Letter 4: When Will We Tell the Stories of Palestine?
Letters From The Ground 4: When Will We Tell the Stories of Palestine?
An Open Letter to Theatre Leaders in the United States
From: Sahar Assaf, theatre maker
Content Warning: This letter contains references to and descriptions of violence, including warfare and sexual violence, experienced by individuals in Palestine. Some of the hyperlinks may lead to graphic depictions of these events.
Dear US Theatre Leaders Who Haven’t Spoken Out for Palestine,
My name is Sahar Assaf, and I am a Lebanese theatremaker. I am writing this letter as an independent artist, speaking solely on my own behalf—not representing any organization or group or people. I write to you as a mother, a woman, and a theatremaker. I write as a relatively new member of your big-small, diverse community.
I have written this letter a hundred times in my mind and in my heart over the past year. I hesitated to put it down on paper until recently when I saw Zoukak Theatre’s initiative, Letters From The Ground, which responds to and confronts the present moment. I was encouraged to write, and I write because of the faith in and love I have for theatre and theatremakers everywhere. I write because when I moved to the United States from Lebanon in 2021, I was embraced by many of you with the love, support, and care that every newcomer hopes for. It's my responsibility to let you in and let you know how your loud silence is being received.
Over the past year, I’ve been grappling with finding meaning in my work as a theatremaker. In the face of the atrocities we’re witnessing every day, the idea of theatre for theatre’s sake feels inappropriate at best and dangerous at worst. When entire populations, cities, and cultures are being wiped out in the most horrific ways, in daylight and under the watch of world leaders, the art of playing/being others to evoke compassion can feel almost absurd. And continuing to create art with a business-as-usual mindset risks perpetuating the same culture that enables these monstrosities.
I arrived in the United States during a time that felt like a profound, all-encompassing commitment to progressive values and collective action. It was mid-pandemic, amidst the waves of brave movements such as Black Lives Matter; We See You, White American Theatre and #MeToo. Every day and each conversation with many of you made me feel lucky to be making theatre alongside such thought leaders—people shaping trends and setting standards in the field and the world.
Then, the genocide in Palestine began. I didn’t expect immediate reactions or statements of solidarity, but I also didn’t expect that an entire year would pass while this atrocity—funded by our tax dollars, your tax dollars—continued without so much as a simple statement of opposition from the theatre leaders. Many individual artists have signed on to a call for a ceasefire, but many leaders have not joined us. I couldn’t understand this silence from the same community that never misses an opportunity to speak of peace, love, and compassion.
I ask myself, is it possible that you don’t know? Did you not know that the United States has spent a record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel from 7 October 2023 to December 2024? Did you not know that the United States vetoed four United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire in Gaza? Since October 2023, over seventeen thousand children have been killed in Gaza. Can you even begin to wrap your mind around that number? I can’t. But I did hear the press conference held by the children of Gaza who were pleading with the world for help. Did you?
Did you not hear Hind Rajab’s voice? Did you not hear her begging for help over the phone with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, surrounded by the bloodied corpses of her six relatives? Did you not hear the interview with her mother where she speaks about the last moments she spent with Hind over the phone? This five-year-old child was concerned about wiping the blood dripping from her mouth every time she spoke because she didn’t want to dirty her shirt and trouble her mom with washing it. Her lifeless body was found two weeks later in a car that had been hit with 355 bullets. Did you not know?
Did you not watch Sha’ban al-Dalou, a nineteen-year-old software engineering student, burn alive before the world while still attached to an intravenous line? Or the newborn twins killed alongside their mother while their father had gone to register their birth?
Did you hear the story of the eleven-year-old Palestinian child who carried his deceased baby brother, Ahmed, to a hospital in Khan Younis in his blue backpack? Or the story of another Ahmed, Ahmed Al-Najjar, just eighteen months old, whose father held his headless body up to the camera after the bombing of tent housing displaced Palestinians near the United Nations Relief and Works Agency warehouses in Rafah? What about nine-year-old Omar Hamad, who watched his father burn alive in an Israeli attack on another tent camp in Rafah, only to cry himself to sleep alone afterward? And Zein Yousef who has been sleeping at his mother’s grave since she was killed? And the parents writing their children’s names on the children’s arms and legs with markers so their bodies can be identified when they are killed?
Most of these stories reached mainstream Western media. Is it possible you missed them all? Or is it possible that you saw all of it and couldn’t imagine what it means for the people suffering through it? Is it possible that you saw all this and still weren’t moved to speak out? All while knowing that this monstrosity is made possible by your tax money?
I ask myself, would you have stayed silent and gone on with your artistic programming if Hind was a Heather, Sha’ban was a Sean, Ahmed was an Anthony, Zein was a Zach, and Omar was an Owen? Would you?
