Juliano Mer Khamis was buried today in Kibbutz Ramot Menashe, in sudden sunshine after days of rain, on a plateau at the top of a hill in the Galilee region of Israel, two days after he was assassinated by one or more masked gunmen in front of the Freedom Theatre he directed and operated in the Jenin Refugee Camp.
The funeral was completely secular — there was no religious figure officiating, there were no religious symbols or references, and there were no prayers — but it was in a Jewish cemetery, where Juliano was buried near his mother, Arna (Orna) Mer. who was described in an article published on Israel’s YNet website tonight as a “relentless idealist”.
His father, a Christian Arab, Saliba Khamis — described in the same article as an “intellectual” – is buried in a cemetery in Haifa.
The YNet article, posted here, noted that “Nothing was ever conventional in the lives of the Mer-Khamis brothers, from their dual identity to their unique names”.
Both parents were activists in the communist party, which is the only political grouping in Israel to have both Jewish and Arab members.
Juliano once said in an interview — and this has been widely quoted since his assassination — that he was “100 percent Jewish, and 100 percent Palestinian”.
In today’s funeral, Israeli film director Udi Aloni, who had agreed to work with Juliano in the Freedom Theatre, remembered Juliano’s words: “I am from here, and I am who I am”.
Arna founded the Freedom Theater in Jenin Refugee Camp in 1988 during the first Palestinian Intifada. [CORR: she apparently called her theater the Stone Theatre.] It was destroyed in the second Palestinian Intifada, during the 2002 Israeli invasion of the Jenin Refugee Camp to eradicate suicide bomb cells.
Juliano, who had previously worked with his mother, re-built it as the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp in 2006. Juliano made former Aqsa Brigades fighter Zakaria Zubeidi (a former theater student of Arna’s) the Freedom Theatre’s co-director, apparently in part because of the political protection Zubeidi could provide in a tense and tumultuous environment.
Juliano lived in the Jenin refugee camp for the past seven years, though he also had a home in Haifa.
The Associated Press reported that “The new Freedom Theater drew criticism and vandalism from some Palestinians who were suspicious of Mer Khamis, an Israeli citizen, and who appeared to see the theater as a threat to their traditions. ‘We lack a culture of criticism. We lack a culture of free thinking’, Mer Khamis told The Associated Press in 2009, when his company put on a production of ‘Animal Farm’. ‘One of our roles is to challenge this’, he said”. This article can be read in full here.
But, the Daily Star newspaper, published in Beirut, published a story which said “Zakaria Zubeidi, a former top militant who was close to Mer-Khamis and a supporter of the theater, telling reporters he believed the shooting was a professional ‘hit’. ‘The people behind this murder either belong to a powerful organization or a state’, he told reporters. ‘This cannot be the work of people who were angry with Juliano or with the theater’.” This article can be read in full here.
UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post later reported here that Zubeidi, who addressed the funeral in a phone call over Udi Aloni’s mobile telephone, amplified by the portable public address system, told the mourners that “he would find the murderers, and vowed that they would be shown no mercy”.
The JPost story quoted Israeli director Avi Nesher, as saying that Juliano “felt very close to his Jewish part and very close to his Arab part. He represented everything beautiful and terrible about this country; he served in the IDF but was also friends with the toughest terrorist in Jenin (Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade Jenin commander Zakariya Zubeida), he made the journey from side to side and didn’t belong to any one side alone. His story is the story of this place … His role was to be a provocateur, to cause people to think whether or not there really is that big a difference between the two peoples… His legacy is to show us that there isn’t that big a difference between the two peoples, and this is the most dangerous thing to say here”.
Juliano’s funeral was not religious — it was political. Two Palestinian flags were held aloft on poles in that Jewish cemetery (there were no Israeli flags displayed), and lots of speeches (mostly in Arabic) vowing to continue the struggle for freedom, and against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. But, Israeli police were at all the road intersections and at the cemetery. One or two Border Police and military vehicles could also be seen parked by the side of the road along the route to the kibbutz.
Juliano’s young partner, Julie, who is Finnish, and the mother of his small son Jay, is now pregnant with twins. [Juliano also has two older children, born to his first wife, who is reportedly Israeli and Jewish. One of them, a young adolescent daughter, with two wildflowers tucked into her thick dark blond hair, spoke at the funeral today.]
There have been reports alluding to anger-management problems in Juliano’s past, which mellowed in recent years.
The author of the YNet article reported that “When I visited Juliano Mer-Khamis in the Jenin refugee camp two years ago he spoke of Jenny with a great deal of love and with a kind of serenity that wasn’t characteristic to his tornado-like existence. He told me how he met her in a pub in Haifa when she was fundraising for Arabs in the Galilee”.
She was restrained at the funeral, tense, in a private world of grief. She sobbed only when she saw the open grave, and then again when the men who had born Juliano’s coffin, covered in maroon-brown taffeta fabric, lowered it into the grave, then began to empty pails of just-excavated red sandy earth back into the ground on top of the casket.
It was a frenzy of motion, three men moving in non-stop synch on each side, and of noise: the thuds of the earth hitting the coffin. Flies — where did they come from — suddenly were everywhere, on everyone near the gravesite.
Then, wreaths of flowers with inscriptioned ribbons, and bouquets in transparent cellophane paper, piled on top.
Then the speeches… in Arabic, mostly, then translated into Hebrew and sometimes into English, in considerate acknowledgment of the presence of the others.
Tears streamed down peoples’ cheeks. A few young women and men from Jenin — yes, the Israeli military allowed 25 of Juliano’s students enter Israel to attend the funeral, though a request had been submitted for 50 — burst into cries of grief, and clung to one another. But it was all restrained, held within limits… there were no wild frenzies. That would have been too much of an imposition.
There was heavy grief in the air.
There has been no explanation of motive for this death.
It is a singular tragedy — like so many others that have occurred here and in other places in the world in this unresolved conflict during the past 30 years, 60 years, 90 years.
This one, however, affected people on both sides, on all sides.
Life is messy, but it is also … well, vital, full of force, compelling.
Who else can do now what Juliano was doing in Jenin?
On Wednesday morning, Juliano’s body had lain in the Al-Midan Theater in Haifa, where friends and family came to pay their respects.
Then — in an astonishing development — it was driven in a funeral procession down to the northernmost Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank, and allowed to cross through without hindrance of any kind, taken to a gas station parking lot (according to journalist colleagues who were there and witnessed the whole scene), where it was greeted with cries of “Allahu Akbar” and carried around.
Then, the coffin was put back into a red van, and the funeral procession turned around and went back through the Israeli military checkpoint without any hassle or hindrance, accompanied by cars and a bus carrying the 25 Palestinian theater students. They passed into Israel and drove the relatively short distance (about 40 minutes or so) to the cemetary at Ramot Menashe.
A speech given by one of the Freedom Theatre students said that they would continue their “Jasmine Revolution”, which — they suggested — actually started with the Palestinian Intifadas, years ahead of the recent events in Tunis and Egypt.
Then, there was spontaneous applause that grew, and lasted a long time, and then became rhythmic, like a curtain call for an encore…
It was, in fact, a standing ovation for the man and the work he was doing before he was cut down.
It was ended only when one of the women from Jenin broke into song. Then, there was spontaneous group singing of two songs in Arabic, then a tune on a harmonica.
Finally, people started to leave, walking out of this beautiful place where this beautiful man was laid to rest on this beautiful day.