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 […]