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HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014

29 July 2014

The work to organise our event is coming together.  Caryl Churchill has sent us an original piece specially written for it.  I haven’t had time to read it yet!  This means that we now have pieces from Hassan Abdulrazzak, Caryl Churchill, Haifa Zangana!  I saw Ahmed Masoud, the other writer we have asked to contribute, at Reem Kelani‘s concert at Rich Mix (which is where our event will be on Sunday 14th September) and he apologised for not getting something to us but he comes from Gaza and his family is there. No hurry, Ahmed.

I got these sms messages from Hossam last night:

Hi dear, I am very worried.  This night is different.  Heavy bombing in West Remal where I live. Same as the night of Shejaiya.  We left our bedrooms and we lay down in the kitchen.  Away from windows.  I am panicked, Abir and Salma too. Moreover, we are in the dark here. In the dark that we see nothing and in the dark that we know nothing, where they bomb? Why they bomb? I want you to know that I have been honoured knowing you and co-operating with you.  Love H, Gaza.

Then after I replied today via sms (‘Sending you and your loved ones love more powerful than bombs (I think!). Not sure of anything except that you are in my heart.  Love, j’) this message came:

Thanks, dear.  We passed that night safe.  My family displaced at my home from the North also safe.Then suddenly we made contact on the telephone. He was at work at the Ma’an Development Centre.  Hossam told me that yesterday the Centre director asked him to take care of some children from his family and neighbours that had come out of the Khozaa district.  Israeli troops invaded the area and occupants were asked to leave their houses at gun-point.  Hossam played with the group of children for an hour or so.  One two and half year old boy told him that an Israeli soldier had pointed a gun at him and told him to raise his hands in the air.  The boy told Hossam that he had to explain to the Israeli soldier: ‘I have nothing.  I have nothing’.

Hossam told me that people were being herded, through random threats delivered by telephone and aerial leaflets, from outlying districts to the centre of Gaza. He asked me to post a piece of writing by a friend.  You can read this below after this message from Hossam:

Do you know how it feels when someone puts a gun to your head and starts to squeeze the  trigger?
No dear, you don’t know, only those who live the experience for real know what it means.
Can you imagine a whole nation is living this experience?
This is how we live for 24 days
But….
But….,,
But yesterday, it was different. Yesterday we could feel the bullet, we could touch, it, we heard it moving out, hot, sharp, ready to take souls.
Yesterday night the Israeli air force conducted 75 air strikes, firing 140 missiles, targeting different locations in Gaza Strip. Israeli forces fired approximately 879 tank shells and the navy fired approximately 430 shells toward Palestinian territory. During the attack, 44 houses were destroyed. 67 Palestinian fatalities and 294 injuries.
Add to it more that 2000 flash bombs causing the same sound as an explosive rocket, it was a terror night, no one slept, no one could sleep.  They meant to terrorize us, to terrorize our children, they make it clear that no-one is safe, any one in Gaza is a target, they proved it, by bombing hospitals, schools, shelters, playgrounds, group of children playing in a playground in beach camp celebrating the feast (Eid).
What to say? Humanity has no space to think about Gaza?!
God is busy and has no time for Gaza!
Alright, we will try to manage.
Thanks, humans, you helped enough.
Our father in the sky !!!!!! Stay there.

Message from Jawad Harb.  Hossam asked me to post it:

Does anyone hear us on this god-damned planet?
Yesterday, I made a tour of the shelters where displaced people fled to during the massacres.
Eight hours of speechlessness, I have decided to put in writing what those people have been through. Tens of stories, a huge amount of painful feelings: anguish, victimization, helplessness and anger.
People feel abandoned, left alone and deserted by everybody, people are unable to know who to blame, who to ask for help.
“I stopped complaining to anyone except to Allah, he created us and he would definitely stay with us to overcome this misery” said a man surrounded by his children.
“How long do we have to wait before my kids feel safe and in peace, how long do we have to cry and suffer? I am becoming more confident that being a martyr is more comfortable than what we have been suffering each and every moment of the day” said his wife, peeping over his shoulder.

These people, caught between danger at home and loss of identity in inappropriate shelters, chose to be in shelters.
“ I am here only to keep my kids alive” said a woman, as I was staring astonished and speechless, wandering all over. My god, it looks like a volcano of people rushing at you from every corner.

