in the diaspora, with no institutional links orunified vision or strategy to unite them. The Oslo accords also promoted an already existingmindset within the Palestinian national movement and the elites of most Arab states that thePalestine problem was the concern of Palestinians. Similarly, the accords reduced the Palesti-nian issue to the 1967 Israeli occupation, disconnecting it from the 1948 Nakba and therefugee problem.55
The unhinging of the ‘Palestinian question’ from ‘48 and the Palestinian refugee crisis asa result of Oslo concealed the responsibility and complicity of Western states to the Zionistcolonial project and its continuation.
Greater surveillance, detention, and policing of liberation and resistance efforts, as wellas differential citizenship such as the use of identification cards and travel permits are inte-gral to many settler colonial projects and were witnessed in Canada’s Indian reservationsystem, the Bantustans of South African Apartheid, and current-day Israel. They create afertile environment for self-censorship, which along with the destruction of historicaldocuments, homes, and villages, also enable the renaming of place and suppress the prac-tices of passing down oral histories. Significantly, while the Palestinian commemoration ofthe Nakba is critical to Palestinian collective memory, the processes of settler colonialismhave never ended. The material and symbolic violence of continued settler colonial dis-course and practice is critical to current-day Palestinian collective memory and everydaylife. For instance, part of the Jenin refugee camp where TFT is located was completelydestroyed by the Israeli army in 2002 during the Second Intifada leaving 2640 refugeeshomeless. All Palestinians involved with TFT project live under the daily imposition ofillegal Israeli occupation; if not arrested themselves they have had friends and familyarrested, and most if not all Palestinians in the area have been touched by the murderof friends or family at the hands of Israel. They live through checkpoints, drones hoveringoverhead, continual land dispossession, and violence.
Unequal relations of power are exaggerated under colonial regimes.56 Gender and agedifferences, amongst other socio-cultural disparities, are used as grounds to justify mis-treatment and abuse between women and men, women and girls, men and boys, and
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children and adults, including young men and boys who show authority over, and batterwomen and girls.57 The play Sho Kman?, meaning ‘What else?’, deals with ‘the psychologicalimpact of occupation in a densely populated area hemmed in by checkpoints. Violence in thisproduction is all-pervasive. Not just the violence of the occupier, but the violence of theoppressed’.58 In a vivid representation of nightmares performed in almost completesilence, Sho Kman? deals with gender and familial struggles of Palestinians living underthe restricted conditions of culture and occupation.59 As the description states, the play
encapsulates how young Palestinians see the world around them, exploring how the externaloccupation and violence turns inwards, mirroring itself in an internal form of chaos, destroyingfriendships, families, society and political structures. It is an intimate exploration of personalexperiences, often wordless, physical representations of memories that become nightmares.60
The multidimensional aspects of cultural and colonial oppression are intertwined. Whileproblematic gendered views of Palestinian women’s bodies continue through the con-struct of the feminized woman as symbolic of the Palestinian nation which needs to bedefended as the play underscores, the oppression of Palestinian women – largely under-stood in the West as connected with traditional culture – must be situated within thecontext of Israel’s colonial relations of ruling.61 The attempt to portray the situation ofPalestine as a national struggle rather than one of settler colonial dispossession relieson constructions of racialized difference that intersect with gender.
The intersection of gender, race, religion, and resistance under Israeli settler colonialismis presented in the promotional videos for Fragments of Palestine. In two separate clips ofthe film, slices of Palestinian life are offered through nameless male and female characterswho assume different roles to show the complexity of life under settler colonial rule. Attimes, the actors represent Palestinian resistance groups with different religious-politicalaffiliations, such as Islamic Jihad, at other times they portray everyday people goingabout their daily lives while at other points they take on the role of Israeli soldiers. Thevideos illustrate Palestinian men and women being beaten, tortured, and eventuallykilled by soldiers as well as a funeral procession for a Palestinian martyr. One of thevideos also includes interview excerpts with two unnamed performers (one woman andone man) who discuss how the play was put together based on different Palestinianexperiences.62 Their comments are illustrative of how radical performance not only chal-lenges and changes the audience, but also transforms the performers themselves.63 Thewoman explains her interpretation of the show. In her words, the show enables peopleto see ‘pictures of our [Palestinians] lives’. She explains the pressure she feels in havingto represent Palestinian life outside of Palestine while her colleague asserts that in per-forming the play ‘We feel we are free… We can do anything on the stage’. For him, theplay provides an opportunity to demonstrate ‘what all Palestinians feel [living underIsrael]’.64 These short clips demonstrate how precarious Palestinian life is and howdemanding it is to represent the multitude of Palestinian life experiences. It is significantthat the actors remain nameless in both versions of this video as the violence of the Israelistate erases so many details of Palestinian lives. The fact that the performers are also notidentified in the second clip can also be read as a desire to stay anonymous for matters ofsafety. While the scenes from Fragments reveal how violence impacts the lives of Palesti-nians, they also demonstrate numerous narratives of Palestinian resistance.
