Picture courtesy of the Palestinian Circus School.I have a sense of deja-vu. One year ago, when I spent the Christmas period desperately contacting news agencies, begging them to publish a story about a friend of mine, Mohammad Abu Sakha, who had been arrested without charge, I didn’t expect that come December 2016, I would be sitting here in the same place, doing it all over again. I guess I was naïve then. I thought that others, if only they knew, would share my outrage at this injustice. And collective outrage would spark change. So all I needed to do was tell people, shine a light on the situation and it would change. A year on, I’ve learned a lot about the way in which power, politics and the personal psyche work together to facilitate and maintain social injustice.
Abu Sakha taught at the Palestinian circus school, bringing joy to hundreds of children across the West Bank.
I became friends with Abu Sakha in 2014 when I spent a year and a half living in Palestine. As with so many Palestinians, I was enamoured by his spirit of positivity, joy and kindness, despite the daily brutality and hardship that he faced under Israeli occupation. But for me, there was something special about Abu Sakha. He taught at the Palestinian circus school, bringing joy to hundreds of children across the West Bank. In addition to this, he had spent the past year volunteering on his day off at a charity for children with physical and learning disabilities and through this, had set up special classes within the circus school for children with disabilities. I remember watching the parents of a young girl cry with pride as their daughter, paralysed from the legs down used her superior upper-body strength to outperform many of her class-mates on the trapeze; beaming as she did so. Abu Sakha went about this work with a quiet and humble integrity that I can only ever aspire to.
