This was first published in Maán News Agency 2007.

Palestinian Circus was started by a man named Shadi Zmorrod and seeks to enlighten people about Palestinian suffering, whilst also entertaining the Palestinian people. When I contacted Shadi to learn more about his creation, he insisted that I come and experience life with the circus first-hand. The day I arrived, Shadi had just secured funding from the French Consulate, which had enabled him to hire a room in which the circus’ performers could practice. Previously, the circus had been forced to make-do with limited resources; they practiced in the street, used toilet brushes as juggling batons and relied on the generosity of local restaurants to feed the performers. The funding will also facilitate a tour of Europe for the Palestinian circus students. As Shadi announced the news to his students he was met with cheers and joyous bursts of laughter.

Children will be children

Shadi explained his motives for setting up the Palestinian circus school. He said that his goal was to, “redraw the smiles on the faces of the children.” Children are born every day into an oppressive, conflictual situation and Shadi is here to enable them, despite their surroundings, to just be children. Shadi described how Palestinians had lost their trust; how it had been systematically destroyed by the occupation. He said that the first exercises the circus does with children in the workshops are trust exercises. Circus is based on trust and working together and it is necessary for acrobats to trust one another in order to perform together. He explained that anything built on trust stands in stark contrast to the Israeli occupation. Shadi told us how he intends to put trust back into Palestinians through the circus. The circus has very grand aims; it also seeks to build unity and solidarity in people who, in the face of the current crisis, have become divided. Shadi explained how the circus is not only about learning techniques; it also has a wider pedagogical purpose.

Breaking down boundaries, domestically and abroad

Fresh in my mind when I went to meet Shadi was an incident when a group of activists were held at Allenby Bridge crossing into Israel by Israeli border control who were suspicious of their purpose in traveling to the occupied territory. Bored by 8 hours of waiting, the activists began to entertain themselves by clowning around and juggling. The border control soon realized that this group of people were harmless and allowed their passage. Shadi spoke of how Palestinians are internationally known as terrorists, he seeks to promote circus as an alternative to violence and rectify the reputation of Palestinians. But the circus has come up against barriers domestically. When Shadi first told people about his idea to set up a circus, they said, “So what, you’re going to put a girl wearing a bikini on a trapeze?” The circus is a truly unfamiliar art in Palestine. Despite this, the performances of the Palestinian Circus not only sold out, but far outnumbered the capacity of the venues they had booked, meaning the circus had to move to larger and larger venues to meet overwhelming demand. The circus maintained respect for Arabic traditions and culture; there is nothing sexual in their performances, no performers are scantily clad. When people witnessed the innocent, yet ground-breaking nature of the circus, they came in droves and brought their children.

 A unique goal

Through the Palestinian circus, Shadi is spreading a Brechtian message, his circus, he claims, is the first circus group which has focused on human suffering. The circus props include a makeshift separation wall, and the aim of the circus is to illustrate the suffering of the Palestinian people. Shadi said he wants to take the tour around the world to highlight the problems encountered by Palestinian people, but that it would be even better if people from around the world came to the occupied territory, to see for themselves. However, he does not always intend to put on a circus based on suffering; he would like to do a show unrelated to politics in the coming years and hopes that this will represent the future and a marked change in the Palestinian situation.

The first circus workshop in a Palestinian refugee camp

We were lucky enough to witness the first ever circus workshop in a Palestinian refugee camp, which took place in one of the poorest refugee camps in the occupied territories, Amari refugee camp, in Ramallah, in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. A school in the camp filled with wide-eyed, expectant children; and they would not be disappointed. The show began with a clown, bringing an element of the absurd to the children of the camp. I watched as the amazed children’s mouths gaped open for the entirety of the show. The show began with the clown obstructing the warm-up of the performers and soon turned to a kind of deliberate chaos, with several intended mistakes, which served to demonstrate that anyone can be involved in circus, and slip-ups on the stage really do not matter. Through the circus, a message of inclusivity and solidarity is spread to the Palestinian people. Following the performance, the performers held a workshop, in which they taught the children to do acrobatics and juggle. The children were divided by gender and I watched as the boys formed an orderly queue, each excitedly awaiting their turn to roll down a row of gym mats. The girls stood in a circle learning to juggle with brightly-coloured juggling balls.

The future of the circus

Shadi intends to work with people with special needs in the circus in the future. He has written a circus production entitled, ‘Dreamer Kid,’ in which 50% of performers will be people with disabilities. The story is about a kid who wanted to join a circus group, but he jumped on a trapeze and injured himself on his first day of practicing, then he went to hospital and discovered that the hospital waiting room was full of other injured circus performers. Shadi and his lively group of performers will also be taking the workshops to other refugee camps within the Palestinian occupied West Bank. The Palestinian circus is an all-encompassing, far-reaching group, led by a dynamic, charismatic individual who has charged himself with reaching out to the whole of the Palestinian people as well as illustrating the Palestinian situation to the rest of the world, and he is certainly on the way to achieving his goal!

