Palestine House - Why We're Called the Salameh Theatre Troupe

Photo: What's In a Name? Why We're Called the Salameh Theatre Troupe, by Hazem Jamjoum In coming together to form an Arab community theatre troupe, an issue we kept coming back to was what to name ourselves. It was clear from the beginning that the ideas we hoped to express through the medium of theatre would stem from our experiences, the experiences of immigrants and refugees, the experiences of a people who’ve had our homelands stolen or destroyed, the experiences of a people who would continue to struggle in different ways to make our lives and our world better despite all odds.

Through months of discussion, we decided to name our troupe after a Palestinian village from the part of Palestine that was occupied in the Nakba of 1948. Usually when people talk about the Nakba, they talk about how the Palestinians were victims, and very few stories survive about Palestinian resistance to Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in which over two-thirds of the Palestinian people were forcibly expelled from Palestine and over 500 Palestinian towns and villages destroyed. In researching these villages, we learned about the village of Salameh.

This village was 5km east of Yaffa, the largest Palestinian metropolis before it’s inhabitants were expelled and the city destroyed and engulfed by Tel Aviv. Before the Nakba, Salameh had over 6700 inhabitants, 5 cafes, several schools and businesses, and the maqam (burial site of a holy person) of Salama Abu Hashem who was one of the prophet Mohammad's companions (buried there in 634 AD), as well as a boys school and a girls school. The people of the town also got together and fundraised to create a local soccer team as well as a musical band that became very well known in the region and would play at celebrations and public events in nearby towns and villages.

The story of Salameh is one of the most powerful and inspiring of untold Nakba resistance stories.

The spark for the Nakba was the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state (November 29, 2007 - now marked as the UN day in solidarity with the Palestinian people). This decision unjustly suggested that most of Palestine should go to the newly settled Jewish refugees from Europe (most of whom came to Palestine because the US, Britain and Canada closed their doors to the Jewish refugees of the Nazi holocaust); this partition plan was fully rejected by the Palestinian people and the Arab states. Salameh was completely surrounded by Jewish settlements because it was so close to Yaffa and Tel Aviv, which is where the major concentration of Zionist settlement in Palestine was and continues to be. The Zionist political and military leadership decided to capitalize on the partition resolution to create a Jewish state, but realized that a Jewish majority would be impossible given the overwhelming Palestinian majority even in the lands of the proposed Jewish state. The only way to achieve a democratic state with a Jewish majority would be to expel the existing Palestinian majority, and the first step would be to clear the Palestinians out of the district of Yaffa and Tel Aviv.

On December 5, 2007 (only a week after the partition resolution), Zionist machine gun fire, sniping and raids started and continued for the following two days as well, and several of Salameh's families fled for fear of their children's lives, mostly to nearby Al-Lyd and Ramleh. According to Israeli military sources, the first Arab village targeted by the Haganah (the precursor of the Israeli army) was Salameh, in which they refer to it as "Salameh, the village with the bad reputation! “ This first major raid was on December 19, and it was also the first defeat of the Zionist forces at the hands of the Palestinian resistance.

On 29 December 1947, the Israelis tried again. This time they tried to confuse the Salameh resistance by launching a diversionary raid from the Zionist settlement of Petah Tikvah, and then sending in the main force from the settlement Ramat Gan. This force was made up of the combined police forces of all the Zionist settlements surrounding Salameh, as well as from the Irgun (one of the Zionist forces that was even more ideologically zealous than the mainstream Zionist leadership, to the point where even the British considered them Terrorists). Not only did the resistance in Salameh defeat and turn back this assault, they were joined by fighters from Abassiya and Al-Lyd to carry out their own counter-assault on Petah Tikva!!!

It should be noted that the Zionists (after having been beaten so many times by Salameh’s fighters) started to make excuses about how hundreds of Arab fighters from all over were flocking, but where in reality it was the people of Salameh and their neighbors who came together to defend their town expecting the worst after the partition resolution of November 29. Unable to defeat these fighters, the Zionists requested help from the British. After World War I (on September 11, 1921 to be precise), the British had taken control over Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire in something called a Mandate from the League of Nations [the United Nations’ predecessor] – “Mandate” was just a nicer way of saying occupation. In 1916, the British and French made a secret agreement called the Sykes-Picot Agreement to decide which European empire would get what parts of the Ottoman Empire (the secret agreement was exposed to the world by Vladimir Lenin, a leader of the communist revolution in Russia after the communists took power and gained access to the Russian government’s documents). All of this was contingent on Britain and France winning the war. To win the war they needed US support, and wanted the help of influential Jewish-Zionists in the US to convince the US government to join them. So it was that in 1917, the renowned anti-Semite British colonial secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to the leader of the Zionist movement in Britain, Baron Walter Rothschild informing him of a British government decision to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine; this is known as the Balfour Declaration. After World War II, the British army and economy was so weak, they could no longer keep militarily occupying places with lots of resistance (like India and Palestine, and so they announced that they would just unilaterally withdraw from Palestine on May 15, 1948, bringing us back to Salameh, where Zionist leaders were clamoring for British help.

By early January 1948, the Salameh fighters had improvised by building ditches, trenches, booby-traps, barricades around the town to help them defend it. The British used mortar attacks to take down four of the barricades, and pressured the Mukhtar (mayor) of Salameh to get the townsfolk to fill in a huge moat that they had dug to help with the defense. The British excuse: they needed the freedom to be able to move with more ease around the area. Salameh was raided and shelled more than ten times in the month of January 1948 alone. On January 18, an entire division of the Haganah was sent in to the northern part of Salameh with orders to kill, blow up and burn all that could be targeted. This attack caused a great deal of damage, but the Salameh and its defenders stood their ground.

Raids from the neighboring settlements were constant, but a major assault took place on 28 February 1948. The Arab Liberation Army (a very poorly armed and trained force assembled by Arab states, and led by the Arab revolutionary hero from Syria Fawzi Al-Qawuqji) sent fighters to help defend against this assault. 250 Zionist soldiers attacked Salameh, and 30 three-inch mortars were launched against Salameh. Despite the size and brutality of the assault, it was beaten back once again, eight Zionist soldiers were killed in the process. From the Salameh defenders, two men and a woman also lost their lives, and Salameh still stood.

By April, the warriors of Salameh had run out of ammunition, and become extremely vulnerable to Zionist attacks. By late April, the Haganah launched operation Hametz which aimed to completely encircle Yaffa in preparing to eradicate the Palestinian presence in the largest city in Palestine. Salameh was overrun, and those fighters that remained surrendered to the Israeli Alexandroni brigade.

Today, Tal-el-Rabi’ which used to be a village just outside Yaffa is the largest Israeli settler city (Tel Aviv) and has engulfed Yaffa itself as well as Salameh. Some of the Salameh buildings survive (four of the cafes, the maqam, some houses; many of these buildings are now inhabited by Israelis, those that are not [such as the maqam] are in a state of serious disrepair). By 1948 there were two cemeteries in Salameh, the old one was destroyed, and on top of it the Israelis built a picnic park. The second one was set up for the martyrs of the resistance and called Maqbarat Al-Shuhada [Cemetery of the Martyrs] which is now an empty piece of land covered with wild trees – evidence that the warriors of Salameh continue to resist even after death.

* Sources for this article include: www.palestineremembered.com, Walid Khalidi’s All that Remains. Originally published in Al-Wattan Newspaper-Mississauga, Issue#18