Palestinian and Israeli comedians perform together at the Syndrome Club in West Jerusalem By Ray Hanania

The Syndrome -- First Comedy Show
Current mood: satisfied

Until Wednesday night, Palestinian and Israeli comedians had never performed together. The resistance is driven not so much by anger, but by uncertainty. Can it be done? The answer is a definite yes.

The Syndrome Show (club across the street from the Jerusalem Towers Hotel) West Jerusalem

The show was phenomenal. We packed the club which is normally the site of rock and blues band musicians. Although the owner Katz puffs on a sheesha pipe at the bar, the place is generally non-smoking. Rules are made to be broken in Israel, like every where else in the world.

The comedians, Yisrael Campbell (who I jokingly call my friend "Zionist Entity Campbell, or just "E" for short) is joking with Aaron Freeman, my longtime Chicago pal and Jewish African American comedian extraordinaire. Charley Warady, who long ago lived near me in the 1960s in my own Chicago neighborhood, Pill Hill in South Shore Valley, is chatting with Daniel Sierdarski, who operates Corner Prophets, the on-the-edge and successful promotion company that not only organizes band performances but also hip-hop and rap artists, including Palestinian and Israeli peaceniks. This is his first Palestinian-Israeli comedy show.

In fact, this is the first ever Palestinian-Israeli comedy show ever held anywhere in the world.

Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs don't perform comedy with Israelis. They will perform with Jews in America, and even in the Middle East (when Jews are permitted to enter Arab countries,) but the cultural taboos driven by the endless and painful Middle East conflict prevent Palestinian, Arab and Muslims from performing with "Israelis."

But I don't care. I am all about breaking stupid taboos that do nothing except reinforce fanaticism and extremism. And the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities have too much extremism. Small groups of fanatics who dominate entire societies.

The majority of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are moderates, but they lack the courage and they support to confront the fanatics. So they sit back silently or sometimes joining in the stoking of the fires of anger because of the frustrations, suffering and failure to achieve justice.

But I believe that Palestinians and Israelis need to see each other as human beings. We have to start at the bottom, as people, rather than the way our "leaders" have tried to achieve peace by always starting at the top. Building organizations. Building agendas. Electing or appointing presidents. Worrying about the structure and the stated mission, never doing anything. Always arguing, fighting, disagreeing about what to do in a never ending living hell of doing nothing. Arabs culturally cannot build consensus. We are plagued by internal destroyers, people who elevate themselves by pushing others down.

Our show went two hours. Non-stop laughter in the room that consisted almost entirely of Israelis and Jews from the United States.

Our emcee is Shachar Chason, a young man who does a weekly entertainment and comedy show on Israeli TV Channel 10, in Hebrew. This time, he offers his jokes in broken but very funny English with occasional references to Hebrew. And the crowd is roaring.

In the back, the beginnings of a media barrage has formed. Ben Weideman of CNN, who spent a decade in Egypt and the last few years in Israel covering the conflict, sits in the back with his crew. The Chicago Tribune's longtime and accomplished Middle East writer Joel Greenberg has completed an interview and is sitting back with his photographer laughing and taking notes on the show, which features two Chicagoans and a great local angle for his newspaper and story. Daphna, the Israeli reporter from Haaretz who also interviewed us for the weekend section, is also taking notes and laughing as the comedians toss out an array of humor that zigzags from politics, to society to culture, to religion to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Nothing is sacred, and high on the list is the lampooning of Israel's President Moshe Katsav, who is about to be indicted on charges of rape and sexual harassment of female members of his staff. Everyone is talking about his angry attack against the media only hours earlier at the President's Compound not too far from the club, where he denounced the media and accused them of conspiring to bring him down. The Iranian-born Katsav is the target of much humor. There are also reporters from Danish TV, who turn out to be great guys with a great sense of humor scarred by the brutality of the attacks against their people by angry Muslims extremists who used the publishing of Mohammed Cartoons by a Danish newspaper as cause to rampage and vandalize and burn down anything Danish, Christian and non-Muslim throughout mainly the Islamic World.

Members of B'Tselem, the Israeli Human Rights organization are also on the audience, as is Mathew Kalman, who is producing a documentary on our performances that we hope to use as the basis for an American comedy tour later this year.

Tonight is the American Colony Hotel show ... it's sold out also. The next show after that is at Tzavta in Tel Aviv on Saturday Jan. 27.

New line: "Andy Warhol said that everyone get's 15 minutes of fame. Palestinians get 15 minutes of fuse."

Ray Hanania