 Hello, my name is Sudhanva Deshpande. I'm from Jannatimanj and from Leftward Books. And it's with a great deal of pleasure that I welcome all of you for this solidarity meeting with the Freedom Theater of the Janine Refugee Camp in Palestine. On the face of it, the Freedom Theater is only a tiny theater in a small town, in a small corner of actually a small land. But the Freedom Theater is much more than that. It is one of the most vital theater and cultural organizations in the world today. And the Freedom Theater has been under attack over the years, several, several times. One of its founders, Juliano Marjames, was assassinated right outside the theater. Many others have been imprisoned. The theater itself has also been physically attacked more than once. One reason for this is its location in the Janine Refugee Camp, which itself has been a strong center of Palestinian resistance over the decades. The other reason is intrinsic to what the Freedom Theater does. It turns the spotlight on the occupation, on the brutal colonialist, apathyite, racist occupation of Palestine by Israel. For us in India, the Freedom Theater holds a special place because through the play that Janata Manch had done with the Freedom Theater in 2015, 2016, called Hamesha Samita, which translates as forever steadfast. We toured 11 cities in India. Subsequently, Janata Manch also toured in parts of the West Bank in the April of 2016. So for many of us, the Freedom Theater is not just an abstract entity. It's actual live human beings as well. So without any further ado, I would now like to invite Mustafa Sheta, who is a producer at the Freedom Theater. This recent raid that happened that lasted for almost three days was one of the most severe and one of the most brutal raids by the Israeli occupation forces. It reminded a lot of people of the year 2002 when the famous Battle of Jenin took place. Mustafa Sheta was there in the Jenin refugee camp at the theater and he would like to hear from you, Mustafa, about what that meant. Thank you, Soudhanva and our friends in India. In fact, it's a really great opportunity to share with you the real story happened in Jenin refugee camp, whereas a political space, a political area include the political lead people. They have their political identity as refugees. They are live here after 75 years under the occupation. After the Israel, this colonialism state established in our country, we face this condition that's happened with us for different scenarios. In fact, we face the same scenarios by different way. We can talk about comparative between what's happened in 2002 and what's happened in 2023. In 2002, big invasion happened here with the big Israel army. They occupied everything. They occupied the land, they occupied the sky. In 2023, they occupied one kilometer for more than 18,000 refugees. They are live in a small camp in the north of West Bank. They came to banishment, banish all the people they already believe and support the resistance, believe the revolution for freedom, for liberation. They attacked everything related with the life. They targeted the electricity, the water, the infrastructure, the streets, the roads, everything here. And they arrested more than 100 persons in that small and intensive invasion. They continue with their aggressive action against the Palestinian with a big support from the US, from the global, our big countries in the world. And that's needed from all the people, all the free people, all the free world to support the Palestinian, to get their rights, to get their liberation and to establish what they dream and what they hope in their life. How we can continue and accept this condition, this occupation to continue and to attack and to try to attack our dignity. That must stop, that must stop from long time, but that must stop now before tomorrow. So yes, for the freedom theater, this place where the people, they came to it just to expression, to feel they can't talk by freeway, to feel it's really a safe space for them, just to present their talent, they present their shows, they talk about their stories. It was under attack by their sound bombs and the rockets and the energy and the snibers, they will provide the building of the freedom theater. They try to make some big impact on the old building. Already we have her in the theater, this, we have theater, it's really old, it's built during the British mandate. We are like you, we were under the British occupation too. They build the store for their army and we use it later to be like a place for freedom and for liberation. They target our camera because they think it's important to hit any reality. They destroy it in the front of the freedom theater because they don't need to leave any evidence or any stamp for their ugly action happened here. It's not just about what's happened just in July, that's happened too in June and in May, in April, in March, in February, in January, that's not happened just in one time, that's happened all the time. All the time we have like big event or like big invasion here and we have, we just collect the number of the people that are killed and we just to check who we know from those people and the relationship between us and those people. But sometime because we are really live here in this small area, sometime you feel all of the people, they are like your brothers or your relatives. So what you can do? How you can protect the people? How you can help them as a theater? It's really, it's really hard and difficult mission. But in the same time what we said and what we raise, we talk all the time about our rule as important to just to protect the people, to talk with the people about their identity, to talk about the rights and about this kind of attacks come. And we talk about this relationship or this unbalance, unbalanced power, deal with us from us, from Europe, from different countries, they can stop that and they must stop that. And we believe for the free people and for the gaseous organizations from the people already believe in Palestine, right, to support us. We know how we can continue to get liberation and we will continue in the freedom theater to raise the title of cultural resistance and we will continue for fight and to continue for a continuing our struggle to get liberation in the end. Thank you very much for giving us a sense of what it means to be in a tiny place that is the genuine refugee camp and the freedom theater itself actually, for those of you who have not been there, it's at one of the entrances of the refugee camp. You don't have to go too deep into it. And so therefore, any Israeli military