British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla has been one of the most vocal supporters of Palestine in the UK arts community since October 7, 2023. He has made political statements on red carpets and at protests, faced a police inquiry and helped organise Together for Palestine, the benefit concert held at Wembley Arena in London.
The personal and professional consequences of speaking publicly remain uncertain. Abdalla believes the experience has strengthened his relationships, expanded his creative work and brought him closer to his Arab identity.
“Until now, I say and believe it that I have gained far more than I have lost,” he said. “As a result of standing up, I have found my people and my people have been able to fund me. I have grown in community. I have grown in relationships. I have grown in terms of the work that I am doing and the work I hope to do. And I feel closer to myself.
“Palestine is making me free.”
Abdalla was speaking at the Amman International Film Festival during Artivism, the Artist as a Driver of Change, a public conversation at Rainbow Theatre moderated by barrister and human rights lawyer, Mary Nazzal-Batayneh.
The pair first met while working behind the scenes on Together for Palestine. Abdalla said the concert had sought to change what people believed was culturally possible, both internationally and across the Arab world.
Support for Palestine formed part of his childhood. Abdalla was born in Glasgow after his parents left Egypt and grew up among Palestinian families. One of his earliest memories is of sitting on his father’s shoulders during a protest in Scotland.
He later carried his own children at demonstrations for the same cause. Their childhood vocabulary now includes the word “genocide”, he said.
“I don’t dream for my children to have their children on their shoulders at a protest,” he said. “If we work together, I believe we have the opportunity to end that.”
That generational experience informs Abdalla’s belief that culture can alter the conditions in which people decide whether to act. Together for Palestine brought prominent artists and organisers into the same space, showing audiences that support extended beyond isolated individuals or online statements.
Fear has remained one of the strongest barriers. Abdalla said people were less likely to speak when they believed it could cost them their careers, homes, savings or their children’s futures. Cultural figures could begin to change that calculation by demonstrating that admired peers held the same position and that supporters numbered in the millions.
The shift also has to reach those with institutional power. Lasting change requires decision-makers to believe that supporting equal rights could benefit their organisations, careers and families, Abdalla said.
Protests, legal work and cultural events each had a role, although none could achieve the necessary change alone. Their combined effect could build the public pressure needed to turn existing laws into action.
“We have the blueprint,” Abdalla said, referring to international law. “We need the institutional power frameworks to ensure that it’s implemented.”
His own career offered an example of how the perceived risks could differ between artists. Abdalla said some actors had built their professional currency around an image of political neutrality and could therefore appear to lose more when they spoke publicly.
His career had begun under a different set of assumptions.
“I already started as an Arab,” he said. “I live in a context in which I was already seen in this way, in which I wouldn’t work anyway with someone who had a racist view towards me.”
He also tied the future of his own career to the wider conditions facing Arab filmmakers. Being able to make the films he wanted in Jordan, Egypt or elsewhere in the region would signal that artists were gaining greater control over their stories and the systems behind them.
“Stories don’t exist in an abstract story space in the clouds,” he said. “Stories exist in a relationship with power, with finance, with culture, with institutions, with people, distribution – all of these different things – and that requires that shift.”
Arab filmmakers can find themselves caught between regional funding sources that discourage political subjects and western institutions that expect stories from the region to conform to familiar narratives of victimhood.
Filmmakers also have to reconsider the scale of their ambitions. Projects are often scaled back to accommodate the restrictions surrounding them, reducing their ability to persuade investors that the potential results justify the risk.
Together for Palestine followed another model. Its organisers committed to a large-scale event, demonstrated that they could deliver it and created something that exceeded the expectations of many who became involved.
“Collectively, we also have to dream at a scale that it can truly change the world,” Abdalla said.
That ambition did not require films to instruct audiences or reduce political questions to slogans. Abdalla said people responded more strongly to work that allowed them to feel something new and arrive at a changed understanding of themselves.
“No one likes to be told what to think or how to think,” he said. “They love it when they feel something that makes them change, and I think that’s what good art does.”
He also questioned the term used in the title of the session, describing “artivism” as a “weird compound”.
“The most beautiful art is inherently political.”
