Although teenage dancer Sanabel Hasan Al Fararja lives about nine miles from Jerusalem, she rarely encounters a Jewish audience.
So she had eagerly awaited her dance troupe’s performance at Berkeley Hillel on Thursday of last week. She considered the exchange important, if taxing.
“It hurts a lot more to perform for you [Jews],” Hasan Al Fararja told the audience of nearly 150.
Hasan Al Fararja has grown up at the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem. Her teen folk-dance troupe, Ibda, depicted scenes of Palestinian refugee life at an event sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace, Middle East Children’s Alliance and Berkeley Hillel. The stop was part of a nationwide tour for the group.
By showing people how they live, the adolescents hope to win support for the Palestinian effort to leave the camps behind.
“Ibda means ‘making something out of nothing,'” said Barbara Lubin, a Middle East Children’s Alliance board member. “And clearly living in Dheisheh refugee camp is not nothing. It’s a very tight-knit, strong community. In some ways there is more community in those camps than we have here in the United States.”
The dances were bittersweet. Colorfully dressed peasants celebrated and worked the fields with cardboard picks and scythes. Inevitably, black ghosts came to spirit the peasants away or shackle their hands. Each dance ended with the hope that national pride would galvanize the Palestinians against the black ghosts, which organizers said were symbols of Israeli occupation.
In dances and autobiographical poems, the 11- to 14-year-olds expressed sorrow, anger and optimism. Jews are not their enemies, they said, but they voiced anger with the settlers.
“My color — white, black, yellow,” a young man read. “People have all different colors of skin, but red is the color of blood, which flows through the heart of all people, no matter where they come from.”
“My hopes are simple,” said another speaker. “To live without checkpoints and soldiers, to have a room to myself, to play in a playground, to have water every day, so that I can take a bath and go swimming.”
Such stories proved enlightening to those in the audience who were unfamiliar with the plight of Palestinian refugees. “I would say that the next step would be just learning more,” said Israeli-born U.C. Berkeley student Hilla Abel.
Berkeley Hillel program director Josh Miller was pleased that the event raised political issues. “This is a place where we embrace pluralism and diversity,” he said.
Mideast scholar Rebecca Stein was even more emphatic. “It’s incredibly exciting to see the Jewish community in the Bay Area and, more broadly, in the United States, welcoming this kind of performance. I think it suggests we can be hopeful about future kinds of dialogue and political exchange.”
Dheisheh is the largest of three camps outside Bethlehem, according to Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Lincoln Shlensky. It was created in 1948 to house refugees from 35 nearby villages. Today the camp holds 11,000 residents, more than half under age 15, he said. Unemployment runs as high as 70 percent. Overcrowding is a major problem, he added.
Ibda founder Ziad Abbas said the rough conditions at Dheisheh breed violence among those who live there, a situation Ibda seeks to reverse. He called for repatriation of Palestinians to the villages from which they fled or were evicted, in the interest of peace.
Ibda dancers share Abbas’ dream.
They asked the audience stand, then sang the Palestinian national anthem as they waved the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag.
The reception, said Lubin, “was remarkable. Five years ago [the flag] probably would have been thrown out, or never allowed in in the first place. I think it really shows how we’ve all moved.”
The audience responded warmly to the performance. Nevertheless, some expressed mixed emotions at being asked to stand for the Palestinian flag.
“I won’t lie,” said Abel. “It was definitely not an easy thing.”
Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Julia Kaplan said she knew Ibda might raise the flag and left the matter to the group’s discretion.
“This is a very political event and they’re a political group,” Kaplan added. “And how can they not be, living in a refugee camp?”
The Middle East Children’s Alliance is raising funds for an Ibda guest house at Dheisheh. Ibda plans to host foreign guests at the house as part of an ongoing cultural exchange program.