‘Our memories have vanished in dust’
ISRAELI REGIME’S RAZING OF GAZA THEATRE DEALS BLOW TO PALESTINIAN CULTURE
It was the deep panic of the last-minute rush known to everyone involved in theatre.
One of the playhouse’s top directors, a 27-year-old who had been working in theatre since he was a teenager, was preparing his latest production, a dark comedy. Stage crew and actors had been working for months, leading up to the Eid performance.
The show was to be held in Gaza City’s premier auditorium, the Said Al Mishal Cultural Centre, where the audience could relax into red fabric seats for a night of escapism. On August 9, the show’s final decorations were hoisted.
Outside, people in the Mediterranean city were winding down for the weekend. Many were hoping for an end to a 24hour flare-up in violence with the Israeli occupation regime.
The Palestinian director, Idrees Taleb, was focused on the play’s preparations, not on the jets in the skies. His office had been on the fourth floor of Al Mishal for half a decade, and he saw no reason why the Israeli occupation military would bomb a theatre.
“During wars, I would leave my house and sleep in the building,” he says. “I thought it’s the safest place.”
Not long after Taleb left for the day, residents in the area received alerts from the Israeli occupation regime that the building would be hit. The army phones locals and tell them to get back. In this case, Israeli occupation forces also fired shots at the building. Palestinians in Gaza have become used to these warning shots — they call them “knocks”.
Two hours later, larger munitions transformed Al Mishal into dust, crumbled concrete and twisted steel. At least 18 people were wounded in the attack. The razing of the cultural landmark, which held a library and offices for artistic associations including dance troupes and musicians, has shaken the strip’s creative community and rippled out to their supporters worldwide.
Founded in 2004, the building housed a recreation centre for children affected by three wars waged between Israel and Hamas during the last decade. Its cafe had buzzed with dancers, actors and artists. “Al Mishal wasn’t just an office for us; it was a story of love and inspiration. We lived there; our memories were there,” says Taleb. “I gave my colleagues some hope that change would happen, but I don’t know what to say to them after the destruction of our place.”
Earlier last month, some of Britain’s leading dramatists and directors lambasted the bombing, calling it “a devastating loss for the already isolated community” and the flattening of “one of the few large venues for theatre and music performances in besieged Gaza”.
In a letter to The Guardian , 14 major figures from UK theatre, including the director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris, and playwright Caryl Churchill, condemned the “total destruction” of the five-storey centre. “We support our dear friends and colleagues who describe their great rage and deep pain at the obliteration of this symbol of Palestinian culture and identity,” they said.
Unique venue
As an isolated 365-square kilometre coastal enclave, Gaza is one of the most inaccessible places on Earth as Israel and Egypt maintain a punishing blockade that limits freedom of movement. Many people there have never left, not even to the West Bank: just 20 miles away at its narrowest point.
“Over the course of three workshops, we applied several times for the four writers to travel, and each time they were refused by the Israeli [occupation] authorities,” says Elyse Dodgson, international director at the Royal Court. The Royal Court had also tried to give residency to Gaza-based artist Nahil Mohana in London, but her visa was refused three times by UK authorities.
Another British-Palestinian performance based at Al Mishal, At Home in Gaza and London, navigated around the blockade by virtually connecting people in both places via a series of simultaneous performances using live-streamed video feeds on big screens.
Based in the UK, co-directors Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso and Julian Maynard Smith had never set foot inside Al Mishal, but knew the building intimately. They spent months working and rehearsing with their Gaza-based colleagues, but through live video projection into each other’s studios, even as they were separated by 2,000 miles. The centre was so popular in Gaza that their most recent performance had a date clash and had to be held at another theatre.
Choucair-Vizoso says Al Mishal had a unique work ethic, with rehearsals held with open doors so other artists, musicians and performers could walk in at any time. “We remember it being odd because here you have a rehearsal room and it’s quite private. People don’t just randomly come in and out. And it’s different there. It is a different way of working.”
Jonathan Chadwick, artistic director of UK-based Az Theatre, has been leading a campaign for the reconstruction of the theatre, raising close to £3,000 (Dh14,320) during the past couple of weeks. Even with money, there are building difficulties due to the ongoing blockade, in which fuel and construction materials are regularly restricted.
Chadwick worked with an alternative stage group in Gaza called Theatre for Everybody, who performed War and Peace, adapted from the Tolstoy novel and translated into Arabic, showing to hundreds at Al Mishal in 10 performances throughout 2015.
“For people there in the artistic community and in Gaza society as a whole, [the bombing] was a major and exceptional blow,” Chadwick says.
Unless a building has been taken over for military use, the intentional targeting of cultural property is illegal under international law. The Israeli regime is party to the 1954 Hague Convention, an agreement signed after the massive destruction of cultural heritage during the Second World War, and has its own regulations drafted to protect “sensitive sites”, including cultural property, hospitals, schools and power stations.
Killing creative freedoms
On the day of the bombing, the occupation army released a statement that did not mention the culture centre, but said jets had targeted a structure it claimed was Hamas.
When requested to comment for this story, the regime’s army said it still considered the structure to have been used by Hamas, but was aware that it “was also used for civilian purposes, including a cultural centre, and this fact was taken into account during the attack planning process”.
Sameer Al Mishal, director general of the centre, balked at the idea of a Hamas presence inside the centre, where around 1,500 people work and volunteer. Since its opening, the building has been a bulwark of freedom of expression and progressive thinking, he said, which had landed its staff in trouble with Hamas’s strict ideology.
In 2007, the local Hamas branch cancelled its licence and Al Mishal could not reopen until 2009.
“We’ve faced much hassle from police and interference in the plays and performances. I was interrogated by Hamas; once, I was arrested for three days,” he says.
For Mohammad Obaid, Al Mishal was a second home. The 28-year-old helped run Al Anqa’a (the Phoenix), a troupe that taught traditional Arab Dabke dancing.
“We wanted to sustain Palestinian folklore,” he says. The group lost all their equipment, costumes and a place to train around 250 children who attend programmes during the summer holiday period.
A day after the bombing, the group joined hundreds of others to perform in the rubble of the building as a show of strength and solidarity. But even that is fading.
“Our memories have vanished now. I don’t know if we can create new ones,” says Obaid. “We will try again, but I am not sure if I can convince my colleagues to continue.”
We wanted to sustain Palestinian folklore. I don’t know if we can create new memories. We will try again, but I am not sure if I can convince my colleagues to continue.”
Mohammad Obaid| Al Anqa’a troupe manager