Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2003, pages 48-50

Southern California Chronicle

Muslim Re-Mix of "You Can't Take It With You" to Run on October Weekends

By Pat and Samir Twair

In 1936, playwrights Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman wrote "You Can't Take It With You." The classic American comedy has been adapted by Peter Howard as "an American Muslim Re-Mix," and will be performed for four weekends in October.

Representing the fourth faith-based collaboration by Cornerstone Theater, the production has received the blessings of numerous Muslim organizations.

The new Muslim version is the first modern adaptation of the classic to be approved by the estates of Kaufman and Hart. Chris Hart, son of Moss, offered whole-hearted approval of Howard's Muslimization of the work, stating: "It's good to have a play contemporized in a way that can be meaningful to a local community."

At the first of a series of auditions at the Islamic Center of Southern California, Howard and Mark Valdez, Cornerstone's acting artistic director, listened as several young Muslims read selections from the script.

Howard told the Washington Report that he has been working on the adaptation for nearly two years, trying to retain as much of the original dialogue as possible and closely portray the actors in the image of their 1936 role models. For example, he said, the ingenue who aspired to be a ballerina in the original comedy now seeks recognition as a Muslima rapper.

Instead of taking place in New York, the eccentric family of the bride-to-be lives in a Victorian house just around the corner from the University of Southern California. The family patriarch, Hakeem Attar, better known as Grandpa, encourages individuality. A case in point: after completing law school in 1962, he decided not to take the California bar exam because it would take too much time to become successful.

Living with Grandpa in the rambling old house are his daughter Sameerah, her husband, Hasan Abd al-Rahman, and children Zahrah and Salmah. There also is Mr. dePaz, who nine years earlier came to spray for termites and remained to help Hasan with his laboratory experiments in the cellar. Others include Saleem, Zahrah's husband, who delights in painting Arabic calligraphy on all available media; Ali, the cook-housekeeper; and Brother Taalib, Zahrah's rap instructor.

One of Grandpa's hobbies is caring for snakes kept in a portable cage in the house. Sameerah devotes much of her time to writing Muslim sitcoms that so far have not been picked up by producers.

Daughter Salmah is a graduate of UCLA who is designing a building for the Khan engineering firm in Orange County. The fun begins when Ajmal Khan, who has fallen in love with Salmah, brings his stuffy parents to meet Salmah's unconventional relatives. Unexpected fireworks occur when the Internal Revenue Service and FBI arrive to question Grandpa for his failure to pay income taxes since 1962.

With its clever dialogue and situations, this should be an entertaining comedy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Play dates are Oct. 2 to 5, 9 to 12, 16 to 19 and 23 to 26. Reservations can be made by calling (213) 613-1700, ext. 33.

Apartheid Wall Is MEF Topic

"The last thing the Apartheid Wall will do is give security to Israeli Jews," stated Dr. Viveca Hazboun, director of the Guidance Training Center for the Child and Family in Bethlehem. While on summer vacation with her parents in Southern California, the psychotherapist spoke July 12 in Placentia and July 13 in Eagle Rock to the Middle East Fellowship of Southern California.

Likening the positions of the two people as "depressive" Palestinians and "paranoid" Israeli Jews, Dr. Hazboun said the Apartheid Wall represents a new kind of war.

Of her 500 current patients, Dr. Hazboun said, 20 percent commonly speak of suicide. In the past, she noted, when children were asked what they wished for, they might say a car, or to be a lawyer when they grew up, or to fly in a plane.

"In the last two years, the children seem unable to envision a wish," she stated. "Roughly one-fifth of them said they would like to be a suicide bomber so they could go to heaven where everything is okay."

She has been successful, she said, in dissuading the majority from wanting to be suicide bombers, and, of some 1,200 school dropouts, most have returned to the classroom.

Dr. Hazboun emphasized that the economic hardships enforced by closures and now the Apartheid Wall depress everyone. "Life is turning primitive," she explained, "CPAs must grow their own tomatoes, people go hungry."

In one instance, she talked to a breast-feeding mother who confided, "I can't feed my other children. If I become a bomber, then I will be a martyr and my children will be proud of me."

According to Dr. Hazboun, the only solution is to train Palestinians to contain their pain. As for Israeli Jews, it would be helpful, she suggested, if they could think of Palestinians as being human.

Both meetings closed with members writing letters to their congressional representative explaining the damage the Apartheid Wall is doing to the people on both sides of it.

