“It’s a symbol of our show: we have to live with all of us between these borders, together,” Sweid says.
The one-man show, co-written and staged by director Isabella Sedlak, was inspired firstly by Sweid’s divorce from his Jewish second wife – “which was depressing” - and secondly by the war in Gaza – “which was depressing too”.
What results is an emotional, challenging and at times funny production that sees Sweid scrutinise his personal history through the prism of the Israel-Palestine conflict: from growing up in Haifa as the only Christian-Arab at an all-Jewish school, to feeling like an outsider in the West Bank, to raising two Jewish-Arab children in Berlin, where he now lives, and coping with his Israeli ex-wife's desire to bring their daughter back to Israel.
“I wanted to say what I experienced, because it really felt like no one had this middle way, this identity between both sides,” says Sweid. “I’ve experienced the Jewish side and the Arab side; I have amazing Jewish friends and I have amazing Arab friends. I've always tried to be a bridge between the two, because they don't understand each other, and I do.”
Sweid, 49, shares stories from a mostly happy childhood in Between the River and the Sea, recalling a time before he realised he was different from the Jewish kids he went to school with, when little things – like letting his Jewish friends call him “Yossi” instead of “Yousef” – didn’t seem to matter much.
“It's weird to look at it from now, when I'm grown up, because when I was a child, I didn't care,” Sweid says. “Only when I grew up, I began to understand these things, like how Palestinians study only about their Palestinian heritage, and Israelis study only about their Jewish heritage, but nobody studies the real connection between them, because each side wants to prove how they claim the land.”
Sweid, whose family was among the “Palestinians of ‘48” who remained within the newly established Israeli borders after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, says he has always felt privileged compared to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, having benefited from Israeli citizenship and the advantages that come with it.
"We always feel a little bit like traitors from both sides; we're traitors to the Palestinians because we don't go through checkpoints every day, we don't have bombs outside, we are not in a war,” says Sweid. “And to the Jews, of course, we can never criticise anything about the Israeli government because we’re expected to just be grateful that we’re accepted in the country, so it’s like, ‘Oh, I should shut up and not say anything.’
"And until recently, from both sides it feels like you're a traitor if you believe in peace, because ‘there is no peace with monsters,’” Sweid says. “So with this show we wanted actually to show that we are living between the river and the sea and that's what we want, we don't want it to be for only one or the other.”
Yousef Sweid in 'Between the River and the Sea', running at ZOO Southside at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Photo: Ute Langkafel).[Missing Credit]
Sweid has been performing the show at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin since April, a venue that has given his message – a voice that speaks for both Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians – a platform despite Germany’s stringent approach to anything deemed anti-Israel. Berlin is also the place where Sweid is raising his two mixed-heritage Arab-Jewish children, a place where he says they are “growing up without the need to explain themselves, like I did.”
But anyone who sees Between the River and the Sea will undoubtedly understand: Sweid loves the country in which he was born and bred. Perhaps it is out of this love that he is finally speaking about the conflict after years of staying silent, fearful of upsetting one side or the other.
"Because I'm an Arab but also Israeli and I have a Jewish family, I feel obligated to talk about it at some point,” says Sweid. "The Israeli government is doing so many bad things for the Jewish people – I feel that I can't say it because I'm an Arab and I'm also Palestinian, but I'm afraid for my kids, and for my Jewish friends in Israel, and my sister, who’s married to a Jewish man. I feel like this government is destroying their future in Israel.”
Sweid’s unique position – as an Arab Israeli, as the father of Jewish children, as someone who has refused the siren call of hatred towards the “other” – gives his Fringe show that rare, original perspective on an issue so many people think they’ve heard every last story about. I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard one quite like Sweid’s.
As for those Jewish Fringe goers whose instinct might be to avoid a show with a title like Between the River and the Sea, Sweid nods understandingly, smiling in his gentle manner.
“I think the emphasis should be on ‘between’,” he says. “Living between the river and the sea, living between Jews and Arabs, living between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s about finding the bridge in between those cultures and seeing a deeper point of view.”
Between the River and the Sea is on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until 13 August at the Studio at ZOO Southside. The show will then return to the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin through September and October.
