Palestinians and Israelis in the Theatre

Palestinians and Israelis in the Theatre

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to: Naomi Paz, without whose skill, devotion and painstaking assistance it would not have been possible to produce this issue. Siham Daoud, for her invaluable assistance in interviewing Emil Habibi and Bushra Karaman Dan Urian

Introduction Dan Urian Haifa University (Translated by Naomi Paz)

Any discussion that incorporates two such very different cultural institutions as the Jewish-Israeli theatre and the Palestinian theatre, must of necessity entail separate approaches, while at the same time also encompass the inherent ties between the two cultures. The Jewish-Israeli theatre is a complex and developed system in which the dispute with the Palestinians constitutes just one of the important components in its repertoire; while the Palestinian theatre, both within and outside of Israel, is still in the initial stages of consolidation. For this reason, I have chosen to begin by relating to the Palestinian theme as it appears in the Jewish-Israeli theatre; while in the second part of this introduction, I shall attempt to characterise the Palestinian theatre in general, and to show that in the last twenty years it has chosen to present the dispute with the Israelis as its primary theme. The reader will find a more in-depth discussion of the subjects touched upon here in the articles that follow (particularly those of Reuven Snir, Dan Urian, Shimon Levy and Avraham Oz).

The Palestinian in the Israeli Theatre The image of the Arab has slowly begun to occupy an important place in the Hebrew theatre, particularly within the last decade. A similar process is also taking place in the Israeli cinema and literature. One of the signs of this phenomenon is the integration of Arab writers and other artists into the Israeli culture, including its theatre. Among these are the writers Emil Habibi, Siham Daoud, Salman Natur and Anton Shammas. They are joined by such artists as Assad Azi and Isam Abu Shakra, as well as playwrights, directors and, mainly, film and stage actors such as Makram Khouri, Yusuf Abu Warda, Salim Dao, Salwah Nakara, Muhammad Bakri, and many others. Hebrew translations of Palestinian literary and dramatic works have also been staged in the Jewish-Israeli theatre. The beginning of this process of “absorption” of the Arab into the Hebrew drama and Jewish-Israeli theatre was slow and hesitant. Between 1911–1948 Arab characters appear in 17 plays and several short sketches, most of which were never staged. Between 1948–1967, 26 theatrical texts, including several satirical or purely entertaining shows, related to Arabs in some way, although only a minority of them actually contained Arab characters, and all of these were only minor roles. An important shift in direction occured between 1973– 1982,

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during which period Arab characters appeared in 29 plays that were staged in the Israeli theatres; most of these characters played focal roles that turned them and the problem that they were representing into the major theme of the play. The culmination of this process occurred between 1982–1993, when Arab characters could be found in over 100 of the plays staged in the Israeli theatre, for the main part representing the Palestinian side in the dispute, Did this increase in what might be termed “the Arab theme” indicate an attempt at dialogue between the two nations, at least on the part of the Jews? Is there a connection between the theatrical representation and the extra-theatrical reality? At first glance, the answer would appear to be in the negative; and it would even seem that quite a gap exists between actual Jewish-Arab relationships and their intensive portrayal on stage. Various surveys and studies that examined the attitude of the Jewish majority to the Arab minority reveal an alienation, and in recent years, an increased hostility. Sami Smooha describes the majority-minority relationship in Israel, against the background of the security situation, as founded upon “basic distrust”. The Arab minority in Israel, according to this description, is “of the unassimilated type”; it wishes to retain a separate existence—to preserve its own identity and culture, “and it has no intentions of becoming assimilated within the Jewish majority.” The Jews, on their part, are interested in maintaining this division. Smooha emphasizes that the State of Israel has “an intolerant Jewish majority”, and that the views of the Jewish public are reminiscent of those of the white population in the U.S. towards the blacks, up until the 1950s, before the struggle for equal rights. This is an environment that does not encourage closeness; on the contrary, it delineates clear borders between Arab and Jew (Smooha, 1983 p. 96). In the following I shall attempt to provide an explanation for this “discrepancy” between the generally perceived image of the Arab in Israeli society, and the intensification over the last twenty years of presenting the Arab image in the Israeli theatre. It is the dispute between Arabs and Jews, that has been going on for about 100 years, that has sundered the Zionist Utopian dream. The conflict, suppressed in the past and termed “The Arab Question” (later becoming the “Dispute” and among peace-seekers “Co-existence”), has constituted one of the most important themes in the Hebrew arts in Israel since its inception. Despite the initial repression of the subject, it later, particularly from the 1980s on, became a central theme in all the arts. The theatrical texts dealing with Arab subjects include many expressions of the wish to solve the conflict, as well as the repressed fears and concerns of their authors and the social group to which they belong and at whom their plays are targeted. During the 1970s artists, particularly in the theatre, tended to present a desire for conciliation with the Arabs in Israel, through the staging of “optimistic” plays that did not openly display the hidden apprehensions that accompanied those Jews who came into contact with Arabs. However, a careful reading of the “Co-existence” plays and a study of their reception reveals that the tension between the desire for conciliation and the fear and aversion of the “Other” can none the less be found, even if only barely hinted at, in these texts too. Most of the plays that present Arabs in the Israeli theatre are political texts that use the characters to deliver ideological claims. Occasionally an Arab character is written into a text in which the playwright almost fails to relate to him and his problems but, rather, deals instead with his own difficulties as a Jew in a new land and a new society undergoing the process of creation. In general, in all the plays in which an Arab character appears, he is subordinated to the ideological or political statement, that at times relates to him and his problems while at other times he merely constitutes an icon on the map of Jewish-Israeli ideological consciousness. A reading of these texts therefore, as well as watching them performed on

INTRODUCTION 3

stage, requires an awareness of the political claims of the period in which they were staged as well as the deciphering of coded statements emerging from the particular combination of theatrical components. In texts dealing with the “Arab Question” the playwrights relate to the reality of the period during which the plays were performed, and in this respect these plays are documents that reflect their criticism of the extra-theatrical social reality from within which they have presented their perspective. Occasionally, due to the desire to react swiftly to what is happening around, plays are staged that tend to be blunt, demonstrative and even stereotypic; but even such texts possess a documentary importance, representing the desires and fears of an important sector of Jewish Israeli society. The majority of plays, however, do not “reflect” reality as it is, but, rather, the wish of its creators to take a stand and attempt to influence. The repertoire of the Israeli theatre, in this respect, is one of the components of this reality; a factor that determines and fashions a historical reality alongside other factors: political, social, economic, religious and spiritual. Another aspect of the theatre, linked to its attitude to political life, is “the public character of drama”, as Georg Lukacs characterised the circumstances of staging a play by actors and its unmediated reception by an audience in a public place (Lukacs, 1969 p. 150); in which respect it is similar to many other political performances. In this connection, the Israeli theatre is perceived by its audience as a high cultural activity: its contents are of importance and it is presented in well-defined locations (even “holy” ones such as “The Temple of Theatre” in the case of the Haifa Municipal Theatre), and generally before a well-educated audience. The combination of all these elements explains the importance of the “discussion” carried out in the Israeli theatre, of various problematic political matters such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the power of its possible effect on society. The Israeli cultural system—the arts, music, dance, and literature—is a system that “matches” its political and ideological perception; particularly in regard to the “Arab Question”. The creators and their target audience belong to a liberal social group, who share similar political beliefs. There are almost no representatives of “nationalist” leanings to be found in the theatre, contending the need to settle the dispute with the Arabs. A similar trend is found in most of the Hebrew literature, that comprises a “sister” art to the Hebrew theatre and which continues to furnish texts for adaptation to the stage; and in the Israeli cinema, whose rival/competitor links with the theatre are complex and interesting, and in which the Arab theme makes a very similar appearance. Such affinity is also found in dance, the plastic arts and music. In order to perceive the theatre’s position within the general artistic framework, with its writer, artist, musician and cinema partners, we shall compare the findings from the theatrical productions with other artistic works—literature, cinema and dance—that also present the Arab theme (in particular in the articles by Nurit Gertz and Eli Rozik, and the opening remarks in the article by Shimon Levy). The examination of a repertoire—in which the incorporation into its canon of this particular subject has been slow, furtive and hesitant—demands an especially careful approach. It is significant that until 1985 no Arab characters were presented on the “main” stage and their theatrical “existence” was mainly restricted to the fringe theatre. The Israeli theatre employed several strategies to circumvent social obstacles in presenting its position in regard to the Arab theme; these included the choice of a suitable genre, such as through the “back door” of satire. For several decades, therefore, the Arab was portrayed theatrically as a comic figure. This distancing from the “serious” genres led to his representation as a character of lesser importance, mainly due to the secondary status given to discussion of the “Arab

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Question” by Israeli society in the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, with the Palestinian dispute having become a central issue in Israeli discourse, the portrayal of the Arab as a legitimate theatrical figure reveals the change from a stereotypic and ethnocentric approach to one that recognises the “Other” and is attempting to come to terms with his humanity. Another strategy employed by the theatre to introduce the Arab subject is that of casting an Arab actor, whose “Arabness” is familiar to the audience, in a “universal” play that anchors the text in the Israeli reality. An additional indirect strategy for presenting the problematics of the Jewish-Arab relationship is one which chooses a “classical” text from another culture, and translates it through theatrical production into the Israeli reality. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, staged by the Haifa Municipal Theatre (1985) (and dealt with in Shifra Schonmann’s article), appears on the surface to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Arab subject. However, it became one of the most important plays regarding the Jewish-Arab theme due to its adaptation/translation into Hebrew and Arabic by an Israeli Arab, Anton Shammas, and its direction by Ilan Ronen, who provided an Israeli-Palestinian theatrical interpretation: to which purpose he used a tendentious casting—with the master being played by a Jewish-Israeli actor and the tramps by Arab-Israeli actors. The set too was completely transformed and located in an Israeli building site, and the characters’ costumes were designed as Arab labourers’ clothing, along with many other similar details. An additional political significance lay in the play being staged on Stage 2 in Wadi Salib in Haifa, in the heart of the Arab neighbourhood. Performances with elements such as adaptation, casting, theatrical space, set design, props, costumes, or music—all together or in any combination—leading to interpretations that link the text with the Jewish-Arab dispute, have commanded an important place in the Israeli theatre. In the 1990s there has been a sharp “discrepancy” between the openly following the intifada,1 and the growth in the number of plays in which the growing display of hostility shown by the Jews towards the Palestinians, mainly Israeli Arab and the Palestinian appear in central roles. An explanation for this apparent contradiction lies in the character of the collaborators in the Israeli theatre: playwrights, actors, designers and audience. The Israeli plays throw light on the attitude of a particular social group towards the Israeli Arabs and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The Israeli playwrights (Yehoshua Sobol, Miriam Kaney, Hillel Mittelpunkt, Yoseph Mundi, Daniella Carmi, Sami Michael, and others) belong to an influential minority among a sector of the Jewish population whose attitude to the Arabs is openly positive and seeks co-existence. These playwrights write for directors and actors who in the main share their opinions, and for a very familiar audience with which they clarify problems as well as consolidate positions—some specific and others inferred from the text. Research by Elihu Katz and others, from 1970 and from 1990, characterizes the Israeli theatre-goers as well-educated and mostly of western origin. 2 In 1970 Katz and Gurevitch also examined the attitude of the Jewish population towards the Arabs, and concluded that “the higher the level of education, the greater the positivity expressed towards the Arabs.” (Katz & Gurevich, 1973 p. 333) The attitude of the Jews towards the Arabs underwent important changes, both for better and for worse, from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s. However, there is room to suppose that the similarity between the characteristics of the Israeli theatre-goer and those of the Jewish population whose declared attitude to the Arabs was a positive one, is not coincidental: they are one and the same group or, at least, there is a great overlap between them. This group includes the Israeli playwrights and other theatre artists, and it is for this group that they write those plays in which the Arab figure appears, together

INTRODUCTION 5

with the problems that he presents for the Israeli Jews. There are, nevertheless, certain reservations regarding the apparently optimistic approach of the Israeli theatre towards the “Arab Question”, which is an impression gained from statistical data on the growing number of plays in which Arab figures appear. In the performances themselves, however, the Arab representation is not only a positive one, and the Arab character, generally indirectly, tends to be assigned certain negative and repugnant characteristics that bring the text closer to the actual experience of the disputed reality. As I have already noted, a great part of the Israeli theatre audience also relates to the theatre as a stage upon which social and political issues are discussed. These spectators therefore frequently choose to attend a particular play for reasons of its subject matter, in order to “strengthen the link with Israeli society”, (Hass et al., 1992) which is why the theatres increasingly present original Israeli plays, that in recent years have occupied about half the repertoire, (Weitz, 1990) and in which an important place is filled by the Arab theme. Two of the social roles of the theatre, as conceived by its artistic creators and audience alike, complement one another: the “reflection” of Israeli reality in various ways; and theatre as an active intervention in the social and political reality. While the Israeli audience may perceive the theatrical text as a prediction of reality, many playwrights, on their side, use the play as an instrument with which to make a political statement; particularly in those plays featuring Arab characters or presenting the “Arab Question”. Hadassah Hass and others, in research into the reactions of Israeli audiences to original Israeli plays, noted the frequent occurrence of the expression “to learn about” among spectators who attend plays in which the Jewish-Arab conflict is the main issue, (Hass et al., 1992 p. 16) thus indicating the common denominator among most of the texts dealing with the “Arab Question”: their ideological intentions. Examples of this can be found in the many love stories between two “representatives” of the two nations (in over 30 of the plays staged in the last 20 years). The Israeli playwright, as too the Israeli audience, is well aware that intimate relations and love affairs between Arabs and Jews do not reflect the general extra-theatrical reality; and especially not at the frequency with which they have been presented in the theatre in recent decades. The playwright chooses them and the audience “permits” their theatrical realisation because these are exceptional stories and provide a powerful stimulus for a discussion of the relationships of Israeli-Jews with Israeli-Arabs. At first glance no real change appears to have taken place in the Arab image in Hebrew drama and then in the Israeli theatre over the last 80 years. In most of the texts from 1912 until 1994 the same dualism can be found, whose source lies in the attraction/repulsion of the Jew towards the “otherness” of the Arab: an image that is perceived on the one hand as noble and generous, and on the other hand as savage, volatile and violent; along with other contradictory elements that illuminate similar attitudes. Such Arab figures were already to be found in 1912, in the first play in which they appear, Alla Karim by L.A. Arieli, and which was followed by dozens of other similar characters in other plays. The play would occasionally incorporate these contradictory identifying traits within one and the same role, while at other times they were “divided” up among several characters, in particular the stereotypes of the exploited Arab and the aggressive “nationalist” one, who appear in many plays. Concomitantly, many changes occurred in the way the Arab was represented in the theatre, including the attitude towards the dispute. From 1948 until the 1970s, almost no Arab figures were to be found on the Hebrew stage. Nathan Shacham’s play They’ll Arrive Tomorrow (1949) (dealt with in the article by Hannan Hever) is exceptional in overtly revealing the avoided subject—that

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the “Other” will arrive tomorrow. The beginning of a process of change took place at the end of the 1970s, after the Yom Kippur war and signing of the peace agreement with Egypt, that contributed to the normalisation of the Arab image as well as his liberation in the theatre from the ghetto of comedy and satire in which he had been imprisoned for so long. It brought him via documentary theatre to a more elaborate and detailed depiction—as a figure of equally valid humanity as the Jew. The image of the Palestinian from the territories underwent a similar process during the 1980s, at the end of which and at the beginning of the 1990s, he too was finally portrayed as a “realistic” figure. The position of the Arab in the dramatis personae of the plays also changed: no longer relegated to a secondary role, he appears as a central figure in many plays. These changes were aided by the casting of Arab actors in Arab roles; or as characters who, through being played by well-known Arab actors, relocated the plays of Chekhov, Strindberg, Beckett or Fugard in the Jewish-Arab conflict. The discrepancy that I noted at the beginning of this introduction—between the disputed and hostile reality between the Jews and the Arabs, and the way in which this dispute has been presented in the Israeli theatre, with its profusion of texts dealing with the subject—is not as great as it would appear to be from the repertoire statistics. The majority of playwrights, as I have already mentioned, belong to a sector wishing to settle the dispute, despite their apprehensions regarding a reality in which there are few causes for conciliation and many difficulties and obstacles. The theatrical text does attempt to allay fears through the structure of its plot and by a generally sympathetic depiction of the Arab characters and the casting of their roles with respected Arab actors. However, reading the texts, or watching their performance, will often reveal concealed expressions of fear and pessimism. The common “contradiction” is that between the spirit of conciliation of the text and its efforts to present the positivity of Arab characters and their relations with the Jews—and its almost always pessimistic ending. This pattern is repeated too many times to be merely coincidental. While almost all the plays that deal with the Arab dispute would like to find a peaceful solution, most of them do not see this as possible and the end of the plays waver between open-ended, blocked, and the pessimistic. This is particularly prominent in love stories, that always end in either forced or voluntary separation. Thus, despite the Israeli theatre appearing to contradict, with its “naive optimism”, the attitude of the Israeli majority towards the Arabs and the “Arab Question”, on the “repressed” level the texts contain many expressions of apprehension and rejection of the “Other” that complement the matching of what is represented on stage with the extra-theatrical perception of the disputed reality. The Israeli theatre displays a combination of attraction, apprehension and reservations regarding different aspects of the Arab image. Several of the love stories staged in the Hebrew theatre express the fear of an apparently powerful rival who might appropriate the place of those Jews whose power has diminished. There are reservations too regarding the double culture: the Arab, who has left his village, will study at the university and compete on equal terms with the Jew, and may even defeat him (a subject with which I deal in my article). From the early 1970s, but mainly at the end of the 70s and in the 80s, the Israeli playwright saw the rejection of the Arab and his restriction to menial labour under shameful conditions of exploitation, as the main reason for the Palestinian uprising. The image of the exploited Arab was no longer a nostalgic or ideological reminder of the belief in “Hebrew labour”, that had constituted an important principle in the ethos of the Jewish settlers prior to the establishment of the State, but was now grasped as a materialization of the alarming dependency; and as a social threat that could be greatly damaging to the social and economic structure of the State of Israel

INTRODUCTION 7

and endanger the security of its Jewish inhabitants. This image also embodied one of the typical fears of an immigrant society—that of “desertion” by the Jews; their abandonment of the land and their country and their replacement by the Arabs. Several of the playwrights make a connection between two traumas suffered by the Israeli Jews: the burden of past memories of the holocaust; and the burden of current and future conflict with the Palestinians. This connection is used to counter the “culture of anxiety” that seeks to justify the superior-separationist attitude towards the Arabs; as well as by the fear that the occupation will harm the moral image of the young Israeli and convert it into that of a jack-booted soldier with all its fearful connotations. In the wake of the intifada (December 1987) additional changes began to occur in the Arab representation in the theatre. He was no longer an Israeli-Arab but in many texts had become a Palestinian from the territories. Research by Kalman Benyamini (1990) reveals that young Israeli-Jews were differentiating between Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, and that they perceived the Palestinian rebels as negative and frightening. During this same period in the early 1990s, in accordance with Benayamini’s findings, the theatre revealed strong expressions of fear of the Palestinians, particularly among young playwrights, in plays that present Arab society as a violent one. This is no longer the fear of the unknown, of the distant, of the anonymous and highly stereotypical “Other”, such as was found in the plays up to the 1970s; nor is it the concealed fear of the anti-stereotype of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is, rather, the fear of a figure that has become closer to the Jew—is familiar to him—and with whom it is now necessary, despite the many difficulties, to reach conciliation. One of the questions that can be asked is about the extent of the contribution of the Jewish-Israeli theatre to the co-existence with the Israeli Arabs and a possible solution to the dispute with the Palestinians. There are many who tend to disparage any possible ideological influence by the theatre on its audience; for the theatre would appear to be a place in which “imaginary worlds” are portrayed, which have no effect whatsoever on the progress of reality. Such an approach does not take into account the unique conditions under which theatre is watched. In general, it can be said that a spectator at a theatrical performance finds him/herself simultaneously within the world of the stage and outside of it. He/she may therefore adopt a critical stand towards what is being shown on the stage both during and shortly after the performance, and connect its contents with the extra-theatrical social and political referents. This is particularly true in the Israeli fringe theatre, which has provided the framework for most of the plays dealing with the Israeli-Arab dispute. We can add to this the various facts already mentioned: that the theatre in Israel is an institution conceived by its makers and audiences alike as an arena for discussion of difficult dilemmas; as well as the consistent rise in the number of plays dealing with the “Arab Question” and later (from the 1980s) the “Palestinian Question”. All these factors taken together validate the assumption that the Arab image as presented in the Israeli theatre, representing a wish to settle the dispute, has contributed to the public discussion by emphasizing the strong desire of a group of Jewish-Israeli spectators for conciliation with the Arabs. The contribution of the theatre was especially important in the years during which a solution appeared to be far off; and which for part of the Israeli society and its leaders it was perceived as less important than the political price that would have to be paid. In this respect, the theatrical texts that staged the Palestinian problem in the 1980s, constituted an artistic avant-garde that urged and demanded the beginning of that conciliation process with the Palestinians in which we are involved today.

