‘We are paralysed’: Israel’s relentless war on culture in the West Bank

On October 18 2022, Israeli police and special forces stormed into the home of Rania Elias, who was then the director of the Yabous Cultural Centre centre in Jerusalem. They were looking for her son, Shadi, who was 16 years old and in his 11th grade at a school in Ramallah. “They beat him in front of us until he fainted, until he was bleeding all over the room,” Elias tells Dazed. “Four soldiers got on top of him and started punching him in the head. They dragged him away, barefoot and blindfolded, and we felt helpless to save him.” Shadi was imprisoned for 41 days, during which time he was tortured and beaten further, but he refused to confess to something he didn’t do.

The accusation against Shadi – who is now a professional football player – was that he had attended a protest at which a settler was allegedly injured. There was no evidence for this charge other than statements made by two young children who later recanted in court, alleging that they had been beaten and harassed by Israeli soldiers into providing false testimony. He was eventually sentenced to one year of house arrest. “You are forced to become the prison warden of your own child,” Elias says. “You have to sign a paper saying you will be responsible for him staying at home 24/7, which means you can’t leave the house at all.” After working there for 25 years, she was forced to make the difficult decision to resign from her role at Yabous – a multipurpose venue with exhibition spaces, Jerusalem’s only Palestinian cinema, and a concert hall, which organises a wide range of events and workshops for young Palestinians throughout the year.

Palestinians in the West Bank – an area of the Palestinian territories which has been under Israeli control since 1967 – have faced decades of violence, oppression and human rights abuses, but life under occupation has got even worse since October 7. Alongside its genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel has in the last year killed at least 747 Palestinians in the West Bank, arrested over 10,000, and displaced thousands from their homes through a combination of forced demolitions and settler violence. Every aspect of Palestinian society has come under attack, and the cultural sector is no exception. The policy of “administrative detention” – where Palestinians can be imprisoned indefinitely without having committed an offence – has been deployed against several cultural figures, including Mustafa Sheta, the producer of Jenin refugee camp’s Freedom Theatre. Elias and her husband Suhail Khoury, the general director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, have themselves been arrested several times – on one occasion, she says, she was detained on the charge of “promoting Palestinian culture”.

In Jerusalem, cultural events are frequently shut down by the IDF. Last month, Yabous organised a screening of Seven Waves, a documentary by director Asma Bseiso. Two minutes before the film was due to start, Elias says, Israeli soldiers stormed inside the centre and demanded to watch it first to determine whether it posed a security risk. Seven Waves is a lyrical meditation on the Gaza sea, which follows – across two parallel narratives – a young rowing champion as she trains for an event, and a fisherman and marine rescuer. It has nothing to do with violence or terrorism, as the soldiers would go on to claim. But after watching it, they told the centre’s acting director that if he screened the film, they would see him in court the next day. It didn’t matter that they didn’t have a legal order to shut down Yabous: in the West Bank, the law does whatever the occupation needs it to.

Because Israel has spent decades carving the West Bank into pieces, it is often simply impossible to travel between Palestinian towns and cities. “The very small humiliations which people have to go through at checkpoints shouldn’t be ignored,” Yousef Elias, co-founder of Radio Alhara, tells Dazed. “The West Bank has settlements in its territories, which are occupied by Israeli citizens. So when you go from one city to another, you have to travel by shared roads which are used by both settlers and Palestinians, and the settlers are particularly violent at this moment.”

Engaging with culture in these conditions – even as an audience member – is extremely fraught. If you live in Liverpool and want to go to an exhibition in Manchester, you can be there in an hour. The distance between Jerusalem and Ramallah is roughly equivalent, but making that journey might take you a whole day, if you can get there at all, and there’s a considerable risk of getting stuck there overnight. You might get shot at by settlers on the way, with guns provided by the Israeli government. You might get arrested at a checkpoint, arbitrarily, and end up in prison for an undetermined length of time, where you may be subjected to physical violence, degrading treatment and sexual abuse. If these were the risks you had to weigh up every time you felt like going to a concert in a nearby city, would you bother?

“Sometimes when I think about the conditions we’re working under, and I say them out loud to people who aren’t from Palestine, it just sounds insane,” Emily Jacir, the co-founder and director of cultural and research centre Dar Jacir, tells Dazed. “Our team members come from Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Hebron, and there are days or even weeks when they cannot come to the space. And sometimes that occurs within Bethlehem itself, because our street is so volatile that we have to evacuate people – the gates open, the army comes in and they start arresting people.”

Dar Jacir is based in a historic residential home in Bethlehem, which happens to be next to the West Bank barrier and the entrance through which IDF soldiers pass whenever they raid the city. Instead of solely relying on tear gas and skunk water to disperse Palestinians, as did in the past, the Israeli military has installed an AI-equipped robotic gun, which overlooks the nearby Aida refugee camp and swivels around to follow people as they pass. Since it was founded in 2014, Dar Jacir has been raided by the IDF multiple times: soldiers have smashed up the building, destroyed some of its historic features and burnt down its urban garden.

