“As I came to Jenin in 2003, I found a swamp, a jungle, steaming with struggles to survive. Here they need hospitals, not a theatre, I thought.” Mr. Juliano Mer-Khamis, in an interview to the Berlin Newspaper Tagesspiegel in early 2010 in Jenin, re-published after his assassination on April 6, 2011.

Mr. Mer-Khamis (53), an Israeli and Palestinian actor, was shot dead on April 4 by masked militants at the entrance to the theatre he built in 2006 in the west bank city of Jenin, “The Freedom Theatre.” He started the theater in Jenin in 2006 following a call from his friend Zakaria Zubeidi, an Al-Aqsa-Brigades fighter, or what we Israelis usually think of as a terrorist. Moving with his wife and children to live in the refugee camp of Jenin, Mr. Mer-Khamis said in several interviews, was a choice he made between being on the side of the soldier and the checkpoint, or on that of the little girl who has no future and no hope.

I first read about the assassination in the Israeli press, linked on friends’ Facebook pages. I was surprised to discover how many of “their friends” reacted directly to the question of whether Mer-Khamis’s actions were just (many users expressed their loathing of his activism, much like replies to the same articles in Israeli news sites).

Journalists and bloggers also asked themselves whether this terrible murder stands as a warning sign to not mix art and politics as Mer-Khamis did in his acting in Israeli theaters, and to not openly criticize both Israeli militarism and the occupation and Palestinian society for its religious narrow mindedness.

There were two camps mourning the murder. On the one hand, there were those who concluded that it was the result of the inhuman, dark and theocratic Palestinian society. It could not tolerate boys and girls acting and playing together and rejected the secular content of the Freedom Theatre’s plays. The other camp lamented the tear in the very identity of Mer-Khamis himself. He tried to be a bridge between the “impossible worlds” in his . . .

Read more: On the Assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis: Fighting for the Freedom of the Everyday