To the Theatre World, Please Read These Words: if we don’t speak in defense of Palestine we stain our spirit beyond redemption

I can’t figure out where I’m gaslighting myself or where I’m being gaslit these days. I was invited to speak with the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada’s (PGC) board of directors this past summer about anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism in theatre. Earlier this year, the organization had amplified an event hosted by several Calgary based artists espousing “A Reading of Banned/Censored Plays.”  The plays in question all dealt with Indigeneity, either here on Turtle Island or in Palestine, but none were written by Indigenous artists nor Arab/Palestinian artists. In fact, they each centered the white voices instead.

At the meeting, I said, “[my contention…] feels obvious to me, but maybe we all have very different social medias.” The plays were either cancelled due to public pressure or the playwrights themselves decided to redact their story at this time to make space for other voices. The sensationalism of naming these plays as “banned/censored” is frustrating, to say the least. Of course, PGC was simply amplifying an event by its constituents, but at the time, I replied on social media with the following:

Respectfully, this is really hurtful to Palestinians and Arabs and the Indigenous struggle all over. These plays were understandably postponed or cancelled as a response to the cultural and political moment where we need to interrogate our values - yes, these plays challenge the dominant and painful ideas of white supremacy and Zionistic supremacy, but they all center the white power and the Zionists impacted by this, not the victims of this harm. These stories are actually a perpetuation of that power. What we need to do is un-center those in power. The real “banned and censored plays” are the litany of Indigenous and Palestinian plays that never seen the light of day. How disappointing.

This is what led to the invitation to chat with the board. It was a good intentioned invitation. To be very clear, I don’t speak any of this to disparage the team at PGC, in fact the guild has been instrumental in supporting me throughout my career, and I’m quite grateful for their work. All the more reason, I’m writing this now, because we need to have difficult conversations within our community. What I’m trying to capture in this essay is the systematic erasure and silence of Arabs and, particularly, Palestinian voices. This feels dangerous, I’m precariously employed as it is, but the cognitive dissonance and moral stain on my spirit for staying silent are far more cankerous than my desire to be “successful” as an artist. It’s easy enough to speak generalizations in support of Palestine on our social medias, but I’m interested in synthesizing how I’m very specifically seeing anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism fall upon our theatre ecology.

This is a long essay, but please read these words carefully, read it over a few sittings if you need.

A Neoliberal Theatre Landscape

I’ve been having conversations behind closed doors with multiple organizations and looking onto our theatre ecology with growing trepidation and concern. I have had an artistic director say to me, “let’s wait until we’re all sober to discuss Israel and Palestine.” He posited that it might be too hot of a topic to speak about with any sensibility. Maybe, but in the meantime, perhaps another 40,000+ Palestinians and Lebanese people might be killed by Canadian and US funded Israeli bombs. I’ve heard “such and such a company has been in hot water from one BIPOC show to the next, I think they just need to play it safe right now.” Play what safe? What are theatres across Canada trying to reestablish?

I think my trepidation and concern is stemming from a clarity I’m having: Our desire to return to the status quo means a desire to return to a neoliberal theatrical landscape.

What my generation of theatre artists, if I may be so bold as to claim I know what my generation of theatre artists want, is not representation. What brought us to art, what galvanized our spirits, was the desire for justice. Unfortunately for theatre companies, who already feel capsized by the disruptions of the pandemic lock downs, what justice demands is another capsizing. Lucky for them, they’re already turned upside down. Maybe this can help turn them right side up.

But I can’t help but look around and see this clinging desire to a return to a neoliberal ideal, where we can have our cake and eat it too. What neoliberal theatre has done, as much as what neoliberal politicking has done, is to simply look into the plights of those who are marginalized and exploited without offering a tangible measure of justice. Neoliberal theatre is “The Life of Pi” and some Cis actor playing a Trans character who is a tragic lesson for us to learn something about empathy. What the neoliberal theatre does is not the disruptive and demanding work of justice, it simply lifts the lid off the boiling pot and lets the steam of emotional release obfuscate the issues, never addressing them. It’s not unlike back when Kamala Harris spoke at length about the dignity of each American and the need to “protect our democracy” while enforcing policies which strip people of their dignity and impose American imperialism in other parts of the world. We need someone to turn the fire off, remove the pot from the burner.