@mondoweiss Israel is testing out AI remote-control guns on Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank. First pictured at a military checkpoint in the city of Hebron, the same technology has recently been installed by the Israeli occupation at a military base overlooking the Aida Refugee Camp in the city of Bethlehem. The gun is pointed towards a Main Street in the camp where children often play. @disappointed — #Israel #Palestine #WestBank #Gaza #GazaStrip #occupation #apartheid #colonization #settlements #IDF #IsraelDefenseForce #MiddleEast #HumanRights #InternationalLaw #BDS #Boycott #Divestment #Sanctions #Zionism #FreePalestine ♬ original sound – Mondoweiss | Palestine News

In the year since October 7, Emily’s priority – like that of many others – has been getting people out of Gaza, which has proven to be an expensive and complicated process. “What upsets me the most is knowing that we could have hosted all the artists we work with in Gaza and their families inside our space. But as West Bankers, we’re not even allowed to welcome and help our own community. It is sick,” she says. Dar Jacir is also supporting artists in Gaza in a number of ways, including by organising exhibitions and overseas residencies, and running workshops for people in the local neighbourhood, some of which are focused on music, sound recording and agricultural practices.

Some of the artists Dar Jacir works with, Emily says, have been too affected by the ongoing genocide to be able to work. But others want to continue their practice and the centre is determined to support them. “There’s so much happening now and everyone’s handling it in a different way,” Emily says. “Some people are doing more activist-based work, others are working on heritage, and it’s all important because it’s all under threat. But sometimes when we’re working, I think, ‘What are we even doing? We’re next. It’s inching closer and closer, and the world is doing nothing.’ But we’re just going to keep working until the end.”

“Sometimes when we’re working, I think, ‘What are we even doing? We’re next. It’s inching closer and closer, and the world is doing nothing.’ But we’re just going to keep working until the end” – Emily Jacir

Life at Aida Refugee Camp, which works closely with Dar Jacir, has always been volatile – a 2017 UC Berkeley study found it was the single most tear-gassed location in the world – but things have escalated in the last year. There has been a significant uptick in military raids, and the executive director of its youth centre, Anas Abu Srour, was held in administrative detention for nine months, without charge and without being permitted any contact with a lawyer or even his family. During his time in prison, Srour writes in Al-Jazeera that he was starved, humiliated and beaten by Israeli forces. Several teachers, trainers and children from Aida camp have been arrested, and two of its board members have also been imprisoned.

Aida’s youth centre runs a range of creative projects. Young people are learning to play different instruments and conducting field research to preserve traditional music from the surrounding areas. “They’re doing interviews and visiting old people at their homes to try to collect stories, songs and poetry from the Palestinian culture before 1948. We’ve managed to collect some songs that we’d never even heard about before,” Mustafa al-Araj, a director at Aida’s youth centre, tells Dazed.

According to Mustafa, Aida’s music projects aren’t just about preserving cultural heritage or having fun, but a way of keeping the camp’s younger residents safe. “We’re trying to keep them away from the violence that’s going on in our street. All of the refugee camps today experience a lot of violence from the Israeli army. We’re trying to find a better future for the young generation, so we try to keep them busy.”

“We’re trying to keep young people away from the violence that’s going on in our street. All of the refugee camps today experience a lot of violence from the Israeli army. We’re trying to find a better future for the young generation, so we try to keep them busy” – Mustafa al-Araj

Graffiti has played an important role in Palestinian culture for decades. During the First Intifada, an extended uprising which took place during the late 80s and early 90s, writing on the walls was a way of spreading news and imparting information – Mustafa compares it to how people post on social media today. Because graffiti was illegal under Israeli military law, it became an act of resistance. That tradition has continued with young people at Aida today: they write poems and slogans on the walls, and they draw pictures, sometimes of political prisoners. Before October 7, residents at the camp also generated income by selling hand-embroidered artisanal products to the visitors who would pass through while visiting Bethlehem.

But the war on Gaza has exacted a heavy toll on people in Aida, as it has done everywhere in Palestine. “Those are our people, our brothers and sisters, we have family and friends there and we stand with them,” says Mustafa. Bethlehem’s economy, primarily based on tourism, has been destroyed, and there are no longer any visitors to buy the goods Aida sells at its gift shop. Palestinian construction workers who used to work inside the borders of Israel have been barred from doing so, which means that many people in the surrounding area are now unemployed.

