A number of folks have sent me the Times piece about the Caryl Churchill play on Gaza that the New York Theatre Workshop is thinking of staging, 3 years after it cancelled the Rachel Corrie production and created an uproar. The Royal Court Theater in London is behind the Churchill play too. It has provided a copy of the short play here.
It's called "Seven Jewish Children, a Play for Gaza" and is ten minutes long. The play is in the form of parents talking about what they'll tell their children about various horrors in the last 100 years, from the Holocaust to the Nakba to the '67 War to Gaza. "Tell her her great great great great lots of greats granddad lived there…" a reference to biblical underpinnings for Zionism. And so it describes the arc of the Jewish psyche from victimization to victimizer.
I find it moving. Seems very dramatic, and a wonderful imaginative response to the destruction of 410 children in Gaza–because Israel feels threatened.
Israel's belief that it is threatened by negative world opinion was Benny Morris's explanation for the Gaza slaughter in the pages of the Times at the war's start. Here is that piece: Why Israel Feels Threatened. Israel is feeling delegitimized in the eyes of the world, he says, it feels the door closing. So its response? It goes out and kills hundreds of civilians and destroys most of the schools and industries in Gaza.
And now it's more threatened than ever: Turkey has all but turned on Israel, Europe is outraged, anti-Zionist Jews are getting a toehold in American life, and The New York Theatre Workshop wants to talk about the slaughter as a reflection of the Jewish psyche.
According to the Times blog (and it is interesting that we get more/different information from the blog than we do from the actual Times report on the play possibly coming to town; this is the character of information on the internet), Jeffrey Goldberg is calling the play another iteration of the blood libel. Goldberg always sees classical antisemitism in any criticism of Israel by a gentile. He calls Jimmy Carter a 3rd century Christian and Walt and Mearsheimer Father Coughlin. He feels threatened too.
The Churchill demonstrates Avrum Burg's big point in his recent book on the Holocaust and Israel. Jews forgave the Germans too quickly. (Sarah Silverman says the same thing in her act, Jesus Is Magic; why are you Jews driving those German cars?)
And who became the Nazis? The threatening threatening Arabs. Even under piles of rubble, they threaten. Don't write plays about them. More threatening behavior..
(Phil Weiss)