The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as any person who:
‘owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.’
Ironically, this definition does not include displaced persons who have not crossed an international boundary nor does it include those who fled, internally to get out of the way of war or civil strife.
The situation of the displaced Palestinians in the UNRWA Schools are not even properly described and included in international law.
What is going on now, as I am writing this blog, is another massacre in different areas of the Gaza Strip. More people are trying to escape this horror leaving everything behind, even the most precious things they worked forever to save.
The whole world is in a deep coma, as if no children’s blood is being shed every moment. I am hearing the crying of children from here all over and around, and this is what kills me more than the horrible death itself.
Those children who were lucky to survive the holocaust, are suffering flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbness, bed wetting , anxiety disorders , episodes of outbursts of crying and nervous breakdown.
Who cares? Who is thinking of those kids? I couldn’t hold back my tears watching them today with eyes full of deep pain and faces full of horror.
We know that the wounds from war are not confined to the battle field. Refugees from Shejaiya and Khozaa have evidently continued to experience trauma from house demolitions, bombardment, airstrikes and loss of loved ones.
Psychological distress from this experience is harmful to the displaced children who witnessed the brutality and blatant violations of their rights by the Occupation forces.
Now, where are we going to with all these crimes, how many more people do we have to lose, how many children does the occupation have to kill in order to bring the attention of the world?
What kind of world are we living in, watching the bloodshed and the screaming of children and no one cares?
Jawad Harb  July 29 2014

Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza. Next.

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014

27 July 2014

On the 25 July Hossam sent this photo with the message:

Did I not tell you that we love life whenever we can!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking about war and peace:

A couple of days ago I asked Hossam and Jamal from Theatre for Everybody in Gaza, how they felt now, in the midst of the current military violence, about our plan to develop a stage production of War and Peace in Gaza.

We’ve been working in partnership with them since 2002 and since 2009 we have committed ourselves to sustaining a creative cultural exchange called GAZA DRAMA LONG TERM.  This has been through a number of phases: Gaza: Guernica, Gaza: Breathing Space, Gaza: Opening Signs.  Much of the work so far has been focused on work with young people and those whose lives have been adversely affected by organised violence.

When the border crossing with Egypt was opened during Morsi’s presidency we thought we could undertake a closer collaboration and we decided to undertake a project that could engage a wider section of Gazan society.  With the army takeover that has led to Al Sisi’s presidency in Egypt we had to admit that our Gazan partners would not be able to get out and we would not be able to get in to Gaza.  So we started planning to develop the production by holding parallel events here, in London, and in Gaza.  When the move towards a unified government was undertaken by Hamas and Fatah things looked even more propitious for work of this kind of scope.  So we are working towards a video link up event at Rich Mix here in London and the Institut Francais in Gaza on Sunday 14th September.

Hossam responded: “Regarding War and Peace, for the time being the only thing I can say: I believe in doing it now more than any time before”

For the time being we are sticking to our plans.  But the question remains for us too.  How does it feel to be continuing to work for this production of a unique Arabic stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s great romantic and philosophical novel?

We have been using the brilliant stage adaptation by Erwin Piscator and colleagues at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in the mid-1950s.  Hossam has created an Arabic translation of this adaptation and it will be this text that will be the starting point for the work on the Gaza production.  In London we have also engaged with a number of writers: Hassan Abdulrazzak, Caryl Churchill, Ahmed Masoud and Haifa Zagana, asking them to make responses to this work.  These new texts will be given staged readings on Sunday 14th September along with a new Arabic translation of Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children that Hossam Madhoun in Gaza and Hassan Abdulrazzak in London have undertaken!

When we conceived this phase of our project we thought it would be inspiring for audiences in Gaza (and elsewhere!) to see what stage artists in Gaza made of this epic novel about themes that those artists would be thoroughly experienced in.  Also we had noticed that artists in Gaza were generally asked to make art directly about their situation.  We thought the optic offered by Tolstoy’s description of the war between the French army led by Napoleon against the Prussians and the Russians, the second movement of which involved the occupation of Russia, the taking of Moscow and the French army’s subsequent defeat would, through reflection,  enhance thinking about the current situation.  And of course the love story that drags apart and draws together the three main characters Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov would be recognisable in all cultures.

We were particularly encouraged when we saw how Tolstoy’s attempt to create a portrait of a whole human society through descriptions of family ‘mini-cultures’ was so relevant to the family-based character of Palestinian society.  Also, the intergenerational scope of the novel, set over a the opening years of the Nineteenth century, involving two wars and two ‘peaces’ touched on current themes in Palestine.  The contour of the events described by the book felt similar to the movement from the First Intifada (1987) to the return of the Palestinian Authority after Oslo (1995-6) and the second Intifada (2000) without the similarity being anything other than comparable.  Somehow these perceptions brought to our minds the kind of movements of history that Tolstoy is so keen to evoke in his novel.