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The Palestinian Theatre A discussion of the Palestinian theatre raises the problem of geographical, political and cultural definitions: Are the Israeli-Arab theatre and the Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip two different theatres? Or the same theatre with different priorities? Since the onset of the intifada, has there been a strong change in direction towards a “Palestinization” in the cultural identity of Israel’s Arab citizens, and if so, in what way has this manifested itself? On the other hand, what has been the influence of Palestinian Israeli playwrights and actors on the theatre culture in the West Bank and Gaza strip? What are the links between this theatre and the Palestinian Diaspora? To these questions and others, it is difficult to find definitive answers, for they touch upon an ongoing process. In fact, a discussion of Palestinian theatre (if we adopt a common term for all those theatrical activities under debate here) is a discussion with a meagre, almost non-existent, historical background, a cloudy present, and a future with which we shall not occupy ourselves. Developments in the Palestinian Arab theatre prior to 1948 were mainly those of an amateur theatre, and it is not coincidental that its beginnings were reminiscent of the first experiments in creating a Hebrew theatre in Israel within the framework of schools and clubs. The War of Independence (1948) was, among other things, a cultural disaster for the Israeli Arabs. It acted as a death blow to the theatre that had only just begun to function, for the majority of the urban citizens who had been its creators and target audience, now became refugees. This was a blow from which it only began to recover in the 1970s. To a great extent the revival of theatrical activity was linked with the consequences of the 1967 war and, more particularly, the 1973 war. These wars opened borders and changed national images, subsequently strengthening the Israeli Arabs’ sense of Palestinian identity, mainly among the intelligentsia from whom the theatrical founders sprung and towards whom their works were directed. The theatre during the years between these wars was also an amateur theatre that functioned almost entirely without funding through the enthusiasm of such theatre devotees as Antoine Salach and Victor Kamar in the larger Arab towns, mainly Nazareth and Haifa. It staged a repertoire from other Arab theatres or adaptations of European or American plays. There were also several attempts initiated by Israeli institutions to cultivate a local Arab theatre—the General Workers’ Union sent the Arabic speaking Jewish actor Arieh Elias to Nazareth to establish a theatre troupe there. Another attempt, also temporarily supported by a governmental agency, the Ministry of Education and Culture, was the El-Nahid theatre. This theatre began as an amateur organization, then became a professional theatre within the framework of the Bet Hageffen Arab-Jewish centre in Haifa, and functioned as an independent theatre. The El-Nahid theatre, like other Palestinian troupes at the time faced many existential difficulties (which have changed little since then), due to lack of texts, lack of professional actors and, particularly, actresses, directors, an official unofficial censor, organizational problems and inadequate budget. The final productions of the El-Nahid theatre in fact comprised a culmination of its artistic activities and also provided a good indication regarding the future development of the Palestinian theatre. These performances gave public expression to subjects that had already been depicted much earlier in Palestinian prose writings: the Palestinian refugees; their eviction from the land and the settlement of Jews in the occupied territories; the restriction of civil and economic rights; criticism of the leadership, mainly that of the PLO; and a presentation of the ludicrous aspects of Arab-Israeli politics, particularly showing the Arab political wheeler-dealers as ridiculous figures. Jewish characters in these

INTRODUCTION 9

texts are mainly stereotypes, starting with The New Shylock by Ali Ahmed Bakhtir (1946), a play offering anti-Zionist propaganda, and up to The Ninth Wave by Riad Masarwi (1990) that presents Jewish settlers as ridiculed characters. The Palestinian self-portrait is also depicted with a self-criticism and irony whose caustic humour characterizes certain of the founding members of Palestinian theatre, of whom the most prominent is Emil Habibi (an interview with whom is presented in this journal). The beginning of the “professionalization” of the Palestinian theatre appears to be linked to the establishment of a theatre in East Jerusalem. The El-Hakawati theatre was founded by Francois Abu Salim in 1977. El-Hakawati combines Palestinian theatrical traditions such as the techniques of the Palestinian story-teller (El-Hakawati, El-Rawi), with European concepts, particularly from France, such as those of Ariane Mnouchkuie and Jerome Savary. The adoption of the storyteller technique in these plays was mainly a political/aesthetic act undertaken to indicate a cultural independence. The majority of the artists in El-Hakawati are young people who have probably never encountered such a storyteller. The messages of this theatre are mainly political. The first play, staged in 1977, was In the Name of the Father, the Mother and the Son, and it already dealt with two of the central themes—the Israeli conquest and criticism of Palestinian society. In the play, the Israeli occupation puts stress on the father and this in turn leads him to pressurize his wife and she consequently pressurizes her children. Several of the plays staged by El-Hakawati, such as Mahjoub, Mahjoub, A 1001 Nights of a Stone Thrower, and Ali the Galilean were staged in front of a Jewish audience, causing a great deal of professional and political interest and even hope for a future of mutually productive discussions. The El-Hakawati style was an innovation—a mixture of commedia dell’arte styles as conceived by Mnouchkine and Savary. The intense activity of this theatre in Israel and the West Bank over a period of 13 years produced a generation of actors, of whom several can be found in Israel today seeking their own theatrical paths. At the same time, over the last 20 years a group of Arab actors has emerged (including Makram Khouri, Yussef Abu-Warda, Muhammad Bakari, Salim Dao, Salwah Nakara, Bushra Karaman, Suhil Hadad, Khalifa Na’atur, and others) the majority of whom studied acting at the Israeli drama schools and integrated into the Hebrew theatre. These actors move between the Hebrew and the Palestinian theatre, cinema and television, and also present Palestinian plays on the Hebrew stage. For some of them there is a problem of identity, that occasionally finds its expression in their abandoning the Hebrew theatre for the difficult conditions of the Palestinian theatre, or in attempts to create their own theatre within an existing framework such as Bet Hageffen, in which Salim Dao and Makram Khouri have been attempting, with other actors, to establish a Palestinian theatre within the borders of Israel. The only attempt to date at a local theatrical expression that has both succeeded professionally and won public acclaim, other than plays staged by El-Hakawati, was Ja’abar’s Head, a play by Sa’d Allah Wannus, adapted and directed by Fouad Awad that won first prize at the Acre Festival of Alternative Theatre in 1989. The Palestinian theatre in Israel and the West Bank makes free use of Palestinian folk traditions. It sometimes appears to refer to them as well as to reject them in order not to fall, in the words of the artists, “into the folkloristic trap”. This theatre still lacks a professional recognised framework, which is perhaps best demonstrated by its staging of several plays which present a “theatre within a theatre” (most recently in Muhammad al-Maghut’s The Play Must Go On, directed by Makram Khouri, 1991), in which the characters are a troupe of wandering actors who make a casual living and have no permanent base. A strong sense of

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frustration and bitterness can be found in these Arab artistes, who must face a hard economic reality, a lack of theatrical infrastructure such as halls in which to perform, direct and indirect censorship and, most frustrating of all, a theatre which still attracts only a very small audience. The extratheatrical reality, and particularly the intifida, has brought the Palestinian theatre to an important crossroads. The intifida, which from its inception also possessed strongly theatrical symbols (graffiti, songs, recordings…and more than anything else an “invitation” to the participants to a violent conflict between the Palestinian David and the Hebrew Goliath, in front of the television cameras of the entire world), has almost completely silenced the Palestinian artists in the occupied territories and in Israel. It is typical that Riad Masarwi chose in The Ninth Wave to present the intifida in a scene that was without text, only gigantic slides depicting women and children facing soldiers. He explained “as a playwright I have no words to express the intifida; my play would shrink into nothing against reality.” (Avigal, 1990) Only two years later Masarwi attempted to come to terms as a director with the reality of the rebellion in the territories. In the first Arabic Monodrama Festival at Bet Hageffen (May, 1992), several plays revealed the crossroads at which the Palestinian theatre has stood in recent years. All were plays from a poor theatre with little freedom of choice, uninfluenced by the theories of Jerzy Grotowski and chosen due to the theatre’s budget constrictions. Some of the participants in the plays were “graduates” of El-Hakawati who are currently working within the Israeli borders. All the plays had relinquished the nostalgic/cultural element of the Palestinian storyteller and were adapted more to the real world of the playwright and his audience. Most of them dealt with political actualities. Makram Khouri’s performance of the monodrama The Electricity Pole by Antoin Shalhat, directed by Salim Dao, like so many other plays, also depicted a Palestinian’s situation. It was set on a stage decorated in the blue and white colours of the Israeli flag, with the dominant elements being a crushed automobile from which the driver’s seat had been removed, and an electricity pole on the verge of breaking, which the actor compared to the Palestinian national fate. This was a deliberate satire, a genre that enables the forceful presentation of real subjects without incurring the restrictions of either internal or external censorship; a satire that deals with the Palestinian’s constant requirement to submit, along with his sense of exploitation by the Jewish state, and the feeling of threat incurred by the increasing numbers of Jews emigrating from Russia to Israel. Shalhat does not restrict himself to these issues alone, but also lashes out at the Arab targets that lie between him and the Israeli government; against what he considers to be mealy-mouthed and hypocritical preaching for Jewish-Arab brotherly love by various organizations; and also against the Arab political parties, in particular the Arab Communist party whose main activities, according to the play, comprise demonstrations and slogan chanting. This play, like The Opsimist (or The Secret Life of Saeed the Ill-fated Pessoptimist) adapted from a novel by Emil Habibi and performed by Muhammad Bakri, reflects the sense of frustration experienced by the Palestinian in his refugee status both within and outside his home. One can observe the beginnings of the process of professionalization of the Palestinian theatre, as a part of the Israeli theatre, but also a striving for independence, by writers, actors and directors who are still seeking an audience. (For studies on the Palestinian theatre, see the articles by Reuven Snir and Ilan Pappe).

INTRODUCTION 11

Notes 1. Stereotypic hatred “that relates undiscriminatingly to all or most Arabs.” (Meisels & Gal, Hatred of Arabs among Jewish high-school pupils, Zichron Yaakov, The Israel Institute for Military Research, 1989. (in Hebrew)). 2. (Katz & Gurevitch, 1973 pp. 95–96, 102, 117, 120); the character of the theatre-goer has not undergone much change in the last 20 years, other than a closing of the gap between the second generation of those of eastern and western origin. (Hass et al., 1992, pp. 10–12) See for example, Giora Rahav and Shosh Weitz, Survey of Habima Subscribers, 1985 season (in Hebrew), the average spectator is 46 years of age, of Ashkenazi origin, holds an academic degree, and works in the “middle” professions: teaching, nursing, social work, etc.

References Avigal, S. (1990) Shylocks. Hadashot ( 28 December 1990 ). (in Hebrew). Benyamini, K. (1990) Political and Civil Views of Jewish Youth in Israel, Research Report, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology. (in Hebrew). Hass, H., Katz, E., Schiff, M. & Inbar, S. (1992) The cultural need. In: Leisure culture in Israel: Changes in types of cultural activity 1970–1990, Tel Aviv:Guttman Institute for Practical Social Research. (in Hebrew). Katz, E. & Gurevitch, M. (1973) Leisure culture in Israel: Types of entertainment and cultural need, Tel Aviv:Am Oved. (in Hebrew). Meisels, O. & Gal, R. (1979) hatred of Arabs among Jewish high-school pupils. Zichron Yaakov:The Israeli Institute for Military Research (unpubl.). (in Hebrew). Rahav, G. & Weitz, S. (1985) 1985 Survey of Habima Subscribers (unpubl.) (in Hebrew). Lukacs, G. (1969) The Historical Novel, Harmondsworth:Penguin, p. 150. Smooha, S. (1983) Tolerance of the Jewish majority in Israel towards the Arab minority—a comparative perspective. In Is it hard to be an Israeli?: qualitative and comparative aspects, Aluf Hareven (Ed.), p. 96. Jerusalem:Van Leer. (in Hebrew). Weitz, S. (1990) Summary of Activities of Public Institutions of the Theatrical Arts and Museums in Israel in 1988–89, Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Administration, Public Committee for Culture and Art, Information and Research Centre, p. 31. (in Hebrew).

12 D.URIAN

Oppressed Spaces Shimon Levy Tel Aviv University Dedicated to Haim Shoham, friend and scholar.

Ever since the beginning of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the 1880s, books, poems, plays and articles have been written about the Arabs who were already dwelling in the land when the Jewish settlers arrived. Few Hebrew writers and poets have not dedicated at least some of their work to a description of the Arab, his lifestyle or his encounters with Jews. Naturally, some of the Hebrew literature that dealt with Arabs was highly self-conscious of the encounter with an alien whom history and upheavals in the Jewish fate had caused to be present at a time and place when circumstances brought the Jews back to their homeland.1 The abrupt transition from the Diaspora to the promised land entailed a deliberate effort by the new immigrants to change their lifestyles according to their pioneering ideology and high level of motivation. This ideology acted as a filter through which the experiences of the new land were absorbed, if not always in their true colours. In any case, it is apparent that the re-awakening in the homeland occurred, as both cause and effect, at the height of a national identity crisis; each pioneer bore his own personal burden of a complete break with the past together with a hope to restore body, spirit and soul in the present and the future. Zionism, which at the time was developing from a religious yearning into a national and social movement, was able to ignore the fact that the homeland was already partially settled by sons of another nation. However, sensitive Hebrew writers soon began to recognize “the other” in literary form, a process that reflected the contradictions between national aspirations and individual encounters. The proliferation of modern Hebrew literature that deals with the subject of the Arabs does not, for the most part, deal with the Arabs as such, but is generally an attempt by the writers to reinforce themselves, and achieve some sort of national self-hood. The Arab in Hebrew literature often appears only as a fictional object or motif (with a realistic-concrete facade) by means of which the Hebrew author attempts to delve into his own identity. During the early period, when there was little dissension between Arabs and Jews, the dominant depiction of the Arab was generally in romantic and exotic terms. In the novels and short stories of earlier writers such as Moshe Smilansky, Moshe Stavy, Jacob Reuveni, Aharon Hurgin and others, descriptions can be found of Arabs in their swirling robes riding their fiery steeds across the desert sands, with the east wind blowing against their black hair and their sun scorched noble faces. Traditions of blood-feuds, oppression of women, hospitality to

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strangers, and the like, held a magical attraction for the Hebrew writer who had recently fled from a small East European town. (Elon, 1972) Among this group of writers, some learned Arabic and were directly inspired by the Arab milieu. While they described the everyday life of the poor peasantry, their writings were dominated by what they saw as the magical spirit of the “son of the desert”, in the style of Lord Byron who longed for the spiritual glories of ancient Greece, or American writers of the nineteenth century who described the Red Indians. Principally, these works idealized reality on the one hand, while imposing the writers’ own wishes and preconceptions on the other. The Arabs were perceived as a sort of continuation of biblical times; a period to which the first pioneers wished to return and prove that they too had had roots in the Holy Land two thousand years earlier. The second President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, devoted much of his time to searching for Bedouin tribes who, according to traditional sources, were the ten lost tribes of Israel. Rachel Yannai, his wife, relates: “My eyes were fixed on a Bedouin…he reminded me of our [Jewish] Yemenite brothers. Something close. Purebred…” (Ben Ezer, 1968 p. 54) Many writers latched on to the old, easily identifiable Hebrew names of Arab villages, and in this way attempted to link themselves with their past through the Arab inhabitants of the land. The relationship to the Arabs in modern Hebrew literature in its early stages was an attempt to seize the Arab and Arabism as a ladder leading back into the past; an identity was desired, and created, for the Hebrew writer who had returned to his homeland. The romanticization of Arabs and Arab life was a sort of literary refuge from a sometimes not too cheerful reality. Encounters with impoverished Arabs, pedlars, donkey drivers and peasants, armed bandits and urban riff-raff, provided material for romantic/exotic descriptions, as long as the writer himself, or that group of people with whom he most immediately identified, remained unharmed. As the Jewish-Arab conflict escalated, romanticism disappeared, leaving its impressions to be used only as material for ironic or nostalgic attitudes in the hands of later writers such as Yehoshua Kenaz, Amos Keynan and Hanoch Levin. The “romantic” wave in Hebrew literature receded, because of changing literary fashions and because reality rejected the imposed connotations imported from eastern Europe. Nonetheless, at the heart of this naive conception of the Arab can be found a line of thought most typical to the entire approach to Arabism: the “literary Arab” was a tool in the hands of the Jew in search of his own identity. It is hard to accuse Hebrew writers, who dressed and behaved like Arabs and mingled with them, of actually wishing to be Arabs, but it is reasonable to assume that at the foundation of their approach lay the desire to examine more closely their historical roots. Moreover, these Jewish pioneers rejected a mainly religious and urban Jewish tradition in order to renew and rebuild themselves in the country of their forefathers, amongst its scenery, agriculture and land, and thereby gain, in a way similar to the “Narodniks”, a national, personal and spiritual renaissance through a mystical communion with the very soil of the land. What kind of space is the Arab expected to have in this context? We must distinguish, therefore, between a historic nostalgia for the Jewish biblical past and the nostalgia that was linked to the personal memories of the writers. When writers such as Nachum Gutman or Benjamin Tamuz recollect the years prior to the founding of the State of Israel, such memories are linked to an image of a small, intimate country,—a non-industrialized, pioneering and optimistic Land of Israel. Such memories are also bound up with the Arabs who populated the settlements of the Sharon area, for example, and who maintained commercial dealings and relatively good relations with the Jews. Writers’ descriptions of the time were dominated by aesthetic elements—oriental arches, costumes,

OPPRESSED SPACES 15

marketplaces, colours, scents, camels, and so on. The tendency of these writers was generally towards non-political writing; their nostalgia was often an attempt to come to terms with the current hostilities. The Arab, when perceived in this way, was often a close friend whom the troubled times had distanced from his Jewish companion. Sometimes he was portrayed as a symbol for deep agricultural roots: the Jewish settler wished to inherit such deeprootedness together with the land that he had purchased. There also exists, of course, the approach that looks at the Arab eye to eye rather than as an object (willingly or unwillingly, consciously or not) in the problem of identity and linkage of the Jew to his renewed land. This approach, neither romantic, nostalgic, nor complicated, simply describes the Arabs as family men, merchants, rivals, doctors and the like. Realistic in style, for the inherent problems involved in a different nationality, religion and politics were not ignored, this approach did not describe Arabs despite their being Arabs but, rather, because they were Arabs. David Shachar (who lived in the mixed quarter of old Jerusalem) and Shulamit Har-Even, for instance, made no attempts at “humanistic” whitewashing (the Uncle Tom’s Cabin syndrome); rather, attempts were made to come to grips with the real problem and the real people.

