Palestine celebrates life of Juliano Mer-Khamis one year after unsolved murder

One year after his murder, the Palestinian Authority police have not yet found who shot and killed Juliano Mer-Khamis.
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JERUSALEM (IPS) - Actors, musicians, activists and friends gathered in various locations throughout Palestine over the past week to commemorate the life of actor and theater director Juliano Mer-Khamis.

Mer-Khamis was shot and killed on 4 April 2011, while he sat in his car in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank.

“It is a sad reminder of the reality of the present situation here, of the fear in our part of society here. It is a reminder of how thin the border is between life and death here, and how little is in our control,” Jonatan Stanczak said. Stanczak, a Swede, co-founded the Freedom Theatre along with Mer-Khamis and Zakaria Zubeidi, the former West Bank commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

An Israeli citizen born to a Palestinian father and a Jewish Israeli mother, Mer-Khamis opened the Freedom Theatre in Jenin in 2006 as a way to encourage Palestinian youth in the refugee camp to express themselves, and to use creative expression as a method of resistance.

“I think that when artists are attacked, then it is a symbol that free cultural expression is under grave threat and every artist is then also a potential target. It also recognises the important role, I think, of artists in this struggle for freedom and equal rights,” said Stanczak.

The Palestinian Authority has jurisdiction over the Jenin refugee camp, a 0.42 square-kilometer area with more than 16,000 registered Palestinian refugees, almost half of them under the age of 18. The PA began a criminal investigation immediately after Mer-Khamis was killed.

A separate Israeli investigation is also ongoing and is being conducted jointly by the Israeli army, police and the Shabak security agency, which is also known as the Shin Bet.

Israeli authorities have arrested various members of the theater — including a twenty-year-old lead actor — and have broken theater windows and equipment, conducted night raids involving the shooting of live ammunition, and intimidated and ransacked the homes of individuals affiliated with the theater.

According to the Freedom Theatre, more than thirty arrests were made in the Jenin refugee camp in December 2011 alone, all supposedly related to the investigation into Mer-Khamis’s killing.

Unsolved

Despite the case remaining unsolved, Stanczak said that the theater has continued to follow Mer-Khamis’s vision of using cultural expression to promote change and fight injustice.

“We are here to join a movement struggling against oppression and inequality, struggling for a society built on democratic values. We believe that culture is a key component in that struggle because culture has the built-in capacity of questioning the present systems, of questioning authority, of questioning and challenging the present reality and also, showing the possible alternative reality,” Stanczak said.

Today, the Freedom Theatre continues to organize various cultural activities in Jenin and throughout the West Bank, including running Palestine’s first professional acting school, and hosting filmmaking workshops and playback theater events, where members of a community share personal experiences, which actors and musicians then act them out in an improvised piece.

Freedom Bus

In September-October this year, the theater plans to organize a “Freedom Bus” tour through the West Bank, where Palestinians’ personal stories and experiences under occupation will again be acted out in street theater events.

“We are continuing to educate professional actors, future leaders, in a cultural revolution. The Freedom Theatre is continuing the work of Juliano in the spirit of Juliano,” Stanczak said.

“We are inviting people all around the world to join this struggle. The reality [in Palestine] is only getting worse by the day. We see ourselves as part of a rising popular struggle and we will only succeed if the international community will join this popular, nonviolent struggle asking for democracy and justice.”