We started, in our conversations, to consider how Tolstoy’s book draws out a distinction between different types of warfare, between the ‘set piece’ battles of the Moravian campaign climaxing with the Battle of Austerlitz and the formal peace treaty that followed, based on the mutual acceptance of the outcome of the battles, and the subsequent war involving the Napoleonic army’s occupation of Russia with its eventual defeat by ‘guerilla’ detachments.  This new kind of people’s war was also encountered by the French in their invasion of the Spanish peninsula (about which Goya  produced his Disasters of War) and these two campaigns, and to some extent the campaign in Prussia, was the basis of Carl von Clausewitz re-theorisation of military strategy that has had the most profound impact on thinking about these matters.

We started to think about the kind of perspectives that this historical overview could give.  The situation for the Palestinians seemed to be characterised by an occupation that was constantly disclaimed, by a power that itself had undertaken terrorist armed resistance against the former imperial power, Britain.  The process of occupation and colonisation was continuous.  The war was called pacification.  The peace seemed like the pursuit of war by other means.  War and peace merged into one another.

Apart from the novel being a deep exploration of the human spirit it couldn’t achieve this without raising broad questions about the nature of conflict and different types of military activity.

Of course, we can’t really predict the outcome of the current intensification of armed violence in Gaza and our partners’ lives are being reshaped in circumstances that are being transformed but we are committed to continuing this deep cultural, artistic exchange that is now thoroughly permeated by love and friendship.

Our effort is to create a space where thinking and the imagination can dance together creatively.  That’s theatre.

Note by Jonathan Chadwick

Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza. Next.

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014

24 July 2014

I wrote to Hossam to thank him for the initial draft of the Arabic translation of Caryl Churchill’s SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN which will be performed at our War and Peace: Gaza-London event on 14th September at Rich Mix.  Also I asked him to write about how our plans to create a stage production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace seemed to him now.  We thought we might get a piece about this into the Comment is Free online section of The Guardian. Crazy!?

Dear Jonathan
lots of love my dear
Sorry I could not write in the last few days, electricity is 4 hours every 2 days, my internet system with its small battery collapsed so I don’t have access as I used to.
At the same time through my work in Gaza with Ma’an Development Center we have started to work helping people, we distribute matresses and blankets and food and hygiene kits for displaced people.
I am assigned by Ma’an to be the  focal person for emergency coordination, this will require so much time and effort as I have to coordinate with all the UN agencies and INGO’s working in the crisis response, also I have to lead the emergency response of Ma’an (with other colleagues of course!)
The displaced people are more than 200,000 people, the capacity of all the humanitarian agencies can not meet half of this number, catastrophe everywhere, people with no shelter (schools are not enough but also targeted) today the Israeli army bombed a shelter / school containing more than 1500 people (16 killed and 100 injured ). UNRWA coordinates with the Israeli side the use of these schools as shelters. They are supposed to be safe, they have the coordinates of the place.
In this war Israel breaks all limits, no red lines, hospitals targeted, shelters targeted, homes targeted, and mainly children targeted, among the 800 fatalities, more than 200 children.
Salma again has to manage her self, as I am in the field, and Abeer started working voluntarily in the main hospital of Gaza since yesterday, we are unable to stay home.
No signs at all of any end soon to this massacre, all the talked-about truces seem to have failed, we expect harder times.
stay safe my dear
we will try to do so as well
Gaza lives
love
Hossam – Salma – Abeer

PS: Regarding War and Peace, for the time being the only thing I can say: I believe in doing it now more than any time before.
I cant write more now. I have only 2 minutes of power

A little later he sent me two photographs with the following message:

So so so sorry my friend for the hard image, but as I know that such photos do not go in the media, I just wanted to share with you little bit of what we are expose to. Please forgive me.

This is one of the photos that he sent:

 

 

 

 

This is the other:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza. Next.

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014

21 July 2014

After a few days of not hearing from Hossam in Gaza I received the messages below.  I am posting them on this blog in the order I received them and indicating the different means of communication used.

Az Theatre is in partnership with Theatre for Everybody in Gaza and our latest project can be read about here.  We intended this blog to be about the process we are going through to organise an event in London on Sunday 14th September which will link via live video with the work in Gaza on Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.  When the current military violence escalated we devoted the blog to the messages from our friends and partners there in Gaza.