By way of comparison In her article on the images of Australian Aborigines and natives of New Zealand and Canada in literature, Terry Goldie (1987) mentions the prominent absence of the Aborigine in Australian literature, and mentions also the shift between writing from the outside and the identified writing from within about “natives”. Margaret Atwood in her chapter “First People” on Indians and Inuit—as symbols—reveals the images of the natives as projections and wishful thinking of the Canadian soul. On the one hand, the Indian is presented as inferior to the white man; on the other hand, he is idealized. In both cases he is doomed. In the description of Brebeuf s voyage she emphasizes how a fortress is built to enclose the settlers and into which are allowed only those Indians who accept civilization and Christianity. (Atwood, 1972) Even when they accept the culture of the conqueror, therefore, they are incarcerated in a jail within a jail. The Jews, however, had been present in Israel before they went into exile and in this they differed from the Australians and Canadians, who came and replaced the local people (and often too their culture), without possessing an historical document of religious, cultural and geographic authority over the land. Certainly the contemporary validity of the old ownership is debatable between Arabs and Jews, who are still fighting over the twice promised land. Therefore the role of the Arab in Israeli theatre is unique and differs from the role of the other native peoples, conquered by European settlers, not to mention the fact that the vast area of Canada, as a single example, is not surrounded by some two hundred million Red-Indians, and 22 Indian countries. Whether Canadian and Israeli playwrights describe Indians and Arabs respectively as well-designed figures in their play, or whether they delineate for them contours of empty spaces, these figures of the strangers in “our” places, the alien within ourselves, those whose places we have taken, is quite prominent. This delineation of the empty contour can be compared to “carrying the void as a snail carries his shell”. The stage void of the Indian and the Arab as strangers is filled with contents less aesthetic and existential and much more moral, social and political. To borrow an image from sculpture, we can compare the hollows in the sculptures of Henry Moore to the space sometimes occupied by ethnic minorities in Canadian,

16 S.LEVY

Australian or Israeli drama. In her article on national romanticism, Marjory Fee’s final provocative lines are “marginal cultures can rarely afford to be cynical about nationalism: we are afraid that if we don’t believe in Indians, we will have to become Americans.” Whether ignoring the character of the conquered minority on the one hand, or describing minorities either much above or much below the level of the describer on the other, we see in both cases an avoidance of a dialogue between equals, a dialogue which must influence drama which necessarily relies on dialogue.

In search of a “real” Arab In the early years, influenced perhaps by Shakespeare’s Shylock and Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Israeli playwrights were inclined to present an either enhanced or diminished image of Arab characters. On the right hand side of the political map, there was fear of “dangerous” humanization of the Arab and on the left, a fear of dehumanization. This may partially explain the non realistic extremity in their depiction when they did appear in drama. From the 70s, a welcome change occurred in this approach, as slowly the Arab began to be liberated from his captivity in Israeli fiction—namely, from his function as a metaphor, an image and a symbol to the self-searching Israeli—and started to grow flesh and blood of his own, and equally, a spirit and self of his own. In the Governor of Jericho (1975) by Joseph Mundy, although an Arab girl fulfils the symbolic role of a harlot, like Rahav in biblical Jericho, the playwright tries at least to describe her from her own point of view. In Shooting Magda by Yehoshua Sobol (1985), the Arab character receives a much fuller and less symbolic depiction, and although the element of self-reference sometimes weakens the political clarity of the message, it also enables the production to be better received, even by its political opponents. In the 80s there were an increasing number of playwrights who tried with varying degrees of artistic success, but a great deal of political zest, to create “real” Arabs in their plays. In the Akko Festival of 1987, a festival of experimental theatre representing the creative attempts of dozens of Israeli theatre people, five out of nine productions in the prestigious framework of the Festival competition, dealt with the extrapolation of the Palestinian struggle for independence and their objection to Israeli oppression. These plays dealt critically with the actual social and moral situation in Israel. In Yesh-Batikh (There’s a Watermelon) by Uriel Greenfeld, a prominent figure was that of a mute Arab. The Zionist Whore, a pointed political adaptation of Sartre’s La Putain Respecteuse, received ideological criticism for the ways in which the director chose to present the State of Israel as a prostitute. The show Kafr Sham’a, presented by the Palestinian theatre El-Hakawati, was disturbed by a group of right-wing hooligans. In general, the entire festival was described as “too political” and not sufficiently “artistic”. Six weeks after the end of the festival, the intifada broke out. Retrospectively it was clear that even minor and inexperienced playwrights had seen what major politicians had preferred to ignore.

The Prisoner Motif An interesting motif that focuses on the identity problem is that of the “prisoner”. Between 1949 and 1959 four short stories (later dramatized) were written dealing with Arab prisoners who fell into the hands of Israeli soldiers during the War of Independence and the Sinai campaign: all four stories are told in the first person, partly for the sake of credibility

OPPRESSED SPACES 17

and, perhaps, because they are genuinely autobiographical. In two of the stories the prisoner appears as the central motif; in the other two he is an important, but not central, character. In three of the stories the prisoners are killed in the end. Their deaths are described as humiliating—senseless from the point of view of human existence like all death—and serving no political, social or military practical purpose. In the fourth story, when the prisoner is released, his captor is left with a sense of personal downfall. The prisoner motif in these four tales—and in a fifth story by A.B.Yehoshua that uses a prisoner in a more metaphorical sense—shows the Arab to be an object and a tool and is primarily intended as a measuring-stick for the Israeli writers themselves. Shacham’s story The Seven was written in the winter of the War of Independence in 1948, and was shortly after adapted to a play called They’ll Arrive Tomorrow. Twenty-five years later Shacham wrote in his preface to a new adaptation of the story as a play: I could not find it in my heart to alter the naivete of the twenty-three year old who wrote this story; the innocent faith in the solidarity of a brotherhood in arms, and the need for a warning that the mines that we lay for others—might yet explode under our own feet. (Shacham, 1973 p. 4) Shacham’s story revolves around an Israeli commando regiment trapped on a hilltop. Seven land mines are positioned on the hill in unknown locations “and the map is lost”. The commanders know that seven soldiers are likely to be killed. After the first one is blown up by a mine, relations between the men deteriorate, for the death of one of them increases the chances of survival for the others. “We commanded our men to leave”, says the Officer, “No-one obeyed us. Oh, if you had only seen with what longing they followed our foot-steps…” (Shacham, 1948) The trapped commandos capture a young Arab villager and order him to run around the hill so as to explode a mine. Refusing, he tries to escape and is shot. Consequently a cynical remark is uttered: “This stranger, enemy, I was sorry for him—for not being killed by one of the mines, thus saving one of us; it was as if his death was wasted. Pointless.” The next day the remaining soldiers catch another prisoner, an old Arab man. I didn’t beat him up and didn’t order him to run. I removed his shackles and treated him like my uncle. The old man, overwhelmed by emotion, and I could hardly keep him from kissing my hand, over and over…No-one has ever cared for me in that way before. In the end, he walked further and further away, stumbling across the ridge until his feet finally found the mine. (Shacham, 1948) The end of the tale reinforces the point made in Shacham’s preface: the seventh mine remains to be discovered. Clearly, Shacham is making an analogy between the relationships towards the two prisoners and the symbolism of the mine. Using human beings as objects is the real mine that has been laid and is about to explode at any moment. The play, performed in 1949, caused a huge scandal: “Israeli soldiers simply don’t do such things”, was the argument. Despite a number of years having passed since then, They’ll Arrive Tomorrow was nonetheless filmed (in 1992) for TV screening, in a period when the moral effect of the message was much milder. The Arab, here, becomes a human mine-detector, a role he also plays in other works that express Israeli consciousness. Ironically, he is not even considered an enemy but merely, as it were, as an

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estranged step in the process of the life or death struggle of a group of Israeli soldiers, and a literary means of rendering moral degeneration in times of emergency. Benjamin Tamuz’s story Swimming Contest (Tamuz, 1973) also deals with a prisoner, where the imprisonment is a tragic end to the personal relationship between the prisoner and the narrator. Three encounters between the narrator and his friend/enemy Abdul Karim are described. The swimming pool becomes an allegory for an entire land in which only one of the competitors can win. A swimming contest between the two young stars, Jew and Arab, takes place. The Arab boy wins. They then compete over a mathematics test. Both make an error in their calculations. In the “world geography” competition the Jewish youth wins on a question about American: “He beat me in America”, says Abdul Karim, “but I beat him here, in the swimming pool”. “The day will come when I’ll beat you in the pool too,” I told him. “If you beat me in the pool too,” said Abdul Karim, “that will be very bad.” (Tamuz, 1973 p. 212) Later the Jew will indeed beat the Arab, but during Israel’s War of Independence and not in a swimming match. The second part of the story takes place several years later, when the narrator is visiting an Arab house in Ein Kerem, in Jerusalem. He recalls the swimming match of his childhood, when the water was clear and cool, and his yearning for the Arab ambience. This pastoral atmosphere is a counterweight to the following section in which, again a few years later, war breaks out. As anticipated, Abdul Karim is captured in the orchard of the very same house where the swimming contest once took place. After a battle, the blowing up of the house “explodes” the childhood dreams of the narrator. He asks to meet with his former friend, and present enemy. “You want to finish him off?” asks his office. “No”, I said, “I want to talk to him”. The two of them, in a laconic and unemotional meeting, recall the swimming match of years ago. After they part the narrator gets into the warm and dirty water of the pool. He hears a shot in the distance. Abdul Karim has been killed, apparently by a stray bullet. Part of Tamuz’s own life and something within himself had also been killed. Not only have Jewish-Arab relations become unbearably poignant, but something deep inside has also died in the Israeli: “Here, in this backyard, I myself, all of us, were vanquished.” In Yitzhak Orpaz’s Point Blank (Orpaz, 1958), an Israeli soldier encounters an Arab in a cave, in the Gaza Strip, after the Sinai Campaign in 1956. Both Israeli and Arab are terrified. The Israeli squeezes the trigger of his automatic rifle—it jams. The story develops from this momentary instinctive willingness to kill someone who appears to be threatening one’s life, and one’s being equally threatening. The Israeli takes the Arab prisoner for questioning: “He reminded me of someone. Someone rather nice. He suddenly looked to me like someone who had sprung out of one of the blurred photographs of members of the first wave of Jewish immigrants, all lined up proudly in front of the camera…I walked alongside the Arab and felt close to him.” While walking, the soldier and his prisoner draw still closer. The Arab saves the Israeli from being bitten by a poisonous snake, despite his sudden leap appearing at first to be a threat. The Israeli learns about the Arab’s life from stories and from photographs he is shown. When they reach the camp the narrator is told: “I see that the Arab gained your confidence.”

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“More than that”, I said, “I gained his.” He suggests letting the Arab go, but things do not turn out this way and the Arab is sent on his final journey with a bullet in his back. The tale ends with the words: “There were lads in the car in front of us singing ‘We have brought you peace’…and I stared at the grave of Ibrahim my friend.” (Orpaz, 1956) In this story too the Arab becomes an object for the heavy guilt complex of the Israeli writer. Here too the Arab is more a literary, political and moral symbol than a living, developing, three-dimensional human being. The Arab’s humanity is measured and compared with that of the Israeli and, as in Tamuz’s story, a contest takes place between the interpersonal level and the military conflict. A man is expected to remain moral and not be carried away by unjustified side issues. The message is clear: The literary Arab is a warning sign in the struggle of the Jew with himself. All of these short stories are dramatically open-ended, finishing with great moral uncertainty. Behind the metaphor of the mentality is the “absence” of aporia and doubt. In S. Yizhar’s tale The Prisoner (Yizhar, 1962), the main conflict takes place in the narrator’s mind, in a style reminiscent of Albert Camus’s existentialist story The Guest, which is itself based on a motif taken from Matteo Falcon by Prosper Merrime. In Merrime’s tale there exists a system of moral values in the name of which clearly defined actions are dictated and carried out. In Camus’s story the Arab is released in the end, as the narrator acts according to his conscience and is ready to take upon himself the responsibility for his actions. Yizhar’s narrator has no single system of moral values to dictate his actions. In The Prisoner the hero is torn between two tentative value systems; and ends up by taking no action at all, in a typical Hamlet situation, expressing adolescent stirrings more than the real risk-taking and acceptance of responsibility over taking a stance and acting unequivocally. Here too the end of the story is irresolute, open, hesitant. …There is another sort of sadness, a grinding away sadness, the sadness of uncertainty, the uncertainty of a waiting woman, the uncertainty of a life sentence, a very private uncertainty, and a different, more general uncertainty, that the sun will set and it will remain among us, unfinished. (Yizhar, 1962) The hero knows that from a humanitarian point of view he should release the prisoner. In this story, as in those of Shacham and Orpaz, it is clear that the prisoner does not present any security risk and that his release would not cause any harm. The writers deliberately burden themselves in their efforts to describe cases of detention in which the importance of moral considerations takes precedence over military considerations. However, in Yizhar’s story, there is also another system of reasoning: What will the guys say? Should I give an order? And you, you have to release him, even if the fellow himself laughs at you, even if he sees it, he or somebody else, as helplessness; even if your friends mock you, even if they ask you to avoid releasing him; and even if they send you to the military prosecutor… (Yizhar, 1962) Yizhar describes the Arab’s incarceration, his interrogation and his transfer to another camp where, perhaps, he will be killed. Description of “atrocities” raised a great deal of anger in the Israel of 1948, the year of the war in which the story was published.

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The major importance of the story lies not in its description of the Arab, but in its internalization of the subject of imprisonment. The true prisoners are not the Arabs, but the Israelis. Their prisoners imprison them by means of the guilt feelings that propel the Israeli to overcome agonizing dilemmas: how to remain an idealist, a pioneering Zionist, a socialist, an honest and fair person, and at the same time conquer and imprison others. An interesting combination in the image of the literary Arab as a prisoner of both love and war is found in Facing the Forests by A.B.Yehoshua (1970). The story is constructed around a struggle between the slow green growth of a newly-planted Israeli forest, and the red, threatening fire about to burn all the trees. The trees, planted on the stone ruins of an Arab village evacuated and destroyed during the war, were donated and planted by Diaspora Jewry. As a forest fire in Israel is usually the result of arson rather than accident, the story is in fact a description of a metaphoric struggle between an Arab stone-being and a Jewish tree-being, trying to put down roots and cover all previous existence with its own growth. Fire, as an element, is an ambiguous image: it gives warmth and light; it purifies but destroys. The nameless hero of the story is totally unsuitable for the job of guarding against forest fires for at the same time he is trying to preserve his own spark of creativity. This anonymous observer finds within himself a growing wild desire, resulting from fear, to burn down the entire forest. As a landmark in the literature of the 1948 war generation, the name Hirbat Hizha successfully dramatized in the Akko Festival, 1992, refers to an Arab village in S.Yizhar’s story that was demolished, and where Israeli soldiers saw themselves as evacuators rather than as evacuees, refugees and Holocaust victims. Hirbet Hize rises from ashes and stones in Yehoshua’s story, as a reminder of futile, senseless destruction, without, this time, making very specific accusations. Thus an Arab village emerges, so to speak, from the depths of Israel’s collective consciousness. The forest is set ablaze by the “observer” collaborating with an elderly Arab, whose tongue has been cut out and who can now speak only in the language of fire. Once again the Arab, a literally mute figure, is activated as a moral catalyst. In the story he also has a daughter, and whereas he himself captures the heart of the observer by his manners and his silence, concealing his enmity, his daughter captivates him with her budding femininity and her wild and fresh eroticism. All three characters, the inhabitants of the forest for just a few months, are redeemed by destruction and destroyed through redemption in the erupting fire. The Arab and his daughter, as well as the observer, are prisoners of their desire for revenge or acceptance of guilt, while dwelling in the same observation tower. They serve as haunting ghosts from the past who torture the sensitive yet weak-willed Israeli. It was actually Yehoshua, the writer who brought to a peak the most internalized image of the Arab in Israeli consciousness, who created the Arab youth, Na’im, in the novel The Lover, which was later adapted to a successful play (1978). Na’im is one of the relatively rare characters in Hebrew literature, up until the 1970s, to deviate from the moral, symbolic and romantic clutches and, mainly, from their projections into the Israeli search for identity. This is an important step in recognizing the Arab opponent; a stage which confers, not only from the literary point of view, an independence from being imprisoned or imprisoning the Israeli in his various spiritual uncertainties. Among the many plays that deal in ranging degrees of intensity with the Arab-Israeli conflict, 2 this intensive and gradually growing treatment of the prisoner motif can easily be detected. Since all Palestinians can be regarded as political prisoners, certainly by themselves and often by Israeli playwrights (and some of them have indeed found themselves behind bars

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because of terrorist activities against the Israeli regime), Israeli drama, both Jewish and Arab, often gives vent to this feeling of Arabs being imprisoned in their own country. The Opsimist by Emile Habibi (1984) (Hebrew version by Anton Shamas), was published as a novel, and soon after adapted to a monodrama played in 1986 by Muhammad Bakri. “We are all the property of the state” says the protagonist, and adds: “I met Yu’ad the way one meets in Israel—in prison. To be precise—when I was released from prison…because I exaggerated with my fidelity…to them…) (Habibi, 1984 p. 165). The irony implied in this text, brilliantly delivered by Bakri, crossed the stage right into the Israeli audiences who loved to hate their own situation as conquerors. One of Israel’s leading playwrights, Hanoch Levin, wrote a short skit, included in his 1970 satire The Queen of The Bathtub, about Samatocha “our Arab”: “He is obedient, smart and harmless to Jews”, especially when washing dishes in a restaurant. Levin describes “his” Arab clearly as an object, “a thing”. Later, in his play The Patriot (1980) Eshet Lahav the protagonist is overwhelmed by three “yearnings”, one of which is most horrid: …The entire family around the table. Glowing faces. A white tablecloth… The Saturday bread is covered, Shabbat candles burning. Ahmed is out in the courtyard. We call him. He enters. ‘Shabbat Shalom, Ahmed’.—‘Gut Shabbas, Sir.’—‘Come, get closer, Ahmed. These are Shabbat candles. Have you ever seen Shabbes candles?’ Two of us grab him from the back, pulls his hand forward, putting one of Ahmed’s fingers over the candle fire. A smell of scorched flesh. The finger blackens. Ahmed is chanting the songs of Shabbat. All of us, the whole family, all the children, all the children of Israel join him—Lecha dodi likrat kala, penei shabbat nekabela…” (Levin, 1980 p. 126) Levin juxtaposes the fake liberalism of the Israeli with the authentic status of oppressors. In Alla Karim, an early Hebrew play by A. Arieli (1912), an Arab is described in the typical tradition of the noble savage—“Oriental and sun-burnt…from his whole being and gait shone the pride of a good looking strong savage.” (Arieli, 1990 p. 180) Levin mocks this positive, liberal yet primitive attitude toward the alien, the enemy, proving, actually, that the Arab is indeed imprisoned in the filters of the mind that describes him. In another early Hebrew play, titled The Fourth Covenant, by Zilla Kumerher, Arabs are depicted as violent, base and untrustworthy, whereas Yigal Mossinson, in Samson (1967/8) goes as far as blaming the Arabs “who force us to kill them”. In all of these cases, there exists no dialogue with a true “other”, only with preconceived (positive or negative) projections of the dramatic character. Levin (1988) in Hefetz (literally both “will” and “object”, in Hebrew) deals with a ritual murder of a tenant, sub-letting a room in the home of a lower-class Israeli family. Hefetz is a “cousin” (a euphemism for Arabs in Hebrew slang) who is humiliated throughout the piece, and finally thrown off the roof by Fogra, the talented, vicious and beautiful daughter of this family, who is just about to be married. In 1972, the State of Israel too was 24 years old, like Fogra, and just as full of pride—after the 1967 victory but before the 1973 setback. Here again the Arab (and Hefetz can be interpreted in other directions as well, and less politically) is an obvious tool, a moral compass but certainly not an equal partner. In any case, he has no space in “the house.” (Levin, 1988)

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A different mode of imprisonment can be found in plays in which Arab characters are actively silent. Silence on stage is often highly dramatic, as Cassandra in Agamemnon, Katrin in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, among many others, have proven. The prisoner in Hillel Mittelpunkt’s Soldiers on the Road (1981) is captured during a patrol in Southern Lebanon in 1981. After long debates he is senselessly executed but immediately thereafter the entire patrol is shot by terrorists. The play depicts, again, the classical Israeli situation of double enclosure—Israelis both “imprisoned” by Arabs and imprisoning them. Whereas in prose (and poetry) the reader is invited to fill in any indeterminacies, performed drama requires an actual space in which the characters evolve their plot, a real place to move and act. Moreover, from this medium-oriented point of view, an actual dialogue is required as the basis for vital, immediate communication not only among the characters, but also between them and their very real audience. Because of this initially public aspect of theatre, the particular dialogue with Arabs (on and offstage…) is also greatly enhanced. If nothing else, at least their space is obvious to the audience. As Haim Shoham (1976) has observed, the less the agreement concerning the target of the Israeli wars, the more the dramatic space represents an inner, mental condition of psychological imprisonment. The earlier 1948 war plays such as In the Vasts of the Negev, by Yigal Mossinson, or The 56th Kilometer, by Moshe Shamir, described a siege situation for the enclosed soldiers. Once the siege was broken, the soldiers were free. Since in those days only a few Israelis doubted the justice of the war, the space in which the war was fought had not been internalized. In 1967 A.B. Yehoshua wrote A Night in May, describing the tension prior to the eruption of the 1967 war, and already one could observe that the room in which the action takes place is not merely a physical shelter but, at the same time, both a symbolic womb and tomb.