Several months ago, I saw a beloved theatre company advertise “Forget Reality, Embrace Hilarity.” I understand what they were going after—a fair desire to offer a balm in a time of difficulty. Sure, I can infer they were probably talking about the Donald Trump election win from several nights prior, but a balm is valuable only when we address the root of the problem. We don’t provide a salve for a shoulder wounded by a bullet without removing the bullet first. We don’t have the luxury of “forgetting reality” when we need to check in with our relatives to ensure they’re still alive on the regular. How could we build a future of our dreams and pursue life, liberty, and freedom, while our siblings, largely in the Global South get the brunt force of the damage and our children inherit a world on fire? Please, theatre companies and their leaders, do not forget reality, the cognitive dissonance can also be hilarious here too.

This is all firmly tied to Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The entire Palestinian Struggle has become emblematic of the assault on all our freedoms because it has revealed the Imperial Core’s infallible commitment to capital and capitalism. The hen comes home to roost when we see Trump and Vance berate Zelenskyy in the recent present. There is no justice without justice for Palestinians. When we make theatre to “forget reality,” we absolve ourselves of the responsibility we have as artists to our society. When we ask artists submit work that is not “overly political” or “timely,” we curtail our responsibility. What an insult and a shame to create art out of fear. If money is what we’re after, if business management is the name of the game, if glory is what we want, there are much more lucrative careers to pursue than running a theatre or being a theatre artist.

The Cost of Being Pro-Palestinian

But I understand your fears, being pro-Palestinian comes at a cost. I’m afraid to wear my Keffiyeh in public. I know Palestinians are asking for us to embrace this traditional garb in solidarity, but as an Arab, I don’t feel entirely safe to wear this in public. I wore it once and got some pretty glaring looks from some passersby. I don’t know if I made up those looks in my head or not, but this certainly illustrates the kind mental strain I’m under these days.

A more consequential example: I worked at a prominent theatre company’s education department for the past two years where I founded, organized, and ran a IBPOC youth mentorship program. In the second year, I was told that the Azrieli Foundation had donated specifically to this program. I felt weird about it, but I said nothing immediately. After October 7, 2023, the Azrieli foundation donated 10 million dollars to Israel to support in their retaliatory efforts in Gaza. Now, I especially felt weird about it, and I asked my supervisor if we could find different funds for the program. I said it was somewhat incongruent with the values of our program to accept funding from a foundation which normalizes and upholds an on-going settler colonial project so transparently. They told me they couldn’t.

I continued to press my employer to find different funding for next year’s program. Then, when it came time to renew my contract for the third year, which had always been the direction of our conversations – they said they were going to let me go in the interest of keeping the work internally run. What’s stranger is they paid me nearly half my contract fee during my dismissal. When I asked, why didn’t you ask me to do it for this lowered fee instead if saving money was your aim—they ignored the question entirely.

I can’t help but feel I was let go because of the contentions I brought up with their funders. But I’ll never know. And when I asked them, they said their decision was “no reflection on your politics or perspectives – those are your strength as an artist.” Still, I can’t help but feel that’s not true. Align that with the countless stories of people getting dismissed from their jobs for demonstrating pro-Palestinian solidarity, and I can’t help but feel I might actually be right. But I just don’t know. Am I being gaslit or am I gaslighting myself?

Being loudly pro-Palestinian, as I have been, has undoubtedly caused theatre companies to estrange themselves from me. Being critical of Israel has almost guaranteed that. I am noticing that there is a respectable way of being pro-Palestinian, which includes advocating for food and medical access for starving and bombarded Palestinian children, speaking in sweeping generalizing about the conditions of war, and sanitizing the details of human rights atrocities in passive language. However, speaking truthfully and verifiably that the starvation and bombardment are happening because of Israel’s increasing fascistic domination over the lives of Palestinians crosses a line. I’m willing to cross that line, and if you feel I’m in the wrong, then I’m simply asking you to engage in this conversation. The cost of being pro-Palestinian is far less severe than the cost of silently witnessing this genocide take place.

Auditioning for Your Empathy

I feel outraged, apathetic, exhausted, and above all, really quite sad. I feel invisible, alongside my Arab and Palestinian peers. Despite this, I love theatre, I love making it, I think there are many worthy Arab and Palestinian artists. Theatre has always allowed me to align my values, my missions in life, with my talents and my artistic spirit. But this feeling of invisibility started long before October 7, but has certainly magnified since. All throughout my career, while my white counterparts got to be in rooms making the art, I must spend so much of my time advocating for myself, for people like me, queer and trans people, Arab and Muslim people, because we start from a posture of dehumanization. As Hala Alyan put it “we must audition for your empathy.” I’m not suggesting white people have it easy as artists, they don’t, being an artist is difficult, but I am certain that white people don’t have barriers because of their whiteness. And if you think affirmative action efforts are barriers for white people, you have a watery understanding of the cultural landscape we’re in.