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The Siege is one such narrative of resistance. Having recently toured the UK, the Siegehas reached a wide audience outside of Palestine through its reviews in mainstreamand alternative media.65 The performance tells the story of the 39-day-long siege of theChurch of Nativity in Bethlehem by Israeli forces in 2002. Directed by Al-Raee andBritish director Zoe Lafferty, the play received a great deal of attention and praise for itsnarrative and professional acting, including from Henry Brenton and Ken Loach.66 Theplay is written and performed in Arabic.67 English subtitles are included in performancesoutside of Palestine. Al-Raee discusses the reasons for this in an interview with Arise Newson 3 June 2015 in London (UK). He explains the significance of the language to the storybeing told; there are words for experiences which are not easily translatable into English.Furthermore, he notes that the six Palestinian actors who performed the play abroad live inPalestine; their experiences are infused by Arabic making it was crucial that The Siege beperformed in Arabic. Still, when asked if non-Arabic speaking audiences would be able tocapture the essence of the play Al-Raee believes that they will since according to himmuch of the performance also supersedes language.68
The Siege offers a complex view of the events that took place at the Church of Nativity inApril and May of 2002 when five armed Palestinian resistance fighters took refuge fromIsraeli forces. Following traditional protocol, the priests offered sanctuary to the men. AsShams states in a review of the play:
The Siege explores the relationship of five fighters to one another, to the Israeli soldiersoutside, as well as to the priests inside the church. The play also explicitly delves intodeeper questions about the possibility of morality in warfare and interrogates each fighterindividually, exploring his relationship to Palestine, to the struggle, and ultimately – whenthe decision to end the siege with exile occurs – to the very land itself.69
Al-Raee stresses the importance of the play not only in documenting a significant historicalmoment in Palestinian history, but also in archiving – in the present sense – what is hap-pening on the ground on a daily basis.70 He also makes clear how onerous the journey forPalestinian actors coming from Palestine can be in applying for visas both to leave Pales-tine and to enter other countries which is often taken as a given from those in the audi-ence.71 What goes unsaid in promotional material for TFT is that the determinations forwho gets to leave the West Bank and who does not is a political process that is purpose-fully arbitrary.72
The play demonstrates mutual aid between Christian and Muslim Palestinians which isan important point to grasp for audiences outside of Palestine. Israeli mythmaking andmainstream media congruence to Zionist narratives provide stereotypical images ofwho and what is Palestinian. The attempt to simplify the context of Palestinian struggleinto a situation of religious conflict between Jews and Muslims evades the reality ofIsrael as a settler colonial state and constructs Israel as a victim of Palestinian terrorism.Al-Raee raises these points in his interviews on the BBC, Arise News, and the Guardianamong others. As he states: ‘We are facing the Israeli propaganda machine that speaksevery language. It turns the oppressed into the oppressor and the oppressor into theoppressed’.73 Perhaps equally important, Nahla Abdo points out in her book Captive Revo-lution is that Israel denies Palestinian Christians their Arab Culture. The Arab in Israel isMuslim only.74 Zoe Lafferty speaks to the significance of the West’s need to recognizethe existence of Palestinian Christians as Arabs in her interview with Al-Raee on Arise
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News. The ‘siege’ of the Church of Nativity is also symbolic of the siege of Palestine, in par-ticular of Gaza. The play compels audiences to challenge their preconceived views ofPalestinians and of the question of Palestine:
We want to discuss what happened, because people misunderstood history many times.History plays a big part in our lives. Is history written by people? I need to question that.And as a Palestinian, I have a perspective, I have been living under an unjust occupationfor a long time.75
When asked by Ylenia Gostoli of Qantara.de an English and German online news sourcewhether he thought of Jenin as his audience, Al Raee answered:
I think as a starting point yes, your audience is around you so you think about it, The FreedomTheatre has a history in the camp; it’s a continuation of the Stone Theatre that was establishedthere before. But the idea itself is bigger than a local community.