This article was published in This Week in Palestine 2007.

While Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza are scrambling to come up with a new national Palestinian vision, Israeli Arabs are looking for ways to wrest equal citizenship rights for themselves as non-Jews in a state whose reason for existence is to nurture Jewish identity and culture.

According to a recent New York Times news item, “A group of prominent Israeli Arabs [in a report issued in December 2006] has called on Israel to stop defining itself as a Jewish State and become a ‘consensual democracy for both Arabs and Jews,’ prompting consternation and debate across the country.” The report is called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” and the strategies in the report will be implemented by The National Committee of the Local Arab Authorities in Israel.

The term “Israeli Arabs”, as used above by the New York Times, is widespread inside and outside Israel, both in the media and in scholarly articles. The emphasis is on the second word — “Arabs” rather than on the qualifier “Israeli”. The alternative term “Palestinian Israelis” would come as a rude shock to many Israelis, even secular nationalists, conditioned as they are to think of the Palestinians amongst them (20 percent of the population) as a people who had no hand in the agrarian or industrial building of the Zionist State. These people are tolerated at best, so long as they submit themselves to the Zionist ideal. Arab Israelis, for example, must acknowledge “the existence of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people” before they can even participate in the political process (1992 Basic Law).

In one way, the subtext for this usage emphasizes the Zionist narrative: Jews (the majority of whom come from outside Israel) have a God given right to live in historic Palestine, but the indigenous Palestinian is a generic Arab with only a tenuous sense of belonging to a specific geographic area. The term “Israeli Arabs” includes Muslim and Christian Arabs, the remnant of indigenous Palestinians that had escaped the ethnic cleansing of 1948, now numbering 1.3 million strong. Significantly, it does not include Jewish Arabs, who are referred to, instead, as “oriental Jews”. Nor does it include the dispossessed Bedouins (about 100,000), who are denied legal recognition and herded in the arid northeastern part of the Negev (the western and fertile part having been reserved for Jewish settlers).

But the term also accurately reflects the sense of schizophrenia as well as exclusion that Palestinians with Israeli IDs feel. As people residing in a State formed against their will, they are not Israelis, but “Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the indigenous peoples, the residents of the State of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation.” In their own words, they are simply “in Israel” and must now resolve their identity and take responsibility for themselves: “who are we and what do we want for our society?”

The rising national consciousness among Palestinians in Israel is both courageous and thorny. Such consciousness aspires to counteract intangibles such as “intellectual and emotional transfer” and distancing from their Arab culture, as well as tangibles such as land, planning, and housing policies and economic strategies.

The predictable Israeli assault on this new consciousness will be ferocious, especially from the Jewish religious nationalist camp, but no less from the Israeli legal apparatus, which has already legitimatized the denial of equal citizenship rights for non-Jewish citizens. Israeli “consternation” will come from every corner, because Zionism, whether in its secular or religious variant, is basically about a nation of Jews (even though the majority is made up of foreigners to Israel) and for Jews. The various segments of Israeli society may differ regarding ways of achieving “security” and “peace”, but there has been no significant practical difference, as far as Palestinians in Israel are concerned, between left and right Israeli governments. The emphasis of both has been on the Jewish nature of the State and so in compromising the rights of Israeli Arabs.

Israeli Arabs have plenty of reasons to deny Israel moral legitimacy and to fight for their rights: “we have been suffering from extreme structural discrimination policies, national oppression, military rule that lasted till 1966, land confiscation policy, unequal budget and resources allocation, rights discrimination and threats of transfer. The State has also abused and killed its own Arab citizens, as in the Kufr Qassem massacre, the land day in 1976 and Al-Aqsa Intifada back in 2000.”

The new Israeli Arab strategies strike a reasonable balance between preservation of Arab identity and values (through institutional self rule in education, culture and religion) and achieving full citizenship and equality with the Jewish majority. Israeli Arabs are proposing a “consensual democracy” for Israel similar to the Belgian model. (Belgium is made up of communities of Dutch, French and German speakers, with each group being able to elect its own parliament that governs such things as culture, education and language).

Israeli consternation notwithstanding, the vision that Israeli Arabs are putting forward is consonant with the vision of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Hertzl, as described by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua. Hertzl envisioned an Israel where “The rabbis didn’t get involved in politics, the Arabs had full rights, the cities all had rapid transit, the workers had social benefits undreamed of in Europe, the choice of theater and opera rivaled … Vienna. Its people did not die violent deaths and the whole world exalted in its contribution to humankind.” It is a vision, unfortunately, that is good only for outside consumption, not for Israeli governments that are driven by a mentality of greed, fear, and paranoia untempered by guilt.