I’m one of few working Arab artists in Canada. I know this has many layers and reasons as to why it is, but the perniciousness of how rare Arabs are in our artistic and cultural landscape isn’t a siloed event. It’s the same reason, at 16, I told my dad “I don’t think Arabs make it in the arts here and it feels intention.” It’s a sensed perception that I felt growing up as an Arab in a post-9/11 Western world. Maybe another way I’m gaslighting myself.

But more recently, I’m starting to think 16-year-old self was right. The unhinged, unbridled destruction of Gaza has had the full support of the orchestrators and organizers of the Western world—yes, even liberator of women, gays, and trans people – like neolib Kamala Harris. It is so necessary for the Imperial Core to usher in a detailed and reason-defying dehumanization campaign against Arabs to justify the genocide we are witnessing. You are not immune to this campaign.

This past year has been all too reminiscent of my coming of age in a post 9/11 Iraq war era. Today, Arabs are so vilified that a parent felt embolden to complain to an Ottawa school board because they played an Arabic song during a Remembrance Day celebration citing that it was offensive to the veterans and unsafe for the Jewish students at the school. And what’s worse, the school board issued an apology because of the pressure they faced. If simply hearing Arabic is an antisemitic attack and a danger to the West, we could call that kind of discrimination racism.

When Ukrainian folk songs were used during Remembrance Day observances last year, it was a welcomed part of our collective imagination and Canadian identity. In fact, after President Zelenskyy was ambushed by the American presidency, European leaders almost immediately took to social media to express solidarity and support for Ukraine—something the same people have been hemming and hawing about in regard to Palestine for over a year and a half now. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t support Ukraine—we absolutely should—but why isn’t a consistent ethic applied to Palestinians and Arabs? Again, I’d wager it is racism.

Humanizing One Side, Making Invisible the Other

Neoliberal politics and arts would have us convinced that Arabs are the antithesis of the Western world – the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel P. Huntington so divisively determined – placing me and my kind on the wrong side of the civilizational divide. And interestingly enough, this is reproduced in the arts from Hollywood to our local theatre programming (or lack thereof). I guess it turns out arts are a site where we exercise our empathy and redefine our collective imagination about who we are and who we could be.

But I can’t help but feel we’ve reached a limit of progressive politics. I think people liked my queerness more than they did my Arab-ness anyway. I think, in the trenches of their spirits, there is, amongst neoliberal audiences, a detesting and fear of Arabs and more broadly, the Muslim world. What the Palestinian Struggle has unveiled is the consistency of the Western world’s global colonial project. Indeed, it has fortified the commitment to the Imperial Core to maintain it’s power. When Kamala says “I will ensure America will have the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” I can’t help but cringe as I know she’d use that force against my people. But she is speaking to the neoliberal thinker who can’t imagine a world without the USA at its center—who can’t imagine a world not under the boot of the American empire. When Trump called Haiti and African Nations ‘shithole countries,’ the western neoliberal might disagree with his phrasing, but in practise, they agree with the point. Whatever we feel about Trump, at least he lays this all bare. Perhaps now that Canada is under imperialist threat from the US, we have an opportunity to reimagine ourselves and contribute to anti-imperialists and globally conscious communities, like those we’ve been taught to fear and hate for so many years.

And I’m about to say the Z word here, but we are being deliberately negligent if we deny this; Zionism and Zionist funders (like the Azrieli Foundation) play a significant role in so many of our artistic institutions. RBC is a major donor force across our theatres and they are one of the most impactful investors into the Israeli military industrial complex. Other donors supporting Canadian theatre, like Sylvia Soyka, continually demonstrate their commitment to Zionism through their history of philanthropy. CIBC, TD Bank, and Scotiabank have all demonstrated a commitment to Israel’s military by investing, quite heavily, into Israeli’s Elbit Systems, a company which sells weapons to Israel’s military that are used against Palestinians. I invite you to look up some of our major theatre’s and explore their board of directors, their major donors, and see their ties to Zionist enterprises.

Now I want to be clear and recognize that Zionism is an umbrella term that many people use in many different ways. The Zionism that I’m firmly against is the one that set out to displace and colonize Palestine from the Arab natives that was formed as a nation-state movement in the mid 19th century in Europe. Other interpolations of Zionism is the very valid understanding that Jewish people have the right to self determination. However, we can talk semantics about what Zionism actually means to whom, but I’m more concerned with the material reality. To be Anti-Zionist, in this moment, with the real material conditions we are in, is to be against the illegal settlements displacing Palestinians in the West Bank, against ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and against the apartheid system in Israel proper and the occupied Palestinian territories.

