Beautiful acts of resistance.

• Author: Farrell, Bryan
• Position: Abdelfattah Abusrour - Interview

Just moments after performing a dramatic final death scene, Palestinian playwright Abdelfattah Abusrour was back on stage delivering an afterword that was no less intense. Speaking softly, Abusrour told the small Parisian audience about his work back home in Bethlehem's Aida refugee camp where he grew up and now runs the Al Rowwad Cultural and Theater Training Center.

"We are a beautiful people and we want to show our humanity to others, as well as ourselves," Abusrour says. "We need to see beautiful acts of resistance. It's not always linked to blood and martyrs and destruction."

For Palestinians like Abusrour, who lived the hardships of occupation, resisting isn't the question. "To exist is to resist," as Palestinians often say. The question is how to resist.

"I firmly believe that nonviolence as a strategy will win," he says. "And the way to do it is through building this culture of people who think they can create a world based on nonviolence and the strength of people power."

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Abusrour began building this culture through Al Rowwad (which means "pioneer" in Arabic) in 1998, when he returned home after nine years in Paris, where he studied for a Ph.D. in biological and medical engineering. He also took acting classes while living there and performed in many classics of the French theater, which has long been associated with its promotion of social change.

At first, Abusrour ran the center out of his parents' house and split his time teaching biology at universities in Bethlehem and Ramallah. Abusrour points to his parents as the people who first set an example of nonviolence in his life. "My father and my mother never tolerated us talking badly of anyone, even if they were the worst person in the world," he says. "One of their famous sayings was that even with a just cause, if you practice violence, you lose part of your humanity."

When the Second Intifada began in 2000, they moved to a safer location in the middle of Aida Camp, out of the direct line of Israeli fire.

During the Israeli invasions of Bethlehem, starting in 2001, Al Rowwad became the camp's main emergency clinic.

It ran twenty-four hours a day during the thirty-eight-day siege of Bethlehem in 2002. Al Rowwad was able to take care of almost 100 people a day from the camp and its neighboring areas, with the help of unarmed civilian peacekeepers from the International Solidarity Movement.

"I realized then that we are not just a cultural center," Abusrour...