In March 2024, Manchester’s HOME arts venue suddenly cancelled a planned April performance of Voices of Resilience, which centred on very moving extracts from the now-published diaries of the Palestinian Atef Abu Saif. The decision provoked huge objections from the arts community, hundreds of whom signed a protest letter to the venue and, according to the BBC, “100 artists began removing their work from the gallery in protest at the decision”. Very quickly, HOME reinstated the event.
Since then, the show has appeared at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August and on Saturday, a version drawing on the diary entries of three women and Atef Abu Saif was aired at the Barbican, despite demands from UK Lawyers for Israel that it be cancelled.
They claimed it is “likely” to breach “the Public Order Act 1986” and “the Equality Act” arguing that “any Jewish or Israeli person attending the event is likely to feel that there is an intimidating, hostile and offensive environment.”
Not only was that not the case, but one of the after-show panel welcomed to speak about the event was Naomi Wimburne-Idress, a founding member of Jewish Voice for Labour.
The sold-out event performed by theatre workers follows the experience of people in Gaza from 7 October 2023 via diary entries of three women and one man. Film footage of Palestine and family pictures are projected onto a huge screen above the stage.
The show opens with the poignant poem of Hiba Abu Nada, the thirty-two-year-old woman killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza in October 2023. It includes the words, “there is no room for us in this universe. Like a narrow corridor, it closes in. It’s as if we were scandals, our longing a crime, and the love of our country a sin.”
The actor Yusra Warsama steps forward as the writer Sondos Sabra describing how her family trip on 7 October to collect olives from their “land, in Sheikh Ajlin, south of Gaza City” was interrupted by explosions that triggered the “screams of my little sister Fatima”.
As she hugged her sister, she recalls being age eight sitting a school exam in 2006 when Israel bombed nearby areas killing 200 in one day: “I wanted a hug that day from my mother. I remember needing it so badly. So today I don’t leave Fatima for a moment.”
Nabil Elouahabil as Atef Abu Saif speaks of taking his son Yasser and other family members on 7 October for an early morning swim off the coast of Gaza. “As usual, Israeli warships squat on the horizon, visible to everyone. Suddenly, explosions sound in all directions, rockets tracing lines across the sky. I swim back to shore, calling on Ismael to come with me. Everyone on the beach begins to run.”
He describes how, later in October, he rushed to a relative's house where all but “Wissam, my 23-year-old niece, and her sister Widdad” had been killed. “Wissam has been taken to the ICU and went straight into surgery, where both of her legs and her right hand have been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place just the day before.” She will ask him to give her a lethal injection. He refuses.
Maxine Peake as the playwright Nahil Mohana talks about the day in October when Israeli leaflets were dropped over her home telling them to evacuate the area by 17:00. A car is ordered for 14:00 to take her uncle, who is dependent on a wheelchair. It didn't arrive, but later they heard that seventy people were killed on the road they would have travelled.
The Palestinian filmmaker Hind Shoufani as the writer Ala’a Obaid recalls the trauma of giving birth in a hospital that barely had room for the “bleeding and serious cases”, so she ended up delivering her child in “a room containing four patients and an unusable bathroom.” She wonders, “how many women in our country are having children to men who have died in this war? How many pregnant women won't survive?”
Occasionally, between the stories, Ahmed Adnan sings traditional folk songs whose hopeful sounds allow us brief moments away from the intense horror of the memories we are sharing.These are stories we rarely get to hear in the Western media. And no surprise, since for nearly a year, Israel has refused to allow journalists into Gaza.
The chair of the panel discussion that followed the event asked if the arts industry had failed Palestine. One of the panel replied that it hadn’t. He argued that art “workers are with Palestine. It’s the funders and the administrators that are not. That’s cracking. It is only being held back by the power of a small elite.”
Let’s hope so.
All the proceeds from the ticket sales will go directly to the “three central diarists currently in Gaza.”