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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Lanre Bakare and Nadia Khomami

Leading lights of UK stage call for Israeli release of Palestinian theatre group

Apparently Palestinian men in combat gear on stage.
Freedom theatre performing in Battersea Arts Centre in 2015. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Some of Britain’s most heralded playwrights, actors and theatre directors have signed an open letter calling for the release of members of a Palestinian theatre group who have been in Israeli custody since 13 December, while also decrying the destruction of cultural sites in the West Bank and Gaza.

Caryl Churchill, Vicky Featherstone, Dominic Cooke and Maxine Peake were among the 1,000 signatories of the letter that called for the immediate release of Mustafa Sheta and Jamal Abu Joas of the Freedom Theatre, whose members were detained after the Israeli army conducted raids in Jenin refugee camp last week.

The Freedom theatre’s artistic director, Ahmed Tobasi, was also taken into custody but released after a day, while Sheta, a producer, and Abu Joas, a theatre graduate, were taken from their homes and detained. The Jenin-based Freedom theatre, founded in 2006, has toured the world extensively – including the UK.

“On Wednesday 13 December, Israeli soldiers attacked the Freedom theatre in Jenin, shooting the building, destroying offices and assaulting its staff,” the letter reads. “The Freedom theatre is a beacon of hope and resilience in the face of inconceivable adversity.

“Our friends and contemporaries at the Freedom theatre deserve the right to carry out their work without fear of violence or persecution.”

The open letter is the second sent from British theatre-makers in recent days. On 15 December, 100 Scottish theatre writers demanded that the staff of the Freedom theatre, which toured to the Edinburgh fringe in 2017, be released. The Royal Court in London, where Featherstone is the artistic director, also released a statement saying it was “horrified to read of the attack on the theatre, destruction of offices and assaults on staff”.

Several Palestinian artists and writers have been killed during the conflict, including Heba Zagout – who died along with two of her children, Adam and Mahmoud, in an Israeli airstrike – and the poet Refaat Alareer. The signatories of the letter call for an end to the violence and criticised the destruction of cultural institutions, including the Rafah Museum and al-Qarara cultural museum, calling attacks on such sites a “clear violation of international law”.

The other demands include the immediate release of Sheta, Abu Joas and all 100 Jenin residents detained on Wednesday; an immediate and permanent ceasefire; an end to the occupation in Gaza; an end to settler expansion in the West Bank; the rightful return of first-generation Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Last year, Churchill, who is one of the UK’s most celebrated playwrights, was stripped of a lifetime achievement award in Germany because of her support of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and accusations that Seven Jewish Children, her 10-minute play that was written in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in 2009 when at least 1,383 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, was antisemitic.

In response, Churchill said: “[The play] is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians; it is not an attack on all Jews, many of whom are also critical of Israeli policy.”

It was also announced on Monday that Stephen Fry would deliver this year’s Channel 4 Alternative Christmas message, using it to call for British Jews to “stand upright and proud in who they are” in the face of “the greatest rise in anti-Jewish racism since records began”.

Fry, who will say he “never thought for a single second” he would have to worry about being Jewish in the UK, will point to the 1,350% rise in antisemitic attacks in Britain over the past two-and-a-half months, including “shop windows smashed, Stars of David and swastikas daubed on walls of Jewish properties, synagogues, and cemeteries, and Jewish schools being forced to close”.

He will say he accepts and claims his Jewish identity “with pride”, and calls on viewers to “speak up and call out venomous slurs and hateful abuse wherever you encounter them”.

First airing in 1993, Channel 4’s annual broadcast has served as an alternative to the monarch’s annual televised address on the BBC and aims to bring viewers a message about that year’s events.

In previous years the message has been delivered by a varied selection of presenters, including the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the actor Danny Dyer, and Ameca – one of the world’s most advanced AI robots – last year.

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