Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon have an article on The Nation website in support of the Israeli actors boycott of the new performing center in the West Bank settlement Ariel. They write that part of the power of the action is that it brings attention to the reality of life in the occupied territories, which is often ignored. From An Unsettling Protest in Israel:
Ariel, with a population of about 18,000, is one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Already extending twelve miles past the Green Line, Ariel continues to grow. In January Israel announced the development of the Ariel University Center, with plans to triple the size of the campus of a local college and to build a neighborhood for housing the new faculty and staff. The settlement is one of the sites of the expansion criticized by President Obama last year, when he pushed Israel to adopt a freeze in new settlement construction as a step toward renewing peace negotiations (as every American president since settlements began in 1967 has had occasion to do).
Ariel cuts deep into the West Bank, blocking off villages from one another, forcing Palestinians to travel extra-long distances around the settlement to reach the area’s commercial center of Salfit. Villages to the north are cut off from Salfit altogether by Ariel’s bypass road. Salfit itself has no room to expand for economic development or population growth because Israel has claimed every bit of land around it, and a few years ago the Israeli army prevented the town from building a water-treatment plant. Meanwhile, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Ariel’s sewage runs down into the Palestinians’ agricultural valleys – a blatant metaphor for the way settlers’ privileges come at the cost of Palestinian human rights.
You can drive easily from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem onto the four-lane settlement road and arrive in this Jews-only bedroom community of pretty, red-roofed houses and suburban shopping centers – and the John Hagee Sports Center, named after the Texas televangelist who has donated millions of dollars to the settlement – and not notice that you’ve actually left Israel. The theater artists who will not play in Ariel are refusing because they want to break through this carefully constructed illusion of seamlessness to shine their spotlights on the true nature of such places.
