The White Kite collective of cultural workers in support of the Palestinian people has held twelve events since November 2023 where volunteers give voice to the stories, poems and songs of Palestinians.
The latest, held at the Roundabout Summerhall courtesy of Paines Plough, speaks the words of seventeen Palestinians along with a short briefing from a local cultural workers activist. Funds raised by the event will be split between children’s workshops in Jadbalia run by Thilal and a project to “extract drinking water out of the ground in Al Mawasi and Khan Younis.”
The first story comes as a childhood memory from Hossam Madhoun, the co-artistic director of a theatre in Gaza. On a warm summer’s day, he had come across his grandfather looking intently at some documents and crying. “As a kid, I almost laughed at the image, It was astonishing to see him crying.” The response of his grandmother was different. She seemed angry with his grandfather for getting the documents out. Then she also broke down crying.
They were the proof the family owned a house and some land in what is now Israel, which they fled in the wake of atrocities. But they kept faith with their home, passing on the documents and the house key to each generation in the hope that one day they would be able to return. Hossam has now fled to Cairo from his own home in Gaza. As he holds onto the key to his Gaza home, he says, “forgive me Grandpa, I am sorry, I was young, I did not understand, I love you.”
There are many moving stories in this powerful compilation. Some bear witness to the regular absurd harassment Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israel.
Hannah Khalil, the resident playwright of Shakespeare’s Globe in 2022, shares a story from her relatives in the West Bank. In November 2023, at the time of the olive harvest, the road from their village had been blocked by armed settlers. The “olive grove has been in our family for generations,” so with a few friends, her uncle managed to collect over 400 bags of olives but on their return home are stopped by armed settlers. To avoid trouble, her uncle began to hand them over. The settlers told them they didn’t know what to do with them so “you need to take them, get the olive oil from them and bring it to us.”
To be a Palestinian anywhere within reach of Israel is to fear death. Nada Shawa writes of the time in February when her unarmed aunt Dayya and her daughter Rasha in Gaza were “forced at gunpoint by the Israeli military to flee their home,” only to be shot dead by drones as they walked on a road to what they hoped was a safe area.
It can be difficult to report what Israel is doing to Palestinians. Israel doesn’t allow foreign journalists into Gaza. Since October 2023, it has also killed many of the journalists who were in Gaza. The journalist Ayah Walid Shama’a has written about what happened to her on 15 January 2024. “My four sisters and I were lying on the floor amidst our sleeping children in a room located in the middle of the house. We had sought refuge there, believing it to be the safest spot, thinking it might be out of the range of tank shells. Next to me were my three children.”
“All I remember is looking into the eyes of my sister Rama while talking to her, then closing my eyes as a red light penetrated the room. The sounds followed, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself in a grave, surrounded on all sides, with sand and debris filling my face and mouth.”
Most of the people in that room were killed, and although Ayah Walid Shama survived, she will suffer memories of that night for the rest of his life.
Her story and those of other Palestinians we heard that night are a powerful testimony to events we should all know and care about. The White Kite Collective should have been the key event at the International Festival, which seems to have nothing useful to say about the UK’s continued part in the killing of Palestinians.
Among those speaking at the evening’s event was an activist from Arts Workers for Palestine Scotland who has been expressing concern about the sponsorship the International Festival and the Festival Fringe receives from Bailie Gifford that is said to have billions “invested in companies with direct or indirect links to Israel's offence forces as well as being named in 2023 as a top European investor in illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine.”
They have been “calling on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society and the Edinburgh International Festival to lever their cultural weight, to demand that Baillie Gifford divests from funds complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
If they don’t, we can expect those cultural organisations to come under more pressure from September.
This year, theatre at the Fringe has mounted many powerful responses to the brutality of Israel and the suffering of Palestinian people, from the dramatic journalism of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, to the fury and grief among traumatised Israeli Defence Soldiers in Nadav Burstein’s impressive Rebels and Patriots.
The White Kite Collective must surely stand alongside them for presenting such a brilliant and important event.