Ephraim Returns to the Army The most striking play dealing with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and what it means to be simultaneously conqueror and conquered, was written in 1984. Paradoxically, the anticipated but outrageous ban by the censor helped in promoting the production of the piece, but despite a court order rescinding the ban the Haifa Municipal Theatre did not take up its rights to the play, and so a private production was initiated. The play, Ephraim Returns to the Army by Itzhak Laor (1984), achieved a tumultuous reading at Tel Aviv University, in an attempt by a group of left-wing friends and supporters to circumvent the then existing ban. It was finally staged at the Tsavta theatre in 1989. The play deals with a military governor in the occupied West Bank, who, together with his ambition to fulfil properly his oppressive military missions, also tries to let it be known that he is pro-Palestinian, pro-resistance and pro-PLO. Ephraim, the schizoid, self-pitying soft-hearted “macho” protagonist cannot cope with the juxtaposition of his real function and his yearned-for one. The main conflict, following a series of smaller ones, between on and off-stage occurrences develops after a Palestinian youngster is shot dead at a demonstration while throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Unlike other political plays, Ephraim Returns to the Army does not address itself to an already positively convinced target audience. Even in the satirical scenes the play avoids two-dimensional political slogans and formulas. Laor confidently steers a path between the “weepers” and “shooters”—Israeli idioms for “liberal” soldiers who, instead of being

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conscientious objectors choose to bemoan the need “to shoot” and yet do so. The playwright rejects cheap sentimentality and compels the spectator to relate to what is being said through his own private feelings rather than through confronting external attitudes, political or otherwise. The classical unities of time, place and plot are shown in a novel way in Ephraim Returns to the Army. For example, the dramatic convention of character as understood in a realistic-psychological play is revealed here in flashes of situations and relationships that are correct and authentic only for short periods, in a specific time, plot and space that may change from moment to moment. Similarly, the stage character itself is not “the same” character but an ego-less collection of social, circumstantial, political, sexual and psychological encounters. In this play it is clearly implied that only he who admits to the existence of self-awareness amongst his fellow men, may himself receive the right to say “I”. Self-referential elements are enlisted to a moral cause and references to “other” elements—social, political and ideological—avoid the habitual traps of two dimensionalism, so typical of “educational” theatre. The dramatic character of Ephraim is fictitious and carries none of the obligations that are generally linked to a real character off-stage. The scenery, props, lighting, movement and, mainly, the world of voices that surround the stage, are displayed in a compressed process of disintegration. Instead of cohesion, the play explodes; instead of dramatic action there is a series of splinter events—a controlled, lingering dissolution that symbolizes the “message” of the play and is at the same time an integral part of it. The stage is the attenuated edge of whatever is happening beyond it, shown to represent as well as present in an absolutely committed way, the real evils that happen “out there”. Ephraim Returns to the Army deals with an “enlightened occupation”, a linguistic monster, whose logical inability to exist does not prevent it from a certain existence notwithstanding. Against the background of this paradox the representatives of this enlightened occupation crowd into the room of Ephraim, the military governor. The entire play takes place within a space which is described at the beginning as simply a functional and focused area for events to occur. Gradually the space gains meaning and an imagistic impetus. Instead of a technical centre for scenery and props, the military governor’s room becomes a bunker, a gaol, a TV screen: (after a long silence) Who told you that I don’t want to leave the room? I leave the room whenever I want to. (Pause) Just because someone told you that I don’t go out of the room you think that I don’t go out of the room… and so on, until the message is made utterly clear. Ephraim, in a mock-Hamlet “to exit or not to exit” monologue, turns his office room into a mock-Sartre No Exit situation of his own qualms of conscience. The play’s space, which is in the protagonist’s head and thus metaphorically off-stage, is the place of politics, social, legal and economical wrong-doings, and the place for administrative acts inflicted by occupying armies, even “enlightened” ones. Laor alludes to the War of Independence plays of 1948 and to “In the Negev Wilderness” and “Dudu”, two sentimental heroic songs about war heroes. Allusion works in two directions and ironically reveals both the source alluded to and the alluding target, particularly as the playwright is saying “There is no such thing. Soldiers in reality do not quote soldiers from plays of the past.” As in Hanoch Levin’s Shitz (1975), Laor also uses past literary responses as

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material for his bitter juxtaposition of bygone idealism with the present oppression of the Palestinians. A small poison dart is thus also sent in the direction of Amos Oz, the liberal left-wing author of the novel Another Place, claiming that there is no other place (or country?) except for the governor’s room and only it may be shown on the stage, and only through it may be disclosed what is inside the chambers of the heart of the governor. Ephraim Returns to Alfalfa, by S.Yizhar provides an additional clear allusion: Ephraim attempts a neat little rebellion against the collective values of the kibbutz, but at the end he decides to return rather than leave, accepting the ideological conformity of his friends. Laor does not only slaughter holy quasi-mythological cows of the liberal Israeli left-wing—his potential supporters on such moral and political issues concerning the occupation. He charges the very ideological fortress of the Kibbutz movement in claiming, implicitly, that their spokesmen, like Oz and Yizhar, preach much better than they practice. In using common Israeli values through “mis”alluding to them, Laor succeeds in shifting well established points of view, catching his audience off-guard. They may even refresh their modes of comparing the past against this undesirable present. With deliberate intent, Laor eliminates any remnants of realistic illusion. He reveals the fictionality of his text and puts it to a test of psychological hygiene. The effort demanded from the reader/spectator is far greater than that demanded by the exclusive emotional commitment to the fiction of theatre. In following and paying explicit tribute to Bertolt Brecht, Ephraim and his lieutenant Gedalia are complementary contrasts like Puntilla and Matti, Shen-Te and Shui-Ta; so too are the characters of the young soldiers, David and Solomon. Their names, of glorious Hebrew kings, are not chosen by chance. Other contrasting couples in the play signify the soft versus the hard, left and right, mother and sister, or prostitute and mother. The play presents the soldier David as left-wing, soft-hearted and weak-willed; he wants to go and see the rock music group “Measures Taken” (deliberately named after Brecht’s play). Solomon, on the other hand, is a Jewish fascist, firm in his convictions and capable of action; he kills an Arab demonstrator. David is actually in favour of the Arabs and shouts this semi-convincing message from the window of the room. Of the pair of women, Nehama, Ephraim’s mistress “consoles” (nehama in Hebrew) him sexually, while his wife Dvorka is deliberately ignored: “Be my big sister,” he says to her. Ephraim, conqueror and conquered, experiences violent and impotent moments of love and sex in both the political and mental realms. In his depiction of the Palestinian prisoner, Laor appears to be painfully aware of the cultural colonialism manifest in some plays of his dramatic predecessors. He does not deal with the conquered Arabs but with the subjection of the Israeli conqueror. In this play the Arab, the Palestinian prisoner, does not speak. His character comprises a condensed collection of the silences of many local Arabs on many Israeli stages, whereby some of these silences are deliberate and ironical while others are simply a refusal to let the Arabs talk. Silent characters contain the compressed energy of the dumb, a slowly burning fuse. And indeed, there are a number of mute Arab figures in Israeli drama. The verbal violence used by Laor for all the other speaking roles does not stem from a sheer need for destruction. It is an attempt to shake up awareness in the dozing complacency of the occupiers. With the sad understanding that the theatre has no real power to uproot evils, Laor rattles his dramatic characters on the stage in the hope that at least some small movement will occur in the reader/spectator. Moral distortion exists not only in the occupation itself, but also in the selective ways and false satisfaction in which it is displayed. Real violence does not take

OPPRESSED SPACES 25

place on the stage, as is well-known, and the verbal vulgarities often used by the theatre, such as “sucking”, “homosexual” or “prick” have sent far fewer men to their death than respectable words like “forward!” or “follow me!”. The main tension in the play is found on the borderline between stage and off-stage; an area that demands clear-cut measures to be taken, between the aesthetics of art and the politics of life. The play ends with a speechless scene: …she [one of the girl-soldiers] gets up. Sits near the prisoner and again plays with a key she had hidden as the officer Gedallia came in. She plays with the key. The light slowly fades as she and the prisoner sit opposite one another. He is in handcuffs. She with the key. Dark. (Laor, 1984)

In summary Laor is not the only author to depict the Palestinian problem in his works. From The Governor of Jericho by Joseph Mundy up until Hamdu and Son by Yitzhak Buton, through David Grossman’s Yellow Time and Emile Habibi’s The Opsimist, the question of occupation has been raised and debated in the Hebrew theatre; and the image of the Arab has fleshed and developed from a two-dimensional caricature into a fully three-dimensional figure. Only recognition of the self-consciousness of “the other”—a recognition whose personal and political ramifications are astonishingly similar—will enable true personal freedom. Self-consciousness is inconceivable and so too, for our purposes, is complete identity, without recognition of the selfconsciousness and independent personal and national identity of others. The mentality, embracing the tensions between awareness and unconsciousness, may be traced out in the shifting figure of the Arab in Israeli drama.

Notes 1. Shorter versions of this discussion have been published in Mentalities, vol. 6 no. 2, 1990; 2–8 and in Moznaim no. 5/6, May 1983. 2. Extensively treated in the forthcoming book by Dan Urian.

References Arieli, L.A. (1990) Alla Karim. Yeshimon. Tel Aviv:Dvir. (in Hebrew). Atwood, M. (1972) Survival, Toronto:Anansi.. Ben Ezer, E. (1968) Breakdown and Siege. In Keshet, 10th year Edition, 124–160 (in Hebrew). Elon, A. (1972) The Israelis, Tel Aviv:Shoken. Goldie, T. (1987) Fear and Temptation, In The Native in Literature. T.King, C.Calver, H. Hoy (Eds.) ECW Press. Habibi, E. (1984) The Opsimist, Tel Aviv:Mifras, p. 165. (in Hebrew). Laor, Y. (1984) Ephraim Returns to the Army, Tel Aviv:Timon. (in Hebrew). Levin, H. (1988) The Patriot, Tel Aviv:Siman Keria & HaKibbutz Hameuchad. (in Hebrew). Levin, H. (1988) Hefetz, Tel Aviv:Siman Keria & HaKibbutz Hameuchad. (in Hebrew).

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Mittelpunkt, H. (1981) Soldiers on the Road (Theatre text for production). Orpaz, Y. (1958) Point Blank, Tel Aviv (Manuscript). Shacham, N. (1948) They’ll Arrive Tomorrow, Tel Aviv:Or Am. Shoham, C. (1989) The Drama of the ‘Native Born’ Generation in Israel, Tel Aviv:Or-Am. Sobol, Y. (1985) Shooting Magda, Tel Aviv:Or Am. Tamuz, B. (1973) Swimming Contest, Tel Aviv:Yachdav. Yehoshua, A.B. (1970) Facing the Forests, London: Esquire. Yizhar, S. (1962) The Prisoner. In Israeli Stories , New York:Shoken

Palestinian Theatre: Historical Development and Contemporary Distinctive Identity Reuven Snir Haifa University

Introduction Most Arab scholars and western orientalists have emphasized that Arabs did not know theatre before the nineteenth century. They consider a theatrical tradition of foreign origin to have twice reached the eastern Mediterranean: first, the Hellenistic theatre that arrived in the wake of the Greek and Roman conquests of the Near East; and second, the Arab imitation of western theatre that had come into being in the nineteenth century. In contrast, some scholars have recently concluded that there already existed a secular and live theatre in the pre-modern Arab world before the nineteenth century (Moreh, 1992). Notwithstanding this controversy (Snir, 1993b), the pioneering Arab ventures into modern drama clearly occurred in Egypt in the middle of the nineteenth century, although the very first attempt was Syrian: after visiting Europe, the Syrian Christian merchant Mārūn al-Naqqāsh (1817–1855), being impressed particularly by Italian opera, in 1848 wrote and produced at his own house in Beirut a play entitled Riwāyat al-Bakhīl (The Story of the Miser) which drew heavily on Molière’s L’Avare, though it was not a direct translation and involved a great deal of singing (Landau, 1958, pp. 57–58). After Mārūn al-Naqqāsh’s death, his nephew Salīm al-Naqqāsh (d. 1884) moved the theatrical troupe to Alexandria. Since the middle of the nineteenth century the influx of Syrian Christian men of letters into Egypt, where they pioneered free journalism and various cultural activities, was a contributory factor to the lead taken by that country in the Arab renaissance in the nineteenth century. This was due in part to the stimulation provided by Bonaparte’s expedition at the turn of the century, and in part to the drive for modernization embarked upon by the dynasty of ‘Alī (1769–1849). Indeed, from the nineteenth century Egypt became the center of the theatrical movement in the Arab World and produced the first notables in the modern Arab theatre, such as the Egyptian Jew Ya’qūb (Jacob Sanua) (1839–1912) and the Syrian Abū Khalīl al-Qabbānī (1836– 1902), who was the first Muslim to rise to prominence in this field. Both these men produced their plays in Egypt. Palestine, on the margins of the Egyptian cultural center, has never been a center for any modern cultural movement in the Arab world during the nineteenth and the twentieth

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centuries. Moreover, the cultural activities in Palestine prior to the First World War lacked any political strand, in the form of Palestinian consciousness, which has since become an integral element of Palestinian literature (Peled, 1982, p. 141). In this sense Palestinian literature is not exceptional, since no particular Arabic literature written before World War I can be identified as national in the modern political sense. Up to that point Palestinian literature bore marks of cultural consciousness of a very special nature, but did not reflect the subsequent political consciousness (Snir, 1992b). Nevertheless, Palestinian literary historians and cultural critics have recently taken pains to show that Palestine in the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth was the center for a distinctive cultural revival.1 The information they provide is significant but cannot be isolated from the larger context of the search for roots, or “the invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm & Terence, 1983, pp. 1–14). This phenomenon has been widespread since World War I throughout all of the nation-states in the Arab world, and has been very common in recent years among the Palestinians as a part of their efforts to strengthen their national identity and promote their hopes of establishing their independent state (Snir, 1990, pp. 244–245). “The process of vernacular mobilization,” states A.D.Smith, “must first discover an ethnic past that is serviceable for present needs and then create a unified and distinctive consciousness and sense of ethnic community and of politicized common culture” (Smith, 1991, pp. 132–133). In the Palestinian case this means accentuating a separate culture personality and distinguishing it from the wide, inclusive Arab identity. In the West Bank, for example, the cultural revival in the early 1970s included the foundation of the quarterly Journal of Society and Heritage. The publication of this journal since 1973, as one Palestinian intellectual stated, was a concrete expression of the “pressing need to recognize and preserve the Palestinian national identity in the face of the cultural and national annihilation as attempted by the Zionist Israel” (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 9). The current Palestinian search for roots, as part of strengthening the national identity, is not limited to literature: for example, Palestinian newspapers have started special folklore sections with invited contributions from readers. The folklore here is less a subject of historical and literary study, and more a vital and dynamic force in society as well as a symbol of the determination of the Palestinian people to gain their right to self determination as a nation with a distinctive culture and history. It is only since the 1920s that Palestine became a fertile ground for certain cultural activities, especially in the field of poetry. The development of theatre was very slow, particularly taking into consideration the circumstances of the growth and emergence of modern Arabic theatre and dramatic literature. This article attempts to outline the historical development of the Palestinian theatre on the margins of the Egyptian cultural center. Was there any serious Palestinian theatrical activity before the 1970s? Or should we accept the harsh judgment of Palestinian critic Mīkhā’īl Ashrāwī in the middle of the 1970s that “Palestinian literature cannot boast of a single written play of any merit, despite several attempts” (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 55). In addition to a description of the historical developments of Palestinian theatre and dramatic literature, an attempt will be made to indicate the distinctive traits and characteristics of contemporary Palestinian theatrical activities as well as to present in some detail one of the most prominent of the pioneering printed plays in the final phase of the development of the Palestinian theatre. The analysis of this play also provides an introduction to the nature of the theatrical movement among the Palestinians, its main thematic and poetic traits and its major sources of influence.