These dire circumstances have required a shift in priorities for the directors at Aida. “Most of our creative projects have had to be stopped and replaced with relief projects, like medical or food programmes,” says Mustafa. “We have less activities related to art nowadays because feeding people is more important.” But while the cultural projects at Aida have been drastically curtailed, they have not stopped entirely. “The kids wrote messages and drew pictures for our colleagues while they were in prison, which we gave them after they were released,” says Mustafa.

Radio Alhara – an online radio station based in Bethlehem, which was co-founded in 2020 by a group of friends, including brothers Elias and Yousef Anastas  – is grounded in internationalistic principles, which is reflected as much in its musical curation as its political activism: if you turn it on at random, you’re as likely to hear jazz, spoken word and experimental sound art as you are to hear Arabic music. In 2020, the station launched its first online protest in response to Israel ramping up its illegal annexation of the Jordan Valley: Sonic Liberation Front brought together 85 different musicians, DJs and music enthusiasts from around the world, each contributing one hour of content that protested Israel’s illegal actions.

The Anastas brothers also run a cultural centre in Bethlehem called Wonder Cabinet, which provides a space for creative production in the broadest sense, including design, artisanship, music, food and cinema. In May of this year, the Wonder Cabinet organised ‘Sounds of Places’ – a yearly gathering that brings together sound artists and DJs from within Palestine and all over the world, who spend a month together creating work in relation to a specific place. This year, the event focused on the Cremisan Valley, a territory to the northwest of Bethlehem which is in danger of being annexed by Israel. “[It’s important to mark] our presence in an area that is heavily threatened.”

After the war began last year, the Radio Alhara team decided to shut down the station for a day, then asked their residents around the world to adapt their shows in response to what was happening. “On the station, small communities started expressing their feelings about their own struggles, which were connected to other struggles in other parts of the world, and bringing those things together created a community which is even stronger, which has even more commonalities. It brings to the world something that is global, but that stems from hyper-local situations,” says Yousef. “We have live sets from Indonesia, France, the US, Palestine, Japan, South Africa, Algeria… It creates a common understanding, and I think this is how the station is resisting the current situation. In Bethlehem, even on an emotional level, it’s also helpful to have a solidarity which isn’t patronising, but which enables you to find common ground with other people.” While Yousef is sceptical of the idea that culture itself is resistance – suggesting that it has become merely a “marketing slogan” – he believes that building these international networks can result in more meaningful forms of resistance in which culture plays a role. 

When I asked Yabous’s Elias how the genocide in Gaza is impacting people in the West Bank, she tells me she doesn’t think this is the right question. “We are one people. It’s very difficult to say how it is affecting the West Bank. It is happening for all of us, wherever we are,” she says. Most people I interview echo this sentiment in one way or another. It’s true that Palestine has been carved up and divided by Israel (including within the West Bank itself), and that Palestinians can be subject to radically different conditions depending on where they live, even if they’re only separated by a few kilometres. But this makes it even more important not to reinforce this fragmentation in how we speak about it: Gaza and the West Bank are not distinct, separable entities.

For people in the West, it might be comforting to think of art and culture as something which endures even in the bleakest circumstances: maybe it makes us feel less guilty about the crimes being committed with the support of our governments; maybe it appeals to some sentimental ideas about the indomitability of the human spirit. In the case of Palestine, this idea is to some extent true: people are still making art, still preserving their culture, and still fighting for liberation. Palestinians are not passive victims. You don’t have to look hard to find humbling acts of courage or collective care. But the reality is more complicated. As Emily says, some people are so distressed that they cannot continue to function as normal, and this is not a mark of weakness or a failure on their part, but a profoundly human reaction to slaughter on a mass scale.

“People are paralysed, to be honest. We are not managing to continue our normal lives” – Rania Elias

In some places, like Aida Youth Centre and within Gaza itself, cultural projects have been obstructed or made impossible; conditions have worsened to the point where anything beyond baseline survival has become a luxury. It is a mistake to romanticise the resilience of people being subjected to intolerable suffering. While it’s often framed admiringly, the expectation that Palestinians should possess boundless resolve and a supernatural capacity to endure violence, trauma and grief is its own kind of dehumanisation. A recent study by medical journal The Lancet estimated that the death toll in Gaza could reach more than 186,000 people. You can’t look for a silver lining in a situation so monstrous; you can’t try to spin a heartwarming tale about the power of art in spite of it all.

“People are paralysed, to be honest. We are not managing to continue our normal lives,” says Elias. “When it’s too hot, we think about how people are doing in the streets of Gaza, where they don’t have shelter. We cannot eat without thinking about the people there who do not have anything to eat. We’re not human anymore. I feel like a robot now. I cannot sleep when I think about how we’re in a safe place, we have a shelter, we have a roof on top of our heads. I have my children around me who are safe, and other mothers, they don’t have their children anymore. They can’t sleep, they can’t eat, they can’t do anything. We’re not living here. We’re suffering every minute.”