We are carrying on the organisation of the event at Rich Mix.  We are building our team, contacting performers, receiving short scripts from writers who are involved in the project. Hassan Abdulrazzak and Haifa Zangana have written short pieces.  Caryl Churchill has agreed to a brand new Arabic translation of SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN which Hossam Madhoun in Gaza and Hassan Abdulrazzak are working together on.

Note by Jonathan Chadwick

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Help meeeeeeeeeee! I want to cry, but I can’t find my tears!

After receiving this we sent Hossam a message begging him to write, tell me about the photo, tell me how his family was coping.  We had this SMS exchange:

Me:  Please write more if this at all possible.  Love Jonathan

Hossam: It’s too hard my dear, it is beyond words.  Families are slaughtered in Gaza every day, babies, children, mothers, homes.  Trees, life, every alive thing is a target, it is beyond words.

Me:  How are you, Abir and Salma coping?? How are you managing?  Love j

Then this email arrived:

The photo is of a mother and his boy running out of Shijaiya the day after the massacre, the Israelis kept shelling at them until they kill both the mother and the son, my cousin, working for a human rights association, (Almizan) was near by. He was injured slightly. He saw part of the massacre.
Massacres are every day, every hour , every minute, many families killed inside their house without being warned and without having any so-called target, shelling, bombing, sky strikes every moment everywhere, more than 100.000 people took refuge in schools, more than 100.000 took refuge at relatives or friends.  They ran out with nothing, no food, no clothes, no shelter, no safety, and no one has the capacity to assist them, neither  UNRWA, nor the Red Cross. All emergency preparedness plans and capacity of all the UN agencies and Red Cross and INGOs is to help 50.000 people for 2 weeks with shelter and food and non-food items, now the needy people is more than double. There is no electricity most of the time, that means there is no water most of the time, (no electricity to operate the water wells and the water pumps to houses) no electricity to operate the sewage pumps and the sewage treatment plants, so sewage floods.
More than 560 people killed, at least 150 among them children under 15 years old, more than 100 women among them, bodies arriving to hospitals in pieces without heads, without arms, without legs, Oooh my God Ohh  my God, what you want me to write about, Jonathan, about more than 3000 houses destroyed totally and more than 1000 destroyed partially in a city were cement is not allowed in and so people won’t be ab;e to rebuild their homes. I can only cry and cry helplessly, my ultimate fear is to face the moment that I won’t be able to help or protect my daughter and my wife, I am unable to think further than that. I have no space to think about my mother sisters, brothers, friends. We are slaughtered here and the world understands the Israelis need to defend themselves. Why is no-one trying to understand that we too need to defend ourselves, to live! For more than 7 years we live under blockade like rabbits in a cage, not allowed to travel, not allowed to build, not allowed to plan for the future, not allowed to progress, just living with the world assisting to help us survive, just to survive but not allowed to live or practice human life, why??????????
Do you want me to write about those orphans children who don’t know why they are suddenly living with strangers….sorry my friend . Allow me, I …..I cant…….maybe tomorrow I will be able to write you something.

Then this email arrived minutes later

Do you understand what I mean my friend? There are many like this boy. Can any one imagine what is waiting for them?
At this moment while writing to you, my dear, heavy bombing near my home, yesterday they bombed a flat in a building 50 meters from my home.
Now I am writing to you, I can not promise you to be alive to write again, we will see tomorrow
love,
Hossam – Abeer – Salma

Then much later in the night he sent this SMS:

What to write?  About the man who lives in the fourth Floor finding the body of a 2 year old boy in his bedroom thrown from the opposite building?  Would you believe? Would anyone believe it happened in Gaza not in an American action movie.

So very hard dying everyday a million times.  Gliders in the sky.  Bombing heard every three seconds. Unable to sleep for days.

I first met Theatre for Everybody in 2000 in Gaza and we first worked together at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania in 2002.  Hossam and Jamal are my colleagues, they and their families are my friends. This is why I am posting what they have to say. Note by Jonathan Chadwick.

Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza.  Next

 

 

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014 

19 July 2014

I want to say…. sorry, I am unable to say any thing, I don’t want to say any thing any more, I am very angry, tired, sleepy, unable to sleep, afraid, frustrated, panic………when I got married, all I wanted was to be a father, today, as I feel helpless, unable to protect my daughter or my wife, or my self, I wish I’d never been a father have a look at the attached photo, may be you will understand me. Sorry for any inconvenience

This post from Hossam arrived this morning and at the same, time from a different source, I was sent this link about an Israeli MP calling for the killing of Palestinian Mothers. Also yesterday Jamal, the other co-director of Theatre for Everybody, sent me his blog piece about what he did with his daughter, Yara, during the 5 hour ‘humanitarian’ cease fire. 