The call to bear witness, significant to Madison’s concept of radical performance, is alsoa crucial aspect of TFT’s ‘Freedom Bus’.76
The Freedom Bus
In all respects, the Freedom Bus is a performance of decolonization exemplary of Kanafi’snotion of taht al-ihtilāl (‘under occupation’). According to TFT’s website, the Freedom Bus is‘an initiative of The Freedom Theatre that uses interactive theatre and cultural activism tobear witness, raise awareness and build alliances throughout occupied Palestine andbeyond’.77 It is also used as a mechanism to demonstrate and contest the severity ofrestrictions on mobility for Palestinians living in the Palestine.78 The Bus is modelledafter the civil rights movement in the US, but as Marayam Griffin explains, unlike theAmerican Civil Rights movement, TFT’s Freedom Bus is not about desegregation.79
Rather the Bus challenges the settlements themselves which are illegal under internationallaw. The Freedom Bus draws attention to the fact that Palestinians are not allowed on thebuses which are only for settlers and seeks to change the mobility restrictions that Pales-tinians have within Palestine.
A central feature of the Freedom Bus, as noted on the website, is playbacktheatre. Playback theatre is a form of improvisational theatre wherein people trans-fer personal stories into political theatre. The audience members tell their stories andthen actors dramatize them back.80 Palestinian actor Faisal Abu Alheja, who was onthe UK tour of the Siege, believes that the impact of TFT project is making a differ-ence to Palestinians and also to Israel. In an interview with Philip Weiss from Mon-dweiss while in New York, Abu Alheja speaks to this: ‘We have art, we have dreams…. We are not terrorists, we have a right to live… . The Theatre must be a threatsomehow to Israel, art must be a threat, why else arrest me?’81 Abu Alheja explainsthat at one particular place where the Freedom Bus was enacting playback theatrethe Israeli military:
would come to the camp to arrest people every night, so [the Freedom Theatre actors]decided to perform playback theatre about these experiences. The same night the armyattacked my house and arrested me. They walked with me to where I did the performance,blindfolded me, and then took me to Jalameh. [Kishon prison in Israel]82
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When asked about the experience and how it made him feel he points to the psycho-logical trauma of arrests and detentions to the individuals involved and also those aroundthem:
It makes me stronger, but it also makes me afraid. Maybe they will kill you and nobody will ask,man… . Look if they can enter my room. Really, I woke up and found them in my room, like aHollywood movie. I think ‘fuck politics’ … . Nobody can do anything for me in this moment.Maybe you will die… . They have the possibility to kill you. You feel, as a Palestinian, thatyou are nothing… . You are disappearing.
The intention of such arrests is to ‘break the person’s spirit’ and ‘bring them to their knees’,to make them ‘afraid of anything political’.83
For Abu Alheja, as for other Palestinians involved in the Theatre, creative resistance pro-vides an outlet for release from otherwise unbearable violence and a way to teach othersabout the Palestinian experience of living under settler colonial rule. In a video clip aboutthe Freedom Bus, Ahmad Rohm who also toured with the Siege explains: ‘Freedom is not aword you learn in school. You have to learn it from the people who have lost it’.84 TheFreedom Bus challenges and resists the current narrative which discursively marks Pales-tinians as an alien/stranger population rather than as natives with irrevocable bindingrights to the land. In its re-enactment of everyday Palestinian experiences, the Busfurther exposes the imagined democracy of the Jewish ethno-national state of Israel,where the sovereign disciplines and regulates the body and population through dis-courses, practices, and processes paradoxical to the liberal notions of equality, rights,and freedoms.
