Art, Music & Culture

Waleed Zuaiter, a professional actor in his early thirties now living in Brooklyn Heights, New York, never thought his life would change the way it has after reading a book. While taking part in the US West coast premier of Homebody/Kabul, a play by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright Tony Kushner, Zuaiter’s wife Joana came across On the Hills of God, a novel by Ibrahim Fawal, a Palestinian writer and filmmaker now residing in Birmingham, Alabama. Although he was preoccupied with acting at night while living in Berkley, California, Zuaiter’s captivation with the 450-page book sparked him into action.

Sitting perched on a hill in the suburb of Al-Masyoon, the Ramallah Cultural Palace has an almost conspicuous air of tranquillity to it. Just down the road lie the mangled remains of half a dozen cars destroyed by Israeli tanks as out in the distance one can see the first signs that the separation wall is finally beginning to encroach on the city. The gleaming new building, however, almost seems to rise above these troubling reminders of the enduring Israeli occupation, offering instead a sense of hope and renewal. The grand opening of the West Bank’s first and only Palestinian cultural centre of its kind is generating a great deal of buzz in the occupied territories. From Ramallah, Jaideep Mukerji looks at what the centre means for the Palestinians’ sense of identity.

As soon as he’s done saving New York, perhaps Spiderman can take his act to Palestine, where his uncanny ability to scale high walls will be welcomed by those imprisoned by the concrete barrier walls that enclose Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. After all, Spiderman’s connection to the Middle East is pretty close, considering that Palestinian-born cult-animator Ralph Bakshi, was executive producer of the animated Spiderman series in the late ’60s. Bakshi’s other claims to fame include animating America’s first X-rated animated film Fritz the Cat, directing The Rolling Stone’s video “The Harlem Shuffle,” and inspiring the Comic Book Guy character on the Simpsons.

“People who have been [to the West Bank and Gaza Strip] always say it’s very difficult … to speak about it” to others who haven’t been there, says French director Samir Abdallah, creator of the film Writers on the Borders: A Journey to Palestine(s). Abdallah adds that his film “brings some proposal to this question of how to speak about it and show what’s happening in Palestine and … [informs how to] not only be a storyteller but an actor, in an active position” in striving for justice for the Palestinians. EI’s Maureen Clare Murphy caught up with Abdallah who was in Chicago for the North American premier of Writers on the Borders.