Having spent the last five years studying the organization and aesthetics of citizen protest against oppressive power structures in the Middle East and Africa, we find ourselves in agreement with the description of the protests as “staged.” But the criticism of such staging reflects a misunderstanding of the history and practice of civil protest, which, from Gandhi's Salt March to MLK's march across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge or Tahrir Square has succeeded in direct relationship to the creativity and planning behind it.

In the case of Palestinians confronting an exponentially more powerful foe, only the most creative and carefully planned protests, attracting the greatest possible media coverage and with the strongest narrative coherence, can hope to prevent Israel from gaining control of more land, the raison d'être of the Occupation.

Authors:
Mark LeVine in Professor of History and Bryan Reynolds is Chancellor’s Professor of Drama at UC Irvine. Together they are writing Art at the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in the Middle East and Africa. In March 2015, they work-shopped their play Nabi Saleh (written/directed by Reynolds, dramaturgy by LeVine) at Cinema Jenin Theatre in the West Bank with the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company and actors from the Jenin Freedom Theatre.