Discussion and conclusion
There are always risks when writing from inside or outside of a context of resistance; theserisks include leaving out information to simplify narratives and make them into clear casesof good versus evil. Sherry Ortner warns that these simplifications avoid the politics thatexisted prior to as well as the continued struggles of subalterns which leads to an idealiz-ation of resistance or in other words, a romanticization of resistance.85 Creative resistanceworks against such romanticizations to show the complexity involved in struggles againstoppression. It does not minimize the violence of the oppressor, but neither does it attemptto reduce the complicated situation of oppression. By looking at internal contradictionswithin resistance, including how some people benefit from ongoing situations of injustice,creative resistance explores the ‘prior and ongoing politics of subalterns’.86 These politicsinvolve social dimensions of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability, and citizenship, forinstance, as well as the practice of collaboration with the oppressor. Addressing internalpolitics is significant for understanding the complicated power relations connected tothe external politics of oppression. There are also potential harms of epistemic violencein speaking and writing on behalf of others. For instance, the use of woman’s bodies inresistance literature that connects land and gender links to earlier texts and cannot beread solely as a one dimensional re-inscription of patriarchy onto woman’s bodies;rather, the connection may be used as a method of strategic essentialism to resist colonialoppression and bring attention to the harm that is (re)produced for woman and girls. Anintersectional approach to examining resistance enables the study of complexities such as
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these which require looking at context and linkages between social categories as well asrelations of power.
In the case of Palestinian creative resistance against the violence of the settler colonialstate of Israel, the stories told and enacted through the Theatre signify the importance ofthe Nakba on the collective memory of Palestinians in Palestine and in exile.87 Palestiniancreative resistance works to disrupt Zionist narratives to illustrate the continuous occu-pation, apartheid, and settler colonial practices of the state. By providing alternative dis-courses as sites of struggle to Israel’s dominant myths of biblical renaissance and liberaldemocracy, the projects and performances of TFT creatively work towards transformingthe current understanding of Israel. While the labelling of criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic attempts to pre-empt a critical assessment of its laws, policies, and practices,this creative project presents historical narratives of Palestine unknown to many in theWest. These overlooked stories of Palestine are significant in the telling of history andcrucial to resistance; they further demonstrate the complexity of narratives that havebeen stifled through violence endemic to settler colonial societies as well as the particula-rities of Israeli state violence on the Palestinian people.
In this article, I have considered TFT’s project and how it reveals the functioning ofIsrael’s ongoing settler colonial policies and practices. The telling of the Theatre offerscounternarratives that play a crucial role in the formation of collective memory. In buildingcommunity through consensus, common understandings and ethics, these stories alsoserve an equally important ‘destructive function’. As Delgado argues, stories and counters-tories can contest widely held but nevertheless disputable public knowledge to ‘shattercomplacency’, and ultimately challenge structures of power and transform them.88 Narra-tives can therefore also expose what Thomas Ross refers to as ‘the violence of the word’.89
They
can show that what we believe is ridiculous, self-serving, or cruel. They can show us the wayout of the trap of unjustified exclusion. They can help us understand when it is time to reallo-cate power. They are the other half – the destructive half – of the creative dialectic.90
Ronit Lentin shares a similar perspective in her work on commemorating the Nakba:
This juxtaposition [between Palestinian and Zionist histories], illustrates what Edward Said(1980) saw as the… dialectic contestation of the right to what both Jews and Palestinianscall ‘the land’, though even when they are aware of Palestinian claims, Zionists put theirown claim on a higher level. If we follow Said, this dialectic encounter means that it is fruitfulto theorize Palestine in tandem with theorizing Zionism and the state of Israel. […] Debates onthe place of the memory of the Nakba past stand at the heart of the ‘memory boom’ in relationto the Palestinian question regarding homeland, rights, entitlements, refugeehood, againstwhich Israelis position Israeli-Jewish victimhood (and at times also the divine Jewish rightto the land) as an opposing narrative.91
Narratives are thus also sites of struggle and crucial to resistance in the telling of history. AsBarbara Harlow asserts: ‘The struggle over the historical record is seen from all sides as noless crucial than the armed struggle’.92 The creative resistance and solidarity of the TFT’sperformances and projects speak to Benjamin’s appeal to read history against the grainfrom the perspective of the oppressed not the oppressor: the Israeli state is a settler colo-nial project that depends upon violence against the Indigenous Palestinian population toensure its continuation as a Jewish homeland. The Theatre explores the stories
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experiences of Palestinians living under the settler colonial regime of Israel, the connec-tions to the land as well as the interrogations of the contradictions and cultural oppres-sions within their experiences. In performing narratives from the perspectives ofPalestinians to tell their own present histories, TFT creatively exposes and rewrites Israelas a settler colonialist project while altering realities on the ground.