or police vehicle that comes in has to necessarily almost pass next to the freedom theater. And that's also a reason why the freedom theater has been very much in their targets. Ahmed Tubasi is an actor, director, and currently the artistic director of the freedom theater. He's a super performer. I have seen him perform. And he's just in, he really is a force of nature and a wonderful, wonderful human being. Yes, I'm sure Mustafa said a lot about feelings in the army, but also it's good to mention that when the Israeli army comes to invade one of our villages or towns or cities or with time, they are not come just to destroy a building or to destroy the stones or to destroy the streets. I'm not talking about the stones. I'm not talking about the smell. I'm talking about the memories that you have in that house, that your life, your family, your woman is your past. It's gone. So exactly when they attack, when they come with those are with tanks, with vehicles, with drones, they come to tell us as people don't dream you are not free, you are under occupation. We have a serious issue. Now we are not talking about the free Palestine. Now we are not talking about a human equality. We talk about people are living 75 years under a big psychologically mental health problems. So the freedom theater was so clean. With all these challenges, we will, we have to continue our way. We have to secure a space safe, a space activity, a workshop, an emergency artistic program that can make the children able to go, at least a little bit, join this activity and have some fun and leave the reality behind them. And I was so happy to see all artists from different fields, all gather in the freedom theater and they go inside the camp with the big protest and demonstration, artistically celebrating the children, the women and was very clear all people joined to celebrate with us, which mean clearly our responsibility become bigger. Our responsibility have to bring and offer with all the situation that we live in to bring more colors to the camp, to bring back some colors to the people. After the invasion, and I'm challenging now more people, more our community, more our neighbors because now it's not about exist or not, freedom theater is exist. Now we want more achievements, how big responsibility we have as a freedom theater to continue our work as there is invasions, as there is martyrs, tanks, rockets. Also there is the freedom theater in Jaleen who also gonna attend the Israelis, the occupation, the world. We also as a Palestinian, we are artists and we have theaters, we have dreams and we gonna do art and for us as a freedom theater we will resist through theater and art. We try now to focus on our really program to see how we can really match it, not just to show the world that we're doing work about the invasion, but it's how to make it naturally attached to the daily life in Jaleen camp with the work of the freedom theater. Now we're taking, we have the biggest possibility we have been showing whatever is going on in Jaleen through the freedom theater. The freedom theater become much more than a theater. It's an organization, it's an place, doing everything serving the cultural resistance in different way and for us, that's what makes us continue when I say even some friends in India are interested and following and supporting us and stand in solidarity with us, that's the energy we need. So for me, thank you for this event that show us all this care and for us, that's what we need to continue the work, difficult work in the freedom theater. I just want to say that as far as we in India are concerned, we have a very long history of support for the Palestinian cause for Palestinian freedom. This is something that goes from the time of Mahatma Gandhi in fact, from before independence, from the 1930s, the independent movement in India, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and others stood in support of Palestinian freedom. That is really important for us to recognize and to be aware of the fact that Indian taxpayers' money is also financing the occupation of Palestine. And so it's really important for us to press upon our governments, our representatives, to take strong pro-Palestinian stance at the moment because of the right wing government that we have in India. And in Israel, we have the most right wing government in its history at the moment, which is saying something because in Israel you had a series of right wing governments but there's a kind of a natural affinity between Netanyahu and Narendra Modi. There's a natural affinity between the ideas of Zionism and the ideas of Hindutva. Recently, we've seen how the bulldozer, for instance, has been weaponized in India against the Muslims. Now, this is something that is directly from Israel. This is what Israel have done consistently for many decades against Palestinians. So it's really important for us to be aware of this and to put pressure wherever we can, however we can on our elected representatives to stand up in support of Palestinian rights. That's one thing, but the other thing also to be aware of the fact that in India, we have the Indian campaign for the cultural and artistic boycott of Israel, which is called INCACB. INCACB is part of a much larger global movement called BDS, which is Boycott Divestment Sanctions. The BDS movement, the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement is something that has the support of literally all Palestinian civil society groups and political formations. So it has the entirety of the Palestinian people behind this campaign and this campaign has appealed to people all over the world, but to boycott companies that do business with Israel, to boycott artists who do business with Israel, but also ask artists and others to boycott Israel and Israeli institutions and so on and so forth. So that's one, going from there into divestment and then eventually, hopefully for governments also to sanction Israel as they did in the case of South Africa. I also want to lastly underline the fact that this is not a boycott of all Israeli people. So therefore individual Israeli artists or intellectuals are not under boycott, but artists or intellectuals who come to us with the support of Israeli state institutions, they are the ones that we don't have to have any truck with. This is the exact, it's an expanded version of the campaign that eventually worked in South Africa and it was boycotted and sanctioned by people and governments across the world. And that is what really in the end brought the appetite regime of South Africa down. We are also very pleased and lucky to have