It has long been the case that if anyone was going to bring first-hand nuance and complexity to a subject about which the loudest voices drip with simplicity and hatred, it was going to be a Palestinian, if only because it is difficult to imagine an Israeli voice being given a stage at a major theatre without attracting calls for a boycott and vehement or violent protest.
But wait. This one-man autobiographical play, which ran at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer, is actually written and performed by an Israeli. Although Yousef Sweid now lives in Berlin where his play was first seen at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, he is an Israeli Arab born and raised in Haifa, though he prefers the term Israeli Palestinian.
These facts suggest we are in for an evening of complexity many anti-Israel protesters in the West might find difficult to hear. And we are. For instance the very fact that Sweid’s two children (by two Israeli Jewish ex-wives) are Jewish (and Palestinian of course) conveys a narrative that is deeply inconvenient to those who wish to view all Israelis as oppressors. Any who turn up expecting a Caryl Churchill-style piece of agitprop in the manner of Seven Jewish Children will be disappointed.
Which is not say that oppression is not felt by Sweid. A mini-lecture on where some Palestinian communities live – in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians of Gaza “who are...destroyed” – is brimful of pain. His father Sliman, one of many characters conjured by Sweid during his hour-long show, regularly reminds him of his identity.
“You are not a Palestinian Israeli!” he admonishes his son. “You are a Palestinian with an Israeli passport!”
Yet every moment in this show, which is well directed by Sweid’s co-writer Isabella Sedlak, where the maximalist protest position about Israeli “tyranny” might be expected, something more complex and human emerges, and often, something more funny too.
The Palestinian diaspora extends to Canada where his father now lives, his lecture informs us. And then comes the kicker. “Not because the Zionists were hunting him…he had to leave Israel because of tax fraud,” he says.
Then there are the Palestinians like Sweid and his family “who weren’t kicked out after the Israeli state was established”. We lost Palestine “but we got Israeli IDs and passports. We are quiet citizens, parents, workers and taxpayers to the Israeli state… who can participate in Israeli elections; vote and be voted for. Technically I can be the next prime minister of Israel!”
This is not exactly the “apartheid state” cry heard at every anti-Israel protest on the streets of London and Sweid’s home city of Berlin. Or in protests such at the Globe Theatre where Sweid performed for Israel’s Habima Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice in 2012.
The actor unfurls one of the many protest banners he has collected over the years. He has collected many over the years. This one is from that performance at The Globe. “Israeli Apartheid! Leave the stage!” it says.
I remember the press night well. It was a tense evening. Anti-Israel protesters had infiltrated the audience. Before curtain-up the theatre’s then artistic director Dominic Dromgoole pleaded with everyone to remember that they were “not watching policy-makers but artists” who were “here to tell a story”. But in the fevered lead-up to the opening there had been calls to cancel Habima from leading artists with apparently little knowledge about the theatre company other than it was Israeli.
One such was The Globe’s theatrically talented but politically challenged previous (to Dromgoole) artistic director Mark Rylance.
“Protesters kept screaming ‘You spill blood’ while I was on stage,” remembers Sweid. His next banner is in Hebrew from an Israeli “right-wing” protest who also wanted to ban them when Sweid was performing at the Arab-Hebrew Theatre in Jaffa. “Stop The Islamic Terror” the banner says. All this is in a show with spoken in English and, as befits an Israeli Palestinian, with passages in Hebrew and Arabic.
Sweid declares that his production is not even about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the much more personal subject of his second divorce. He wants to continue to bring his young daughter up in Berlin but his wife wants to return with her to Israel – the place suggested by this show’s provocative title. “Seriously? That’s the best environment to raise our Arab-Jewish-Palestinian-Israeli kid?” You can’t keep an urgent issue down.
October 7 and Gaza rips through the evening and rips up Sweid’s two closest friendships. One of over 40 years is with Daniel, an Israeli Jew. The other is with a fellow Palestinian actor, Salma. Both want Sweid to take sides. But Sweid cannot be anything other than what he is, a “two-times divorced Israeli Palestinian stuck in the middle”.
His 15-year-old son from his first marriage has been raised in Berlin without what Sweid sees as the oppression of identity politics. On the boy’s return from a family visit to Israel, Sweid overhears him talking to Mia, an Israeli girl who took a shine to him.
Mia: What do you mean you’re Arab? But you’re Israeli.
Son: Right.
Mia: Are you Hamas?
Son: I don’t know. Abba, are we Hamas?
Not everything Sweid says is beyond challenge. The conversation between Mia, the girl from Tel Aviv and his son is hard to credit and feels manufactured for comic effect.
Would she really ask the son if he’s Hamas? Would he really not know who they are?
However, this is still an evening that dismantles assumptions held by those with the loudest prejudices.
And the group I imagine being most discomforted by this play is those British, white middle-class often keffiyeh-wearing protesters who cry From the River to the Sea – the phrase which the show’s title pointedly adjusts – and who see in Israel and its ten million people nothing but a stain to be erased.
Sweid’s Israel, for all its tensions, includes memories of nurseries with Arab and Jewish children, peace initiatives in schools, playing basketball with his adult Jewish Israeli friends, and shows just how bigoted they are.
Between the River and the Sea
Royal Court Theatre, Upstairs
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