{"id":311904,"date":"2026-01-12T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=311904"},"modified":"2026-01-11T18:26:03","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T18:26:03","slug":"until-his-final-day-mohammad-bakri-would-not-be-crushed-by-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/until-his-final-day-mohammad-bakri-would-not-be-crushed-by-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Until His Final Day, Mohammad Bakri Would Not Be Crushed by Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Palestinian filmmaker and actor Mohammad Bakri at the Supreme Court, in Jerusalem, May 16, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel\/Flash90)<\/p><\/div>\n

Israel\u2019s courts, military, and mainstream media united to punish the Palestinian actor for giving voice to his people. But he remained unbroken to the end.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

6 Jan 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Ten minutes before the opening hearing of the first defamation lawsuit brought by five Israeli soldiers against Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri \u2014 who passed away last week \u2014 I met him in the lobby of the courthouse on Weizmann Street in central Tel Aviv. It was 2003. I was a very young lawyer, working in the office of veteran civil-rights attorney Avigdor Feldman, and had been sent to argue that the soldiers lacked standing to sue.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit stemmed from \u201cJenin, Jenin,\u201d Bakri\u2019s documentary<\/a> about the Israeli military\u2019s invasion of the Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada. In what would later be known as the Battle of Jenin, Israeli forces entered the densely populated camp with tanks, helicopters, infantry units, and armored bulldozers. Large parts of the camp were left in ruins; at least 52 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed<\/a>. While the film includes accusations of war crimes<\/a> against the Israeli army, it does not attribute any specific crime to any individual soldier.<\/p>\n

When Bakri realized we had a few minutes before the hearing began, he smiled and said, \u201cIn the meantime, listen to this monologue.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so there, in the courthouse\u2019s vast inner plaza, with the Magistrate\u2019s Court on one side and the District Court on the other, as dozens of lawyers in black-and-white clothes hurried past, Bakri performed for an audience of one. He recited an excerpt from \u201cWeek,\u201d a play by Israeli playwright Shlomi Moskowitz, in which he was then starring at HaBima, Israel\u2019s national theater in Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n

At first, I felt awkward. But within seconds, I was transfixed. Bakri\u2019s presence seemed to swallow the space whole, dissolving the surrounding commotion. His gaze locked onto mine, refusing to let it wander. Passersby slowed, astonished by this strange pairing: a lawyer and his client, suddenly turned into an actor and his audience (in reverse roles). Bakri was utterly in the moment. He continued the monologue as we walked to the elevator, inside it, and down the hallway after we exited, all the way to the courtroom. Only when we entered was he forced to go silent.<\/p>\n

\"Filmmaker<\/a><\/p>\n
Filmmaker and actor Mohammad Bakri with the author, attorney Michael Sfard, at the Lod District Court, central Israel, February 6, 2020. (Oren Ziv\/Activestills)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A threat to ethnocracy<\/b><\/h3>\n

Feldman, my then-boss, once wrote that in the Israeli legal system, Palestinians can have a biography but not a history. The distinction captures one of the animating forces at the core of Israeliness: the systematic dismantling of Palestinianness as a collective identity, and its forced reduction into a shallow, individuated personal identity.<\/p>\n

So long as Bakri was seen as an actor who happened to be Arab, Israeli society knew how to embrace him. The moment his image changed into that of an Arab who happened to be an actor, he was violently cast out.<\/p>\n

It did not help that he was a gifted and mesmerizing symbol of the possibility of Jews and Palestinians living together in this land; that he embodied a humanist tradition rooted in an unwavering belief in the human spirit; that he devoted much of his artistic and public life to the struggle for equality and dignity for all. As long as he refused to relinquish his national identity, as long as he resisted the erasure of his people\u2019s past and present, as long as he insisted on naming the dispossession at the heart of Zionism, he never stood a chance.<\/p>\n

Precisely because of his immense talent; precisely because he could, and wanted to, play Mordechai the Jew in Amos Gitai\u2019s \u201cEsther\u201d; a Jewish father in \u201cBenghazi-Bergen-Belsen,\u201d a play based on Yossi Sucary\u2019s book about the Holocaust of Libyan Jewry<\/a>; and to write and act with his sons in \u201cEye Drops,\u201d a tender, lyrical film about a Holocaust survivor living alone in Tel Aviv; precisely because he made it easier for Jewish audiences to imagine an equal, shared life, Jewish ethnocracy could not allow Mohammad Bakri any space for political existence.<\/p>\n