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I. Before 1948: First Attempts Palestine, as mentioned above, was removed from the main cultural activities in the Arab world throughout the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Literary historians and cultural critics have attributed this vacuum to such political and socio-economic reasons as the severe economic conditions in Palestine, the widespread illiteracy, the absence of educational institutions and the general cultural backwardness (al-Sawāfīrī, 1979, pp. 17–31). No Palestinian literature, or any other particular local Arabic literature, bearing distinctive marks of national identity can be found in the nineteenth century. Some poets were writing poems praising the beauty of places such as Nazareth or Haifa, but without any reference to political circumstances (Peled, 1982, p. 146). Only after the revolution of 1908 and the promulgation of the Ottoman constitution of that year did Palestinian national consciousness begin to emerge, but Palestinian literature was still trailing behind the pioneering literatures of Egypt and Lebanon. The general cultural atmosphere in Palestine till the 1920s was characterized by backwardness, as indicated by the literary historian Kāmil al-Sawāfīrī: “Palestine was living in all-encompassing darkness of ignorance, a plain scientific backwardness, and widespread illiteracy among its children” (al-Sawāfīrī, 1979, p. 31). After the First World War, the cultural atmosphere began to change: Palestine started witnessing a cultural revival, encouraged both by the political revival, particularly in light of the Zionist activity and the economic revival, due to the British mandate over Palestine. This atmosphere was stimulated by the opening of schools and educational institutions, public libraries, cultural clubs and societies, publishing houses, newspapers and periodicals, literary organs and the growth of intellectuals trends. In the period 1919–1921 no fewer than 15 new Palestinian newspapers appeared (Sulaymān, 1988, p. 15). This revival, concentrated especially in Jerusalem and Haifa, encouraged the development of literary salons by established families, where young poets, writers and dramatists were invited to read their works. In addition, a revival occurred of folk and religious culture which combined such theatrical elements as the (the storyteller), who used to tell tales from folk literature, mainly from A Thousand and One Nights; Shā‘ir al-Rabāba (the singer of the rebab i.e., a stringed instrument with one to three strings); the itinerant storyteller with al-‘Ajab (The box of wonders or the Magic Box); the religious festivals like the traditional Mawlid (the Prophet’s birthday) or the Mawālid (The birthdays of saints); and the night-time shows presented during the fast of Ramadan. Theatrical elements were also combined in the popular peasant culture like the dabka dances, in which a group of dancers, with linked arms stamp out the rhythm and sing; and in the zajal, i.e., the popular Arabic poetry in strophic form, all of which were performed on special occasions such as weddings and feasts and even at funeral rituals. However, these folk and popular activities never developed into theatre in the western sense and only with the rise of a professional Palestinian theatre during the 1970s did they become associated with theatre in the western sense. An important forerunner of the first attempts at theatrical activities in Palestine were the performances of the Khāyl (Shadow Plays) i.e., a type of puppet theatre in which flat articulated figures are manipulated between a strong light and a translucent screen, so that the audience sees only their shadows. Most of the performances of this type of theatre were given during the month of Ramadan, when local troupes were competing with performers from the neighboring Arabic-speaking countries. The Arabs of the Old City of Jerusalem in particular,

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both young and old, were known to be especially fond of Karagöz.2 In the month of Ramadan 1944, for instance, these shadow plays in Jerusalem were directed by a Syrian performer. They were presented twice nightly, the first show being intended for children and the second for adults with a background at times historical and at others satirical (Landau, 1958, p. 38). One of the major stimulations for the Palestinian cultural revival, including the theatre, was the foundation of al-Quds or Idhā’at (Palestine Broadcasting Station), which began broadcasting on 29 March 1936. The Arabic section of this station, headed by the most (1905–1941), encouraged men of prominent Palestinian poet prior to 1948, Ibrāhīm letters, poets, playwrights and actors to broadcast their works (al-Sawāfīrī, 1979, pp. 66–72; , 1985, pp. 118–128). The play Shamshūn wa-Dalīla (Samson and Delilah) by al-Jawī (born 1908) was the first to be broadcast from the station.3 This was also the period in which the geographical position of Palestine on the margins of the culturally prestigious Egyptian center helped to encourage the development of Palestinian theatrical activities along with stimulating other cultural activities. Egyptian literature, poetry and prose, newspapers and periodicals, visits of dramatic and dancing troupes, and the pioneering Egyptian cinema, were an important catalyst for the local revived Palestinian culture. For the Palestinian intelligentsia, as for any other intelligentsia in other Arab countries, Egypt was the recognized heart of culture for the Arab world. Palestinian intellectuals were not only reading Egyptian newspapers and periodicals but also contributing to them. Palestinian writers were publishing their works in Egyptian publishing houses and even the eminent Palestinian writer Mūsā (1904–1990) published his famous and controversial novel Mudhkkirāt Dajāja (Memoirs of a Hen) (1943) (Snir, 1989, p. 134) in a publishing house in Cairo and asked the leading Egyptian writer (1989–1973) to write the introduction. Some of the first Palestinian dramatists used to publish their works in Egyptian magazines like al-Hilāl and before publishing them in the local arena (Landau, 1958, p. 103). The influence of Egyptian culture upon the growing Palestinian culture in those years was intense: the local audiences flocked to watch the performances of Egyptian troupes which visited Palestine4 and later became the nucleus for Palestinian audiences who “demanded” local and original performances. Consequently, groups of amateurs, especially students, began producing and performing plays or dramatic texts. The Palestinian writer and dramatist Imīl (born 1921) notes that when he was a school student he acted the role of the thief in a play based on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Urian [in press]). Yet almost all the dramatic activities were limited to amateurs and took place within clubs and schools without being developed into professional troupes. The dramatic texts were based mainly on translations and adaptations of famous western plays in addition to texts based upon Arabic literary texts from the non-canonized folk literature. Very few original texts were used, but if so they were generally didactic plays staged for social and religious purposes. Frequent insertion of well-known verses from ancient Arabic poetry into these plays indicates their didactic nature. Due to social and religious considerations only a few actresses participated in these theatrical activities and female characters were generally converted into male ones. With the growth and development of the urban middle classes, some serious attempts were made to initiate professional theatrical activities. One of the first professional troupes was Firqat al-Jawzī (The al-Jawī Troupe) established by al-Jawī (born 1908) in the middle of the 1930s. came from a noted Gaza and Jerusalem family, known for its cultural and theatrical activities. His troupe was the first to broadcast dramatic texts from the above-mentioned broadcasting station, which both encouraged and directly and indirectly

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accelerated theatrical activities (al-‘Awdāt, 1992, pp. 93–94). Imīl , who was working at the beginning of the 1940s in the Arabic section of the Palestine Broadcasting Station, notes that actors recited the dramatic texts in live broadcast (Urian [in press]). , who continued his intense theatrical activities till 1947, wrote several original plays, including al-Shumū‘ (The Burning Candles), a four act social moral drama about the suffering of children caused by their father’s unhealthy lust.5 In his ceaseless quest for new ways to develop the newly emerging local theatre he was also the first Palestinian dramatist who wrote for (The Wisdom of children. Among his contributions in this field was the play Dhaka’ the Judge) describing a famous trial before the Calif Hārūn al-Rashīd. In one of his essays prior to 1948, entitled “How Can We Encourage the Palestinian Theatre”, he mentioned more than thirty troupes active in Jerusalem alone bearing symbolic names like (The Awakening), al-Taqaddum (The Progression) and al-Funūn (The Revival of Arts).6 These troupes, most of them amateur, generally preferred to stage productions based on translations and adaptations of English and French plays. Although the local audiences showed some interest in these plays, rarely was any play performed more than once. brother Jamīl al-Jawī (born 1917) also contributed to the growing Palestinian theatrical movement and in 1937 even established a theatrical troupe within the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Jerusalem making use of translated texts as well as his own original material. J.M.Landau, who watched one of the plays staged at the YMCA in 1946, testified not only to the unsuccessful production, but also to the attitude of the spectators who could “not distinguish between sitting in a cafe or in a theatre.”7 After 1948 Jamīl al-Jawī continued his activities in the field of theatre and in 1952 he published dramatic TEXTS IN East Jerusalem (al-‘Awdāt, 1992, pp. 91–92). Both brothers resolutely pursued their interest in the theatre but since 1948 they have resided in Jordan, and concentrated not on practical theatrical activity but mainly on the historical aspects of Arabic, and especially Palestinian theatre.8 Another prominent figure of the newborn Palestinian theatrical movement before 1948 was Jamīl who was also a prominent journalist and the owner of the journal al-Zahra, published in Haifa, in which he used to publish his dramatic works. Among these was Qātil Akhīhi (His Brother ‘s Murderer), a play in three acts, staged in several theatres in Palestine and Syria. In his translated plays he used to omit the female roles for lack of actresses, as well as to insert verses from Arabic poetry, according to his didactic and educational inclinations (Sayegh, 1990, p. 159; Landau, 1958, p. 103). Palestinian theatrical and dramatic activities, like literature in general, were very limited prior to 1948. First attempts were marked by European influence, whether in translation of texts or adaptation. As many of the plays were intended to be staged in schools or by groups of students, the didactic nature of this theatrical activity was dominant. Moreover, Palestinian theatre before 1948, like Palestinian prose, was not generally involved in the national struggle. Prose in general,9 let alone the theatre, was barely concerned with politics, and concentrated on didactic aims and entertainment. Direct involvement in the struggle was at that time typical only of poetry, which remained the dominant genre in Arab culture till the middle of the twentieth century. Palestinian poetry served as a weapon in the political struggle and was overwhelmingly concerned following the 1917 Balfour declaration, with the anti-Zionist and anti-British campaign. It expressed the innermost desires and fears of the Palestinian community and its emotions regarding the Jewish threat and the prospects of the foundation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Although, like many other Arab poets, Palestinian poets

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before 1948 also wrote dramatic texts, especially verse-drama, only a few of these plays were staged successfully. Among those writing for theatre before 1948 were the distinguished poets Burhān al-Dīn al-‘Abbūshī (born 1911), al-Dīn ‘Īsā (1897–1974) and Mu’yyad Ibrāhīm al-‘Īrānī (1913–1987) (al-‘Awdāt, 1976, pp. 34, 357–358, 430–431). The constraints of the dramatic genre in that period, however, did not allow its development as a weapon in the political struggle.

II. 1948–1967: Uprooting, Decline and a New Start Following 1948, the greater part of the Arab urban intelligentsia, the traditional and social leadership and most of the property owners abandoned the territories of the State of Israel. Those who remained were generally from the poorer or the uneducated village populations. All the cultural activities, including the newly developing theatre, were uprooted (Snir, 1990, pp. 247–248). Many of the exponents of the young Palestinian theatre left the country, giving an impetus to the development of the newly emerging theatre in Jordan (Landau, 1958, pp. 97, 103). Cultural activities among the Palestinians in Israel as well as in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were very limited during this period. The immense shock in the wake of the defeat, the fact that the Palestinian majority in Palestine had become a minority in Israel, the political limitations as well as the difficult economic and social circumstances under which the Palestinians were living, whether in Israel or in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, prevented Palestinian writers, poets and dramatists from working freely. Moreover, since theatrical activities require more than merely writing texts and publishing them, the political and socio-economic circumstances had greater effect than in other cultural fields, and thus ruled out any real progress in the first years following 1948. All that remained from the promising Palestinian theatre of the 1940s, were a very few amateur troupes, mainly within clubs and schools. Nevertheless, Palestinian culture, which had emerged and started crystallizing before 1948, did not totally disappear, though it crumbled into two segments—outside Israel and within it. Those Palestinians who were uprooted from their homes following the war and had become refugees suffered the greater shock and were preoccupied in their daily struggle for existence in the refugee camps, whether in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip. Despite the educational system established by the United Nations Relief and Working Agency (UNRWA) (Sawāfīrī, 1979, pp. 79–80), significant cultural activities, certainly in the field of theatre, were almost totally absent from the camps. Due to political and economic reasons the fate of the permanent citizens of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip till the 1960s was mostly similar. The Hashemite rule over the West Bank and the Egyptian rule over the Gaza Strip was overtly and directly involved in suppressing the publication of any worth-while literature, especially that of political or social significance. Direct censorship plus control over educational and social institutions, clubs, and all cultural activities, along with relentless political persecution, succeeded in maintaining what one Palestinian critic described as “a standard of ignorance and superficiality of alarming dimensions” (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 3). Only the regimes’ mouthpieces or writers of trashy third-rate literature succeeded in getting their works published, while an underground movement remained scarce and did not reach a significant audience. Within Israel the 1950s did witness certain cultural activities, especially due to the efforts made by the Israeli establishment to encourage “positive” cultural activities. The vacuum

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created by the disappearance of the urban cultural elite was partially filled by Jewish writers and poets who had emigrated to Israel from Iraq (Snir, 1991). Some Iraqi Jews with acting experience produced Arabic plays, the first of which, staged in October 1956, was the famous verse-drama Majnūn Laylā (The Madman of Laylā) by the eminent Egyptian poet and playwright Shawqī (1868–1932). Jews who had immigrated from Egypt, with a certain amount of real theatrical experience, also contributed to the revived local Arabic-speaking theatre and their first production concentrated on the life of oriental immigrants in Israel (Landau, 1958, p. 103). Since theatrical activities before 1948 were initiated as well as consumed by the urban elite classes, the crumbling of this elite society following the war was almost a death blow to the young Palestinian theatrical movement. Nevertheless, shortly after the war cultural activities among the Palestinians within Israel were showing signs of revival in two opposite directions: one sponsored by the establishment and the other sponsored by the Communist party. Several literary organs stood at the disposal of those who were close to the establishment, such as the newspaper al-Yawm (established 1948 and closed in 1968), the weekly al-Amr (established 1937 and closed in 1959) and the monthly al-Mujtama’ (established 1954 and closed in 1959). The Histadrut—The General Workers’ Union—played an major role in the Arab sector during these years, organizing and launching “positive” local Arab cultural and literary activities. Needless to say these activities did not include any criticism of government policy and avoided dealing with controversial problems. The “positive” cultural and literary activities were initiated and cultivated by means of prizes and literary competitions, as well as through The Arab Book Fund acting under its aegis. This fund, for example, published the book In the Festival of Literature (Agasi, 1959) containing Arabic-language literary and dramatic works, which had earned prizes in the 1958 Histadrut competition. The book, whose introduction illustrates the effort to produce “positive” literature (Agasi, 1959, pp. 1–3), includes two short plays, both using the Palestinian dialect in the dialogues. The first, entitled al-Qarya al-‘Arabiyya fi Isrā’īl Khilāl ‘Ashr Sinīn (The Development of the Arab Village in Israel in Ten Years) (Agasi, 1959, pp. 119–129), was written by a Palestinian playwright from Nazareth who preferred not to reveal her name. It goes without saying that this play, as reflected by its title, is a good example of the above-mentioned “positive” literature. It is the story of a couple, Abū ‘Alī and Umm ‘Alī, who had been living before 1948 in one of the villages in Palestine. They had left their village following the “war of liberation”, as the 1948 war is described in the play. After ten years they returned to Israel to visit their previous birthplace on a symbolic day, the 15th of May (on 14 May 1948 the State of Israel was declared). The two Palestinians, amazed by all the development that had occurred in their ancient village during their absence, promise at the end of the play to inform their relatives outside Israel about the miracles and the wonderful projects in the Israeli Arab villages. The play, portraying the development brought to the “primitive” Arab villages by the Israeli authorities, seems to be pure propaganda without any redeeming literary value and illustrates the nature of the cultural activities sponsored by the establishment. The second play included in the book is Fatāt al-Yawm (Today’s Young Women) (Agasi, 1959, pp. 130–142), written by Ibrāhīm Karkabī (born 1929), from Shfaram. The play, whose events take place in Nazareth in April 1958, deals with the improvement in the conditions of women in Arab society in Israel since 1948, and its evident message was to serve the aims of the establishment’s propaganda exactly like the first play. Karkabī has continued to be active in the

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field of Arabic-speaking theatre in Israel and during the 1970s published several other plays (Moreh & Abbāsī, 1987, p. 196). Palestinian scholars have totally overlooked the “positive” cultural activities sponsored by the Israeli establishment. Moreover, the fourth volume of Encyclopaedia Palaestina, dedicated to studies about various aspects of civilization, including theatre, generally ignores the period of 1948–1967, dealing only with the cultural activities before 1948 and after 1967 (Sayegh, 1990. Cf. ‘Alyān, 1992). Not all the cultural activities in Israel during this period, however, were sponsored and directed by the establishment; there were also the leftist writers of the opposition. These writers were active within the framework of the Communist Party, whose intellectuals had not abandoned Israel following the 1948 war, unlike most of the Palestinian elite. The leftists writers faced many difficulties and obstacles and the establishment employed various means to disrupt their cultural and literary activities. Furthermore, the establishment’s implicit ban on Communist writers, Jews or Arabs, inspired those writers close to the establishment to refuse to collaborate with them. Such a polarity was naturally reflected in the literature and readership of both trends, with each having its own writers and audience. The journals of the two camps were fiercely competitive, but the Communist journals stood out, particularly (established 1944) and al-Jadīd (established 1951), for their quality and wide circulation. These journals provided avenues of expression for promising new poets and writers—hence the predominance of Communist literary figures as pioneers in modern publishing house in Haifa, several Palestinian literary tradition. Along with the Dār other progressive publishers contributed to the increasing output of Palestinian literary figures opposed to the establishment The lack of freedom and the censorship imposed on leftist writers did not prevent their works from gaining high popularity among the masses within Israel and later, particularly from the mid 1960s, even outside it. The Israeli attempts at suppressing this kind of literature not only failed entirely, but even produced contrary results. The charge of endangering the “security of the state”, exploited frequently against outspoken Palestinian writers, only enhanced the popularity of those writers and showed them in heroic light. The leftist writers did not hesitate to raise their voices in protest and to deal with subjects considered taboo by the establishment sponsored press. The latter was thus perceived by local Palestinians as the trumpet of the ruling party, and even as anti-Arab. In contrast, a preoccupation with political and social problems was dominant in communist writing. In order to evade censorship, heavy symbolism was sometimes used, which gradually detracted from the literary value of Palestinian literature. The communist literary writing generally conveyed a world view whose universality rejected the narrow confines of nationalism and preached equality of rights for all peoples, and justice and equality in all human societies. The two opposing literary trends were in fact sharing a striking, black-versus-white, dichotomy; but while for those close to the establishment, this dichotomy contrasted the dark past with the joyous present, for the Communist writers it was social and universal, between a dark present filled with oppression and a Utopian future ruled by justice. The writers of both groups, each from their own viewpoint, preached coexistence, peace and brotherhood and believed in their realization. Prominent writers, like Imīl , frequently emphasized in the 1950s the obligation of Arabic literature in Israel to “carry the banner of Jewish-Arab brotherhood.” They were stressing Jewish-Arab cooperation not only in times past but also for the present and future, as well as praising the contribution of Jewish writers in this field (Snir, 1991, p. 168).