with us Zoe Laferty. Zoe has been associated with the Freedom Theater for many, many years. She has worked there, she's co-directed plays, she's directed plays for them and so on. Some of us in Janati Manj were lucky to have seen a play called The Siege, which she had co-directed. It was an extremely powerful depiction of the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the Second Intifada. I'll not go into the details of that. I just want to say that those of you who are interested in knowing more about the Freedom Theater do visit the website of Leftward, which is Leftward.com, www.leftward.com. We have two books on the Freedom Theater that have been created and published in association with the Freedom Theater. So just go there and search for the Freedom Theater. You'll find both those books. Zoe joins us from London and over to you Zoe. Hi, great to be here. I'm joining you from the North, North, North, West of Scotland, and there's not great internet, so hopefully I'll manage to stay with you. Before Savannah's very kind introduction, we heard a testimony and that testimony was of Doreen Tatour who is an independent poet and was imprisoned for writing the poem, Resist My People, Resist Them. This testimony is part of a project called The Revolution's Promise, which is created by the Freedom Theater and artists on the front line. And it focuses on censorship and attacks on Palestinian artists. And I'm just going to talk about that a little bit today and try and encourage you all to get involved. So the Freedom Theater and cultural organizations across Palestine have been incredibly successful in shifting the narrative of what's happening on the ground in Palestine and also around Palestinian culture and history. I can say as someone who is British that we often don't really hear the truth of what's happening or learn about that history correctly. And it has been artists and film and theater and all of these entities which have really helped shift things and educate people internationally. As Janine Camp was invaded this July, the Freedom Theater and its team, I think it did a triumphant job against so many obstacles and also as they were having to quite literally survive against that invasion, but they managed to continue to get the narrative of what was happening in Janine Camp out to the international community and combat a lot of the misinformation that is often widely reported in mainstream media. So as mentioned today, the Freedom Theater has also had a lot of repercussions for the work. Juliane Mechamiz, the co-founder and artistic director was murdered in April, 2011. There have been numerous attacks and destruction to the building, including in this recent invasion, there has been the arrest and imprisonment of many staff members. In the last couple of years, again, as mentioned, the Freedom Theater has lost 80% of its core funding due to refusing political stipulations that that funding would come with that would make the work impossible. Currently, Balal Alsadi, who's the chair of the Freedom Theater's board has been imprisoned for nearly a year and that is under this sort of administrative detention where you don't actually have to really give a reason to why someone is arrested, which is the term that many artists, this administrative detention, it's the term that many artists end up being held for a prolonged amount of time. So they never even have the right to defend the charges because they don't even know what they are. So we created this project called The Revolution's Promise about the legacy of persecution at the Freedom Theater. It's not the whole history because it's so, so long and epic, but it's at least about part of that. And it also has testimonies of artists across Palestine who have been under attack, including a filmmaker who spent 20 years in and out of court being sued, a photographer who was shot in the head but survived, venues that have been ransacked and had all their equipment and documents destroyed, a theater in Gaza that was specifically targeted and bombed and it was a six-story building and it's literally like a crater in the ground now. So The Revolution's Promise collated all of these testimonies, but rather than the Freedom Theater taking that on tour around the world, what we decided to do was create a global solidarity project which invites people worldwide to read these stories and share these stories. And it's not just about censorship, it's also celebrating all of the incredible and innovative ways that artists in Palestine are using culture to resist and as a form of cultural resistance. So it's really like a model of solidarity that we're inviting you to get involved with. And I think it's really interesting what was being touched upon today, how all of the, both sometimes within histories of colonialism, but also weapons and stuff, there's lots of interconnections. And I think one thing we found doing this project or other people taking on this project is that connectivity in struggles and in tactics. And that's been very, very powerful and interesting, whether that's in Catalonia or Chile or various different places. So it's not just necessarily always about giving information from Palestine, but finding those connection points. There is very much a need for people to get involved and be spreading these stories because artists in Palestine absolutely doing an incredible job, but it needs people internationally to join in that sharing of stories. And hopefully this is one model and one way that we can provide you with testimony and information that you can then go on and use in your communities. Thank you very much. And I do want to say to Mustafa and to Tabasi and to all of our friends and comrades in Palestine, in the Jenin refugee camp at the Freedom Theater that we are sending you lots and lots of love, solidarity, strength, but also we get inspired by you because the incredible spirit of the Palestinian people, as it is symbolized and expressed through the Freedom Theater is something that has been of incredible importance to us in our struggles in India. So thank you very, very much for all the work that you do and thank you very much for joining this solidarity meeting today. I also want to thank Zoe without whom really the meeting today would not have happened. I also want to thank Vikas Ravel and his team who have worked behind the scenes to make this experience as seamless as possible. And a big thanks to all of you. Share this clip, this meeting, with your friends and comrades who were not able to join and spread the word and spread the revolution. Thank you very, very much, all of you.