(2017) Playwright Statement: Ismail Khalidi on Tennis in Nablus
Writing Palestine's Invisible History
Growing up, the period of the Arab Rebellion in Palestine (1936-1939) was always of great interest to me, both in terms of my own family’s involvement (several of my relatives were imprisoned and/or exiled by the British for political activities during this period) and also in terms of its importance to the history of Palestine. In my research for what would become this play, I came upon a passage in a book by an Israeli historian in which he documents an instance of Palestinian prisoners chained at the feet and used as ballboys for the tennis matches of the British authorities. This image was striking to me in that it spoke to the cruelty, absurdity and overall mindset of the British Empire in particular, and imperialism more generally. It also struck me as echoing the brutality of occupation and incarceration today, whether in Palestine, Iraq or or the U.S. Most importantly, perhaps, the image conjured a situation brimming with dramatic potential.
I knew almost immediately that this was the image and dramatic situation which I wanted to build my play around. How then, I asked myself, were the two prisoners in this scenario related? Did they like each other? Did they agree on what their predicament meant and how best to extract themselves from it? Ultimately the two prisoners/ballboys, as they came into being in Tennis in Nablus, are indeed related by blood, and yet very much at odds. This circumstance seemed especially relevant and timely considering the infighting that has long plagued the Palestinian national movement. Working outwards, a host of other characters entered into the world, from the British overlords to the Irish and Indian conscripts; the fearless Anbara, the kind but troubled Samuel Hirsch, and even the wandering ghost of Emiliano Zapata.
As I began to construct the play, the year 1939 struck me as a unique and meaningful entry point into the conflict, especially for an American audience that is totally unfamiliar with the real history of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. In fact, for most Americans, Palestinians, if they exist at all, only do so in opposition to Israel and therefore as a post-1948 phenomenon at best. At worst we are one-dimensional terrorists. To set a play before the creation of Israel and the accompanying dispossession of the Palestinians, seemed to me to be a crucial way to convey an important truth about Palestine: namely, that Palestinians did exist and were in fact struggling to achieve their freedom from a colonial power in the early part of the last century.
It was telling to me, for example, that in the U.S. the Irish and Indian struggles for independence in the 20th century are looked upon favorably and celebrated in art and mainstream culture and politics. Why then, should the Palestinian struggle against the same British colonialism during the same period not be afforded such consideration? To set a dramatic story infused with tragedy and comedy and peopled with compelling characters against this historical backdrop was hard to resist, and for me served, in part, as an act of reclamation and solidarity.
For at the heart of the question of Palestine are a plethora of issues that go far beyond Palestine. They include settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, ethnic cleansing, human rights, international law, refugee rights, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia among others. It is my hope then that this play can be one part of a larger conversation in the theater, not only about Palestine and Israel, but about much more.
(2017) Director Statement: Michael Malek Najjar on Ismail Khalidi's Tennis in Nablus
Mining History for the Origins of the Conflict
Ismail Khalidi’s Tennis in Nablus, labeled a “tragipoliticomedy,” views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of historical fiction. The play, set in 1939 British Mandated Palestine, relies on hindsight for much of its effectiveness. In many ways, viewing the Palestinian situation during this period of time can bring clarity to this extremely complex issue. Although Jews and Arabs (Christian and Muslim) were being dominated under British rule, Palestinians believe it was a decidedly pro-Zionist British mandate which both trained and armed Jewish immigrants.[i] Set in Nablus, the play offers a view of Palestine when Arab resistance was focused squarely upon the British during the period that Jews were emigrating from Europe at the onset of World War II. If there was any doubt about how the British administration viewed the citizens of their Mandated Palestine, British General Sir Walter Norris Congreve once wrote, "I dislike them all equally. Arabs and Jews and Christians, in Syria and Palestine, they are all alike, a beastly people. The whole lot of them is not worth a single Englishman!”[1] It is Khalidi's view that British colonial rule was ultimately replaced by Zionist settler colonial rule and, later, Israeli occupation.[ii]
The crux of the politics of the play is found in the British struggle to maintain control over Palestine, the European Jewish desire for a homeland during their persecution at the hands of the Nazi regime in Europe, and the Palestinian quest for freedom, dignity, and self-determination. From the European Jewish perspective, as voiced by Hirsch in the play, the situation for the Jews in Europe had become completely untenable. For the Palestinians of the time, embodied by Tariq, there is the burning question "Can we both live here? Or is it going to be one of us?" It can be argued that neither ultimately finds satisfaction.
All of the characters have compelling reasons to fight and die for Palestine during this period, yet peaceful coexistence is nearly impossible when radicals rule the day and when an imbalance of power denies the rights and freedoms of one side to ultimately benefit another. The moderates of the play are silenced by those who wish to seize power through violence and deception rather than coexistence. The playwright manages to humanize both sides through an intentionally Palestinian position. In the preface to their edited anthology Inside/Outside: Six Plays From Palestine and the Diaspora, Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace write about the fact that Palestinian plays are often “culturally delegitimized, derailed and delimited by the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ wherein the Israeli perspective is always/already privileged.” It is their view that presenting both sides of this conflict in anthologies, for instance, is problematic because to do so limits and shapes free speech about Palestine, depriving the work of its right to be judged by its own merits, and because there is already an imbalance in the conflict that adversely affects the Palestinians due to their being the weaker party in this struggle.[iii]
The play’s decidedly melancholy ending presages the actual historical events following the failure of the Arab uprising which, according to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, led to five thousand killed, ten thousand wounded, and over five thousand detained. Khalidi writes, “…the suffering was considerable in an Arab population of about a million: over 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.”[iv] Tennis in Nablus sets the stage for the events of 1948 known as al-Nakba or “the catastrophe” by Palestinians. By dramatizing the situation that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel, Khalidi provides the historical context for the intractable situation we see now in Palestine and Israel.
[1] Quoted in One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the Mandate by Tom Segev. 1st American ed. New York: Metropolitan, 2000. Print. 9.
[i] For more about this issue see "The Haganah by Arab and Palestinian Historiography and Media" by Sarah Ozacky-Lazar and Mustafa Kabha. Israel Studies, 7.3 (Fall 2002), pp. 45-60.
[ii] Khalidi, Ismail. Personal interview. 26 January 2017.
[iii] Wallace, Naomi and Ismail Khalidi. “Preface.” Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora. Edited by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi, TCG, 2015, N.pag.
[iv] Khalidi, Rashid. “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure,” in The War for Palestine : Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Cambridge Middle East Studies ; 27.