Radical Report on Road Map

Dr. Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad were key speakers at a July 13 program by the Freedom Socialist Party in Solidarity Hall. The two are co-editors of Between the Lines, a journal on political and social realities in Palestinian and Israeli societies.

"The trend of the road map reveals that Israel has declared all-out war," Dr. Honig-Parnass declared. "Intifada 2 convinced Israeli decision-makers that the Palestinians won't give up."

Initially, she said, the Zionists believed they could destroy any organized Palestinian society capable of resistance, but they didn't take Palestinian refugees into consideration. Now, said the sociologist, Israel looks at all Palestinians as the enemy.

"There is more talk about the 'new demographic,' the 'unruly young Arab Israelis,'" she said, "and this could lead to a second expulsion."

According to Haddad, who was born in Kuwait and has lived in Palestine since 1997, the current situation has united all sectors of the Palestinian people who believe in neither the Palestinian Authority (PA) nor Abu Mazen.

While the PA ignored the plight of refugees and the poor, the United Nations withdrew much of its assistance, Haddad noted, with services reduced to $71 per annum per refugee. In its drive toward urbanization, he added, Israel has targeted all rural agricultural life of the Palestinians, whether by harassing farmers or preventing them from harvesting their crops.

"While the Oslo process created division, the intifada united these groups and new leaders unmasked the peace process for what it is," he said. "The intifada delegitimized the pro-Oslo class who became rich in the process, people like Abu Mazen and the cronies of Arafat. As a result of this corruption, a new category of 'honest' people emerged."

Whereas the road map wants to resurrect the old model by putting Humpty Dumpty together again, Haddad said, the new leadership warns that seeking a solution is a trap.

Relief Workers Speak Out

The Strike School, a project of InnerCity Struggle, hosted July 27 a Palestinian struggle teach-in with Ala al-Azzeh of the Beit Jibrin Cultural Center and Maha Nassar, chair of the Union of Palestinian Women's Committee.

Al-Azzeh, who was born in a refugee camp, is the youth organizer for the Handala Cultural Center. Founded in October 1999, the center serves 140 boys and girls aged 7 to 15. It is located in the Beit Jibrin Refugee Camp near Bethlehem, the smallest of 59 Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East. Some 1,800 people, refugees from 1948 and their descendants, live on one-quarter of a square kilometer (62 acres).

The village of Beit Jibrin itself is in ruins, and the Israeli kibbutz of Beir Guvrin stands on its land.

The Handala Center was named for cartoonist Naji al-Ali's character of a 10-year-old refugee. The Israelis assassinated Al-Ali in 1987, but his Handala icon is an inspiration to all Palestinians.

The center provides a range of activities for refugee youth who suffer from depression, early withdrawal from school and impoverished living conditions. Computer training is available at the center, which is adding two floors to its facility.

Nassar, who comes from a middle class Christian family in Ramallah, discussed her efforts to educate Palestinian women on their civil rights. She became immersed in the Palestinian struggle, she explained, after the Israelis arrested her in 1990 for being a university student leader.

Her husband, also a student, had been incarcerated before her. The Israelis came after midnight, took her away and left her children, then aged 2 and 4, untended. Throughout her time in prison, Nassar said she was kept in a one square meter cell, called "the crypt" by other inmates. Lights remained on 24 hours a day, as her Israeli tormentors played tapes of children screaming in Arabic for their mother.

After her release, Nassar recalled an incident in which one of her children threw a stone at an Israeli soldier. The angry man turned on her and shouted, "You've trained your kid to be a terrorist."

Her retort was: "You trained him."

Armenians Protest "Tolerance" Museum

According to Ardashes Kassakhian of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), the Armenians are mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more. The object of his wrath is a broken promise made by officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Tolerance Museum to display an exhibit including the Armenian genocide.

The controversy began when Armenian activists staged a hunger strike in front of the West Los Angeles museum to protest its failure to include the Armenian genocide in its graphic displays dealing with the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. On April 21, the sixth day of the hunger strike, museum officials made a pledge to Armenian spokesmen that, by June 30, they would set up an exhibit including the Armenian tragedy.

And so, on July 1, a contingent of 30 representatives of Armenian organizations paid the entrance fee and walked around the museum's first floor to see where the Armenian display was mounted.

Not so much as an Armenian postcard was on view.

When they asked a museum employee why the promised exhibit wasn't in sight, Kassakhian was told curators were still researching "the numbers." When he asked what "numbers" referred to, he was told he should talk to Museum Director Liebe Geft.

Geft, however, was unavailable.

