Jerusalem’s El-Hakawati Theatre Scales Up Fundraising to Avoid Potential Closure

In the past months, El-Hakawati, the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem, has publicly announced that it is facing an unprecedented financial crisis.

On November 23, 2025, Israeli forces stormed the theater, considerably increasing the challenges it was already facing. Five minutes before the opening of a children’s performance, “Dreams Under the Olive Tree,” Israeli police and security forces stormed El-Hakawati and closed the whole theater for days on end. This also prevented a planned second performance of the show from taking place.

Seventy children were onstage during the event, dressed in their costumes, and ready to perform and impress their families and friends who were waiting with excitement in the audience. Instead, they were all ordered outside by armed forces, leaving the children and their families in considerable distress.

This is not the first time the theater has undergone such constraints. However, recently, El-Hakawati’s staff members and board of directors have publicly expressed their concern over the unprecedented financial and operational pressures.

On December 30, 2025, El-Hakawati put out an open call for support and to help ensure that the theater can remain open.

On February 7, 2026, as a way to help support El-Hakawati, Palestinian actor, director, and playwright Amer Hlehel performed his famous and world-acclaimed play Taha for an audience at El-Hakawati with the proceeds from ticket sales benefiting the organization. Amer is currently the director of the theater.

The play won the writer/actor critical acclaim for this one-person show, which gives tribute to the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. It was developed in part at the 2015 Sundance Institute Theater Lab and received—among other things—the Best Production award at the 2017 Asian Arts Awards in Edinburgh. In his compelling performance, Amer personifies the life of a Palestinian poet from the village of Saffuriyya in the Galilee region whose family gets displaced to Lebanon during the 1948 Nakba, while others remain behind. The play highlights the themes of displacement, loss, disappointment, humanity, love, and poetry, while shedding light on the poet himself.

The proceeds from the February show in Jerusalem helped contribute to sustaining the organization. At the end of the play, after a prolonged standing ovation, Amer—as well as some of El-Hakawati’s board members—urged the audience to help spread the message and support Jerusalem’s culture.

El-Hakawati, founded in the early 1980s, has been a vital space for the Palestinian community of Jerusalem: opening the space for theater, performance, music, storytelling, creativity, and resilience. It has offered artistic, educational, and community programs that have been pivotal over the years for many generations.