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The first Palestinian printed play in Arabic to be published in Israel after 1948 was entitled wa-Nūr (Darkness and Light) (1954), written by Mīshīl (born 1919) and Jamāl Qa’wār (born 1930) both of whom were close to the establishment. The play, betraying a didactic trend, describes the struggle of a student in a secondary school in Israel wanting to study at the university, despite his father’s blindness and poverty. The didactic aim of the play, as indicated in the introduction ( & Qa’wār, 1954, pp. 5–6), directs the plot towards culminating in the student’s success despite all the difficulties facing him. Another pioneering play published in Israel in the 1950s was the two-act Sirr Sharazād (The Secret of Sharazād) (1958), by Najwā Qa’wār (born 1923), dealing with the character of Sharazād. The playwright, distinguished by her penetrating studies of human emotions, was one of the first female writers in the Arab sector in Israel. Since the 1950s she has also published several volumes of short stories and a collection of poetry in prose (Moreh, 1967, p. 169; Moreh & Abbāsī, 1987, pp. 174–175), in addition to another play entitled Malik al-Majd (The King of Glory) (1962), based on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The actual Arabic theatrical activities in Israel in the 1950s were limited to troupes of amateurs, particularly in schools. Only in the 1960s did these theatrical activities start developing rapidly, first in playwriting and later on in the field of staging. A prominent dramatist has been Salīm Khūrī (1934–1991) who has published several plays (Moreh & Abbāsī, 1987, pp. 76–79; Moreh, 1974, pp. 47–50). His first play, Amina (1960), was based on historical events and preaches, through its eponymous heroine, love and brotherhood among people. His second play was Warīth al-Jazzār (The Heir of the Butcher) (1960) and one of his most interesting recent plays, Ba‘da al-Aswār (After the Walls) (1983), shows the clear influence of the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956).10 Salīm Khūrī is also prominent in being one of the forerunners in establishing a Palestinian children’s theatre. Till the 1960s Arabic-speaking theatrical activities for children were limited mainly to amateur troupes in schools. For lack of space we shall not deal in this article with the development of the Palestinian children’s theatre, except to mention that since the 1960s this field has been developed extensively, as part of the development of Palestinian children’s literature (Sayegh, 1990, pp. 239–251). Plays for children have been presented in recent years by professional troupes in various frameworks.11 In addition, the Arabic section of Israeli television has played a major role in encouraging Arabic-speaking theatrical activities for children. One of the great successes of this section was the series Sāmī wa-Sūsū (Sāmī and Sūsū), in which the leading roles were played by George Ibrāhīm and Labība Darīnī. The theatrical activities in the Arab sector in Israel were concentrated in Haifa and Nazareth, both dominant centers of the Palestinian intelligentsia and culture. The establishment of Beit Hageffen Arab-Jewish center in Haifa and the Frank Sinatra center in Nazareth in the early 1960s indicated some change in the attitude of the establishment toward the culture of the minority. Rather than encouraging “positive” culture, a genuine attempt was made to stir up local cultural activities. With regard to theatre, the Jewish actor Arieh Elias was sent to Nazareth where he established a local troupe with the assistance of Palestinian theatre people. This troupe staged several plays for (The Modern Theatre) (established in 1965), prominent among which was the famous above-mentioned verse-drama Majnūn Shawqī. Laylā (The Madman of Laylā) by Theatrical activities among the Palestinians outside Israel were very limited in both playwriting and staging. Nevertheless, some theatrical activities were held in the West Bank, and especially in the framework of the summer festivals in Ramalla and al-Bīra. The director

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even established a local troupe which staged some plays. Several important dramatic texts were written in the 1960s by Palestinian playwrights outside Israel, prominent among whom was Ghassān Kanafānī (1936–1972). Among the plays he wrote before 1967 was al-Bāb (The Door) (1964), which tells the story of a young man torn between his ideas and the possibilities of acting upon them (Sayegh, 1990, p. 222). The foundation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 prompted cultural activities aimed at strengthening Palestinian consciousness, including the foundation in Damascus of Jam’iyat (The Association of Palestinian Theatre) with three prominent aims: stimulating national awareness; presenting experiences of the revolution on the stage; and reviving the Palestinian heritage (Sayegh, 1990, p. 223).

III. After 1967: Reunification and the Growth of Professional Theatre The period after the 1967 War marks paradoxically, despite the defeat of the Arabs, not only the political and literary reconciliation of the two segments of Palestinians—those in Israel and those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—but also the dawn of the era of optimism and rebellion and the revival of Palestinian culture. Palestinian theatre developed in this period extensively and drama in the western sense, written and staged by professional Palestinian theatre people came into being. This is also the period marking the end of the involvement of the establishment in the cultural arena of the Arab sector in Israel. The reunification of the Palestinians and the removal of the borders between Israel and the territories strengthened the Palestinian identity of the Israeli Palestinians, making the writing of “positive” literature almost impossible. Moreover, the Palestinian intelligentsia within Israel were beginning to search for means of strengthening their national identity and consolidating their cultural relations with their brothers in the territories. This phenomenon was also accompanied by a change of view in Arab general public opinion, and especially the poets, writers and critics, towards Israeli Palestinian literature. Following the initial shocked response of the Arab writers to the heavy defeat in 1967, they gradually became aware of activities of cultural resistance exercised by the Israeli Palestinians writers, and especially poets. From being considered in the 1950s almost as traitors by the Arab world because of their readiness to accept Israeli citizenship, they had now become heroes after the 1967 War. The new political and cultural circumstances disclosed the literary activities of Israeli Palestinian literature, especially poetry, to Arab public opinion and brought a worldwide reputation and fame to some of the poets. Palestinian literature written in Israel became the central topic of discussion in literary circles and has been widely studied in various Arab countries. Local Palestinian poetry began to be broadcast on various Arab radio stations, translated into European and Asian languages and incorporated into poetry anthologies. Later, novels, short stories and plays, also became popular in the Arab countries (Snir, 1990, pp. 253–257), to such an extent that Darwīsh (born 1941), the most prominent contemporary Palestinian poet, felt obliged in 1969 to voice his dissatisfaction with the injustice critics in the Arab world had done the Palestinian literature by avoiding any objective criticism.12 These critics, in their readiness to accept unconditionally anything which was Palestinian as a positive contribution to the spirit of the nation, prompted a leading Palestinian critic to declare in 1976 that “Palestinian literature is not a spoiled child or mentally deficient person for whom all sorts of excuses and rationalization are to be made. It is responsible

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enough to demand honesty and responsibility from its readers and critics” (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 58). In contrast to its effect on poetry and prose, the 1967 War did not open immediate new horizons for Palestinian theatre in Israel. The nature of this art and the lack of financial resources necessary for staging plays, in addition to an insufficient familiarity with the dramatic genre, were among the major reasons for its delay in development. Nevertheless, some important plays were published following the war, even if most of them were not staged immediately. Outstanding among them is a verse-drama entitled Qaraqāsh (1970), by al-Qāsim (born 1939), one of the prominent contemporary Palestinian poets (Moreh & ‘Abbāsī, 1987, pp. 181–184). This play is considered to be one of the first printed plays of which Palestinian literature can boast (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 55. See Section VI, below). Theatrical activities in the late 1960s and beginning of the 1970s generally concentrated on the field of writing new original dramatic texts. This phenomenon cannot be isolated from the growth of Palestinian literature in Israel after the 1967 War, but unlike poetry and prose the dramatic text cannot be fully realized without staging. In this regard there were many difficulties, such as the lack of professional actors, and particularly actresses, directors and the mainly insufficient budgets. Plays staged in the first years after the war were mainly by amateur troupes functioning without funding and mostly in the centers of the Israeli Palestinian intelligentsia in Nazareth and Haifa. Although the repertoire of these troupes was based on the repertoire of other Arab theatres, in addition to adaptations of western plays, more and more original dramatic texts were being staged. Among the prominent theatre devotees in those years we can mention and Victor Qamar, who had also been active in the Arabic section of Israeli television since its inception. After the 1967 War the involvement of the Israeli establishment in the local Palestinian cultural arena decreased following the failure of a similar involvement during the 1948–1967 period (Snir, 1993; Snir, 1993a). Nevertheless, the relevant sections in the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Histadrut continued to employ Arabic speaking Jews in order to start new cultural activities. In 1967 the Ministry of Education and Culture inaugurated in Haifa (The Rising) Theatre, which started as an amateur troupe and later became a professional theatre. Its productions, which continued till 1977, concentrated on the 1948 events, particularly the refugee problem, the settlement of Jews in their lands, and minority Theatre, rights in Israel, in addition to various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. which also contributed to the development of the children’s theatrical movement, faced many difficulties, like other Palestinian dramatic troupes at the time, and in particular the lack of a sufficient budget. Budgetary restrictions were also behind the closure of in Nazareth in the middle of the 1970s. One of the successful theatrical troupes in Israel at that time was Masrah al-Ghirbāl. Established in Shfaram in 1977, it organized the First Arabic Theatre Festival in Israel in September 1982. Following the festival al-‘Arabī (The Arabic Theatre League) was established on 8 January 1983 in al-Makr.13 The revival of Palestinian culture was not limited to the Palestinians in Israel but also included the territories, constituting another aspect of the reunification of the two segments of the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, although 1967 was the actual date in which Israeli Palestinians met their fellow Palestinians who until then had been under Hashemite Jordanian or Egyptian rule, the process of discovery and recognition remained rather slow and tentative until the middle of the 1970s. The completion of this process coincided with the October 1973 War, which formed a turning point in the uplifting of Palestinian morale. This was also the period

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in which the cultural activities of the two Palestinian segments were interwoven, stimulated by a new self-confidence, after years of defeat. This self-confidence later emerged, in the words of Mīkhā’īl Ashrāwī—the most prominent Palestinian literary critic of that period—as a distinctly Palestinian energy which was able to withstand the political setbacks of the Arab world and hold its own as a viable force with which the oppressed faced their oppressors and asserted their presence, their rejection of the status quo, and their awareness of their own national identity and consciousness (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 2). (The This Palestinian unity was climactically expressed on March 30, 1976, i.e., Yawm Day of the Land), when the Palestinians both in Israel and the territories declared a total strike and faced Israeli soldiers with rocks and burning tires. The tragic events which the Palestinians underwent in the 1970s—the September massacres of 1971 in Jordan and the Lebanese civil war since the middle of the 1970s—contributed to their cohesion and solidarity. They were convinced that their survival depended primarily on their steadfastness in their own land, and not on external forces. This awareness played an important role not only in the political but also in the social and cultural history of the Palestinians. Moreover, since the 1970s we can speak again about Palestinian culture as a whole, as it was before 1948, rather than the literature within or outside Israel. Both Palestinian segments were becoming closer and more interdependent, despite the various distinctions. This unity was expressed in common cultural interests and in the beginning specifically helped the intellectuals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to become acquainted with newspapers, journals and books from throughout the Arab World. Moreover, since there were no copyright laws between Israel and the Arab countries, works by Arab and Palestinian writers, poets and playwrights were printed and smuggled on both sides and pirated editions put out by private publishers were the norm. Thus, the progressive political, intellectual and cultural trends occurring in the Arab world also reached the Palestinians in the territories. Despite this reunification, a great difference remained in the attitude of the authorities towards the Palestinians in Israel and those in the territories. While most of the restrictions on the Israeli Palestinians were removed, the Palestinians in the territories continued to face the same kind of censorship which had followed the British Mandate emergency laws of 1945 (Sulaymān, 1988, pp. 212–218). These laws, enforced also on the Arab newspapers and magazines in East Jerusalem, were very arbitrary in the 1970s and made frequent use of the argument that a publication was a threat to “the security of the state”. In that period, for example, the word “Palestine” was considered threatening enough to be censored, even in West Bank children’s textbooks (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 5). Nevertheless, these years witnessed a revival of Palestinian cultural activities in the West Bank, and especially in East Jerusalem, which became the undisputed capital of Palestinian culture. A prominent role was played by the Palestinian press in East Jerusalem, and specifically al-Fajr (the Dawn), al-Sha‘b (the People) and al-Quds (Jerusalem) (Shinar, 1987, pp. 41, 48–52). These newspapers, recognizing the need to create further channels for literary expression, produced literary sections which have gained immense popularity. The Israeli Palestinian communist newspaper was banned during that period from being sold in the West Bank, still following the Jordanian laws, according to which the Communist Party is outlawed and possession of any communist material is illegal. Nevertheless, and the communist literary

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journal al-Jadīd played an important role in the development of the Palestinian national consciousness. Al-Jadīd remained the main literary Palestinian magazine until March 1976, with the publication of the magazine al-Bayādir, which soon established itself as the leading organ of intellectual and literary Palestinian life. In it, as in al-Jadīd, one can read the works of the major recognized, as well as the most promising new literary figures, and at the same time follow the development of contemporary literary trends.14 Nevertheless, the Palestinian intellectual arena in the territories and East Jerusalem has continued to suffer from a scarcity of journals and magazines due to the difficulties in obtaining licenses and financial support. Hence, one of the stimulative factors of the cultural movement in the territories was the establishment of several publishing houses, prominent among which was al-Dīn established in 1974 in East Jerusalem and which soon became the major publisher of West Bank intellectual, literary and political circles. However, the Palestinian cultural revival in the territories was not limited in that period to the printed page alone, and various channels of expression were devised to supplement the gaps and circumvent obstacles to freedom of thought and expression. Poetry reading sessions, panel discussions, seminars and study sessions have become familiar phenomena on a very wide scale, especially in the West Bank. Literary 15at Birzeit University, have gained events, such as the traditional Sūq increasing audiences. Several indirect attempts were made in Israel during this period to counter the emergence of nationalist and progressive newspapers, journals and publishing houses. Thus, for example, the authorities sponsored publishing houses which would serve Israeli policy, or those intellectuals who did not come out openly against it. The most prominent of these have been Dār al-Nashr al-‘Arabī and Dār al-Sharq (the latter developed into Dār al-Mashriq in Shfaram), both of which are directly connected with and sponsored by the Histadrut and the authorities. The prominent organs sponsored by the establishment in that period were the newspaper al-Anbā’ (established in 1968 and closed in 1985) and the literary journal al-Sharq (established 1970 and still published). The above-mentioned cultural background was a fertile ground for the emergence of the most noticeable literary-cultural phenomenon of the 1970s, i.e., the professional Palestinian theatre, which was mainly in the Jerusalem-Ramallah area. The first attempt took place late in 1970 when an amateur troupe called ‘Ā’ilat (The Family of the Theatre) was established in Ramallah and started rehearsals on al-Qāsim’s above-mentioned verse-drama Qaraqāsh, until the military authorities banned the staging of the play. ‘Ā’ilat troupe formed the nucleus of the Balālīn Theatre troupe established in 1971 by the Bethlehem-born Palestinian director François Abū Sālim and the East Jerusalem poet-singer al-Kurd. Abū Sālim, who had returned from Paris after studying theatre there, soon became the major figure in the modern theatrical Palestinian movement. He says of the early 1970s: When I returned from Paris I wanted to create a Palestinian theater, although friends told me it was not the right time. I knew that I could influence through theatrical-political protest more than through joining some militant organization. I did not go for military training to South Lebanon, because I felt that creating the theater would be more effective in keeping our society intellectually awake, during the long nation-building process. It has not been easy to establish a modern theater. They do not

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always understand the need for a full company, when one storyteller can enact the entire plot (Shinar, 1987, p. 134). In addition to Abū Sālim, the troupe included al-‘Abbūshī, Hānī Abū Shanab, Nādiyā Mīkhā’īl, Imīl ‘Ashrāwī and later also al-Kurd and the French physician François Gaspard, who settled in Jerusalem and initially made his house the home of the troupe. The troupe looked for ways to develop a Palestinian theatre based upon the idea of addressing the audience in the vernacular (al-‘āmmiyya) and the ability to perform its productions in the towns and villages as well as in cafes; i.e., al-maqhā (cafe-theatre) (Sayegh, 1990, p. 217). On January 22, 1972 the troupe performed the play (A Slice of Life) which met with great success and attracted audiences from all over the territories as well as from Israel. One of the reasons for its success was the fact that it did not hesitate to criticize the social backwardness of Palestinian society, including the status of women. The troupe also produced some of the masterpieces in Palestinian theatre in the 1970s, such as al-‘Atama (The Darkness); Come, Let me Tell you my Friend; and Nashrat Ahwāl al-Jaww (The Weather Forecast). The same troupe also produced folkloristic shows with dances and songs as well as the musical al-Kanz (The Treasure) and the dramatized poem Yūnus al-A‘raj (Yūnus the Lame) originally written by the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963). One of (The Theatre’s the experimental projects of Balālīn entitled Jarīdat Newspaper)—was a short (about five minutes) theatrical presentation given in the vicinity of schools or in the streets. This was in addition to other activities like the foundation of The Balālīn Friends group, lectures on the art of theatre, popular plays and musicals. The professional nature of the troupe was expressed in its leading role in the week-long First Palestinian Theatre Festival which took place in August 1973 in the basement of Ramallah’s City Hall, an event in which students and other amateur groups presented their works. The festival was organized by the troupe and included sixteen productions (Sayegh, 1990, pp. 221–2; Shinar, 1987, p. 134). In addition to these activities, a temporary splinter group from Balālīn, entitled Bilā-Līn (Without Mercy), put on the play (Free Wrestling) to great acclaim. The Balālīn theatrical activities were discontinued in 1976 with the deportation of al-Kurd, one of its founders and major activists. Several other amateur theatre troupes were formed in the 1970s such as al-Kashkūl (The Beggar’s Bag) which won acclaim for its play A Sheep and a Half plus Half a Sheep and another troupe, Firqat (The Palestinian Theatre Troupe) for its play (The Plague). In 1973 al-Dabābīs (The Pins) was established and won great success for its productions ‘alā (Blame the Blame) and Dā’irat al-Khawf (The Foggy Fear Circle), alluding to Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Following the staging of (The Insect), the majority of the troupe members were arrested by the authorities (‘Alyān, 1992, p. 84; Sayegh, 1990, p. 219). In 1975 another new troupe was established giving itself the name al-’Ajab (The Magic Box), alluding to the above-mentioned box of wonders which the wandering Palestinian storyteller used in the folk tradition. This troupe won great acclaim with the production of Lammā Injanenā (When We Went Insane) but was forced to stop the staging following the arrest of its leading actor al-Kurd. Other troupes which were active in the 1970s were al-Frāfīr (The Birds), al-Jāmi‘ī (The Academic Theatre) and al-Warsha al-Fanniyya (The Artistic Workshop). In August 1974 a theatre committee was established within the newly founded Association for Work and the Development of the Arts. The intensive theatrical activities of that period

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brought also about the development of theatre criticism with the emergence of some prominent critics (Sayegh, 1990, p. 222). Almost all the plays presented in that period were written by the troupes themselves, and most of these troupes preserved their independence. Financial troubles, lack of qualified actors and attempts by the authorities to disrupt them caused serious difficulties which prompted some of the troupes to stop their activities. The attitude of the military censor to the theatrical movement in East Jerusalem and the territories was very arbitrary. The censor took responsibility for censorship of plays published or staged in the territories, while for plays published and staged in East Jerusalem the responsibility was entrusted into the hands of The Council for the Criticism of Films and Plays; however the Palestinians have argued that the attitude of this committee was basically no different from that of the military censor. Out of 27 dramatic works examined by the committee in the period 1977– 1984, only 17 texts were approved, and even these were partially censored (‘Alyān, 1992, p. 86. Cf. Sayegh, 1990, p. 218; , 1985, pp. 249–252; , 1989, pp. 180–181). In addition, the authorities banned the staging of plays in the territories by troupes from East Jerusalem. Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties a new national Palestinian theatre was emerging in the 1970s, stimulated by the major Palestinian writers and poets who began to direct some of their attention to this genre. Palestinian theatrical activities in Israel and the territories, and especially in the Ramallah-Jerusalem area in the early 1970s, brought about several attempts to establish a solid national Palestinian theatre. One of the first, albeit unsuccessful attempts made by groups and individuals, was to unite under the name of the above-mentioned Balālīn troupe. The major event in the development of the Palestinian theatrical movement was the establishment of Theatre in 1977, which was to become a synonym for the national Palestinian theatre. The foundation of and its subsequent various activities were the brightest expression of the cultural unity of the two segments of the Palestinian people.

