Trek to Palestine to fight historical amnesia
Golden Thread’s season opener shows Gaza conflict ‘goes over millennia’
When war broke out between Israel and Hamas in October, it was the first time Sahar Assaf read about a major new conflict in the Middle East while outside of the region.
“Because I’ve lived in Lebanon most of my life, and I’ve experienced what it means to be under the F-16s and the fighter jets, the traumas came back to me,” the artistic director of Golden Thread Productions, who’s three years into her job, told the Chronicle.
Her artistic side was paralyzed at first, she said, noting that it “felt like I had to drag myself to work every day — this feeling of, ‘Why are we doing this? What does it matter?’ ”
Simultaneously, she was taken aback by the “dehumanization” in U.S. coverage of the hostilities, finding a piece by New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman that compared Middle Easterners to insects especially galling.
But she also felt, for the first time, as if she had to justify her anger about the carnage.
“While in Lebanon, you’re sharing the rage,” she said. “You don’t need to explain why you’re enraged, why you’re upset, why you’re traumatized, why you’re grieving.”
By contrast, for many Americans, she noted, the conflict in Gaza is “just another war.”
All these feelings led Assaf to dedicate her 28-year-old company’s season to Palestine, with the first production, “Returning to Haifa,” beginning performances Friday, April 12.
The show adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s touchstone 1969 novella about two families — one Palestinian, one Jewish — in two eras: during the 1948 Nakba (the Arabic word for “catastrophe” and the term Palestinians gave to their banishment),” when Palestinian couple Safiyya (Amal Bisharat) and Said (Lijesh Krishnan) are forced out of their home, and in the aftermath of 1967’s Six-Day War, as the couple make the return of the play’s title.
Programming the play serves as a corrective to historical amnesia, director Samer Al-Saber told the Chronicle before a recent rehearsal.
“A lot of perceptions about Palestine erroneously go to the latest event,” he said. “The reality is, the story of Palestine goes over millennia.”
Assaf knew that calling her 2024 lineup a “Season for Palestine” could be controversial, so she formed a community council with members from a variety of backgrounds, including those with ties to Israel and Palestine, to advise her. One member, Debórah Eliezer, an Arab Jew and the former artistic director of nowdefunct FoolsFury, said the council was formed in part to anticipate and respond to critiques of the company’s choice.
“A season of Palestine doesn’t mean a negation of other folks who are suffering at this time,” she offered, as one such defense.
And Eliezer knows she can’t speak for all Jews; she can speak only for herself.
“I’m undoing a lot of narratives that no longer serve me,” she said. “That makes me very vulnerable. But I’m willing to do that because I’m unwilling to support a government that doesn’t serve me or my relatives who live in Israel right now.”
Bisharat, who is Palestinian, is embodying her family history in playing Safiyya. “We were expelled from our ancestral village in 1948,” she said. After being displaced internally in Israel for three
years, they settled in Nazareth — just 10 kilometers from where they’re from, which she described as a closed military zone now. “On Israel’s Independence Day, they’re allowed to get permits to go visit and have picnics in the village.”
As weighty as the play is, with Safiyya and Said debating whether to return to see what’s become of their home two decades later, Al-Saber kept the rehearsal room at Golden Thread’s Potrero Hill offices light and playful.
“We’re going to try to do this scene as if there is no director,” he began. Later, he told actor Diala AlAbed, who plays young Safiyya, to try the top of the show as if her whole motivation were to get her older counterpart to dance.
“I’ll pretend I know what that means!” she quipped gamely.
Before long, Bisharat was leading the ensemble in the basic steps of the dabke, a celebratory folk dance.
The play’s idea of return to home is not idle whimsical nostalgia, Al-Saber said. “This is not a situation where I go back to the cafe I used to type in, or, ‘Oh, I grew up in that house that we sold to the neighbors, and I just want to see it again.’ ”
Instead, he continued, “This is a complex situation where the owner of the home is going to their home for the first time in 19 years. I could imagine that they have the hope of unlocking that door and walking in and seeing it empty, ready to receive them … because it’s their home. I mean, they still have the deed. They still have the key.”