2023-10-22 17:25:03
The war between Hamas and IsraeldossierThe fighter of the 90s and director of a theater in the West Bank tours with his one-man show “And Here I Am” in several cities in France, despite the cancellation of one of his dates, at Choisy-le-Roi, due to the Hamas attack in Israel.
One day, somewhere in the 1990s, at the corner of an alley in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, a charismatic man walked up to a teenager engaged in the armed struggle and said to him: “You will not be able to liberate Palestine only with weapons. On the other hand, theater is a serious weapon.” The man’s name was Juliano Mer-Khamis, he was an Israeli citizen and activist for Palestinian rights, founder of a makeshift theater in Jenin called the Freedom Theater, and led a single fight, the hardest: the third Intifada, for him, would be a “cultural intifada”. So, today, on the small stage of the Subs in Lyon, where he finally arrived after a four-day journey from Jenin, the 39-year-old teenager turned actor, Ahmed Tobasi walks towards the audience while displays in a surtitle this manifesto sentence: “Here it is, my chance, to change everything”.
To “change everything”, therefore, a one-man show, And Here I Am, written over four years with the Iraqi author Hassan Abdulrazzak and the British director Zoe Lafferty. Not to explain to the foreign public “who is right and who is wrong” on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, not to try at all costs to “make people cry in the cottages” but so that the world knows “also the artists and the stories Palestinians. And that of Tobasi offers here a Time.news of the ordinary life of teenagers in occupied territories, punctuated with burlesque energy, something in short like the Secret Life of Young People by Riad Sattouf, except that the young people here often end up martyrs or incarcerated for “terrorism” in Israeli jails.
“Committed to making my reality known”
Ahmed Tobasi has been touring with his show for six years, from Chile to the United Kingdom. He would like to play it in the United States: “I am not banned but I have not yet managed to go there: when they see that I am Palestinian with a Norwegian passport and that I apply for visas from the Jordan, they don’t really understand…” “To change everything”, obviously, we would have had to be able to play in Israel, the place he dreams of the most for this show, the impossible place. “One day an Israeli came to see my play in London and expressed a wish to work with us in Jenin. I refused, because we would not have been equal, but I told him to set up a “Freedom Theater” in Israel and to organize the conditions of our mutual invitations. On October 7, that dream turned a little more into smoke. What remains is France, among others, to “change everything”?
As the mayor of Choisy-le-Roi (Val-de-Marne), Tonino Panetta (LR), reminded the media, who canceled the first date of the French tour initially scheduled for October 12, and which the Sens Interdits festival supervises, And Here I Am does not contain anything that calls for violence but it is a “committed” show. “Committed to making my reality known, yes,” Tobasi responds to us: the reality of a child born in a Palestinian refugee camp, marked by the two Intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005) who, like other children of the camp “does not know what an Israeli civilian is, because he only sees soldiers.” That of a teenager who dreams of being DiCaprio in Titanic to seduce a girl, then of being Rambo to seduce the same girl, until he picks up in his hands the brain of one of his friends exploded by Israeli fire. That, then, of a young man engaged in the armed struggle, arrested in 2002 after having, according to him, failed to throw an explosive at an Israeli military vehicle, a relatively “unheroic” act, according to his standards at the time. (in a panic, he replays on stage, he threw the lighter instead of the bomb).
Ahmed Tobasi will be incarcerated from the age of 17 to 21 in an Israeli prison, and will be resurrected after an acute depression thanks to the Freedom Theater by Juliano Mer-Khamis. Afterwards, it’s off to Brussels for a festival where the budding actor is welcomed “as a VIP” by left-wing cultural circles romanticizing the figure of the “Palestinian resistance fighter”. It’s the discovery of arts student life in Oslo, and the promise of never setting foot in Palestine again. Until the news fell one day on his Facebook feed: in 2011, Juliano was murdered at the age of 52 in circumstances that are still debated. Today, Ahmed Tobasi continues the mission of his former mentor in Jenin. A mentor whom he first considered “as a traitor, who distracted us from the real struggle,” he says over coffee. “Because the children’s dream here is to be a martyr, not to be an actor.”
Ensure the smooth running of the tour
For the moment, the Jenin theater is completely shut down. So “thank you, to the French partners, for continuing to make our stories heard” outside the walls of the West Bank, because in Sweden, for example, the tour planned for December was completely canceled the day after the Hamas attack in Israel . For the moment, in France, only the date planned for Choisy-le-Roi on October 12 has been canceled. “Postponed,” the mayor’s office firmly corrects in a context where no one knows, however, when it will be possible to leave the West Bank once again once returned. The decision was taken, “out of respect for all the victims” and “as a security measure, in a city where two strong Jewish and Muslim communities currently live very well together”, the cabinet is reminded, which assures that the decision would have been the same if a “committed Israeli show” had been scheduled the day after the attacks.
To the extent that the Choisy-le-Roi town hall was not given the opportunity to illustrate this impartiality, this “postponement” immediately lit the torch of “double standards”, as evidenced in all case the press release published immediately by the Freedom Theater in Jenin. “Out of respect for all the victims? It’s simply hypocrisy when Paris lights up the Eiffel Tower in white and blue. […]» The first performances in France were given in Bordeaux, where several programmers expressed their wish to host the one-man show if the team chose to stay longer in the territory. In the meantime, discussions continue between cultural structures and authorities to ensure the smooth running of the tour. “The discussions are lively,” they tell us. Some consider that playing in this context is risky, others consider that symbolically, canceling or postponing is much more risky.
“And Here I Am”, directed by Zoe Lafferty, with Ahmed Tobasi, based on her life story. November 21 and 22 at the Théâtre Joliette in Marseille, November 24 at the Théâtre l’Alibi in Bastia, November 28 at the Safran in Amiens.
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