As the group departed, it asked for a refund on their admission tickets. The museum complied.

"I don't think the museum officials were sincere," Kassakhian said. "If they were, they'd have called us and told us the exhibit was being delayed. I think this was a blatant lie, and it makes one question the motives for the omission of the Armenian genocide."

The next step is to try to open the eyes of the rest of the community. "It's not just us Armenians," he pointed out, "but everyone who pays taxes—as well as other minorities who have been victimized who should be included as targets of intolerance at the museum.

"No one else has had the guts to speak out on this, and now we are."

Ali Nassar's Film Premieres at L.A. Israeli Festival

Arab Israeli filmmaker Ali Nassar's new feature film, "In the 9th Month," is a tragic love story told in the context of a subjugated people who may still transcend their problems through a young boy, Amal (Hope). It premiered in Los Angeles at this city's 19th Israeli Film Festival.

Nassar was in town for the 10-day event along with Palestinian actress Nisreen Faour, who made her film debut in the role of Samira. After studying acting in Tel Aviv, Faour has appeared in theater productions for 11 years, particularly with the Haifa Deaf Theater.

The film represents the second entry for director Nassar, whose 1998 film, "The Milky Way," was shown at the 15th Los Angeles Israeli Film Festival.

"In the 9th Month," which Nassar wrote and directed, tells the story of Samira and Khalil (Juliano Khamis), who were born and wed in a small town in the Galilee. For reasons not explained, Khalil was exiled to Lebanon and, after 10 years, he secretly crosses the border to join his wife.

Only Khalil's brother Ahmad (Ashraf Barhoum) is aware of Khalil's return, and it is Ahmad who must surreptitiously take Samira late at night to rendezvous with her husband in a remote cave.

The villagers live under conditions tightly controlled by Israeli authorities, and tensions are high. When a young boy vanishes into thin air, ancient stories of the Ottoman period are revived about a kidnapper who "drags his buttocks in a basket" and sells abducted children to the Jews.

As the search for the boy grows more futile, his grieving father accuses Ahmad of being the kidnapper, for everyone knows Ahmad has been sneaking through the streets late at night (to meet secretly with his sister-in-law Samira, or to abduct children?).

The film offers dream sequences between scenes in 1991, when Samira and Khalil are secretly united, and 2001, when their child, Amal (Wisam Nassar), who was born from that reunion, is being raised by his Uncle Ahmad.

Nassar recruited his own 10-year-old son, Wisam, to play the role of the orphaned son of Samira and Khalil. The film director proudly describes Wisam as a natural actor. The only scene the child was reluctant to perform was the dream scene, in which scores of women bare their breasts to the heavens in supplication for the sons who have disappeared or died.

This scene, the director acknowledged, could make the film taboo in Muslim countries. "But," he countered, "this is a custom in some regions in which women open their garments and expose their breasts to God in a plea to heal loved ones or in supplication for the return of missing ones."

Stated UCLA-educated Arab Israeli filmmaker Hanna Elias: "It would be a shame if 'In the 9th Month' is banned for this reason, or because it received funding from Israel. After all, we're 20 percent of the Israeli population and we pay taxes. It's our right to ask for a share of the pie, and Israeli Jews should get used to sharing with us."

Elia was referring to the $600,000 Nassar received from the Israeli Film Fund (IFF) to produce and distribute "In the 9th Month."

Explained David Lipkind, IFF head of finance and production: "We help finance six to eight films a year; the two Arab films we've backed are both by Ali Nassar."

Nassar's film was shot over a period of 25 days by two cameramen in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Ramla and the Galilee. The budget was tight—cut in half from his original estimate. The film now belongs to Nassar, and it will be up to him to find sources open to distribution.

The solution may be to screen the film, which is in Arabic with English subtitles, to Arab communities in the West.

Israeli critics praised the film when it played in the Jerusalem Film Festival, but the general Israeli public was not enthusiastic.

"If my film had come from Iran, it would have been a sellout," Nassar grimaced.

Nassar already is working on a new script, entitled "Searching for Ahmad." The bearded Galilean told the Washington Report that his forthcoming story takes place from 1980 to the present, and that Ahmad symbolizes the ideologically lost leftists following the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

The filmmaker, who eschews city life, works and lives with his wife and three children in the village of Araba—population 18,000—in the northern Galilee, where he once herded sheep.

"Likud may want us to go away," Ali Nassar said, "but I want my children to remain here. I am sad for their future. I want to be wrong, but I don't see any solution [to the Palestinian/Israeli claims to the same land]."

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.