What we are witnessing today, as you likely know, is the most documented genocide in history, a livestreamed genocide unfolding on our mobile phones, sanctioned and sponsored by the United States.
On my mobile phone, I have read stories about people in Gaza hearing the voices of survivors under the rubble and then having to walk away because it’s impossible to reach them. I read stories about women enduring C-sections without anesthesia, and children being stitched up, their limbs being amputated without anesthesia. There are stories of children dying of starvation in their parents’ arms and of women and children crushed to death in stampedes over bread. There was even a story about a massacre that Gazans called the flour massacre and another about Israeli soldiers swapping food aid entering Gaza with bags of sand. Can you even fathom this cruelty?
Doctors in Gaza have created a new acronym, “WCNSF,” which stands for Wounded Child with No Surviving Family. Can you imagine a child you know is a WCNSF? More than a hundred healthcare workers have been killed, and hundreds more have been detained, including Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, a beloved doctor in Gaza, who was detained, raped and tortured to death, and most recently Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, whose current whereabouts remain unknown. There has even been a leaked surveillance video from Sde Teiman allegedly showing soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian. Have you read any of the testimonies of Palestinian women who were systematically raped by Israeli soldiers and guards? How much more can one ignore?
Over a hundred journalists have been killed in Gaza since the genocide began. I witnessed a story about a nineteen-year-old Palestinian journalist, Hassan Hamad, who was killed in an air strike on his home in the Jabalia refugee camp, and the dismembered remains of his body were collected in a shoe box. Shouldn’t we be concerned about the fact that not a single international journalist is allowed into Gaza to document how our tax money is being used? Gazans, like Said, Saleh, Nahed, Wissam, and many others, are left to document the genocide as they are trying to survive it. Over 45,000 deaths, nearly 70 percent of which are women and children. Each one of them had a life, a love, and a dream. Each one of them is a story.
While I watched and read these stories, I have watched you, my colleagues, deliver land acknowledgment statements with unwavering commitment. These land acknowledgments intend to confront the truth of both historical and ongoing processes of colonialism. They’re intended to signal the need for systemic change within settler societies in relation to Indigenous peoples. So I do not understand how one can stay true to these statements while remaining silent on an ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land theft right now—acts sanctioned by one’s own government. This silence in the face of such atrocities undermines the very purpose these statements are meant to serve.
I don’t understand how one can stand truthfully against racism while staying silent about one’s government investing billions of dollars in a state that, for seventy-six years, has oppressed, murdered, and annexed land from an Indigenous Brown population with total impunity. The United States governments gives billions of dollars to an apartheid state that has been subjecting 2.2 million people—half of whom are children—to a seventeen-year blockade, forcing them to survive on restricted-calorie diets, bombing them arbitrarily and preemptively, and shooting them in the knees and necks when they march peacefully for freedom.
We say theatre helps us imagine better worlds. This belief calls us—especially those who have access to platforms—to recognize our responsibility to the world that this genocide creates. It should compel us to consider our accountability to our communities in the United States and to this country’s history and legacy of civic activism and social change.
We say we do theatre to tell stories. By overlooking the most urgent story of our time— a genocide perpetuated by our own money and silence—we are complicit in its continuation. While fear of possible repercussions for speaking out is real, it pales in comparison to the fear experienced by those under the bombs, the fear of families evacuating their homes to go to a “safer” location only to be killed en route or on arrival, the fear of hearing drones and quadcopters twenty-four hours a day and not knowing when and where they will strike next. I have felt that fear; I have lived through it. This fear takes the place of every other emotion. It makes you completely present in an intolerable now, breathless, deprived of your past or any glimpse of a possible future. That fear persists, there, right now–under the lethal artificial intelligence-powered weapons that are made in the United States.
In the years to come, I am confident there will be a moment of reckoning in the United States, when citizens and taxpayers here will have to deal with our direct involvement in the Palestinian genocide and cultural erasure. Think about how you will respond to future generations of theatremakers when they ask, “What did you do to oppose this genocide?”—knowing that “we didn’t know” cannot be an excuse.
In years to come, when history unequivocally declares what has happened in Gaza a genocide, and the sociopolitical taboo of speaking the name of Palestine has been lifted, I’m pretty sure that the big stages many of you are entrusted with now will be eager to tell stories about it– the people who perished, those who survived it, and the movements that helped bring it to an end.
I hope you will say something, do something today to earn the honor of having these stories on your stages in the future. The world is watching.
May we have justice, so peace can ensue.
Sahar Assaf
In the memory of Juliano Mer Khamis, co-founder and artistic director of The Freedom Theatre
“Our responsibility as artists is to rebuild or reconstruct this destruction. To build up hope, to build up resistance, to build up identity. To build up strategical plans. To build up thinking. To build up a concept of life.” —Juliano Mer Khamis
One Day. Photo by Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha, Gaza, Jan 16, 2018.
