One year of genocide. What is our role?

10.7.24

After one year of genocide and resistance in Palestine, theater workers are left with a critical question: if our theater, which can only approximate or mediate reality, is incapable of satisfying the requirements of the real, on the ground resistance that ending a genocide calls for, what then is the role of our art? What is the nature of cultural complicity? Do we have any power at all? 

Such questions may seem trivial in relation to the scale of brutality in Gaza. From the safety of the imperial core, it is largely a story of numbers, painful to recount. A frozen death toll of 40,000 and the 11,000 children among them, of 90,000 wounded, the 21,000 held in Israeli prison camps, the 70,000 tons of explosives, the 40 million tons of rubble, The Lancet’s projection that the real total, in the end, may number 186,000 martyred Gazan’s. The horror of these numbers is only matched by the certainty that they are all undercounted. This is to say nothing of place: critical infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and homes destroyed; the routine bombing of so-called “safe zones” such as Khan Younis; the mass graves discovered near hospitals like al-Shifa; or of condition: the UN reporting that 96% of Palestinians face acute food insecurity, the rise of polio virus and subsequent Israeli obstruction of medical aid. 

Our politicians equivocate about ‘conflict’ while refusing an arms embargo, creating a culture of indifference that enables the relative silence of our theater industry. Among the population however, the average US citizen is likely to want a permanent ceasefire now. The International Court of Justice ruling only confirms what the starkness of common sense demands we acknowledge: with only 12% of Gazan’s spared from (at least one) evacuation order at this point, with lack of access to food, shelter, clean water, or electricity, where is one to go? What of the unborn and children? The elderly? The disabled? How can this be anything other than the systematic destruction of an entire people? How could there be any question of genocide?

As artists, we know that the story we speak of is not merely a story of numbers. It is a story of human beings—lives of value, complexity, and persistent hope. Not in the abhorrent sense of which Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant deemed Palestinian’s “human animals,” but in the sense that a people will never go quietly in the face of their erasure. Our entire body of artistic works, from epic poems, classic stage drama, and Hollywood films merely attempt to mirror what the Palestinian people are living in the real time: a determined steadfastness, wrought of an ancestral binding to their land. “The right of return,” the fact that in the fleeting moments when the bombs let up and the dust clears, one may still see their stolen home in the distance, is not a metaphor but an active project. 

We must ask if this truly is the beginning of the story. In 1948, during the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), approximately 800,000 Palestinans—3/4ths of the population—were forcibly displaced by Israel, often through massacres, so that their lands could be more readily confiscated. It is said that the Nakba, however, did not start in ‘48, nor has it ended; many have deemed the genocide of the past year a second Nakba.

The ability of this second Nakba to be enforced cannot be understood as anything other than the perverse logic of the United States. Israel is, for no other reason than its own murderous excursions, incredibly unpopular on the world stage. Were it not for the U.S., which has provided some $310 billion dollars of primarily military aid to Israel since its founding—including $12.4 billion since 10/7—it would be almost impossible for the Zionist project to flaunt international law, which actually ensures Palestinian resistance as a protected right. In short, the coupling of a racist ideology and the material imperatives of an imperialist war machine (the top 5 U.S. defense contractors are projected to double their profits from 2021; genocide is simply good for business), means that liberal norms and policy go out the window. In the end, it is not the genocide which is subjective, but rather the will of the state to stop it. If we are to draw any lessons from the steadfastness of our Palestinian siblings however, it is that we cannot let this tiny group of génocidaires demobilize our efforts to create an objective imperative to stop this madness.

What are we, as theater workers, able to do about all this? It is beyond the scope of this address to definitively exhaust all answers to that question, but as artists in solidarity with Palestinian resistance to genocide, one year in, it must be our vocation to demand the question be sufficiently raised. 

