Dancing in time to the resistance

ABDUL Masoud was six years old when the Palestinian people launched their first intifada against Israeli occupation in 1987.

He vividly recalls the way that the Palestinian national dance was an integral part of their resistance.

"I remember watching guys throwing stones at Israeli tanks - when they hit the metal and heard the dull ping sound they would do a few steps of dabke to celebrate, showing off to each other, very happy and pleased with themselves."

Masoud doesn't deny taking part himself. "Everyone did," he says when I meet him in London.

"But it was also about having fun and taking the day off school as much as it was about politics, to be honest.

"Throw a few stones and then have the rest of the day off - there was one year when we went to the classroom only three days a year because every day there was a rally in the streets. I miss it so much."

For a decade now, Masoud has been living in London, unable to return to his beloved Gaza.

By the time that he had completed his BA in English literature at London Metropolitan, Israel had sealed off Gaza to the outside world - the borders were shut tight and Israeli officials refused to open them.

Stranded, separated from his mother and father, five sisters and four brothers, he decided to fulfil his dream of completing a PhD and got married to an Englishwoman.

But he refuses to give up hope that one day he will return home.

Masoud's own experience is reflected in his new adaptation for Al Zaytouna dance group of Ghassan Kanafani's Ila Haifa, the story of a Palestinian couple who are deported from their home in the 1948 nakba or "catastrophe."

"They decide to come back to visit their old home and get quite a shock, a surprise that they didn't expect to find there," he says coyly, not wanting to give away too much of the story.

"I suppose you could call it an Arabic musical. Dabke dancing interspersed with dialogue, all accompanied by live music from oud master Nizar al-Issa and Mohammed Diab, Arafat's favourite singer. It's our present for the audience."

Much as he would like to, Masoud cannot make his living from directing. He is directing Ila Haifa as a labour of love.

It is his way of upholding his national identity and breaking down the walls that stand between Palestine and the rest of the world.

He hopes that Ila Haifa and the lively dabke dancing "will go some way to showing British audiences that there is life and a rich culture out there.

"The Israelis may be attempting to stifle it, but we dance on in defiance. Our resistance is not all about suicide bombings."

Masoud thinks that British audiences will find Ila Haifa a refreshing change from the hackneyed old belly-dancing cliche.

He reckons that Westerners "tend to think that Arabic dance is all about gyrating bellies, so I feel that dabke is waiting to be discovered."

The raucous line dance is "more than a simple representation of the people and their culture and how it grew and evolved through history," he stresses.

"Dabke is a proof that the Palestinians have lived in Palestine for a long time, because it is made up of steps that are choreographed from very traditional music that goes back two, three hundred years, even beyond that."

Masoud points out that "Palestine has been a place of culture and civilisation for hundreds of years. It was never the "virgin land" that the zionists still try to maintain.

"A lot of our traditional songs are about travelling from Haifa to Jaffa and on to Al-Quds. These old Palestinian cities are specifically mentioned - one of the very few proofs that they existed - as well as the memories, the keys to the old house and the household articles that people left behind."

Dabke dancing became increasingly politicised after 1948 and the loss of Palestine.

"Instead of singing to a beautiful girl, people started to sing for the beautiful girl who is resisting, who doesn't want to submit to this tyranny, this oppression by the colonial power," explains Masoud.

"But it still uses the same metre, rhythms and scale. That's what makes dabke an enduring symbol of our national identity."

Masoud dedicates Ila Haifa to the 132 Palestinians who were killed in Israeli attacks on the Jebaliya refugee camp between February 27 and March 2 this year.

"Israel called them terrorists, but I know that they were not because my cousin was one of them," he says.

Ila Haifa is also a response to the way that "war on terror" propaganda has poisoned community relations.

Masoud remembers working at London's Haymarket Theatre just before the second invasion of Iraq.

"The technicians there were very patriotic, talking about 'our boys' going to invade Iraq and, to me, that was tough," he recalls.

"I had to endure people insulting my culture, insulting the Koran. I may not be very religious, but, when something comes to that, it hurts, you know. Especially because you feel there that you are powerless and you don't want to say: 'Hey, guys, you should stop,' because they know that themselves."

Masoud blames Whitehall's refusal to challenge Israeli state terror and a docile media that presents news through the distorting prism of the war on terror, in which peoples on the receiving end of the "free world's" liberating bombs are either passive victims caught in the crossfire or fanatical extremists who are far better off dead.

"The government makes out that Gaza is teeming with terrorists and that message is duly rammed home again and again in the media and, due to a lack of alternative information, it does sink in," he points out.

"I had a work colleague say to me: "Oh, it's fine,' when Israel was bombing Jabilya refugee camp with 150 people being killed, on the basis that the people there were 'protecting terrorists.'

"Palestine is my country, the people of Gaza my compatriots. When people here say it's alright to kill civilians in the name of 'security,' then it feels to me that they are saying it's alright to kill me and my brothers and my sisters."

Al Zaytouna will perform Ila Haifa from May 8-10 at the Greenwood Theatre, Weston Street, London SE1. Tickets from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, telephone: (020) 7700-6192.