After five years on the road, Jennifer Jajeh’s widely publicized one-woman “I Heart Hamas” comedy tour is drawing to a close. That she chose Beirut — her only leg in the Arab world — as one of her final stops is fitting for a journey that has taken the Palestinian-American across the United States and that will end in London next month. Despite admitting that an Arab audience was “not my target audience,” Jajeh was keen to avoid “preaching to the choir” to a Beirut crowd that was “obviously very aware of the issues.” Jajeh presented a comical, and at times depressing, transformation of her Palestinian identity from being a member of a migrant community with set stereotypes in the US, to that of a people under occupation during the Second Intifada (2000-2001).

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Al-Monitor:  “I Heart Hamas” was originally written for a Western audience; did you have to tailor it for the Beirut show?

Jajeh:  I was really concerned about that, because the show is so geared towards Western audiences who maybe don’t have a lot of knowledge about the Palestine question, or who think they know a little and are interested to know more. I chose to tailor it a very little because I wanted to see if the same ideas of feeling out of place, and out of sorts resonated, and I felt, surprisingly, it really did.