Home? A Palestinian Woman’s Pursuit of Life, Liberty, & Happiness – 20 September 2025

Hend Ayoub’s one woman show about the discrimination she has experienced as a Palestinian-Israeli in every place she has tried to call home was a surprisingly lighthearted outcry about how the world sees Middle Eastern people. In particular, Hend analyzed three places: Israel, Egypt, and the United States. As she stated in a comment about news sources post October 7, each place seems to think it is its own world; the disconnect she pointed out in the way things are painted and their realities was striking. Hend’s writing and performance posed a lot of poignant questions—both those that were asked directly and those that were implied. Rather than comment on this piece as a piece of theatre, I’d like to participate in the dialogue Val Day brought up in her curator’s note in the program.

The scene that brought up the most for me was when Hend traveled to Cairo. Hend had struggled to find work as an actress in Israel because she was Arab, even after being at the top of her acting class at an Israeli university. In Cairo, she was instantly asked to play a prostitute in a movie which many actresses had been unwilling to take, and she eagerly agreed, only to have the offer rescinded when the agent found out she had an Israeli passport. He stated that Palestinians like her are traitors and that Egyptians look upon them as scum. There’s a lot to unpack here. My first question is if she was offered the role of a prostitute because her hair was showing; in Israel, there are no mandated restrictions on a woman showing her hair. Hend’s mother cut hair for a living and wanted Hend to be independent. In Israel, women are closer to equals than most other places; everyone regardless of gender is assumed to be fit to serve in the army unless they are a member of certain protected classes, like the extremely religious. Was the agent looking down on her even before knowing where she was from? In the scene, when Hend explained her passport, she also dropped an interesting fact—a Palestinian with an Israeli passport can only legally enter two Arab countries, Jordan and Egypt.  In this moment, Hend also slipped in an acknowledgment of the existence of Arab Jews, which seemed like the only thing that she could have been that would have been worse to this particular agent. The Egyptian agent did not receive her in a friendly or welcoming way, and seemed to suggest that the countries that will not accept Palestinian refugees are in agreement with the countries that do, believing that Palestinians should stay in their place and not be welcome should they choose to leave their land. It seemed to me that Hend received the most crushing discrimination in Egypt. This scene was short, and it seems that Hend’s time in Cairo was similarly short.

Hend’s experiences in Israel and America, comparatively, seemed less overt. Though in Israel she regularly heard chants calling for “death to Arabs” and couldn’t find work, in America the work she found was portraying relatives of terrorists. In Israel, she was viewed as a potential terrorist, and in the US she was asked to perpetuate that cycle of thinking. There were several times when she was asked about her heritage and stumbled, trying to say she was Israeli or Palestinian or Arab. It was as though she was trying to tailor who she was to who it would be safest to be. Hend struggled with the concept of “home”, and it seemed like the only places that ever felt like home to her had less to do with actual places and more to do with the people who inhabited them. She felt at home practically sharing an apartment with a rabbi and his children. She felt at home with her mother and other members of her immediate family. She felt at home in her acting classes— whether in Israel or in America. To some extent, she felt at home with her Palestinian-American boyfriend, Dean, though she did make a joke about him being from New Jersey. For Hend, it was not the place that mattered, but the people in it. 

At the end, when looking for something hopeful to say, she goes back to her childhood. At the beginning of Home?, Hend portrays her five year old self going to a Purim party. At the party, some of the kids are mean to her because she is Arab and she goes home. Yet the rabbi’s wife and daughter, who is her best friend, profess to yell at the kids who were mean to her, and her friend brings her hamentaschen from the party. They’re not the flavor she wanted, and as an adult Hend struggles with feeling like a flavor no one wants. Her childhood friend made her a pinky promise to seek peace and never fight, and when Hend returns to this moment at the end it is implied that her hope lies with the children who can’t see or understand cultural differences but just want a peaceful and cheerful relationship with their friends and neighbors.

Home? is a touching contribution to an ongoing dialogue that, in many countries, feels more like a monologue. Hend’s nuance is tremendous, as is her pain— which deserves recognition. Not belonging in one’s own skin is a complex reason to want to be an actress, and doing a solo show that is so raw and real from her own perspective is a genuine act of courage for someone who repeatedly mentions needing theatre as a form of escape more than a form of introspection. The most beautiful element of this story is that Hend tells us all of these things gently. She doesn’t say that she hates Israel or Egypt or the United States. She just lets us know that things have been unfair for her everywhere. She doesn’t directly ask us anything, but I think the unspoken ask is that we approach the Middle East with a little more gentleness and a little less presumption. For Hend, it is complicated, but the hope is that, one day, it can become simple and that we can coexist in a gentle, patient, peaceful place.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Berlin Rosen.