Seven Jewish Children –A play for Gaza

Short Play, By Carole Churchill
The Guardian has decided to show on its website a performance by actor Jennie Stoller of the controversial (performable by) one woman short play, written hastily in response to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza, earlier this year.

The play, just nine minutes long, is a series of seven short vignettes, of an anxious Jewish (grand)mother agonising over; what and what not to tell, and how and how not to explain; to her (grand)daughter, events in Jewish life over seven decades from the 1930s to the present.

It starts pre-Holocaust with a family in hiding and a mother unsure how to explain to her daughter their predicament so that she will keep quiet and not give away their location, but without causing terror in the child. It ends with a mother deeply disturbed by the recent campaign in Gaza, but determined to Justify it to her daughter through an unjustified demonisation of the Palestinians hemmed in Gaza. In between, we have a mother and daughter who have no other family left, settlers in the newly declared state of Israel living in a displaced Arab family’s home and an Israeli mother sharing in the triumph of the Six Day War.

Artistically, the play is poetic, tightly written and powerful, giving it definite artistic merit.

However it also produces a powerful propaganda message: a picture of a people who moved swiftly from being victims to oppressors and we are forced to draw comparisons between Israeli Jews since 1948 and the Nazis. We are encouraged to see Israelis, in a pseudo-psychological way, as damaged, abused children who have grown up to become abusers themselves.

A slight shift of balance in the text and it could form a worthwhile basis for introspection and thought in any Jewish, Israeli or wider discussion group. However, in its crude form, the play with its grotesque sentiments and historical inaccuracies , conjures up unfair images of a people culpable of terrible crimes and yet in denial and defiance of them.

Clearly, Churchill intended to use the play to instil Jewish guilt and Gentile anger. It is provocative inflammatory and bordering on anti-Semitic; and therefore it was either brave or sad of Jennie Stoller, who is presumably Jewish, to have performed the part for the Guardian.