A Palestinian actress in NY describes the end of belief in Oslo

On Sunday night in New York I attended a gathering for the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre at a lovely apartment on the Upper West Side. Forty people crammed a booklined room with a grand piano to hear Nabil Al-Raee, the theater’s artistic director, and Alia Alrosan, a student and actress. The contrast between these two visitors’ background in Palestine and the background as they spoke was dramatic: everyone there knew they had come from a refugee camp in an occupied city to this spacious apartment with African masks and a broad carpet and windows opening on the last of the NY marathoners stumbling out among the big elms on Central Park West.

And yet the magic of their appearance was that there was no contrast at all. The two scenes were somehow continuous; the two Palestinians knit them with their words and feelings. They made a connection between two bright outposts of civilization, one in empire, a group of committed friends, the other under occupation.

I was especially stirred by Alia Alrosan. It was her first time in New York, and she is young, 30, but her presence was arresting. She spoke with such delicacy and genuineness, as you can see in the long video, the last one below, in which she introduces herself. Her parents were PFLP fighters. They had so believed in the cause of revolution that they’d fought Israel in Lebanon in 1982, and lost, and been exiled to Tunisia, and then Baghdad. But they had come back to Palestine because they believed in Oslo. Her father is ashamed now to admit it. And her mother had accepted that she would return not to Haifa the city she left as a refugee, but to Palestine.

Here are three videos of Alrosan. In the first, she talks about how it felt to be in the West Bank as Gazans were being slaughtered last summer, her helplessness. It was easier for her to get from Jenin to Manhattan than it would be for her to visit Gaza.

Next she speaks about the role of women in traditional Palestinian society, describing her experience with the production of Atuwani, a show about cultural resistance, as it toured Palestinian villages. She explains why Palestinian culture has become less secular, why radical or political Islam came to the front line, because others failed in the liberation struggle. It is obvious, she says: under attack, people protect themselves by being more conservative.
Finally, there is the first speech she gave, about her background and her need to do something to resist occupation–“living for something that is more noble than just living.” She wanted to die rather than accept the loss of freedom. She relates her despair at being “a fighter for freedom who loses the war,” and of wanting to join Hamas. She tells of choosing theater as a form of cultural resistance, and her family’s surprised acceptance of her choice.   I cannot be alone in seeing the magnificent spirit in this young woman, or in the recognition that you cannot oppress people like this without their doing all they can to resist, often violently, as her parents did.

When Alrosan described her father’s belief in Oslo, I remembered that New Yorker editor David Remnick said last week on public radio that he also had believed in Oslo, then he reflected that he has since been toughened and made more conservative by history, by the failure of the Soviet collapse to bring freedom to Russia, and by the failed promise of the Arab Spring, too. But if Oslo was a liberal promise that failed, who lost it? I think we must say, Israel, in unending occupation; as far back as 1997, Nathan Thrall reports, the liberal Zionist hero Ari Shavit opposed Oslo, calling it “a collective act of messianic drunkenness”. So tyranny in which the U.S. is complicit continues for decades; and Alrosan’s future is also now in the balance, doing what she is doing when others will choose violence– even as we in the U.S. and on the beloved internet get to opine about the future of the conflict. Alrosan’s appearance reminds me of the urgency of doing everything we can in nonviolent ways to bring her people freedom, lest there is yet another bloody chapter written in the history of the Jewish state. For me that means supporting boycott, as these Palestinian artists asked us to Sunday night, and countering Zionism inside American Jewish life, and helping the Jenin Freedom Theatre.