Notes
1. See Lee Maracle, ‘We Feel Something from Stories’ (June 18, 2015), http://www.thewhig.com/2015/06/18/we-feel-something-from-stories (accessed June 6, 2016).
2. Eric Selbin, Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story (New York: Zed Books, 2010), 46.3. Richard Delgado, ‘Legal Storytelling: Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Nar-
rative’, in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. R. Delgado (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 1995), 64–96.
4. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2010), 96.
5. See for instance, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope andEmpowerment (New York: Pluto Press, 2010).
6. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox withcommentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]).
7. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power ThroughBedouin Women’, American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990, 42): 41–55; see also Sherry B. Ortner,‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 37, no. 1 (1995): 173–93.
8. Stephen Duncombe, A Cultural Resistance Reader (New York: Verso, 2002), 8.9. Delgado, ‘Legal Storytelling’, 64.
10. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations. Edited and with anintroduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973 [1955]).
11. Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, ReclaimingMemory (New York: Zed Books, 2012).
12. David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, 1988), 9.13. In Ronit Lentin, Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 34.14. See Himani Bannerji, ‘Demography and Democracy: Reflections on Violence against Women in
Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing’, Resources for Feminist Research 30, no. 3/4 (2003): 93–106; seealso Oren Yiftchael, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and ‘The Political Geography of Ethnic Protest: National-ism, Deprivation and Regionalism among Arabs in Israel’, Transactions of the Institute ofBritish Geographers, New Series 22, no. 1 (1997): 91–110.
15. Achille Mbembé, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003: 27): 11–40.Duke University Press.
16. D. Soyini Madison, Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (New York:Cambridge UP, 2010), 3, emphasis in original.
17. Brecht in D. Soyini Madison. Acts of activism: Human rights as radical performance (New York:Cambridge UP, 2010, 12 ); see also Eric Selbin, Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power ofStory (London: Zed Books, 2010).
18. Baz Kershaw in Madison, Acts of Activism, 18, 19; Ibid., 2.19. See Artsworld: Palestinian Theatre. AlJazeera English, September 6, 2008, http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=KoeBhD6Q_60&feature=related- (accessed June 20, 2016).20. Erin B. Mee, ‘Juliano Mer Khamis: Murder, Theatre, Freedom, Going Forward’, TDR: The Drama
Review 55, no. 3 (2011, 9): 9–17.21. Agustin Velloso de Santisteban, ‘Palestinian Education: A National Curriculum against All
Odds’, International Journal of Educational Development 22 (2002): 145–54.
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22. Jonatan Stanczak, Personal Correspondence [Email]. Managing Director, the Freedom Theatre,Jenin Refugee Camp, West Bank, May 1, 2012.
23. Madison, Acts of Activism; see also Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader.24. Following this, I use the first initial of Arna Mer Kamis’s first name to distinguish between her
(A. Mer Khamis) and her son Juliano (Mer Khamis); Emine Fisek, ‘I want to be the PalestinianRomeo! Arna’s Children and the Romance with Theatre’, Theatre Research International 37,no. 2 (2012, 104): 104–17.
25. Ibid.26. According to Walid Khalidi, Palmach ‘is short for Plugot Machats, i.e., crushing battalions. By
spring 1948, this force was made up of three brigades (Yiftach, Harel, and HaNegev) number-ing just above 8,000’. See Walid Khalidi, ‘Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine’,Journal of Palestine Studies, Special Issue: Palestine 1948 18, no. 1 (1988, 13): 4–33.