The journey of Israeli Arabs towards freedom will be long and arduous, not least because the Israelis have perfected the art of using bureaucratic procedures to block the implementation of legal advances when these do take place. But articulating their vision is a major step forward and an inspiration to Palestinians everywhere. Equality for Palestinians in Israel will never happen unless they themselves make it happen.

* Rima Merriman is a Palestinian-American living in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

This article was published in 2007.

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” – German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke during a visit to Ramallah in March 2007

Last week, Israel marked the “Holocaust Day” in West Jerusalem amid the usual fanfare of sanctimonious rituals, never-again speeches and glorification of Zionism.

The solemn but also highly propagandistic occasion is manipulated to the fullest by Zionist leaders in order to justify the crime against humanity, otherwise known as “the state of Israel.” -This year, too, Zionist leaders preyed on the memories of holocaust victims by seeking to blackmail the collective conscience of the world into recognizing the “uniqueness of Jewish pain” ” as if non-Jews were children of a lesser God and their pain was unimportant.

Thus we had the political and ideological gurus of Zionism, from the morbidly sanctimonious Elie Wiesel to the pathologically duplicitous Ehud Olmert berate the world for the “reincarnation of anti-Semitism,” a deliberately twisted reference to legitimate criticisms of nefarious treatment of Palestinians, including the adoption of such policies as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the use of brutal tactics for the purpose of forcing the victims of Zionism to leave their ancestral homeland.

Nobody does or should question the enormity of the holocaust. Doing so, besides being morally unconscionable, serves the interests of Zionism, which has morphed the Holocaust Industry into a virtual religion that encompasses even Judaism itself.

However, manipulating the holocaust to justify the treatment Israel has been meting out to millions of helpless Palestinians is no less obscene and no less outrageous than the utilization by the Third Reich of the outcome of the First World War to wage war on Europe and cause the death of tens of millions of people.

All humanity had suffered through history, recent, past and distant. Nobody, not even Jews, could claim that the suffering of one group is more special and more unique than the suffering of others.

Russia, for example, lost tens of millions to the Nazis in the course of the Second World War. The same thing applies to other European peoples, who too, suffered immensely. The Gypsies were also incinerated and gassed in great numbers in Hitler’s liquidation chambers, but we see no holocaust memorials perpetuating the memory of these hapless and unwept victims as if they were lesser and insignificant human beings.

Of course, nobody objects to Jews commemorating the holocaust and reminding humanity of its evils. I, too, would join conscientious Jews in remembering the victims of Nazism. However, remembering, when done in the wrong way, can be worse than forgetting.

The world, including Jews, doesn’t have to choose between “remembering” or “forgetting” the holocaust or any other enormous crime against humanity. Instead, the choice should be between learning the “right” or “wrong” lessons.

Today, in the name of the holocaust, Israel wants the world to give her a carte blanch to commit another holocaust against the helpless and virtually completely unprotected Palestinians.

In the name of the holocaust and the “never-again mantra,” Israel wants the world to allow it to commit every conceivable crime and every abominable violation of human rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, from murdering school children on their way to school “for security reasons” to shooting pregnant women on their way to hospital (also for security reasons) to dumping tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians into modern-day concentration camps deep in the Negev desert.

Indeed, in the name of the holocaust, Israel has been hounding, brutalizing and tormenting four million impoverished Palestinians, barring them from accessing food and work, and utterly ravaging their lives and livelihood as well destroying their streets, colleges, bridges, and power stations. And, as if these obscenities were not enough, the Israeli state has augmented its oppression with an Satanic wall that is effectively reducing the bulk of Palestinian population centers into updated versions of the Ghetto Warsaw.

In short, the holocaust and the memory of its victims, have been used and are being used outrageously and relentlessly by Israel in order to justify and legitimize crimes against humanity that, while not as enormous as the holocaust in their magnitude, have non the less many similarities with it in terms of their brutality, insidiousness and criminality.

The holocaust, we all know, didn’t start with Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen. It started with a book, some sporadic acts of harassment, a Kristalnacht, and some discriminatory laws against Jews, things very much like what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians

Today Israel is on its way to being a fully-fledged apartheid state. It systematically discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens in ways reminiscent of the overall German discourse against Jews in the mid 1930s.

One ominous portent is the fact that a majority of Israeli Jewish citizens, who are bombarded 24 hours per day by virulent anti-Arab propaganda, readily support the deportation of non-Jewish citizens who make up nearly a quarter of Israel’s population. Needless to say, this state of affair is very similar to the state of affair that prevailed in Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, the holocaust, which was perpetrated by Europeans, has caused European states to go morally blind, a blindness that, even today, is preventing most Europeans from seeing the outrageous crimes committed by their former victims against the Palestinians, Germany’s and Europe’s victims’ victims.