IV. Theatre The establishment of Theatre in East Jerusalem in 1977, a joint project of Arab dramatists, directors and actors from Israel and East-Jerusalem, marked a prominent phase in was founded and developed by the professionalization of Palestinian theatre. François Abū Sālim and a group of theatre people, prominent among whom were ‘Adnān , Ibrāhīm Khalālyila, Da’ūd Kuttāb, , (born 1952), Idwār al-Mu‘allim, ’Imān ‘Awn, ‘Ammār Khalīl and the actress and costume designer Jackie Lubeck, Abū Sālim’s Brooklyn born Jewish wife. Additional actors as well as set designers, lighting professionals and musicians were recruited according to need. al-Kurd, permitted by the military authorities to return in 1982, also joined the troupe. The aim of its founders was to establish a theatrical framework which would contribute to the strengthening of Palestinian culture, as well as to provide an artistic framework which would intensify the political awareness of the Palestinians and become a vehicle for expressing social and political messages. These messages included not only resistance against the occupation but also protest against negative phenomena in Palestinian society itself. Undertaking the mission to express in dramatic terms the national aspirations of a society under occupation, it could not rely, as had former Palestinian troupes, on a classical

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repertoire. Nevertheless, in shaping its own stories and style the troupe drew inspiration from folkloric and traditional sources. The fact that target audiences included intellectuals and professional critics as well as villagers, workers and merchants, and that the troupe was operating under the military government’s regulations, led it to develop a language of subtle symbols and metaphors, which served as an artistic code between the theatre and its audience, using plot, rhetoric, creative-interactive processes, and institutional structures as channels for its nation-building messages (Shinar, 1987, p. 134). The theatre’s name alludes to the ancient i.e., the itinerant storyteller, who would appear in places such as cafes and public squares and present his stories based mainly upon ancient folk tales and legends. He would accompany his tales with gestures and different voices and encouraged his listeners to react and become involved. This cultural institution of the storyteller disappeared in the middle of the twentieth century following the increasing influence of the electronic mass media and the development of modern theatre and cinema. The relation to the ancient was preserved in some of the activities of Theatre and its traditional techniques, and even in the specific arrangement of the seating at these activities so as to resemble the atmosphere of a public cafe. The adoption of the story-teller techniques by the troupe was an act undertaken to indicate the ancient roots of Arabic theatre, in what was perceived as a new genre which the Arabs, including the Palestinians, had only recently come to know.16 These techniques motivated some of the original experiments and improvisations by the troupe in its first years. For lack of suitable available dramatic texts, and due to a desire to experiment, the act of playwriting and devising characters and dialogues became a collective undertaking by the actors themselves and was based largely upon improvisation. In addition to the influence of the ancient tradition, western theatrical concepts too were incorporated into the activities of . Brecht, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil and le Grand Magic Circus Théâtre of Jérôme Savary, as well as commedia dell’arte and American slapstick, all exerted their influence. The rhetoric of was delivered in Chaplinesque tones, a Brechtian, alienated, “poster theatre” style, and a blend of traditional and contemporary symbols. This rhetoric was undoubtedly adopted in order to reach a wide audience, and the plots were full of traditional and mythical characters whose language and behavior bordered on the vulgar. Brash humor served to depict Palestinian and Israeli characters alike. Thus, Israeli civilians as well as army personnel and the military government were presented in terms as grotesque as the Palestinian characters. The choice of this style, whereby all characters are ridiculed, may have been adopted in order to enable the group to pursue its objectives in relative safety. The first play produced by , Bismi al-Ab wa-l-Umm wa-l-Ibn (In the Name of the Father, the Mother and the Son), was staged during the 1978–1979 season. The play, in circus style, depicted the violent invasion of modernization and occupation into Palestinian life and illustrates how the stress on the father causes him to pressurize his wife who in turn pressurizes her children. The play clearly illustrates one aspect which had become predominant after the 1967 War in Palestinian literature in general, namely: criticism of Palestinian society and leadership. The figures, making their first appearance on the stage inside cages, are the husband (in Arabic: a deaf male), his wife Kharsā’ (in Arabic: a mute female) and their son (in Arabic: an obedient male). While the training of the female Kharsā’ by the male is announced as a “special trick”, a clever, intelligent and modern unknown creature, which may symbolize Israel or modernization (Shinar, 1987, p. 135), sneaks his way in and imposes himself on the tamer’s pets. The stranger stays on while the tamer tries unsuccessfully to get rid of him:

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OK stranger, time’s up! Get lost! Excuse me folks but this is definitely not part of the act. That stranger is taking over! Hey, wait a minute! Where is ? , get back in your cage! Kharsā’, cook dinner!…The female is on the loose! The offspring is on the loose! I’m losing control!!!…My act! My creatures! My work! My act!17 One of the Palestinian critics stated that in this play there is no difference between the “social backwardness and the military occupation…this society is falling between the hammer of the occupation and the anvil of poverty, economic, social and intellectual backwardness” (Abd Allāh, 1979, p. 16). Several of the plays were staged by before an Israeli Jewish audience, causing a great deal of professional and political interest. Among them , , staged in the 1980–1981 season, gave more than 120 performances. The play, in which the troupe attempted to activate the audience by inciting it against the reactionary character in the play, portrays the Palestinians as a community robbed of their vitality and their creativity: A new age for the living dead…a foggy murky world where one comes and goes, speaks and writes, buys and sells, plants and ploughs, works and meets, faithfully but uselessly beating the air and striking the wind.18 This is the dehumanized world into which the anti-hero steps, soon to understand that such a bare existence holds no more joy than a peaceful death. He gives up and chooses to die but quickly awakens when his companions unfold his life before him. The core of the play comprises the three long nights of his wake during which his life is narrated, interpreted and performed. The sequence of mishaps typical of his life begins when, in the excitement of his birth, his father drops on his head. He leaves school after being reprimanded for asking too many questions. In a series of tragicomic episodes, is made aware that he does not know who he really is. Before 1967 he refuses to stand up for the Jordanian national anthem. He shouts for joy at the radio news bulletin that boasts Arab victory in the 1967 War, but droops in despair when he learns the bitter truth. He outwits an Israeli soldier who stops him at a checkpoint and is subject to interrogation after the colours of the Palestinian flag are recognized among other colours of his clothing. The troupe present hilarious adventures to portray Palestinian reality. He is shown as a prospective member of the Israeli Histadrut workers union and as a participant in the Jerusalem municipal elections, who upon being caught voting by a TV reporter states I didn’t vote. I am simply a worker in the building—I sweep the floors. is also presented as an immigrant who tries unsuccessfully to live in the United States; as a prisoner and as advisor to the late Egyptian President Anwar al-Sādāt. Reflecting all dimensions of Palestinian life, directs caustic and bitter criticism at the sterile confusion of his brethren’s existence and wonders at the contradictions in the occupiers’ lives: on the one hand they display military power, social organization, and technological skill, but on the other hand they are obsessed with a ridiculous security ritual. Thus, whenever goes out to dispose of his garbage bag, a voice is heard asking, “Shel mi ze? Shel mi ze?” i.e., a Hebrew phrase meaning “Whose is this?” often heard upon discovery of a suspicious object. The influence of Woody Allen on various episodes of the play is clear, as well as the influence

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of the novel by Imīl al-Waqā’i‘ al-Gharība fi Ikhtifā’ Sa‘īd Abī al-Mutashā’il (The Peculiar Events Surrounding the Disappearance of Sa‘īd, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist [optimist & pessimist]) ( , 1974; , 1982), in which the Palestinian tragedy is presented through the story of Sa’īd, whose image represents ironically the absurdity of the life of the Palestinian people from the perspective of those who remained after 1948 (on this novel and its adaptation to theatre see below). Another important play staged by the troupe was Jalīlī, yā ‘Alī (‘Alī the Galilean) presenting the adventures of a Palestinian villager in Tel Aviv, the very heart of the occupiers’ country. A circus-like burlesque style is used to portray a series of episodes in ‘Alī’s life, as refugee and stranger in his own country as the: Tragic son, the naive little boy, the thief in the night, the hot-shot cowboy, the imaginary lover, the silent worker, the steadfast militant, the black and white…as he moves from the village of his ancestors to the city of his colonizers.19 The question of ‘Alī’s Palestinian identity is thoroughly explored upon his arrival in Tel Aviv: being recognized by the “sheriff” he is ordered to leave before sundown. An Israeli friend he meets in the local saloon advises him to adopt in Israeli name, Eli, and thus to evade the “sheriff’, to court a beautiful Israeli woman, to work, fight, and play “safely”. At the end a couple of Hebrew-speaking thugs enter the stage, shouting that their act will be presented instead, the act called” ‘Alī, the Terrorist”. One of the plays staged by the troupe and regarded later as a self-fulfilling prophecy was Alf Layla wa-Layla min Layālī Rāmī (A Thousand and One Nights of the Nights of a Stone Thrower). First presented before the outbreak of the , it portrays a confrontation between a Palestinian youth and the military governor, Gidi, who steals the magic lamp from ‘Alā’ al-Dīn. The narrator indicates: In the tiniest flash of a second, a military governor, a modern man, having stolen the lamp of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn, swept us away to his control tower, his headquarters, his palace… I present to you this tale of the magician governor, how he moved us aside and upon his tattered decor, installed himself. I recall it to you in my own Arab spirit and all that has been conserved by my Palestinian memory.20 A series of confrontations portrays the Palestinians enduring and triumphing over one thousand and one nights of oppression and humiliation. Gidi, the military governor, loses awkwardly: Already a man by the age of ten, the stone thrower child’s game with the stones became a gesture of a free man. He saw that nothing remained but the stones themselves to defend his home from the gluttony of the governor, who was gobbling away at the trees, the stars and the sun.21 The struggle is presented as a fight between the Palestinian David and the Israeli Goliath: the Palestinian boy armed with stones is confronting the military governor’s well equipped warriors. This struggle, frequently reflected in Palestinian literature since 1967, develops into a Middle Eastern “star wars” with flying carpets fighting rockets and laser beams. The satirical confrontation between the occupier Goliath and the occupied David is associated with the

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struggle between the traditional and the modern. “If they show us this play,” says the Israeli Jewish critic Amos Kenan, “it means that instead of throwing stones at us, they want to talk to us” (Urian [in press]). Nevertheless, the staging of the play brought about the arrest of the leader of the troupe, François Abū Sālim (‘Alyān, 1992, p. 85). In November 1983 the troupe of leased the al-Nuzha cinema in East Jerusalem for ten years and converted it into the first Palestinian theatre in the West Bank. Supported by a $100,000 Ford Foundation grant and donations from Palestinian individuals and organizations in the West Bank and abroad, the troupe managed to renovate the building and set it up as their base. The theatre was formally opened on 9 May 1984. The main 400-seat hall, a small 150-seat hall, and additional facilities have enabled the troupe to pursue its objectives as well as to become a facility for other professional and amateur drama, music, and dance groups. Plays are performed in the new theatre by West Bank troupes, such as the al-Jawwāl troupe, Bayt ‘Anān’s ‘Ā’idūn Theatre, the al-Sanābil troupe and some troupes of children’s theatre. Haifa’s Municipal Theatre also staged there Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Arabic and Hebrew. Films have also been screened, including Les Enfants du Paradis (The Children of Paradise); the Israeli film Behind Bars; The October Revolution, and Costa Gavras’ Hana K. Musical programs were presented, featuring performances of folk songs, contemporary poems, sing-alongs of popular songs, and nationalist concerts, such as al-Kurd’s.22 The activities have included art exhibitions as well as cultural and political debates (Shinar, 1987, pp. 132, 139). The first play to be staged in own theatre in May 1985 was al-‘Ayn wa-l-Sinn (The Story of the Eye and the Tooth), one of several successful productions staged by the troupe in the 1980s. The play was directed by François Abū Sālim with stage design by François Gaspard. Among the actors were , Hiyām ‘Abbās and Jackie Lubeck. The play was a landmark in the development of the West Bank theatre as “a nation-building communications medium” (Shinar, 1987, p. 132). Moreover, unlike the previous plays it is more sophisticated, employing more abstract terms, generalized form, surrealist symbols and a wider use of non-verbal techniques. Music, movement, costumes, puppets, lighting and sets are put to work, enhancing a modern theatrical language almost entirely absent from the earlier, more primitive shows, which relied basically on the spoken word. Thus, in the first scene of the play, when tradition is the topic, the musical score is composed of Palestinian country tunes featuring motifs popular in the West Bank villages. The second scene, in which modernity is emphasized, is illustrated with contemporary international rock music, while the musical finale toward the end of the show features a majestic choir performance of the “Kyrie Eleison” of Mozart’s Requiem, perhaps as a symbol of total destruction and hopelessness. Combinations of visual elements are used abundantly to convey the play’s grim message. The colorful laundry hanging overhead during the play later turns into grimy rags; the shiny paper used to represent the village square and well becomes paler and paler during the dabka dance, in which the elders’ bodies disintegrate into inanimate objects. Pessimism reaches its peak when, as a result of the “eye and the tooth” war, the families, dressed in typical clothes resembling uniforms, start wandering around the pile of bodies at an ever-slowing pace; the sacks on their backs become heavier and heavier burdens. The play concentrates on the larger issues of tradition, modernity, identity, war, and peace through a composite process rather than through specific adventures of individual characters. Tradition is blatantly challenged when the two pairs of twins born by the well refuse to comply with the commitment assumed by their parents when they signed the traditional wedding contract upon the babies’ birth.

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The revolt triggers a long bloody feud between the families, which becomes the central axis of the plot. A reconciliation ceremony between the feuding sides is imposed on the families in a later scene by the neighbors, in which a traditional dabka dance is performed by the elders who did not succeed in forcing their offspring to behave according to tradition. They dance until they disintegrate into a inanimate pile of puppets, which stay put on stage. The past in which the elders determined the younger generation’s ways is dead, but it physically obstructs progress, forcing all the action on stage to move around the dead bodies. The atmosphere of appeasement is disturbed again in the second part of the play when a new character, symbolizing Zionism and Israel, makes his entrance. The two sides in the conflict are no longer fathers and sons, but Palestinian and Israelis. The longer their endless war becomes, the greater the losses suffered by both sides, and the weaker they become. The conclusion is far from optimistic: the final words, “how happy are the parents of the bride and the groom on the day of their children’s wedding?” refer to Tanza, a Palestinian, and Sarah, an Israeli woman, who fall in love and marry under the shadow of bombs and death. Thus, notwithstanding the common fate of the two sides, no solution is offered to restore mutual respect and normal life. Walking around in blood up to their ankles, the protagonists cannot bring a message of hope for the present or the future. The outbreak of the created a new reality for and the troupe went into shock: the artistic framework seemed to be slight indeed in the face of the demonstrations of the masses, the stone throwers, the dozens of Palestinian killed and wounded and the thousands in prison. Moreover, though no restrictions were placed on the troupe itself, it was not permitted to present its work on the main stage of the i.e., the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It began to act in a vacuum, unable to reach its audience, although various productions were staged23 and attempts were made to adjust to the new circumstances.24 This was why several of its founders and earliest members began to search for other new theatrical frameworks. The original group crumbled and its leader Abū Sālim left for Europe, but not before had succeeded during his few years of intensive activities in arousing Palestinian awareness and contributing to the forming of a political Palestinian consciousness. Moreover, the theatre contributed to the arising of a new generation of actors, of whom several can currently be found seeking their own theatrical paths. The great success of was despite, and perhaps because of, the constant attempts to disrupt its activities by the Israeli authorities, the Jerusalem municipality and The Council for the Criticism of Films and Plays. In order to foil these attempts the troupe was sometimes aided by Jewish Israeli theatre people who protested against the prevention of freedom of speech.25 The success of the theatre outside the Palestinian arena was not limited to the Israeli Jewish domain alone and the troupe also won great acclaim abroad. Since the early 1980s it has conducted annual tours in Israel, the West Bank and abroad, including participation in festivals in England, France, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain and Tunisia. One of the successful productions abroad was the abovementioned al-‘Ayn wa-l- Sinn (The Story of the Eye and the Tooth), staged at the beginning of 1986 in London. In the late 1980s held a long tour of performances in Japan, Europe and the United States, achieving great success according to the Palestinian press.26 has become in recent years, under its new name (Palestinian National Theatre), the central framework of the Palestinian theatrical movement. Its own original productions have decreased and it has increasingly became a

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framework for various productions of Palestinian theatrical activities and festivals including puppet and children’s theatre. In 1989 the name of the theatre building was changed to al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘ Arab! (The Arabic Cultural Center). In recent years a new phenomenon has appeared in Palestinian cultural life: festivals of national Palestinian theatre, prompted and sponsored initially by , are convened throughout the Palestinian centers in Israel and the territories, encouraging the development of this art and opening new paths and horizons.

V. Contemporary Palestinian Theatrical Activities The first festival of Palestinian theatre was held from 26 December 1990 to the end of January 1991 in East Jerusalem, which had consolidated its position as the center not only of Palestinian political activities but also of Palestinian cultural activities. Another festival, entitled Theatre Week, was held in December 1992 and included seven monodramas presented by troupes from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. Similar festivals were also held in Nablus, Ramalla, Bayt , Bethlehem and Bayt Jālā.27 Prominent among the plays staged at these festivals was Imīl Umm al-Rūbābīkiyā (The Junk Dealer), based on one of his own stories ( , 1985, pp. 23–28), directed by the Israeli Palestinian Yusuf Abū Warda and performed by Bushrā Qaramān. The play, which was first presented at the Acre Festival, tells the story of Hind, a junk dealer who, following the 1948 War, refused to emigrate to Lebanon with her husband and children but chose to stay in her home in Wadi al-Nisnās in Haifa. She recalls her memories of childhood interwoven with feelings of blame for the Palestinians who left their homeland as well as for those who chose to stay. The events in the short story upon which the play is based occur immediately after the 1967 War, but the events in the play have been adapted by to occur in 1991 ( , 1992, p. 12). There were three other outstanding plays dealing with the Palestinian tragedy presented at these festivals. The first of these was al-‘Akash (The Gravedigger) written and performed by ‘Adnān and directed by . The play is about an Israeli Palestinian who decided following the outbreak of the to live in the West Bank. After trying to find work in various places he begins to work as an gravedigger, since this job is the most widespread in the new situation of the , in view of the large numbers of dead of all ages. In this monodrama the actor interwove several storytellers who tell the same story in different ways with perspective variations à la Rashomon.28 The second play was ‘Amūd al-Kahrabā’ (The Electricity Pole), written by the Palestinian Israeli dramatist and critic (born 1956), directed by Salīm and performed by Makram Khūrī. The play is a satire dealing with the Palestinian tragedy through a meeting between a man living far from his homeland and an electricity pole on the verge of breaking, thus illustrating the Palestinian fate. This meeting takes place on a stage decorated in the blue-white colors of the Israeli flag, which enhances the man’s awareness of his reality. This reality creates the sense of frustration experienced by the Palestinians in view of the exploitation by the Jewish state, the constant Jewish immigration into Israel, the hypocritical preaching for Jewish-Arab brotherly love and solidarity as well as the hypocritical behavior among the Palestinians themselves. The third play was al-Zārūb (The Narrow Lane) directed by Fu’ād and performed by Sāmiya al-Bakrī, who tells the story of her childhood in Acre. The spectators become acquainted through the play with the Israeli-Jewish attempts to efface the Palestinian

