Point / Counterpoint: A history of Israel in ten minutes

Counterpoint to:

My play is not anti-Semitic
"I find it extraordinary that, because my play talks about the killing of children in Gaza, I am accused of reviving the medieval blood libel that Jews killed Christian children and consumed their blood."

Caryl Churchill
The Independent (London)
February 21, 2009

Consider the movie Gone with the Wind, the American civil war saga, or Lawrence of Arabia, about the legendary British officer who led the Arab revolt against the Turks. They may be great movies, but they are long - more than three hours. Some people don't have the patience or the desire to sit through hours of storytelling. 

Such was my old friend, Dr. Yossi Shiftan, who had a magnificent video library that contained many of the great classics, several of which were only about ten minutes long. Yossi could show you his edited version of High Noon with just the gunfight so you wouldn't have to watch Garry Cooper and Grace Kelly arguing over whether they should get out of town. In his shortened version of Gone with the Wind you could watch Atlanta burn to the ground without having to follow the events that led to the destruction of the city.

Yossi once explained that the reason he edited his movies so drastically was that he didn't need all the details. He wasn't interested in the plot, he said, he only wanted to watch the exciting parts.

I was reminded of Yossi Shiftan's video library when I first heard about Caryl Churchill's short "play", Seven Jewish Children, which is billed as "a ten-minute history of Israel". Churchill skips the details and goes straight to her favorite parts. One or two minutes are dedicated to the Holocaust, and the rest - some eight or nine minutes - are devoted to the ostensible villainy of the Jews against the Palestinians, with a lingering morbid emphasis on the death of small children.

Such is the history of Israel according to Caryl Churchill. For her, the details are a distraction - she only needed a few suitable fragments to make her point: the Jews, who suffered in the Holocaust, have gradually taken on the form of their tormentors.

Admission is free but the audience is encouraged to donate to a Palestinian fund. The encouragement of donations is not discretionary; it is a condition of Churchill's for anyone who wishes to stage her "play".

Churchill defends her creation in The Independent: "I find it extraordinary that, because the play talks about the killing of children in Gaza, I am accused of reviving the medieval blood libel that Jews killed Christian children and consumed their blood." 

But in the jumbled litany that Churchill puts in the mouths of Jewish parents discussing what their young daughters should be told, she peppers their conversation with numerous references to dead Palestinian girls and babies. The Palestinians are "filth", explains one parent , and "they want their children killed to make people sorry for them." And while the Jews are proud of the Israeli army, they have no sorrow for the Palestinians and their dead babies and children who "did it to themselves", and "we won't stop killing them till we're safe".

Churchill characterizes the Jews as laughing when they see the dead Palestinian policemen "who are animals." They tell their daughters that they "wouldn't care if we wiped them [the Palestinians] out" even if subsequently "the world would hate us" because the Jews are "better haters." "We're the chosen people," a Jewish parents declares. "I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel?" And all that the parent feels is happiness that it's not his/her own daughter.

Churchill has a definite advantage in the confused flow of words that constitutes her play. It enables her to argue that her critics do not understand her true intent. She is not anti-Semitic, she claims, and she offers the most common contemporary defense: she is only being accused of anti-Semitism because she is criticizing Israel.

If all criticism of Israel were anti-Semitic, then all Jews would be anti-Semites - most especially the Jews of Israel, where harsh self-criticism is a national pastime. Widely respected New York Times columnist Tom Friedman articulated just when criticism of Israel crosses the line: "Singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction - out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East - is anti-Semitic."

So what is the message in Seven Jewish Children? Churchill explains that her play "shows the difficulty of explaining violence to children." That's like saying that Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice shows the difficulty in guaranteeing loans. There's more to it than that.

Churchill admits that her ten-minute history of Israel is, of course, incomplete. "It leaves out a great deal that is favorable to Israel" she says, "and a great deal that is unfavorable." That sounds fair, almost objective. But search as I may, I could not find any favorable bits that she had left in.

Let's call a spade a spade. Caryl Churchill has staged a piece of brazen Palestinian propaganda at the Royal Court Theater in London, and it is her right to do so. The Israel-Palestinian conflict is being conducted on many fronts of which the media is but one, and Churchill, who is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, is doing her bit for her side.

But what is intolerable is the virulent racist undertone in Churchill's offering. The play is not called Seven Israeli Children, it is called Seven Jewish Children, and the demonization, which would be bad enough had it been leveled solely at the Jewish state, is in fact leveled at Jews in general. It would be difficult to ignore the similarity between Churchill's obsession with the death of children (which is undoubtedly horrific) and which she imputes to the Jewish state, and the age-old anti-Semitic blood libel about Jews craving the blood of Gentile children.

If a similar play called Seven Muslim Children had been staged in London, there would have been a deafening roar in the media, angry demonstrations in the streets, permanent pickets outside the theater, and calls to ostracize the author, all of which would have been justified. In fact, the associate director of the Royal Court Theater, Ramin Gray, has stated that he would be reluctant to stage a play critical of Islam. 

Well, in this author's humble opinion, there is nothing wrong in staging a play critical of Jews, Muslims, or any other people, as long as you avoid any manner of incitement to racial hatred. The free expression of ideas and opinions, no matter how outlandish, is a cornerstone of any free society. But Churchill has gone beyond the pale. Britain's mainstream Jewish community and those to whom human rights in Britain are dear, should have reacted to Churchill's play as if it had 'Muslim' in its title.