Juliano was gunned down in Jenin in 2011 under mysterious circumstances.
Of the five core members of the group, only Zubeidi survived.
The film, made by her son Juliano, follows boys from the Jenin refugee camp who joined the theater as children, only to be drawn into the vortex of the second intifada as young men. A mishandled explosive left a peppering of black scars on Zubeidi’s face, and he spent years eluding Israeli authorities.Ī far younger Zubeidi appears in the archival footage of “Arna’s Children,” a 2004 documentary about a children’s theater founded in the Jenin refugee camp in the late 1980s by Arna Mer-Khamis, an Israeli Jewish activist who married a Palestinian and supported the Palestinian cause. The camp, which is home to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, was the scene of a major battle with the Israeli army in 2002. Zubeidi rose to prominence during the second intifada as the leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular Fatah party, in the impoverished Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Now, he and the other escapees are being hailed as national heroes for staging the biggest breakout from an Israeli prison in decades. He played all the roles.”Īmong Palestinians, Zubeidi was just one of several prominent militants of that era, his name having long ago faded from the headlines. “In many ways, he’s the poster kid for Israelis of the Palestinian terror campaign of the second intifada,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired general who served in Israeli military intelligence during the uprising. He also is one of the few who regularly gave media interviews. To Israelis, he is a notorious terrorist responsible for suicide bombings and shooting attacks that killed civilians. They lived through a brief period of hope at the height of the peace process, only to take up arms in the far more violent intifada that erupted in 2000, and which claimed the lives of Zubeidi’s mother, brother and several comrades.īut even among that cohort, few Palestinian militants had closer ties to Israelis than Zubeidi, who for many years was an even bigger celebrity in Israel than in the Palestinian territories. Zubeidi, now in his mid-40s, comes from a generation of Palestinians who were children during the first intifada, or uprising against Israel, which erupted in 1987. Now he has emerged as one of Israel’s most wanted fugitives after tunneling out of a high-security prison on Monday with five other Palestinian militants. JERUSALEM (AP) - For nearly two decades, Zakaria Zubeidi has been an object of fascination for Israelis and Palestinians alike, who have seen his progression from a child actor to a swaggering militant, to the scarred face of a West Bank theater promoting “cultural resistance” to Israeli occupation.
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