Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 28.12.2025
I met actor and director Muhammad Bakri in Canada when he was performing the book turn to a play written by Emile Habibi, “The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist,” which mocks a Palestinian collaborator with the Zionist regime. Habibi won wide recognition in 1974 when his second novel, “The Strange Circumstances Surrounding the Disappearance of Sa‘id Abu’l Nahs, the Pessoptimist”, was published. Some critics considered it a rare literary achievement, opening a new horizon for the Arab novel.
Over four decades of filmmaking, Muhammad Bakri was both an actor and a filmmaker. His roles in both Israeli and Palestinian cinema – along with his documentaries – presented the Israeli public with a mirror that showed the ugly image of the Zionist. His films aroused strong opposition and the use of the court against him after his film “Jenin Jenin”, which deals with the massacre carried out by the Zionist army in the refugee camp.
In mid-April 2002, the Zionist army scrambled to hide one of its first, most significant war crimes of this century in the occupied West Bank: Israeli soldiers killed at least 52 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp. Having completed their killing spree between 1 and 11 April at the height of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada.
Like in Gaza, those in charge of so-called” Operation Defensive Shield” decided to enforce a siege so tight that no one, despite global protests, could get past Israel’s total lockdown. It lasted for weeks while the Israeli government did its best to keep journalists and human rights observers away from the Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank.
Secretary of State Colin Powell. Speaking from — ironically — the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where Zionist terrorists had planted a bomb and killed 91 people in 1946, said that he saw “no evidence” of a massacre. By 23 April, Powell was back in Washington briefing senators: “Right now, I’ve seen no evidence of mass graves, and I’ve seen no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place.” He was lying, of course, because he never went to Jenin, so could not have “seen” the evidence even if he had wanted to.
Powell, the man who lied at the UN about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the build-up to the 2003 invasion, went on to criticize the “coarse speculation as to what happened, like a massacre and mass graves to go by.
The Prime Minister of Israel at the time was Ariel Sharon who, as Minister of war, had “personal responsibility” for the Zionist army complicity in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982, told the world that “only” terrorists had died in Jenin, but the bodies of the dead being pulled from the rubble, included children, women and a man in a wheelchair; they were no reasonable person’s idea of “terrorists”. In their bid to cover up the massacre, the Israelis buried many of the bodies under buildings demolished by a bulldozer; some were still alive when the bulldozer moved in.
Bakri’s 2002 movie “Jenin, Jenin” sparked a scandal that reached the Supreme Court. In the film, Bakri cited the testimonies of the residents of the refugee camp who accused the Zionist army of committing massacres and war crimes during Operation “Defensive Shield”. The Israeli censor disqualified the film for screening and justified its decision because it presented false accusations, undermined the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and could incite public unrest and harm the soldiers who participated in the operation and their families.
In the years since the film “Jenin Jenin”, libel lawsuits against Bakri have continued. Bakri himself refused to apologize, refused to deny the Palestinian narrative, and as a result found himself excluded from Israeli cinema. In 2022, the Supreme Court declared that the film did indeed slander IDF soldiers and banned its screening in Israel.
Muhammad Bakri was not afraid to hurt the feelings of the Zionist public, and he turned cinema into a political arena, even at the cost of the Zionists’ hatred of him.
When Uri Barbash made his film “Behind Bars” (1984), he chose Muhammad Bakri to play the role of Issam, a Palestinian security prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment in an Israeli prison. Bakri was not chosen just because he was an excellent actor with a tremendous presence. His choice also challenged the stereotypical image of the Palestinian, as it is etched into the Israeli consciousness.
Barbash planned to finish the film when Issam broke down, but Bakri insisted on ending it by portraying the Palestinian prisoner as unbroken by the prison warden’s manipulations; he then approached his beautiful wife, who had been brought to visit him, and demanded that she go home. He would not be the one to break the strike declared by all the prisoners, Jews and Palestinians, against the oppressive regime. He is the real hero of the film.
“Behind the Bars” was the first Israeli film that dared to present Jewish-Palestinian solidarity as a response to political oppression and racist Zionist ideology
Bakri was a political actor who never chose roles that sought to flatter the viewer, certainly not the Israeli one. In Judd Ne’eman’s “The Silver Tray” (1984), he appears as a Palestinian activist advocating armed struggle. “The Silver Tray” is one of the most poignant political films ever made in Israel, and the first to describe the political situation left over from the bloody platter on which the Zionist state was built.
Bakri has also directed a number of documentaries; “Since You’ve Gone” (2005) was a film letter to the Haifa-born Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, and “1948” was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nakba.
The battle for “Jenin, Jenin” was probably the most bitter Bakri had ever known in his career, as an actor and creator. He was a man who fought through his art. A man whose integrity and loyalty to his people did not allow him to compromise. He was a brave artist for whom art and politics were the same side of the coin. He died young, probably because of the attacks and the slanders. However, his films will not be forgotten, and the image of this Shaheed( Martir) will be remembered after the establishment of the democratic and socialist Palestinian state from the river to the sea.