Juliano Mer Khamis: Murder, Theatre, Freedom, Going Forward

On Monday, 4 April 2011, Palestinian Israeli actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis, director of The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp, was shot five times by an as-yet-unidentified gunman. Mer Khamis died in the ambulance en route from the theatre to the hospital. His death is a great loss. His life’s work is a resplendent testimony to the possibilities of constructive art making, education, and drama therapy.

Figure 1.

Juliano Mer Khamis in front of The Freedom Theatre on 17 March 2011. (Photo by Erin B. Mee)

Juliano Mer Khamis (1958–2011) was the son of Arna Mer, a Jewish Israeli peace activist, and Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Communist Party. Mer Khamis was a well-known Israeli stage, television, and film actor — his last film was Julian Schnabel’s Miral (2011). Arna Mer established The Freedom Theatre with money awarded to her as winner of the Right Livelihood Award from the Swedish government — which has been called the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize. When Arna died in 1994 the theatre continued, but it was reduced to rubble during the 2002 Battle of Jenin when Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered Jenin and demolished the building. In 2003 Mer Khamis, returning to Jenin to see what had happened to the children who had acted in Arna’s productions, made the documentary Arna’s Children. The positive reaction to the film led to the rebuilding and reopening of the theatre in 2006 on a new site in Jenin. In 2008 Mer Khamis began the first professional actortraining program in Palestine.

The Jenin Refugee Camp has a population of 16,000 people who were expelled from their homes in and around Haifa during the 1948 Nakba (in Arabic, “catastrophe”) and in 1967 after the Six-Day War. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, children under the age of 14 make up nearly 40 percent of the population in the West Bank, where Jenin is located (in Passia 2011:367). The Freedom Theatre (TFT) created plays for these children and their families.

According to Mer Khamis, between 2002 and 2009 schools were closed about half the year because of curfews imposed by the Israeli military. Poverty, lack of secure housing, high unemployment, and rampant malnutrition are the conditions in Jenin under which Mer Khamis opened The Freedom Theatre in 2006.

Mer Khamis:

The Freedom Theatre is a venue to join the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation with poetry, music, theatre, cameras. The Israelis succeeded [in damaging] our identity [and] our social structures [both] political [and] economical. Our duty as artists is to rebuild or reconstruct this destruction. Who we are, why we are, where we are going, who we want to be.

(TFT 2010)

In a 2009 interview with the BBC, Mer Khamis said:

To be free is to be able to criticize. To be free is to be able to express yourself freely. To be free is to be free first of all [from] chains of tradition, religion, nationalism (in a dark way I mean). Then you can start to free yourself from others.

(in WNYC 2011)

Mer Khamis worked amidst violence and advocated struggle by any means necessary, but personally he engaged in nonviolent struggle. “We believe that the third intifada, the coming intifada, should be cultural, with poetry, music, theatre, cameras, and magazines” (TFT 2010). The Freedom Theatre’s cultural intifada is based on courses in film, photography, creative writing, and drama therapy with a three-year training program in theatre. The TFT has produced adaptations of Palestinian Ghassan Khanafani’s Men in the Sun,¹ George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.² Mer Khamis intrepidly proclaimed: “We hope that this theatre will generate a political artistic movement of artists who are going to raise their voices against women’s discrimination, against children’s discrimination, against violence” (TFT 2010).

The TFT started with a drama therapy program taught by Petra Barghouthi. As Mer Khamis noted, “There was no intention to create a...