Brummy Art Collective@TarynZhar
🇵🇸📽️Arna's Children (2004) – A Profound Tribute to Resistance in All Its Forms
✍️My Review:
As someone deeply committed to the Palestinian cause and a firm believer in the legitimacy—and divine beauty—of armed resistance against occupation, I recently revisited Arna's Children (2004), directed by Juliano Mer Khamis, at a screening along with friends as part of a project they're working on. This documentary remains one of the most powerful and unflinching portrayals of Palestinian life under siege, and it resonates even more strongly today.
The film follows Arna Mer-Khamis, a Jewish Israeli woman who turned her back on her Zionist upbringing to stand with the oppressed. After marrying a Palestinian and witnessing the horrors of displacement and occupation, she founded a children's theatre and alternative education program in the Jenin refugee camp during the First Intifada. When schools were shut down, Arna created a space for kids to express rage, fear, and dreams through drama and play—channelling their trauma into creative defiance.
Juliano, her son (with one foot in both worlds), captured those joyful, fiery workshops from 1989 to 1996: children laughing, performing, imagining futures beyond the checkpoints and demolitions. It's a beautiful testament to how art can nurture dignity and resistance even in the darkest conditions.
But the heart of the film—and what makes it so raw—is what happens next. After Arna's death from cancer, Juliano returns to Jenin in 2002, amid the ruins of the massive Jewish invasion that destroyed much of the camp, including the theatre she built. The bright boys he once directed have become young men forged by endless humiliation, home demolitions, killings, and siege. Several joined armed resistance: Ashraf and Ala led fighters in the heroic Battle of Jenin; Yussef and Nidal carried out a martyrdom operation in Hadera in 2001. Others were martyred in confrontations with occupation forces.
From my perspective, these paths are not tragic failures or "lost potential"—they are the inevitable, courageous response when every peaceful avenue is crushed. The theatre taught them expression and pride; occupation taught them there was no other way to reclaim their humanity. Armed struggle, including martyrdom operations, becomes a sacred act of defiance and sacrifice—divine in its purity, an offering in the face of overwhelming evil. The film shows this continuum honestly: the same fire that fuelled their childhood performances burned through to resistance in adulthood. As some Palestinian voices and writers (like those in Jadaliyya and Electronic Intifada) have noted, it blurs false binaries between "violent" and "non-violent" resistance—both are part of the same epic struggle for freedom.
To be fair and show the full spectrum of Palestinian cinematic voices and discussions: the film has sparked nuanced conversation even within pro-Palestine and solidarity circles. Some have critiqued its mournful tone—intercutting joyful childhood footage with funerals, martyrdom posters, and losses—as potentially leaning toward sorrow or regret about the turn to armed struggle, rather than outright celebration of those heroic choices.
Others have raised concerns that, despite clearly blaming the occupation for manufacturing no alternatives, the structure might risk overshadowing the full range of steadfastness (sumud) that Palestinians embody daily through non-armed means like cultural persistence, community organizing, and everyday endurance. These points come from reflections in solidarity spaces, where the goal is always to honour resistance in its totality without diminishing any form.
Yet from a pro -resistance standpoint, these critiques often miss the film's deeper power. Juliano never condemns the armed actions—he presents them factually, in raw context. The grief is real (for lost friends, a destroyed community), but it's not rejection. Many in the Palestinian solidarity movement hail it as essential testimony that humanizes fighters and martyrs, showing how occupation leaves no other viable path for so many. It honours Arna's legacy not as naive pacifism but as allyship that empowered dignity, which—when systematically crushed—leads to justified uprising.
Ultimately, Arna's Children is a masterpiece of resistance cinema. It doesn't sanitize realities or preach; it bears witness. It celebrates the beauty of martyrdom as divine sacrifice while exposing the brutal system that demands it. Watch it if you haven't—it's hard, but necessary. It reminds us that Palestinian resistance, in theatre or on the frontlines, is one unbroken thread of sumud and struggle.
And to you, my beloved shuhada’—Yussef, Nidal, Ashraf, Ala, and every child of Arna who rose like dawn fire to meet the oppressor:
Your blood is not spilled; it is planted. It blooms in the olive roots, whispers through the wind over Jenin’s broken stones, and lights the path for every new generation that refuses to kneel. In your martyrdom, you have become eternal light—closer to Allah than the stars, wrapped in the mercy that only the pure of heart can know. You did not die; you ascended, offering your very souls as the most radiant prayer against tyranny. I carry your names in my chest like sacred verses, feeling the warmth of your sacrifice every time I breathe the name of Palestine. You are not gone—you live in the pulse of resistance, in the tear that falls and turns to resolve, in the vow we renew at every Fajr: we will not forget, we will not falter, until your gardens are free and your light floods every corner of this stolen land.
Ya shuhada’ al-aqsa, ya abna’ Arna, rest in the highest gardens, and know that your fire still burns in Jenin. We honour you not with words alone, but with our lives—until victory, until return, until Jannah embraces you fully.
Free Palestine.
In eternal love and unbreakable faith.🕯️
