DURING Israel’s latest invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the illegally occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers last week broke into and ransacked the offices of the Freedom Theatre.
The Star of David was spray painted on the walls of the theatre’s film screening room, and the Star of David and a crude representation of a menorah (the candelabra used in Jewish religious rituals) were graffitied on the front of the theatre building.
On the same day, the Freedom Theatre’s artistic director Ahmed Tobasi, its producer Mustafa Sheta and acting trainer Jamal Abu Joas were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and detained by the Israeli forces.
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According to the latest reports, Sheta is still in Israeli detention and faces a trial by an Israeli military court in the coming days. According to Sheta’s lawyer, he is being held at the Megiddo Prison in Israel. This is in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that all Palestinian detainees are supposed to be “detained in the occupied country” and not taken elsewhere.
The outrageous treatment of the Freedom Theatre exposes a number of important truths about the Israeli Occupation. Israel’s latest, three-day invasion of the Jenin camp – which included not only the terrorising of the civilian population, but the detention of more than 100 people (mainly boys and men) – gives the lie to Israel’s insistence that its onslaught on Gaza is a “war against Hamas”, rather than a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.
Hamas is not in power in the West Bank. In fact, the nominal power in those parts of the West Bank that have not been gifted by the Israeli state to the ever-increasing number of illegal Jewish settlements is Fatah, the party of the late Yasser Arafat, which is an avowed enemy of Hamas.
In truth, the real power in the West Bank is Israel. The primary function of the Palestinian National Authority under Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah (under the constant supervision of Israel and the United States) is to keep the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank in check.
It is ludicrous to suggest that the lifelong theatre artists of the Freedom Theatre – who have done so much to uphold the dignity and spirit of the people, especially the children, of Jenin – are reasonable targets of a military campaign that is supposedly against Hamas. In truth, the theatre company was targeted precisely because its very existence is an act of resistance against the Israeli Occupation.
The people of the West Bank (a territory, like Gaza, illegally occupied by Israel following the Six Day War of 1967) live, as the great South African leaders Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu both attested, under a system of apartheid.
In addition to dreadful conditions of day-to-day life (from overcrowding to unemployment and scarcity of basic utilities, such as water and fuel), they are subjected to regular violence and humiliation at the hands of the Israeli army and, increasingly, armed, far-right Israeli settlers.
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In such circumstances, for Palestinians to insist on a cultural life, to create artistic companies such as the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, is an affront to the Occupation. The Freedom Theatre insists on giving to the Palestinian people, and their children in particular, a sense of the history, the dignity and the beauty of their own culture.
It insists, too, on telling the Palestinians and the world the truth about the Occupation.
That is why Israel targets the Freedom Theatre.
It is also why, in a grotesque contortion of history, the Star of David and the menorah – historic symbols of the Jewish people – were scrawled on the Freedom Theatre by Israeli soldiers, not as symbols of peace, but as markers of repression and racial supremacism.
We know – from the brave Israeli refuseniks (who rot in Israel’s jails rather than serve in the army of the Occupation), from the Jewish youth leading the protests against the bombing of Gaza in New York City, and from the Scottish Jews marching in solidarity with Palestine on the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh – that such shameful abuse of the symbols of Judaism is considered an outrage by many Jewish people.
Last week’s acts of repression against the Freedom Theatre were merely the latest abuses of an Occupation that dates back to 1948 and the “Nakba” (the “catastrophe”) in which Zionist militias ethnically cleansed 850,000 Palestinians to make way for the Israeli state.
What happened last week in Jenin reminds us that the logic of Israeli settler colonialism is not only the physical oppression of the Palestinian people, but also an attempt to extinguish their culture.
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Worse still, the indiscriminate mass murder by Israel of more than 20,000 people in Gaza (most of them children and women), in retribution for the killing of 1200 Israelis (including 300 military personnel) on October 7, speaks to a desire to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.
Don’t take my word for this. The genocidal intent has been expressed openly by members of the Israeli government itself.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, Israeli defence minister.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has compared the people of Gaza to the Amalek, the people of whom, according to the Bible, God said to the Jews: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.”
Israel acts with such flagrant, genocidal impunity because it can hide behind its imperialist patron and funder, the United States. However, the horrors Israel has visited on Gaza and the brutality it continues to enact in the West Bank have unleashed a great storm of protest around the world.
That movement must now become a global intifada demanding justice for the Palestinian people. We here in Scotland must play our part.
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