27. Gideon Rahat and Reut Itzkovitch Malka, ‘Political Representation in Israel: Minority Sectors vs.Women’, Representation 48, no. 3 (2012, 311): 307–19.
28. Mee, ‘Juliano Mer Khamis’, 9.29. The Freedom Theatre. (July 13, 2008). From Stones to Freedom, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=dvK47dFl07Y&list=PL23528330B134E57B&index=5&feature=plpp_video (accessedJune 20, 2016; see also Fisek, 107).
30. See Artsworld: Palestinian Theatre.31. See The Freedom Theatre. Mission, http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/who-we-are/mission/
(2016) (accessed June 6, 2016).32. According to the Freedom Theatre’s website,
In the Arab and Mediterranean world, the hakawati (storyteller) has traditionally playeda central role in a society’s culture, reflecting the importance placed on oral histories,improvisation and mythmaking. The Freedom Theatre’s very own hakawati spellboundsthe children of Jenin Refugee Camp and beyond with wondrous and engaging storiesfrom Palestine’s rich cultural heritage
See ‘What We Do’, http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/what-we-do/theatre/ (accessed June20, 2016).
33. See Freedom Bus, http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news/the-2016-freedom-ride-in-occupied-palestine/ (accessed June 6, 2016).
34. See Mariav Zonszein. Juliano Mer-Khamis, Activist who lived in two worlds, murdered in Jenin.http://forward.com/news/136813/juliano-mer-khamis-activist-who-lived-in-two-world/, April6, 2011, (accessed June 20, 2016).
35. Ibid.36. See Human Rights Watch (HRW). Israel/Palestinian Authority: Theater Group Hit from Both
Sides: ‘Freedom Theater’ staff mistreated, due process denied, July 27, 2012, http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/07/27/israelpalestinian-authority-theater-group-hit-both-sides (accessedJune 20, 2016).
37. Ibid.38. Ibid.39. Ibid.; see also The Freedom Theatre (TFT), ‘New Information on Nabil and Zakaria’, July 11,
2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20121031232026/ http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=257 (accessed June 6, 2016); TFT, Nabil Al-Raee released on bail, July 12, 2012,http://web.archive.org/web/20121031231408/ http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=259 (accessed June 6, 2016); TFT, ‘Nabil Al-Raee’s trial’, July 29, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20121031233639/ http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=264 (accessedJune 6, 2016); TFT, ‘Zakaria Zubeidi temporarily released’, August 19, 2012, http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=271. http://web.archive.org/web/20121031231808/http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=271 (accessed June 6, 2016); TFT, ‘ZakariaZubeidi’s release postponed’, August 27, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20121031231803/http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=274 (accessed June 6, 2016); TFT, ‘Zakaria
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Zubeidi remains in prison’, September 2, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20121031231610/http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=275 (accessed June 6, 2016); TFT, ‘Theurgent call for action: Free Zakaria Zubeidi’, September 10, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20121031231354/ http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news.php?id=280 (accessed June 6,2016); Jesse Rosenfeld, ‘A rebel on the wrong side’, Toronto Star, October 27, 2012, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1124391331?accountid=9894 (accessed June 6, 2016); JenMarlowe, ‘Give Zubeidi justice, or he will die at the hands of the Palestinian Authority’,Haaretz, September 12, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/give-zubeidi-justice-or-he-will-die-at-the-hands-of-the-palestinian-authority.premium-1.464546 (accessed June 6, 2016).
40. TFT, ‘Zakaria Zubeidi temporarily released’, August 19, 2012, and ‘Zakaria Zubeidi’s releasepostponed’, August 27, 2012.
41. TFT, ‘Zakaria Zubeidi remains in prison’, September 2, 2012.42. TFT, ‘The urgent call for action’, September 10, 2012.43. Ibid.44. See Matt Trueman, ‘West Bank Freedom Theatre Director on Hunger Strike’, The Guardian
[Online]. July 11, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jul/11/west-bank-freedom-theatre-director-hunger-strike (accessed June 6, 2016); Nadia Khalil, ‘Zakaria Zubeidi: Orator,Fighter, Activist’, Al-Araby. [Online]. (January 7, 2015). http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/features/2015/1/12/zakaria-zubeidi-orator-fighter-activist (accessed June 6, 2016), respectively.
