Rising from the rubble: The Freedom Theatre keeps cultural resistance alive in Palestine

“For our liberation, we need guns. But without culture, guns are useless. Brothers end up killing brothers,” Zakaria Zubeidi had told me in April 2015.

Zubeidi is one of the co-founders of The Freedom Theatre, established in the Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine’s north West Bank. When I met him, he had voluntarily turned himself in to a Palestine Authority detention centre in response to a threat to his life from the Israeli army.

Zubeidi is an icon of the Palestinian resistance. As a military commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, he led the armed resistance to the Israeli incursion of the Jenin Refugee Camp during the Second Intifada in 2002. In 2021, he was the leader of perhaps the most dramatic and sensational escape from an Israeli high-security prison, a jail break that invited comparison to the Hollywood movie Shawshank Redemption. He was captured soon after, and has been in prison since.

I was reminded of Zubeidi’s words while listening to Ahmed Tobasi, the current artistic director of The Freedom Theatre recently at an online solidarity meeting for the Palestinaian group organised by LeftWord Books and Jana Natya Manch, both outfits with which I am closely associated.

The Jenin Refugee Camp has been a particular target of the Israeli...

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