I’m not making this up – these are verifiable claims by every reputable and recognized human rights organization that have made up the moral backbone of the Western world since WWII. I’m so frustrated that I even have to go on at lengths about this because the conversation of Zionism and Israel has been so obfuscated that even while we are witnessing with our own eyes that destruction and immoral power imbalance on our phones, we have to spend so much time deliberating what is materially happening and what isn’t materially happening. When we have Zionism so baked into the funding structure of our artistic institutions (not to mention how it’s baked into our media and political institutions), I can reasonably infer why Palestinian voices are so censored.

And censorship of Palestinian voices isn’t new, it isn’t a thing that just started after October 7. In the recent past, When Bluma Appel found out that the Canadian Stage wanted to do the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” (the play about the young Australian woman bulldozed by an Israeli tank) several years ago, she threatened to “react very badly” if the play was programmed. Yes, the Bluma Appel of one of our largest stages in Toronto, the Bluma Appel Theatre, home to many of the Canadian Stage’s shows. This wasn’t the only time this play faced pressures from Zionist funders and Israeli lobbying groups to be shut down. Am I gaslighting myself? Or am I observing something true here? I must admit, besides the few courageous artistic leaders who have spoken truthfully and taken a principled stance in this moment of genocide and ethnic cleansing (see here and here), the entire refusal to even engage has been destructive to my spirit and will be a stain upon our consciousness for years to come.

My faith is so shaken, and I don’t know how to quite trust a theatre company that says, “we invite IBPOC artists” and then become ambivalent and silent at the overwhelming evidence of the annihilation of the Palestinian people. I can accept that it’s “complicated” but if we can’t even discuss the paradox of the situation, then we will be stuck in the polarity of fascism. What really magnifies this point is during the Professional Association of Canadian Theatre’s (PACT) conference in Montreal this past year, one speaker spoke so fervently in favor of the Zionist defence, and proclaimed antisemitism against any objection, which ended up shutting the entire conversation down before it even started. And it’s not like it was started with a lot of gumption either, it was an afterthought of a conversation, the result of meaningful organizing and pressure from artist activists.

To be very clear, it’s not to say that shows that prioritize and center Jewish voices should ever be silenced, but there’s a very real effort to humanize one side of this story and make invisible the other. In the recent seasons alone, we’ve had the following shows centering the Jewish experience: Guilt* (corrected from initially writing: Doubt) at Tarragon Theatre, The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare Bash’d, 18 Jewish People Order Chinese Food at Persephone Theatre, Playing Shylock at the Canadian Stage, just to name a few. Marry that with how legacy media, our politicians, and our military aid have also contributed to humanizing one side of the war while making invisible the other side, I can’t help but feel I’m not actually misreading the room. How many shows about the Palestinian Struggle have been programmed this year? By Palestinian artists? How many shows by Arab artists in Canada? Teesri Dunya skews the stats up somewhat because they dedicated their entire season to work that discuss the Palestinian Struggle. Most everyone else? Shamefully silent.

A real different approach to the illegal and immoral annexation of Ukraine by Russia, where this year alone, we’ve got the National Ballet of Ukraine hosted at Mirvish, our most commercially successful theatre in Canada. Or the tour of the First Metis Man of Odessa across Canada in major A-house companies peppered across Canada. And I know that doesn’t feel like it’s enough for Ukrainians, fair enough! I’m not saying this to disparage the amplification of Ukrainian art – we absolutely ought to be amplifying these stories, they deserve this success and intentionality. Especially now, more than ever. Ukrainians deserve sovereignty, security, and freedom from their war – but my consistent ethic says that Palestinians also deserve the same. I’m connecting this thread to demonstrate the massive cognitive dissonance I’m experiencing when it comes to how we treat the injustice the Ukrainians are facing versus the injustice the Palestinians are facing.

But What Can We Do?

A friend in a leadership position at a prominent theatre in Toronto asked me “what difference would it make if we made a statement? Would that affect anything happening there?” And I replied that “it would make a difference to us here, it would make Arabs and Palestinian artist and audiences understand that they have solidarity, support, and people on their sides.”

Is that so bad? Unless, of course, theatres do not want to demonstrate solidarity and support with Arabs because they’ve also absorbed the sublime textures of the neoliberal imagination and the “clash of civilizations.” Maybe they think if you’re pro-Palestinian, you’re pro-Terrorism. I don’t blame them, when Hamas is equated to Palestinians by Israeli Hasbara and Western media 24/7 even long before October 7, 2023. Where right wing pundit Ryan Girdusky felt emboldened to threaten Mehdi Hasan’s life on live daytime television when Hasan simply said he’s a supporter of Palestinians. Arabs are so blatantly disregarded, objectified, and dehumanized, the racism is simply the waters we swim in, hard to see until you see it. Then you realize it’s all around you.