Tomorrow I will do another skype guitar exchange with Yara.  All being well.  We will continue our work on the Girl From Ipanema.  

Now I’m going out on the demonstration opposite Downing Street and the march to the Israeli embassy.

Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza. Next.

 

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014 

17 July 2014

you want to be safe in Gaza during the war (remember – the war on Gaza is a trend, it will happen from time to time – any time – all the time)
so here’s some advice
where to live? this is not the question, the question is where not live?
so in order to be safe
don’t live near a police station
don’t live near a security facility
for sure not near a security base
not near a governmental institute
not near the legislative council
not near an empty land or a landscape
not near a school
not near a hospital
not near gas station
not near a Hamas leader
not near a Hamas member
not near any politician
not near a civil activist
not near the border
not near the sea
not in a high building
not in an isolated home
not in the camp for sure
not near the market
not near a local organisation

now, if you find that place in Gaza, please, please pleaaaaaaaaaase  tell me about it that I can move and live there

Read Hossam’s messages from Gaza. Next

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014 

13 July 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear friends, colleagues

Attached some information figures reflecting part of the reality of what’s going on in Gaza

The photo is in my street yesterday night, my home is 50 meters from the blast, me, my wife and my daughter are safe (so far)

Be safe

from Gaza with love

link to: http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_sitrep_14_07_2014.pdf

The above is the report for the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs for 13/07/14

Read Hossam’s next message. Next

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014 

13 July 2014

This line from Mahmoud Darwish means: “We love life whatever way we find our path to it” Or “We love life – whenever we can”.  He wrote this to me in response to my message below telling him about Hassan Abdulrazzak’s translation of his previous message.

Dear Jonathan

Mahmoud Darwish said,

نحبالحياةمااستطعناإليهاسبيلا

this, they will not take from us

H

Dear Hossam,

Our friend, Hassan Abdulrazzak, has translated your message and, of course, I am thinking about you, Abir and Salma.  You are in my heart.  

Yesterday when I was making a guitar exchange with Yara, Jamal’s daughter, there was a strange repeated sequence of sounds on the Skype signal and about a minute afterwards there was an explosion that was very close.  It was so close that even I, in London, ducked down!!  I noticed how Jamal kissed Yara’s hand afterwards when they realised they were still alive. 

I was teaching the chord sequence of The Girl from Ipanema, the celebrated Brazilian bossa nova song by Antonio Carlos Jobim.  Yara is extremely clever at guitar.  She picked up the difficult chord sequence quickly, much more quickly than I did!

I’m looking forward to performing The Girl from Ipanema on Skype with Yara once we get the melody line over the chord sequence.

You know why I’m telling you about this.

Sending you love,

Jonathan

Read Hossam’s next message. Next.

 

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014 

13 July 2014

Hossam sent us this in Arabic. Hassan Abdulrazzak translated it.

One of the hardest nights. A sleepless night. Bombing closer than ever to our home since the start of the aggression. Salma had been able to ignore the bombing and explosions and sleep through the previous nights. This night is different. Black smoke fills the horizon. The smell of gunpowder and pulverised concrete fills our home. After the first bombing, we jumped out of our bed, scared and haven’t been able to sleep ever since. Salma moved into our room. Less than ten minutes after a huge, terrifying explosion – bigger than all the previous ones – shook the entire house. This was accompanied by the sound of smashing glass. We later discovered that it was one of our house windows. We tried to ignore it and decided to go back to bed with the hope that sleep could take us away from this horror. Then after a further ten minutes, the house shook once again and we realised that we cannot sleep tonight. We are still awake. The shattered glass of the window is still scattered in the bathroom and balcony. How lucky we are to have survived on a day when fifty others were martyred.

Read Hossam’s next message. Next

HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014 

11 July 2014

Hossam sent us this photograph and message from his friend, artist, Basel El Maqosul

Hi dear, just wanted to share with you a post from a friend of mine, he is an artist. best, H

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hammoud, my son, my darling 10-year old, said to me, I am 10 years old and I witness three wars so far, when I reach your age dad, how many wars shall I witness? How many times I shall cry because of rockets and bombing, how many dead people I shall weep for…..????

Read Hossam’s next message. Next