We should bear in mind we are not meant to “free” the Palestinian people, for they have, and will, do this themselves. It is our task to aid the struggle which only they can face, to work from where we are and from where we know best. As theater workers, this must be through ensuring that all aspects of our artform and artistic industry end their complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial violence. This is the ground from which real solidarity springs, not just in word but in deed, as U.S. civil society organizes itself to go where its state will not. However, for this strategy to be meaningful, it must be powerful—it must threaten the status quo in a way that the tiny minority of stakeholders cannot ignore.

The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) strategy gives us a resolute pathway to accomplishing this. We are asked, as theater artists, to endorse the PACBI call, to de-normalize and de-legitimize the genocidal Israeli regime, refusing its propagandistic programming and blood soaked funding. The more who join the call, the less possible it becomes for Israel to enact its terror; in turn, our power builds. Consolidating ourselves to this movement is also a way to meet others at the intersection of artistry and activism. And to be sure, the BDS strategy is only one among many. What would it mean to use our art as a way to shift consciousness? To develop new forms of theatrical storytelling in form and content, which further divests psychically from all the thinking that made this genocide possible in the first place? What must our theater poke, prod, and destroy the image of so that we might destroy it in the world itself? How can theater contribute to a world in which $12.4 billion dollars is not sent to maintain a genocide, but to fund healthcare, education, and the arts? What would it look like for our organizational infrastructure to think past (only) representation, past (only) the stories it puts on its stages, and rethink itself as a totalizing apartheid free zone?

Again, these are not questions for a savior, or mere ally. Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia presciently noted that ‘What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.’ Solidarity and mutual liberation are neither metaphors nor catchphrases, but a practice that arises from the material basis that the same war machine which thrives on Palestinian blood is behind the 80 Cop Cities currently being constructed across the U.S. Many of us maintain relative domestic comfort now—but for how long? 

There are so many possibilities to meet the above questions, but we cannot discover them unless we engage in the sustained practice of organizing. Thus, we must get to work. One bit of comfort is we know that we have numbers on our side. The practice of organizing has revealed as much: after forming in March of 2023, Theater Workers for a Ceasefire’s first initiative was to launch a statement calling for a comprehensive ceasefire which, through grassroots efforts, has resulted in over 3,700 individual and 75 organizational signatures. Since the launch of our PACBI Working Group a few months ago, 17 theatrical and performance organizations (and counting) have heeded the call to divest from the complicit State of Israel. Our Red Carpet Takeover campaign has supported showings of solidarity from the Tony Awards to regional opening nights around the country, and we have organized contingents for marches and protests in multiple states. We have hosted or co-hosted three teach-ins on topics including cultural resistance in Palestine, the PACBI movement, and U.S. imperialism in Palestine and beyond, all with tremendous turn out both virtually and in-person. 

None of this is accidental: TW4C exists to educate ourselves as an industry, consolidate our educated forces, and guide them toward the struggle to make change. All of our projects draw together a great diversity of theater workers: in race and ethnicity, age, religion, theatrical practice, and political leanings. 

One year later, we humbly salute Palestinian steadfastness in the face of genocide, and out of an abundance of solidarity, we loudly exclaim that our work as Theater Workers for a Ceasefire is just beginning, because clearly it has not been enough. We will not rest until there is a permanent ceasefire, arms embargo, and a Free Palestine. We are grateful to be led by organizations like the Palestinian Youth Movement and BDS National. If they will not rest, then neither will we. 

We should bear in mind that one year of genocide is also one year of resistance. Juliano Mer Khamis, co-founder of The Freedom Theatre of Jenin clarified before his murder that “What we do in the theater is not trying to be a substitute or an alternative to the Palestinian resistance in the struggle for liberation, just the opposite... We join, by all means, the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is our liberation struggle. We are not healers... We are freedom fighters." 

From this we can glean at least two responsibilities: one, to more firmly connect our theater to our own fight for freedom, and two, from our various localities and particularities, connect our fight to the fight of all those struggling against oppression and exploitation globally. Perhaps, in these simplified terms, the only question which remains is how far are we willing to take our fight? Theater Workers for a Ceasefire commits to answering this question with you, with more cultural organizing to come.

In Solidarity,

TW4C