Another leader told me “I’m worried to rock the boat on something I don’t fully understand,” when I asked them if they would sign our letter asking for institutional and individual solidarity in ensuring Palestinians are not censored in Canadian. It’s been over a year. Do we still not understand? I have two reports by United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese that share tremendous and meticulous detail on how Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip legally meets the definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing that I would be happy to send to anyone who wants to read them. But of course, the character assassination on Albanese by Zionist and allied media have made it that not a single Canadian politician agreed to meet with her on her visit to Canada several months ago. What an absolute shame and a demoralizing degradation of truth and justice.

It has been over a year. I’ve certainly known about the Palestinian Struggle my entire life, but in the past year, my learning has deepened and expanded to new reaches. Where is the effort in learning? What more do we need to take a principled stance?

And what can you do?

I’m turning to my theatre community because, strangely, all we have is each other. What I haven’t spoken about in this essay in any length are the companies that have taken a stance and committed to actions that are combatting anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism. Today, 18 companies signed onto PACBI; this gesture of solidarity is a tremendously heartening start. It is important to recognize that there are a handful of companies, many of which I and other Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, and people from allied communities, have worked with in solidarity efforts. The Theatre Center, in Toronto, has taken great care to demonstrate pro-Palestinian solidarity in the form of protests, events and fundraising solidarity actions, and a continued invitation and commitment to the Palestinian Struggle. This kind of loud and visible solidarity is deeply meaningful. But while all of this is heartening and vital to create rippling change, it’s not enough on its own.

When the concentration of power and wealth is confined within institutions that purport a neoliberal ethic, we hit a glass ceiling that will be impossible to shatter alone. I believe in the will of the people and our artistic desire to put something great into this world. What I’ve learned by having these meeting behind closed doors is that behind the systematic march of institutions are real people, concerned people, who are looking on with the same trepidation and fear as I am. What I learned by having the difficult conversation I did with the Playwright’s Guild of Canada, is that we are able to create meaningful change is we’re willing to have those hard conversations—there will be more solidarity coming.

I want to galvanize you, to redirect this moment and speak courageously behind the values I know you hold. This is a real, tangible moment where you could do something meaningful with your positions of power. Supporting the Palestinian Struggle, when done right, is uplifting and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, the greater Decolonization movements, and the protection of Trans and Queer people, Women, other Muslims, and Jewish people. Listen to Noura Erakat speak deftly about this connective tissue. The web is interconnected, the struggle for justice and equity is not a zero-sum game and theatre could be a site that absolutely demonstrates our greatest possibilities into our collective imagination.

We’re already capsized, we’re already belly up, and if we only invest in the old guard, the neoliberal world order, then what have we set up for our future? Neoliberal theatre, which too many theatre companies seem to be hoping to return to, will always nurture this imperialistic fetish where we choose to numb ourselves with art that is distracting or avoidant.

But we always have an opportunity to resist. If we aren’t using our strength as storytellers to resist violence and spiritual castration, then what are we doing?

There is so much more than theatre to reckon with in this moment. But it’s the garden I’ve been tending to my entire life, so I’m speaking now. A part of me wants to say fuck it and walk away, but I think that’s cowardly. I think about the resistance of Indigenous people and Black people, who have seen this pendulum swing over and over and find it always falls in the center of whiteness again and again. In solidarity, our resistance must keep moving so we uproot this pendulum and build something better together. We are artists; is it not our duty to imagine better futures? Is it not our mission to fantasize the solutions for our grand problems? We can make societies that are built upon our better impulses, that are sculpted after the needs of our spirits and not the fears of our egos.

I think of the intergenerational change that is being asked here. I look to our artistic leaders and ask “why not usher in a new age by taking a principled stance?” Am I naïve? Do we gain anything by getting ahead on faulty, morally stained foundations?

Solidarity with Palestine is the smallest step we can take today to fight against rising fascism. Instead, we’re ignoring it entirely, and worse, subtly virtue signaling to Zionist funders that we are committed to their narratives.

If this is how our major institutions want to represent us, then please, take your land acknowledgements out, remove your equity seeking clauses. If you can’t fulfill those values, then live truthfully in your neoliberal ones. Because right now, they seem to indicate that “West is best, and White is right.”