When a sizeable section of his students told Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour they want to die, he changed his life to help heal their trauma.

This week I had the honour to share space with Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour, founder of the Alrowwad Cultural & Arts Society located in the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Abdelfattah Abusrour was born into a refugee family after the 1948 Nakba. His parents lost ten of their fourteen children to poverty, displacement, and disease. Despite their enormous losses, they raised him with compassion not hatred.

“Even with a just cause,” his father told him, “if you carry hate, you lose your humanity.”

Abusrour won a scholarship to study in France, where he completed a PhD in biological and medical engineering. However, he always wanted to return home and did so firstly as a teacher.

It was when teaching that he realised a large proportion of his students had no hope at all - they told him they wanted to die; a stark reflection of life under occupation.
And so he stopped teaching and founded Alrowwad, a community arts centre that uses theatre, dance, photography, and storytelling to transform despair into dignity. He calls this work “Beautiful Resistance.”


“Art is not just therapy,” says Abusrour, “It’s a creative process that allows people to auto-heal, to find peace within, and to become peace-builders in their communities.”

At the heart of Alrowwad are children and women. Through performance and expression, these children find confidence, purpose, and joy. The women’s programmes focus on economic independence and the idea that ‘women change the world’ beginning in their own homes.

Abusrour refuses to show images of Palestinians as helpless.
“We are not objects of pity. We are people of creativity and imagination.” His mission: to build peace with respect and dignity, not charity.

Touring with Alrowwad’s theatre troupe across Europe and the US, he has seen audiences deeply moved as we share our humanity.

“Differences are gifts that should enrich us, not divide us.”

https://alrowwad.org/en/?lang=en
https://www.linkedin.com/company/alrowwad-cultural-arts-society/?originalSubdomain=ps
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdelfattah-abusrour-822a048/?originalSubdomain=ps