Jenin

- Outside the "City of the Moon", the boy Mahmoud Al-Saadi founded a huge artwork, and prepared for him the Freedom Theater in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. more than a month ago.

Since 2017, Mahmoud (18 years old) has been involved in the Freedom Theatre, and he and his companions participated in training and preparing for several works of art, including "The City of the Moon", but he was "rebellious" against everything, even his childhood, which he did not live like others like him.

Mahmoud - the only male among his sisters - did not see in the theater anything but a place to prove that he was a "man". Rather, he might rebel and ridicule some of the works and consider them "naive" unless he appears in them as "a man" (a man), as Raneen Odeh, his coach at the Freedom Theater, tells Al Jazeera Net. .

With this personality, Mahmoud reflected the condition of the children of his Jenin camp, whose thinking is growing older, and they are well aware of what is going on around them. Otherwise, the occupation bullet would not have penetrated his body and killed "the kindest heart and kindest person you could know," Odeh continues while she is engaged in the training process.

A cartoon model showing a rifle, a keffiyeh, and a plastic painting indicating the resistance reflected in the theater (Al-Jazeera)

In an attempt to alleviate the misery of camp life, Odeh (30 years old) wanted to compensate Mahmoud and his companions for something from their stolen childhood without dropping their resistance ideology, but she tried in vain, "as they imbibed from an early age the oppression and oppression of the occupation," says Odeh, who became expecting at the moment of hearing The name of one of Mahmoud's companions is that he was martyred.

The resistance didaan the theater and the camp

The same scene of resistance embodied by the martyr Mahmoud Al-Saadi of the Freedom Theater repeats its first biography at the hands of its founder, Arna Mir Khamis, a Jewish activist married to the Palestinian fighter Saliba Khamis. Childhood home.

He soon turned to the "Stone Theatre" (in relation to the uprising of the stones), and presented his first work, "The Little Lantern", based on the story of the late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, and won an international award.

Arna was able to expand, develop and diversify the theater, so her son Juliano Khamis continued her career after her death in the mid-nineties of the last century.

At that time, the theater was taken from a room above the house of the family of the Palestinian resistance fighter and prisoner Zakaria Al-Zubaidi as his headquarters, and Zakaria himself and his companions became heroes of the artistic work, until they became real heroes and leaders of the resistance in the Jenin camp, especially in the battle of the camp during its invasion during the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2002. Where most of them were martyred and others were captured, as is the case of Al-Zubaidi now.

"Zakaria Al-Zubaidi was one of the founders of the Freedom Theatre, and not just an element in it," says Ahmed Tubasi, the artistic director and one of the heroes of the work in the theatre. Zakaria even encouraged the revival of the theater after it was demolished during the invasion, and his famous saying was "the theater is the Kalashnikov for me," stressing Thus, "the idea of ​​resistance through art and culture is no less than its armed counterpart and does not undermine it either," adds Tubasi.

Arna's children

Venice still needed culture and art to support and protect it as well, a feeling that Juliano Khamis evoked during the invasion of the camp when he produced the documentary "The Children of Arna", which restored the theater's presence locally and globally, after it evoked the destruction of the camp and its martyred resistance fighters who are the heroes of the theater at the same time.

This appears in the pictures and plastic works that adorn the theater rooms, its walls and the road leading to it, and international press reports that are highlighted and suspended, telling something of the story of steadfastness and resistance that was embodied in a picture of the Zubaidi prisoner and a group of the camp’s children.

Entrance to the Freedom Theater in Jenin, West Bank (Al-Jazeera)

A cartoon model of a gun, a picture of a masked Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh, and perennial olives planted at its entrance, in addition to colorful T-shirts bearing expressions of resistance, which are marketed to visitors to the camp, especially foreigners, reflect the common denominator between resistance in all its forms.

Tubasi says that art cannot escape or be far from the reality in which Palestinian society lives, and this is not only in its name, but in its works that exceed 40. "We believe in the culture of resistance before the resistance itself, which means that resistance is not confined to a specific group or form. And that all Palestinians, in terms of their location, are resisting.”

And several revolution

And through the production of complete works of art from A to Z, the role of the Freedom Theater continued, and it also received many community performances, in addition to preparing artists in its School of Drama and Acting, as well as educational workshops and training programs for women and children, and other entertainment provided by the theater through music and clowning.

And through the “Promise of the Revolution” project, the role of the theater of resistance is more prominent. This project, says Tubasi, sheds light on the suffering of artists from the occupation’s harassment and oppression of them locally and globally, such as the artist Muhammad al-Bakri and Muhammad Abu Sakha, the cartoonist Muhammad Saba’na, Darin Tatour and dozens of others from different Palestinian regions. This reflects the unity of the situation among the Palestinians.

In the Jenin camp, where dozens of martyrs died this year, including Mahmoud Al-Saadi, whose pictures cover the alleys of the camp, and other Palestinian intellectuals and resistance fighters whose pictures hang on the walls of the Freedom Theatre.

Renouncing "terrorism" is a condition for support

Of the 17 members who carried the Freedom Theater on their shoulders, the number decreased to only 4, including an artist, a trainer, and a technician. The donors’ restrictions and requirements worsened the matter, after they described any act of resistance to Israel as “terrorism”, which made the theater lose an essential source of support in the long run, especially In the absence of local support represented by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture and others.

The Elephant play, produced by the Freedom Theater, dealt with the topic of Corona (Al-Jazeera)

And in the new production of the Freedom Theater, recent works such as the “Kingdom of Emojis” for children and their imaginations compared to reality, and the play “The Elephant” that dealt with the situation of the Palestinians under the shadow of the Corona virus, appear.

The "Gaza Metro" is now leading the scene, and it is a work produced entirely in the theater and tells the story of a girl who dreams of meeting a person in Gaza, and the dream loses the barriers and obstacles of the occupation. It was shown in several theaters in Haifa, Jerusalem and Ramallah.

From the face of a fighter, half of it appears in the dark and the other in the light, and in the form of a shield, the word freedom was written in white handwriting on a red ground, and the Freedom Theater takes its motto.