by SUDHANVA DESHPANDE
On 4 April 2011, the Israeli-Arab actor, director and film maker Juliano Mer Khamis was shot dead in Jenin, Palestine.This was not an unexpected attack.
The Freedom Theatre that he had established had been attacked with Molotov cocktails in the past, its door torched, and Mer Khamis himself had received threats. ‘But what choice do I have? To run? I am not a fleeing man,’ he said in an interview. ‘I am an [Israeli] elite force man, formerly of the paratroopers. The only two things I gained from Israeli culture are Shlonsky’s translations of Shakespeare and adequate field training. Now I need it.’[i] In the end, even the field training given to Israeli elite troops proved inadequate to save Mer Khamis.
In his death, the world lost a brave and imaginative artist.
Juliano Mer Khamis was 52 years old. He was an actor and a director. He had acted in several films, including opposite Diane Keaton in the adaptation of John Le Carre’s thriller, The Little Drummer Girl, and in Amos Gitai’s Kippur. He got many offers from Hollywood, where they wanted to make him the next Antonio Banderas. He certainly had the looks. But he preferred to stay in Israel/Palestine, and work at the Freedom Theatre he had set up in 2006.
The Freedom Theatre itself has a fascinating history. The precursor to the theatre was the Care and Learning Project set up by Juliano’s mother Arna Mer in 1989 during the first Intifada. Arna was an Israeli Jew, and had taken part in the Arab-Israel war of 1948. Subsequently, she joined the Communist Party of Israel and there she met, and later married, Saliba Khamis, a Christian Arab and Secretary of the Party. Juliano was named after Salvatore Guiliano, a handsome Italian bandit who led a revolt of landless peasants against landlords in Italy.
A man with a hyphenated identity, Juliano, then, was an Israeli-Arab-Christian-Jew. Or, as he famously put it, ‘I am 100 per cent Palestinian and 100 per cent Jewish’.
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Juliano’s killing connects to another, some 22 years ago. On 1 January 1989, Jana Natya Manch (Janam) had gone to the outskirts of Delhi to perform our street play, Halla Bol (Attack!). The working class movement of Delhi was then on the upswing, and our play was in context of a massive strike. Most of the play was written by Safdar Hashmi, who also directed it. It had been a huge success, with the workers in various industrial areas picking up slogans from the play and using them in their own organising efforts.
As they began the play that morning, the actors were attacked by a mob led by a local goon who was also a small-time industrialist, and who had the protection of the ruling Congress party. The attackers came with iron rods and bamboo sticks. They also had guns, as the actors found later. The actors had nothing. They resisted with stones for a short while, allowing most of the actors to escape. But the respite was temporary. The mob came back and attacked CITU office where some of the actors had left their bags. Safdar and another actor, Brijender, held fast the gate, which allowed the rest to jump over the back wall and escape. In the end, Safdar ordered Brijender to escape, and in doing so must have realised that he wouldn’t be able to. They dragged him back to the place where we were performing, and beat him up with rods and sticks. All the injuries were to the head. When three actors reached that spot some 15-20 minutes later, he was unconscious and bleeding profusely. He was to die in hospital the following night. But Safdar was not the only person killed that night. They also killed a Nepali worker, Ram Bahadur, because they suspected him of hiding a trade unionist. He hadn’t, but they were in no mood to listen.
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