45. Stanczak.46. TFT, ‘Nabil Al-Raee released on bail’, July 12, 2012.47. HRW, Israel/Palestinian Authority, July 27, 2012.48. TFT, ‘New Information on Nabil and Zakaria’, July 11, 2012.49. Khalidi, TFT, July 12, 2012, and TFT, July 29, 2012, respectively.50. TFT, ‘Nabil Al-Raee’s trial’, July 29, 2012.51. Ibid.52. TFT, ‘Senior Staff Member and Student Prohibited from Travelling Abroad’, http://www.
thefreedomtheatre.org/news/senior-staff-member-and-student-prohibited-from-travelling-abroad/ (accessed June 6, 2016).
53. See for instance, Abdulrahman Muhammad Ali, ‘Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Jails: Their LegalStatus and Their Rights’, Middle East Monitor, May 2012. Briefing paper; Nahla Abdo, ‘Palesti-nian Munadelat: Between Western Representation and Lived Reality’, in Thinking Palestine.ed. R. Lentin (New York: Zed Books, 2008), 173–88, and Captive Revolution: PalestinianWomen’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System (London: Pluto Press, 2014);B’Tselem, ‘Administrative Detention in the Occupied Territories’. B’Tselem, The Israeli Infor-mation Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. (2015). http://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention/occupied_territories (accessed June 6, 2016). B’Tselem,‘Beating and abuse’. B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occu-pied Territories. 2011. http://www.btselem.org/beating_and_abuse (accessed June 6, 2016);B’Tselem. Detainees and Prisoners: Statistics on Palestinian Minors in IDF Detention 2001–2007. B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.2005. http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/Minors_in_IDF_Detention.asp (accessedJune 6, 2016). Ghazi-Walid Falah, ‘Geography in Ominous Intersection with Interrogationand Torture: Reflections on Detention in Israel’, Third World Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2008): 749–766.
54. See Jamil Hilal, ‘The Polarization of the Palestinian Political Field’, Journal of Palestine Studies 39,no. 3 (Spring 2010): 24–39.
55. Ibid., 32.56. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and The Politics of
Feminism’, in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, ed. ChandraTalpade Mohanty (London: Duke UP, 2003 [1991]), 43–84.
57. Hanna Herzog and Taghreed Yahia-Younis, ‘Men’s Bargaining with Patriarchy: The Case of Pri-maries within Hamulas in Palestinian Arab Communities in Israel’, Gender and Society 21, no. 4(2007, 586): 579–602; see also Nahla Abdo, Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship(New York: Zed Books, 2011), 29–30.
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58. TFT, ‘What Else?’, (2015), http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/what-else/ (accessed June 6,2016; emphasis in original).
59. TFT, ‘Sho Kman’, (2011); Kate Laycock, ‘After the Killing of Its Director, Jenin’s Freedom TheatreAsks: ‘What Else?’, The Guardian. [Online], October 26, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/oct/26/jenin-freedom-theatre-what-else (accessed June 6, 2016).
60. TFT, ‘What Else?’, 2015.61. Joseph A. Massad, ‘The Persistence of the Palestinian Question’ [electronic resource], Essays on
Zionism and the Palestinians (New York: Routledge, 2006), 471; Simona Sharoni, Gender and theIsraeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1995), 39.
62. TFT, Fragments of Palestine. October 12, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akj_yjKiwK8&feature=related (accessed June 22, 2016).
