Tuesday, April 26, 2011

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES - The murder of a committed artist

"An Israeli living in the Jenin refugee camp was shot by unknown before the Liberty Theatre." When I received this text message, in the late afternoon, Monday, April 4, I asked myself who could well be that Israeli who lived in a Palestinian refugee camp. I thought it would be an anti-occupation, but he certainly had not chosen the camp as a dwelling place, nor had it been adopted by the inhabitants .

An hour later I went to the roundabout at Menara Ramallah, where the sit-in organized by the Alliance of Youth on March 15. It was around this place What converged shortly after, dozens of people of both sexes and all ages. Friends of Juliano Mer-Khamis, artists and intellectuals Palestinian struggled to hold back their tears were holding a large sign on which they wrote: "Who killed the director of the theater of Liberty?" On others, it said: "We ask the Palestinian Authority to arrest the murderer," or "No to the silence!" It was only then that I knew who was the victim.

Despite the geographical proximity between Jenin and my village of Naqoura, I never had the honor of meeting him. In talking with people, I learned he was from the city of Nazareth and he was the son of Saliba Khamis, a militant Palestinian Communist renowned. It so happens that in 1993 I crossed Saliba Khamis at a conference in Nazareth.

For two days, I had not missed an opportunity to hear about the struggle of the Palestinian people. This was the first time in my life I met a Palestinian communist figure at this level. This is what had to push to move to Jenin Juliano and live among its inhabitants. This has been a way for him to follow the path opened by his father to defend his people and by his mother, Jewish, in the struggle against the occupation.

[Arna Mer-Khamis, a famous Israeli activist for human rights, chose to live in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin until his death in 1994.] One of his friends told me that Artist patriotic, progressive and internationalist had done an impressive job of training young people for careers in the camp theater, especially the most marginalized of them.

He had managed to turn vendors into professional actors. The day after his death, dozens of artists, writers, journalists and intellectuals gathered again on the same roundabout Menara to denounce the crime, then marched to the Ministry of Culture to the tomb of former President Yasser Arafat.

For them, the killing of Juliano Mer Khamis is an aggression against the entire Palestinian national culture. How the hand of the assassin, he is Palestinian, she has not refused to pull the trigger rather than to kill one of the greatest figures of those who allow us to dream? What a tragedy, this loss! What being "human" has been committing this crime?

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