A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theater
When Palestinian negotiators returned from the Madrid peace talks in the early 1990s, they briefed the press at a theatre in East Jerusalem. It seems an odd setting for news of talks that held the world’s attention, until you discover the role theatre had played in Palestinian life since the Nakba.
A burned-out cinema until 1984, the Palestinian National Theatre was where the negotiator Hanan Ashrawi and the Jerusalem leader Faisal Al-Husseini accused Israel of ignoring its commitments. It also hosted a festival for local schools and a literary festival marking twenty years since Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination. In Al-Saber’s words, the theatre “stepped into the role of an acting ministry of culture”.
That a theatre could take on such a role says a great deal about what it had come to mean for Palestinians. The mass displacement of 1948 scattered the artists, troupes and audiences of pre-war Palestine. In the years that followed, Palestinian culture survived inside Israel under military rule, which lasted until 1966, and in the West Bank under Jordanian rule.
After the 1967 war and Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, a generation of young people in Jerusalem and Ramallah turned to the stage.
Writing from exile in Lebanon, the Jerusalem writer Mahmoud Shqair observed that the theatre movement “became the most conspicuous artistic phenomenon on our occupied land. None of the other arts matched it in drawing and influencing the audiences.”
Al-Saber explains why. Under an occupation that restricted Palestinian assembly, attending a play was a social activity and a political act at once. In his words, theatre had become “a site for free thought and a battleground that did not require forbidden arms”.
A Movement’s Promise tells how that movement, known to its members as Al-Haraka Al-Masrahiyya (the theatre movement), came into being and grew into the theatre industry Palestinians have today.
Al-Saber assembled this history from scattered records and the recollections of the people who made it. “Due to the absence of a Palestinian state,” he writes, “Palestinian theater history has not been collected into a centralized archive.” During fieldwork between 2009 and 2023, he interviewed theatre artists and gathered material from their personal collections: reviews and interviews cut from period newspapers, posters, photographs, brochures and actors’ copies of scripts.
Further material came from the archive of El-Hakawati (The Storyteller), the Jerusalem company founded in 1977 whose theatre later became the Palestinian National Theatre, and from the papers of its founder, François Abu Salem. Records of the Israeli censorship board, held in the Israel State Archive, show how companies dealt with the censors.
El-Hakawati’s satire Mahjoub Mahjoub (1980), about a hapless Palestinian everyman under occupation, shows how artists slipped their plays past Israeli censors, and how censorship backfired.
To obtain a performance permit, El-Hakawati’s co-founder Jackie Lubeck sent the censors an English summary that made the play sound harmless. In one scene, Mahjoub is interrogated for wearing clothes in the colours of the Palestinian flag, which was then illegal. In Lubeck’s summary, this became simply: “Mahjoub is questioned about the outfit he wears to work one day.” The censors saw nothing political, and the play was approved in December 1980.
The following month, the authorities stopped a performance in Nazareth, claiming El-Hakawati had departed from the approved text. The audience turned the evening into a protest, and the actors improvised a new scene, sitting on stage tied to their chairs with their mouths taped. The novelist Emile Habibi condemned the ban, and the play went on to tour Europe.
Episodes like this lead Al-Saber to argue that Israel “inadvertently and unknowingly promoted Palestinian theater” through its efforts to suppress it. Censorship taught artists to say things indirectly, and every ban or arrest only drew more attention to their work.
Al-Saber concentrates on East Jerusalem and its close ties with Ramallah, from 1967 to the Oslo Accords. The two cities worked as a single cultural centre, linked by family, social and professional bonds, and most of the pioneering artists lived and worked in one or both.
Al-Saber wants readers to understand Palestinian theatre through the people who made it. Occupation shaped their working lives, but so did artistic ambition, friendships, rivalries and the effort to build an audience. As he explains, accounts centred on the “conflict” too often leave Palestine’s story existing only in relation to Israel. His approach stresses “the right of Palestinian theater makers to exist on their own merits, without being subsumed by crisis narratives or orientalist motifs”.
Balalin (The Balloons), the first independent Palestinian theatre company formed in the West Bank after the 1967 occupation, showed how theatre could rally an audience without saying a single forbidden word. In its best-known production, Al-‘atma (The Darkness, 1972), a young troupe sets out to perform a play, but the lights fail and the actors ask the audience to help repair them.
Many spectators believed the blackout was real, and electricians sometimes climbed onto the stage to offer help. As Al-Saber explains, “the struggle to end the darkness and perform the play represents the Palestinian struggle to fix its internal conflicts and end the occupation.” When the eager carpenter Adel dies at the lighting board, the cast carries him out on their shoulders as Palestinians carry their martyrs. “It was truly a call for an uprising, but using symbols,” recalls Emile Ashrawi, a founding member of the company.
Fifteen years later, El-Hakawati turned to the memory of the Nakba. By then it had become, in Al-Saber’s words, “a de facto representative of the Palestinian theater” in the international media. The Story of Kufur Shamma (1987) follows Walid, a young man who returns from studying abroad to find his village deserted. Kufur Shamma is fictional, but it stands in for the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. With the village fool, Walid sets out to bring its scattered people home, tracking them across the diaspora, only to return and find the village erased.
Telling the story of 1948 met resistance well beyond the occupied territories. At a festival in Acre in 1987, a mixed Palestinian and Jewish city inside Israel, supporters of the Jewish extremist group Kahane Chai stood up in the front row, raised an Israeli flag and chanted “Death to Arabs”.
Two years later, Joseph Papp, one of America’s leading theatre producers, cancelled the play’s booking at New York’s Public Theater for fear of offending his audience, many of them Jewish and, in his words, “very sympathetic to Israel”. Each time, El-Hakawati performed anyway: the actors in Acre returned to the stage to applause, and weeks after Papp’s decision the play opened at another New York theatre to warm reviews.
The movement’s divisions run through the book as strongly as its achievements. Factional loyalties split ensembles, and the row over who controlled El-Hakawati’s theatre ended with its founders leaving the building they had rebuilt. Yet Al-Saber sees this constant breaking and re-forming as the movement’s strength: a “self-sacrificial” process that kept making way for new companies and artists.
After Oslo came new pressures. Foreign donor money professionalised the theatres but turned a collective movement into separate organisations competing for grants. At the same time, the Separation Wall, military checkpoints and expanding settlements cut East Jerusalem off from the West Bank.
Within a few years, most West Bank Palestinians could no longer enter Jerusalem without a permit. The Palestinian National Theatre lost its largest audience, and Jerusalem was separated from Ramallah, the city whose family, artistic and professional ties had given birth to the movement. Theatre-makers now had to tour to audiences trapped in their own cities, and artists with West Bank identity cards could rarely work across the new lines.
Al-Saber closes by asking whether the movement still exists. He believes it does, carried in the stories that two generations of theatre-makers still tell one another. “Even during war, genocide, and uncertainty,” he writes, “the movement is alive in its lore and lineage, promising and delivering a richly diverse theater industry.” If at times it seems dormant, “its history has shown that it may simply be under the radar”.