63. See Madison, Acts of Activism.64. TFT, Fragments of Palestine.65. See for instance, Arise News, ‘Zoe Lafferty and Nabil Al-Raee Talk about The Freedom Theatre’s
Production of The Siege’, Black Rook Media.Com., June 3, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfCeomMx2JU&feature=youtu.be (accessed June 6, 2016); British Broadcasting Cor-poration [BBC], ‘Palestinian Theatre Group Performs’, The Siege. 15.35 min.Weekend Break, May24, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/weekend (accessed June 6, 2016); LynGardner, ‘The Siege Review – Lives on the Edge in Bethlehem Standoff’, May 21, 2015,http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/21/the-siege-battersea-arts-theatre-review-bethlehem-church-of-the-nativity (accessed June 6, 2016); Glenn McMahon, ‘Palestine’sFreedom Theatre Shines Spotlight on Fighters Dismissed as Terrorists on First UK Tour’, May11, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/glenn-mcmahon/palestines-freedom-theatre_b_7256124.html (accessed on June 6, 2016); Alex Shams, ‘Freedom Theatre Play Takes NewLook at Nativity Church Siege’, April 19, 2015, https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=760574 (accessed June 6, 2016); for more see http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/in-the-media/.
66. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre. The Freedom Theatre, Palestine presents, The Siege. (ND),http://birmingham-rep.co.uk/event/the-siege/ (accessed June 6, 2016).
67. Scripts that are originally written in English, such as The Island, that are staged outside ofPalestine are performed in English.
68. Arise, ‘Zoe Lafferty’, June 3, 2015.69. Shams, ‘Freedom Theatre Play’, April 19, 2015.70. See, for example, BBC, May 24, 2015; Arise News, ‘Zoe Lafferty’.71. Al-Raee was denied a visitor visa to the UK for a speaking tour in June of 2014. See http://
ridinglights.org/freedom-theatres-artistic-director-denied-uk-visa/ (accessed June 20, 2016).72. Yousef M. Aljamal, ‘Traveling as a Palestinian’, Biography 37, no. 2 (2014): 664–79, 720, III, http://
search.proquest.com/docview/1661107110?accountid=9894; Danielle Jefferis, ‘Institutionaliz-ing Statelessness: The Revocation of Residency Rights of Palestinians in East Jerusalem’, Inter-national Journal of Refugee Law 24, no. 2 (2012): 202–230.
73. Al-Raee in Cryse, ‘Truth, Lies, and Fairy Tales’, Blog. 2015, http://crysse.blogspot.co.uk/(accessed June 6, 2015).
74. Abdo, 2014, 156, 157.75. Al Raee in Ylenia Gostoli, Qantara.de, May 27, 2015, http://en.qantara.de/content/interview-
with-nabil-al-raee-of-the-freedom-theatre-we-need-more-time-to-be-more-free (accessed June30, 2015).
76. Ibid.77. TFT, Freedom Bus. 2015. http://www.freedombus.ps/ (accessed June 6, 2016).78. Maryam S. Griffin, ‘Freedom Rides in Palestine: Racial segregation and grassroots politics on
the bus’, Race & Class 56, no. 4 (2015, 75): 73–84.79. Ibid., 79.80. TFT, Freedom Bus. 2015.
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81. Philip Weiss, ‘The Israeli Army Tried to Bring This Palestinian Artist to His Knees, and Failed’.Mondweiss, April 13, 2013, http://mondoweiss.net/2013/04/israeli-palestinian-artist.html(accessed June 6, 2016).
82. Ibid.83. Ibid.84. TFT, ‘This is What We Mean When We Talk about Freedom’, February 12, 2013, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ZjvbpDiMPLU&feature=youtu.be (accessed June 6, 2016).85. Ortner. ‘Resistance and the Problem’, 177.86. Ibid, 179; emphasis in original.87. Ihab Saloul, Telling memories: Al-Nakba in Palestinian Exilic Narratives. 2008. PhD. Dissertation,
Faculty of Humanities: University of Amsterdam.88. Delgado, ‘Legal Storytelling’, 65.89. Thomas Ross, ‘The Richmond Narratives’, in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge,
ed. R. Delgado (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 38–47.90. TFT, ‘Nabil Al-Raee’s trial’.91. Lentin, Co-memory and Melancholia.92. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 7.
Notes on contributor
Madalena’s primary areas of interest concern political state violence, and migrating populationsfrom anticolonial and decolonizing feminist frameworks. Her work has focused on the possibilitiesof creative Palestinian resistance and solidarity narratives to transform the violent discourses andpractices of the settler colonial state of Israel. She is currently exploring the sociological implicationsof political state violence and the limitations of transitional justice for communities and families ofthe murdered and disappeared in South Africa during the apartheid era.
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