Juliano Mer-Khamis, Jew, Arab, actor and activist, died on April 4th, aged
THE two young men in the suicide-video were bearded, nervous and pale. They stood in their camouflage fatigues and bandannas in front of the flag of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. One, carrying a rifle, would not look towards the camera. The other read out a message to friends and family, bidding them a terse goodbye: “Heaven is precious, and jihad is the way.”
Some years before, Juliano Mer-Khamis had worked with these boys in his mother’s theatre in Jenin, in the Palestinian West Bank. Their names were Nidal (with the rifle) and Yousef. Nidal, with his cheeky smile, had crawled around on all fours pretending to be a cat, miaowing daringly round the legs of the girls. Stouter Yousef had preened himself in crimson silk, playing a king. Now he was on his way to kill four Israelis and wound 40 more.
Many might conclude that his brush with theatre had done no good at all. Mr Mer-Khamis drew the opposite conclusion. The horror of Yousef and his murders convinced him that the teeming, dilapidated refugee camp in Jenin needed more stagecraft, not less. He didn’t believe that acting would heal the trauma of Israeli invasion, destruction and occupation; as one of “his” boys said later, “He doesn’t feel sorry for us.” Acting to him was never just a distraction, art for art’s sake. It was a means of strengthening Palestinian resistance by freeing the self and gaining confidence. Rather than throwing stones or learning to shoot, his young actors could curse, dance, shout poems, sing. With his deep, passionate voice and wildly waving arms, he would teach the children of Jenin to hurl words and music at the occupiers until they overcame them, and the armoured cars trundled back across the Green Line. “Aren’t we here for something?” he would cry to the faint-hearted.
His own identity was another question. His ideal, flung out with his usual unstoppable bravado, was to be nothing, selfless, unlabelled, just a free human being. Yet, if anything, he wore too many labels. He was a Jew, the child of a mother, Arna (“the sun in our house”), who had fought as a pioneer for the state of Israel before becoming a feisty, raucous advocate of Palestinian rights. He was an Arab whose father, an Arab Christian, had led the Communist Party in Nazareth. He could be a good Israeli, doing his army service as a paratrooper and acting the hero in gung-ho films such as “Kippur” or “Rage and Glory”. And he was Palestinian, in the sense that when he strolled through the Jenin streets, familiarly cuffing and glad-handing the children who swarmed round him, he was one of them.His Freedom Theatre, set up in 2006 to replace his mother’s workshop (bulldozed by the Israelis four years earlier), was the first acting school in occupied Palestine. It drew audiences from Ramallah, Bethlehem and even Israel, bused in semi-secretly through the mountains. By 2009 700-800 children attended every year, including many girls. There was a waiting list. They acted “Alice in Wonderland” and a Palestinian version of “Animal Farm” in which the children, in their pig masks, learned to speak Hebrew and dared to suggest that fighters in their own intifada might become like their oppressors. In the battered cement labyrinths of the camp, where the only entertainment came from TV or mobile phones, the theatre was Mr Mer-Khamis’s seeding ground for a brand new and liberated Palestinian identity.
Yet he never was one of them exactly. Though Jewish extremists saw him as an Arab, in Jenin he was “Uncle Jule”, the good Jew, frustratingly pigeonholed as a philanthropist. At worst, some of the boys who acted for him thought he might be a spy for the occupation. He co-founded his theatre with Zacharia Zubeidi, once the military head of the al-Aqsa Brigades, whom he had inspired to turn away from violence. It didn’t help. Suspicious parents saw him as an Israeli agent, an unwelcome proselytiser for Western values who let their daughters act with boys and even take the leading roles.
He had a secular Israeli’s loose informality; but he always found Israel hard to deal with. As a soldier in 1978 he was ordered to drag an elderly Palestinian from his car; he refused and was sent to prison, realising then that “the outfit could not fit”. His film about his mother’s theatre, “Arna’s Children” (2004), which included the story of Nidal and Yousef and their transformation into terrorists, was not exactly banned in Israel, but it was neither distributed nor discussed. He felt he was an “alien being” before an Israeli audience, and considered Israeli society “pathological”. Though he lived in Haifa, he found himself spending longer periods in Jenin.
By this spring, however, Muslim hostility to his projects was becoming harder to bear. The theatre had twice been firebombed; in 2009 flyers had been sent to him, warning of bullets if he stayed. In one interview he said he had never felt so Jewish as he did now in Jenin, suddenly needing every scrap of his field training, thinking like a beleaguered soldier. When he was killed outside his theatre, shot five times by a man who apparently had links to Hamas, some marvelled that he had not tried to leave the camp sooner. But he was from the elite Sayeret unit, he had explained once. They never ran away.
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