Ayman Nahas, a artist, said he has kept a “low profile” since October 7 because he fears sanctions against him as an Egyptian actor in Israel, which is waging a civil conflict in the Gaza Strip.
One of the many Muslim designers who live in Israel or east Jerusalem have remarked on being subject to increasing hostility and abuse as well as dreading looming funding cuts or arrests.
” You never know where your location is and that is not the proper environment to perform”, said Nahas, who is also the creative director at the Arabic-language Sard opera in Haifa, in Israel’s northwest.
His theater depends on government grants “like 99 percentage of social spots” in Israel, he said.
He worries that the funding may be slashed, as happened with Al-Midan, a second theater in Haifa’s combined Arab-Jewish town, in 2015 after it staged a play inspired by the tale of an Israeli prisoner imprisoned for an attack on the troops.
One 25-year-old entertainer said he has put acting apart and worked as a swimming pool assistant because he was fed up with just getting perceived roles and asked to use the moniker Elias to prevent a reaction.
Other Muslim players claim that they have lost their jobs in Israel since the war.
Elias has suddenly found a position in Berlin.
He told AFP in a Tel Aviv shop,” I have had to go into captivity to exercise my art.”
” I do n’t wear my” Free Palestine” bracelet any more, and I care what I post on social media. I’ve got friends who’ve had officers officers call me.
– Hazards-
Since October, the non-profit organization Mossawa has documented an increase in human rights violations against Israel’s Muslim minority, including detention, harassment at work, and restrictions on the right to rally.
Singer Dalal Abu Amneh, who is also a scientist, was detained for 48 hours for a social media post after Hamas’s October 7 assault that said” the sole winner is God”.
In her northern Israeli town of Afula, where she has a Jewish majority, Abu Amneh after claimed to have been harassed. According to her attorney, she had received numerous “death risks.”
About 20 percent of Israel’s 9.5 million citizens are Muslim, and many of them identify as Palestinian.
They claim that the Jewish majority often targets prejudice against them, and that these issues have grown over the course of more than nine weeks of Israeli and Palestinian militant fighting in Gaza.
The October 7 assault on southern Israel resulted in 1, 195 incidents, mostly of residents, according to an AFP tally based on Jewish numbers.
Israel’s hostile campaign has killed at least 38, 443 citizens in Gaza, even typically residents, according to statistics from the health department in the Hamas-ruled place.
– ‘ Cultural solitude’-
According to Huda Imam, who promotes Arab historical sites in Jerusalem,” a social solitude has persisted since October 7″.
” There has been a horror, an inability to produce out of fear and respect” for the battle’s subjects, she added.
Before the conflict, Imam said,” There was a Israeli social life, particularly in eastern Jerusalem,” referring to the area Israel had taken in 1967 and afterwards annexed in a move that was never acknowledged by the majority of the international community.
” Now people do n’t go out”.
And it is generally exiles, according to Imam, who also mentions Nai Barghouti, a European singer and flute player, and rapper Saint Levant, who performed at the American music festival in April.
Palestinians also express themselves through their “living history, like drinking caffeine or dance dabkeh”, a standard party, said performer Hani Amra.
Some artists were perplexed as to the importance of their current works.
” You turn on the television and watch the battle survive.” The reality is more powerful than any visual work”, Amer Khalil, the chairman of eastern Jerusalem’s Al-Hakawati, also known as the Palestinian National Theatre.
The theater, founded in 1984, “has been closed more than 200 days in 40 times” and is again in the crosshairs of Jewish government, said Khalil.
” Running a theatre is always difficult, but after October 7 things became even more complicated”, he said, adding that Al-Hakawati was preparing a play about that day.
” It is a match, like repression, it comes and goes”.