Europe has been either completely silent, or blithe, or actively and enthusiastically supportive of crimes against humanity Israel has been perpetrating against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.

Last year, Israel dropped as many as 3.000.000 cluster bomb-lets throughout Lebanon as, we were told, a “ defensive action” against Hizbullah.

The three million bombs, for those who still don’t know, are sufficient to kill three million children. In other words, they could cause a holocaust, or at least half a holocaust by Jewish calculations.

Unfortunately, this outrage drew only sporadic, shy or half-hearted criticism from European leaders who never stop lecturing the Third world, especially the Muslim world, about human rights and terror.

This is no less than a moral whoredom on the part of Europe. Allowing Israel to turn the holocaust into a propaganda asset, as Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote recently, enables the Israeli state to further oppress the Palestinians and legitimize the oppression.

“Turning the holocaust into an asset,” wrote Hass, “ allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.”

Indeed, Europe’s, especially Germany’s, obsequious, even acquiescent, reactions to Israel’s unmitigated crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples shows that Europe has not learned the right lesson from the holocaust.

It shows that Europe is atoning for one holocaust by adopting policies that effectively encourage and facilitate the perpetration of another holocaust.

If this is not moral whoredom, then what is it?

*Khalid Amayreh  is a Palestinian journalist based in Dura, in the Hebron district. He did his university degrees in the United States: BA in Journalism at University of Oklahoma, 1982; MA in Journalism, University of Southern Illinois, 1983. For a long time, his life was not made any easier by the fact that he was largely confined by the Israeli military authorities to his home village of Dura near Al Khalil.

It was published first in Gaza Mom.com 2007.

We’re used to things going from bad to worse very quickly here. But we never expected the situation to get as bad as it has over the past few days.

After a terrifying 24 hours, we awoke this morning to sporadic gunfire, and ghostly streets.

It was a welcome change. Sleep-deprived and anxious, my colleague Saeed, on his first visit to Gaza, and myself headed to Rafah in the southern part of the Strip to continue shooting a series of documentaries we are working on.

Though the gunfire had subsided, the gunmen were still patrolling the streets, each this time casually manning their own turf, masked and fully armed.

Impromptu checkpoints were still set up along the main Gaza-Rafah road, and we were stopped for ID and affiliation checks.

As we approached Rafah, we received word that clashes had broken out there, too, following the funeral of four Hamas men killed in an Israeli air strike the night before.

We decided to avoid the town centre, and headed instead to film near the border area along Rafah’s edge. Young children blissfully flew handmade kites above the iron wall separating them from the Egyptian Rafah. Their atbaq flirted in the infinite sky above with kites flying their way from the Egyptian side. “We play a game with the Egyptian kids” they explained of their unseen counterparts. “We meet here, through our kites, and see who can catch the other’s kites quicker by entangling. So far we’re winning — we’ve got 14 Egyptian kites,” he announced proudly.

The children are small enough that they can wiggle their way through the cracks of the large iron gates along the wall, where once Merkava tanks made their unwelcome entrance to battered camps here. And so they can call out to their Egyptian friends, and learn their names and new kite flying techniques.

Even then, we could hear the fearsome roar of Israeli fighter jets overhead, interspersed with the banter of machine guns from feuding factions.

I then received a call from my father back in Gaza City — a tremendous explosion, the result of F-16 jet bombing a nearby Hamas compound, had just sent intense shockwaves through our house. It was so powerful that it blasted off the windows from my cousin’s home in the neighbourhood behind us. This attack was followed by another then another, and then another.

Hamas’s Qassam Brigades have sent a barrage of rockets into Israel over the past two days. It has been in an attempt to redirect the battle towards the occupation, they say.

There have been six Israeli aerial strikes since this morning. The latest one happened just as we departed Rafah back to Gaza City. The victims this time were two young brothers, standing near a municipality garbage truck that was obliterated.

Even as I record this from back at home, we were shaken by another large explosion, Israelis tanks are amassing at Gaza’s northern border, and unmanned Israeli drones are whirring menacingly, incessantly, overhead in great numbers patrolling the ghostly skies that only the kites can reach, preparing, perhaps, for yet another strike against an already bleeding, burning, and battered Gaza.

* Laila El-Haddad   is a Palestinian freelance journalist, author, blogger, and media activist from Gaza City. She is currently based in the United States. El-Haddad is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between (Just World Books, 2011) and co-author of the The Gaza Kitchen (Just World Books, 2012). She is also a contributing author of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict and a policy advisor with al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. El-Haddad writes principally for the al-Jazeera English website and the Guardian. Gaza Mom.com is Laila´s blog.