Bethlehem Calling: The Celtic Connections show based on the wartime diaries of Palestinian teenagers

The Palestinian Arab Orthodox Scout pipers of Beit Jala | Contributed

Raeda Ghazaleh: In the Second Intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that began in 2000) I was doing a lot of theatre in the West Bank with my company INAD Theatre. I was approached by Suzy Atallah, a teacher at The Terra Sancta School for Girls Sisters of St Joseph in Bethlehem, about working with a group of school girls who she had asked to write diaries about their daily lives. These teenagers were going through curfews, closures, and also losing a girl in their class who was shot and died. But there were also a lot of practical things, how they are with their family, how they celebrate, how they think about music. So you feel there is a person who's trying so hard to live their daily life in the middle of all this mess. I did workshops with most of the girls, and then I worked with them to stage the diaries. And then I travelled to England to do my Masters.

Zoe Hunter: Raeda and I both studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London; that's where we met. She brought the diaries to the table to ask if performers were interested in joining her to do a project with her directing. I was shocked because I didn't realise how limited my knowledge of the Palestinian plight was. These kids were so young and weren't involved in anything, they just happened to be living there. One of the girls, Marianne, was travelling in a car that apparently got mistaken for a car filled with militants. I don’t know how; her family was in the car with young children, two of them young girls. The Israeli army shot at the car. Her dad was hit eight times. Her sister Christine was shot and killed instantly. That has stayed with these girls for the rest of their lives.

Raeda Ghazaleh: It’s very personal to me because I lived what those girls lived daily. We did a couple of theatre productions in curfews. I used to go out in my car and collect the actors one by one, because it's very dangerous to be together in the same car in case something happens to us. The theatre itself was bombed at that time, a neighbour of the theatre was murdered. So I carried it inside me while I was taking a new step in my life. I wanted to tell the world what was happening through those teenage girls. And it became a production in England, The Bethlehem Diaries, at the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT).

Zoe Hunter: The heart of Bethlehem Calling, the new show, is a 20 year relationship with Raeda. We started out as fellow students, she directed me in The Bethlehem Diaries, and we became friends. I always wanted to work with her again. At Christmas in 2023 I contacted Raeda. It had been on my mind that people in the arts were avoiding doing anything Palestinian, and that made me feel quite uncomfortable because being Palestinian in itself shouldn't be controversial. But a big chunk of the music industry was doing the opposite and championing Palestinian artists. I said to Raeda, do you want to revisit and update this with music? And she immediately said ‘yes, we need to do something that's hopeful, people are losing hope.’ And then I contacted Ben Harrison [of Grid Iron theatre company] who I knew had worked in Palestine, and that was the beginning.

Grade 11 pupils from the Terra Sancta School for Girls Sisters of St Joseph in Bethlehem | Contributed

Ben Harrison: Bethlehem Calling includes diaries from 2024 as well as the original material. There’s a kind of despair in the more recent diary entries, we're finding. In the earlier ones, in the 2000s, there's still a fair amount of hope that it'll pass and things will change. In the recent material it's ‘now it’s being live streamed and still no one's listening to us’.

Raeda Ghazaleh: I want people to see that we are not news, we're not just numbers. I want them to see what it means to be a human being, a teenager, living in such a place. The original girls are now women in their thirties who have achieved a lot of things in their lives. One went to England and studied theatre and came back and worked with us. One is a musician who just finished her PhD. One is a fine art painter. They’re very special. But it’s very painful seeing teenagers in Bethlehem now going through the same thing, like a circle, talking about how difficult it is to reach the school because of checkpoints, their worries about Gaza, the death around them.

Ben Harrison: Bethlehem Calling is a conduit for the girls’ voices, but it’s a gig as well and people will be coming for the music. We’ve got Paul Thomson (ex Franz Ferdinand) working with Lewis Cook (Free Love), Chizu Anucha, and Firas Khnaisser in Scotland. And the Palestinian Arab Orthodox Scout pipers of Beit Jala are an incredible discovery. I've worked in Beit Jala three times and I didn't realise there was a Scottish Arab pipe band! When I tell that to people, the average person just can't comprehend it. 'What do you mean, there’s a Scottish style pipe band in Palestine?' The culture has been presented to us as this kind of monolith of Islam but there's a significant Christian minority in Bethlehem. The reality is much more complex.

Paul Thomson | Contributed

Zoe Hunter: When I did The Bethlehem Diaries for the first time I wasn't that much older than the girls who wrote the diaries. I was really struck by how it was raising and embracing the voices of young people, not forgetting they are there, not ignoring them. Now we've got a bunch of really talented people, actors (Hana Greer, Yolanda Mitchell, Aisha Lawal), really exciting musicians from both countries, two of the original diary writers - theatre-maker Mirna Sakhleh and musician Hala Jaber - and they're doing this international collaboration, with visuals as well, by Dav Bernard and Simon Wilkinson. All these different people are working remotely – with Raeda as our artistic lead in Palestine, alongside Charlie Zeidan, the Scout leader in Beit Jala - and then we're bringing them together. I would be over the moon if that was the beginning of an artistic collaboration and that they carried on doing more, that they would go and visit each other in the future and make work together. That would be absolutely phenomenal.

Bethlehem Calling: An evening of stories, music and pipers from Palestine is at Tramway, Glasgow, 25 January, as part of Celtic Connections