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heritage and civilization as well as the changes in the nature of the various Palestinian places including their renaming—a subject that has recently become very prominent in contemporary Palestinian literature. In addition to the above-mentioned plays the festivals included al-Masā’ al-Akhīr (The Last Evening) produced and directed by ‘Abd al-Ju’ba and Kāmil al-Bāshā and performed by Kāmil al-Bāshā as well as Overcoat) (based upon Gogol’s famous short story) , directed by Makram Khūrī and performed by Khālid ‘Awwād, produced by Usāma and Kafka’s A Report to the Academy performed by ‘Amir Khalīl. Various theatrical activities have also been held within a more general framework, such as the First Jerusalem Festival for Culture and Arts held in the middle of 1992. In addition to presenting Palestinian folklore in various fields, several theatrical troupes staged dramatic works: at the Theatre Sāmiya al-Bakrī presented the above-mentioned al-Zārūb and another troupe presented a play for children. The Palestinian National Theatre staged the . Troupes from the Gaza Strip were invited to participate in the above-mentioned festival and one of them, the Amal (Hope), presented (The Determined), written by Nabīl Sāq Allāh and directed by Sā’ib al-Saqqā. Another troupe from the Gaza Strip, the (The Fighter), was prohibited from entering Jerusalem to participate in the activities of the festival.29 The intensification of Palestinian theatrical activities since the 1970s further encouraged prominent Palestinian writers and poets to contribute to the field of playwriting by writing new dramatic texts30 and sometime even accompanying the various stages of production. The most prominent contemporary Palestinian prose writer, Imīl , wrote the play Luka’ ibn Luka’ (Luka’ the Son of Luka’) (1980), considered to be one of the central dramatic texts written by any Palestinian playwright. It tells the story of the Palestinian tragedy from 1948 till the Camp David accord, in three acts or three sessions in front of the abovementioned al-‘Ajab (The box of wonders or the Magic Box) of the itinerant storyteller.31 One of the prominent activists in (The Modern Theatre) in Nazareth in the 1970s was Suhayl Abū Nuwāra, whose play Zughrūdat (The Joyous Cry of the Land) (1976) was one of the first of the few printed Palestinian plays which were aware of the technical problems that accompany an actual stage production. This is a play of obvious symbolism in which an old, sick father wants to stay on the land but is having a hard time in persuading his educated children to remain (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 55). The poet ‘Abd ‘Aql (1942–1993) from Nablus, who has emerged since the late 1960s as one of the more mature and original poets in the West Bank (Ashrawi, 1976, pp. 38–42), began in the late 1970s to direct his attention to dramatic literature. One of his prominent plays is al-‘Urs (The Wedding), which was staged at Bethlehem University in June 1976, and the printed text of which was published in 1980. The play, which is a history of the Palestinian tragedy, was directed by the playwright himself. Hence, ‘Aql was able to carry out exactly his own stage directions which insist on “the unnecessary use of theatrical devices in the staging of the play. The music and the lighting are not for creating effects but are participating in the dialogue and expressing what it cannot express” (‘Aql, 1980, p. 1). This was one of the few plays staged in the 1970s that also appeared in printed form, since although theatre troupes staged numerous plays in that period, not a single troupe published its plays. Several reasons were behind this phenomenon, among them the fact that the plays were written generally in a group effort and rarely existed in a finished or polished form. The plays are also rarely memorized precisely as most theatre troupes believe that plays are dynamic and changing, and hence improvisation and

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last minute changes were quite frequent. In addition the written script had to be submitted to the censor, and therefore most plays were adulterated in writing although the actors and actresses were generally quite aware of the full version.32 Most plays also included songs and since these do not have to be submitted to the censor, the written script usually did not contain parts which were sung. Nevertheless, one cannot totally reject the literary nature of the Palestinian theatrical activities in the 1970s (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 56). Indeed, the absence of written and faithful scripts and the affinity to the oral tradition brought these activities closer to the type of socially and politically oriented cultural activities which were and still are very popular in the territories as well as among the Palestinians in Israel. However, the basic orientation of these theatrical activities was nonetheless western. The participation of Palestinian Israeli playwrights, directors and actors in the above-mentioned theatrical activities sponsored by Palestinian troupes from East Jerusalem and the West Bank is just one of the prominent phenomena in the consolidation of the new Palestinian consciousness after the 1967 War. It is a united culture with no distinction between the literature written in Israel or in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since the middle of the 1970s Palestinian politically oriented directors began staging plays with clear political messages that did not distinguish between the two segments of the Palestinian people. The most prominent of these are (born 1948) and Fu’ād . , who was expelled from the Beit Tsvi theatre school because of his communist activity, studied in East Germany where he was heavily influenced by the Brechtian theatre. He staged several plays, prominent among which is Rijāl fī al-Shamas (Men in the Sun) first performed in Nazareth in 1976. The play was based on the novel of the same title by Ghassān Kanafānī (1936–1972) (Kanafānī, 1963; Kanafānī, 1978), in which the idealogy of “armed struggle” was expressed based upon the two rejections: the rejection of the possibility of absorbing the Palestinians into other Arab states and the rejection of the existence of Israel. This work has long been regarded as a brilliant portrayal of Arab attitudes towards the Palestinians in the period before the 1967 War, censuring of those who sought individual solutions without being actively committed to the collective national problem. Three separate narrative strands are gradually drawn together toward the final tragedy through three Palestinians of different generations who want to break away from the refugee camps and endeavour to find work in Kuwait in order to support their families. Because of the difficulty in obtaining a visa to travel to Kuwait, they have to be smuggled by various middlemen across the Iraq-Kuwait border, being cheated at every turn. A watertank lorry driver, Abū Khayzurān, rendered impotent by a previous war-wound, agrees to smuggle them in his water-tank. But at a crucial point, with the sun beating down, he is delayed at the border in a futile discussion about his supposed girlfriend in . Rushing to cross the border and open the tank, he finds his three passengers suffocated. He unloads the bodies at the closest municipal garbage dump, stripping them of all their valuables. Why, he wonders, didn’t they beat on the side of the tank?33 Another prominent play written and staged by , al-Mawja al-Tāsi’a (The Ninth Wave), was produced with a Belgian theatre troupe. This is a theatrical collage propounding the Palestinian side and their struggle to survive while criticizing the Israeli side. The staging of this play, based on Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1935), faced difficulties with the Israeli censorship which attempted to ban it. Among the reasons given was that the play “bears a racial message, and is anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli…and can cause extremism or violation of the public order.”34 , in his turn, is responsible for one of the most successful plays staged in Arabic in Israel: Mughāmarāt Ra’s al-Mamlūk Jābir (The Adventures of the Head of the Mamluk Jābir)

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written in 1969 by the Syrian dramatist Sa’d Allāh Wannūs (born 1940). Influenced by the German director Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) (Ballas, 1980, pp. 225–231), Wannūs’ dramatic works generally show a preoccupation with self-reflection and introspection, theatre inside theatre, in addition to the involvement of the audience with what is happening on the stage. This play, adapted and directed by Fu’ād , won first prize at the Acre Festival of Alternative Theatre. It used both Arab folklore and modern western techniques to close the gap between the stage and the audience, in a kind of a play-within-a-play. The storyteller in the play, set in a local cafe, tells the story of Jābir who lived a thousand years ago, acts as narrator and advances the plot but also criticizes, judges, observes and warns. The second level of the play is the tale of Jābir as performed by the actors. Since the play presents the past within the present and bears a relevant social message, the cafe’s nargillah smoking clients react to the story during the performance and afterward and compare it to their own reality. The play emphasizes the importance of the responsibility of the nation for its own fate through the tale of the struggle for authority between the caliph and one of his ministers in Baghdad. This struggle is apparent to the entire nation, which does not interfere, despite its suffering. Through the punishment of the opportunist Jābir, the playwright criticizes the apathy and unwillingness of the nation to take a stand, thus bringing a bitter end upon itself.35 notes that when he and ‘Adnān jointly adapted the play for the stage they wanted to emphasize that he who sells his soul to the devil and betrays his people will inevitably come to such a bitter end. In order to express this message they made certain changes, most of them emphasizing the direct link between the stage and the audience, such as developing the character of the cafe’s owner, replacing the storyteller with the character of the director, and incorporating puppet theatre, masks and dance (see comments in Urian [in press]). In the original version of the play the story-teller is the old traditional shā‘ir (poet or storyteller), being asked repeatedly to recite a certain story, while he insists that that particular staged another story is not suited to the times (Ostle, 1975, pp. 170–171). In 1982 adaptation of the above-mentioned Men in the Sun by Kanafānī at the Department of Theatre in the Faculty of Arts of Tel Aviv University. He was also responsible for the directing and the sets of (The Birds) staged in the al-Nuzha— Theatre, which was active in the 1980s alongside the main troupe of . This play, written by Ibrāhīm in a symbolic way through a hunter of birds who Khalāyila, tells the story of the regards all the people around him as birds, without any solid land beneath their feet. He persecutes both an old man, who does not struggle against his fate, and a young man who, in contrast to the old man, does struggle for his freedom which he succeeds in obtaining at the end.36 The troupe, which included the dramatist himself in the role of the hunter, together with Isma‘īl al-Dabbāgh as the young man and Salāyima as the old man, presented the was busy directing rehearsals for play abroad during a European tour. Recently Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem. This production bears a political message not only because a young Israeli Palestinian actor—Khalīfa —plays the role of Romeo, while a young Jewish actress—Orna Katz—plays the role of Juliet, but also because the Palestinian Romeo speaks with his Montague family in Arabic while speaking with his lover in Hebrew! The Palestinian theatrical movement is now a united movement with interwoven branches in Israel and the territories. Nevertheless, despite the cultural reunification of the two Palestinian segments and the intricacy and interlacing of their theatrical activities, one cannot overlook the delicate position of the Israeli Palestinian theatre people in initiating the

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Palestinian national theatre, including the . In addition, Israeli Palestinian actors are also active in the Hebrew-speaking Israeli theatre. Moreover, in contrast to the absence of any real involvement of Arab writers and poets in Israeli Hebrew literature (Snir, 1991a; Snir, 1991b; Snir, 1992), we find in Israeli Hebrew theatre and cinema an intense involvement of Palestinian actors acting in Hebrew-speaking plays and films, and not only playing the roles of Arabs or oriental Jews. Prominent among these actors are Yusuf Abū Warda, Makram Khūrī (born 1945), Bakrī (born 1953), Salīm , Suhayl , Salwā Naqqāra, Bushrā Qaramān, Rātib Awāwida and Khalīfa (born 1965). Some of them are permanently employed or frequent participants in established Israeli theatres, and especially in Haifa Municipal Theatre, which is known for fostering cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian actors. Outstanding among these actors are Makram Khūrī, who has belonged to Haifa Municipal Theatre since the mid 1970s, Yusuf Abū Warda, who has appeared in many plays in the theatre since the beginning of the 1980s and Bakrī, who has participated in recent years in several plays. These actors have also played leading roles in several Hebrew-language plays, In some of which they successfully concealed their Arabic accent, apparently following voice training. For example, in 1993 Khūrī played the role of the father of the bride in the play The Italian Straw Hat totally concealing his original accent and in the same year Bakrī played the role of Phil in the play Hollywood attempting, not always successfully, to conceal his Arabic accent. Nevertheless, the great achievements of these actors remained those in which they remained true to their native accent. For example the crowning achievement of Makram Khūrī was his performance in the role of Michel in the televised adapted version of Amnon Shamosh’s novel Michel Ezra Safra and Sons (1978) a role which contributed to his being awarded the Israel Prize in 1988. Bakrī reached his peak in The Pessoptimist, an adapted version of above-mentioned novel (see below). There are several reasons for the intense involvement of the Israeli Palestinians in Hebrew theatrical activities, in contrast to their minor activities in other Hebrew cultural fields such as poetry and prose. The participation of some Arab actors in Hebrew dramatic activities would appear to be due to practical reasons, as well as commercial ones, related to the need to use Arabic-speaking actors to act the roles of Arabs. There are many such roles in the Israeli theatre due to the number of plays dealing with the political confrontation and the fact that the relations between the Arabs and Jews constitute a focus of interest for Israeli intellectuals. Moreover, the nature of the dramatic genre makes the involvement of Palestinians in the Israeli Hebrew theatre different in comparison to their minor involvement in other cultural fields. The actor is not responsible for the text but merely performs a text written by another, hence avoiding the problem of identity and preference suffered, for example, by the poets. The very decision of the poet to write his poem in Hebrew and not in Arabic indicates his internal cultural preferences, which may even betray a more general inclination, keeping in mind the Jewish alleged norm of Hebrew literature and the Islamic norm of Arabic literature (Snir, 1992; Snir, 1993c). In contrast, participation by a Palestinian actor in a play does not mean any identification with the text. Thus, it is no coincidence that there are no Palestinian dramatic texts written originally in Hebrew and that most of the plays presented by Palestinian actors in Hebrew are translated texts. Moreover, the Palestinian actor in an Hebrew-speaking play feels that he is contributing to the national Palestinian cause; all the more so when he plays the role of an Arabic character. The Israeli Jewish playwrights and scriptwriters tend to be careless in depicting Arab characters, their customs, gestures and ways of expression, and the Arab actor can help to amend these roles (cf. Salīm comments in Urian [in press]).

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Not all of the Palestinian actors in the Hebrew theatre, most of whom are graduates of Israeli drama schools, confine their theatrical activities to the Hebrew language alone. They also participate in Arabic plays, whether in Palestinian or Israeli frameworks, as well as in other theatrical activities such as those produced by the Arabic section of the Israeli television. This creates a problem of identity for Israeli Palestinian actors when participating in Hebrew plays, particularly due to the fact that Hebrew culture does not distinguish between the Israeli identity and the Jewish identity. Yusuf Abū Warda, for example, gave expression to this problem some years ago when he was on the verge of resigning from Haifa Municipal Theatre. Abū Warda, known as an actor with a high political awareness, had once been a member of the Israeli Communist Party’s youth movement, and continued to be so even when he was studying at the Beit Tsvi theatre school. Some of his political utterances were very provocative such as; “in every Israeli a small Nazi is hidden.” Many of the plays in which he has taken part had political messages. However, in an interview in late 1991 he stated that he had decided not to participate in any political plays in the future: Since the outbreak of the I have realized that the preoccupation with politics in the theatre is naive. The theatre tried to find a different way, but the expression was isolated from the reality in which we are living.37 Another actor, Salīm , feels that because he lived through the period of land expropriation in the 1950s, he cannot play a role in the theatre or on the screen, without giving expression to these feelings and memories (Urian [in press]). This problem of identity, shared also by the Palestinian writers in Hebrew like Anton Shammas (born 1950) and Na‘īm ‘Arāyidī (born 1948) (Snir, 1992), has increased in light of the extra-theatrical reality, and particularly since the outbreak of the . The problem of identity encouraged certain Israeli Palestinian actors to attempt to create new local frameworks for Palestinian theatre, as in the Beit Hageffen Arab-Jewish center in Haifa. One of the most prominent plays to be staged in this framework was The Play Must Go On, a collage of various satirical works by the Syrian writer and poet (born 1934), based mainly on his play al-Muharrij (The Jester), adapted and directed by Makram Khūrī. The characters in the play are a troupe of itinerant actors who present a kind of theatre-within-a-theatre. In the Israeli Palestinian context of this production the wandering troupe is conceived of as a metaphor for the delicate situation of the Palestinians in Israel. The play opens with the jester pulling the troupe’s wagon while bewailing his fortune: there is no place in the Middle East in which I can set up the flag of surrender…I am not guilty, I did not betray my people. Makram Khūrī himself was well aware of the relevance of the play to Israeli reality and does not deny that the story of the jester is in fact the story of the Palestinians in Israel: “the play touches the schizophrenic condition and the problem of identity of the Arabs in Israel.”38 The staging of a play of this kind with these messages and by none other but Makram Khūrī, the winner of the Israel Prize in 1988, and at the established Beit Hageffen Arab-Jewish center in Haifa, serves to emphasize the united nature of the contemporary Palestinian theatrical movement.

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All the Arabic-language theatrical activities inside Israel are now an integral part of this movement, contributing to the national consciousness and enhancing the Palestinian identity. These activities are diversified and held within various cultural frameworks, some of them very close or even subordinate to the establishment. For example, in May 1992 a festival of monodramas was held at the Beit Hageffen center. Among the plays staged were al-‘Akash (The Gravedigger) and ‘Amūd al-Kahrabā’ (The Electricity Pole), later also staged, as mentioned above, within the framework of the Palestinian National Theatre in the territories. The activities held every year in Beit Hageffen within the framework of the Arabic Culture and Book month also include performances of plays by Arab troupes. In 1993 both professional and amateur troupes from Haifa, Umm , Qalanswa and Kafr Qara’ performed in this framework, in addition to amateur troupes from Arab schools in Haifa. On 1 May 1993 the First Cultural Meeting was held in the YMCA building in Nazareth sponsored by the division for Arab Culture of the Council for Culture and Art in the Ministry of Education and Culture. The activities included a pantomime by the actor Sa‘īd Salāma. In Israel the mobilization of the theatrical activities for the national struggle is also expressed in a relatively new phenomenon. More and more Hebrew-speaking Palestinian actors are staging plays, most of them monodramas, before Israeli Jewish audiences. All of these plays are politically oriented, forming part of the intensified efforts of the Palestinian national movement, much of them directed by the PLO, to bring to the Israeli Jewish intellectuals the feelings, emotions and views of the Palestinians. One of the prominent frameworks for theatrical activities in this regard in recent years has been the Acre Festival for Alternative Theatre. The actor Rātib Awāwida, for example, staged in 1981 an Hebrew version of the monodrama Bayt al-Junūn (A House Madness) by the Palestinian writer and playwright Tawfīq (born 1939).39 The playwright, who was arrested by the Israeli authorities for security reasons and left Israel in 1974, incorporated personal autobiographical elements into the play (Moreh & Abbāsī, 1987, p. 179), especially in describing the attitude of the security forces. The most prominent play to have been staged in Hebrew is The Pessoptimist based on the above-mentioned novel by Imīl ( , 1974; , 1982), adapted for the stage by Rami Livneh and performed by Bakrī. The Palestinian tragedy is presented through the story of Sa‘īd, a “Pessoptimist” (optimist & pessimist), whose image represents ironically the absurdity of the life of Palestinian people from the perspective of those who remained after 1948. Comic irony, satire, black and bitter humor, wit and discerning insight into the human and Palestinian situation makes the novel, and the play based on it, one of the best that Palestinian literature has offered until now. Bakrī, who presented hundreds of performances of this play in both Arabic and Hebrew, as well as a tour of performances in the United States, won the Isaac Stern Prize for acting in 1988. novel inspired other playwrights too, such as Ra’ūf Mas’ad (Mas’ad, 1989), to adapt it for the theatre. The Acre Festival is still a prominent framework for Palestinian theatrical activities in Arabic and Hebrew. The 14th Acre Festival held in October 1993 included a Jewish-Palestinian joint production entitled Ightirāb (Alienation) staged in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The play, written and directed by Dani Rosenfeld, portrays the feelings of alienation suffered by a group of survivors following an apocalyptic catastrophe. Only after wickedness becomes its own target do the survivors understand that without cooperation they will not survive. Another play at the Festival was an Hebrew adaptation of the novel Mawsim al-Hijra ilā al-Shamāl (Season of Migration to the North) (1966) by the Sudanese writer (born 1929) adapted for the stage by Bakrī. The play, a monodrama directed by

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Uriel Zohar and performed by Bakrī, tells the story of Sa‘īd, a Sudanese student visiting the west, not as a supplicant but in the role of avenger. Far from being overawed by western culture, he becomes a part of it. Given a teaching post at a university and adopted by British society, he proceeds to exploit its hankering for exoticism through a series of destructive relationships with British women, culminating in the almost ritual murder of his wife, Jean Morris, whose sneering defiance he has failed to tame. Returning home he meets the narrator, , who also visited the west but was overawed by its culture. The play attempts to bridge the gap between England and Sudan i.e., between the north and the south, and its message, as noted by the director, is that the struggle against being patronized is the hardest struggle for human beings.40 One cannot overlook the similarity between the identity problem of the figure in the play and that of the actor himself, as a Palestinian who has become a part of Israeli society and is even referred to, like the literary figure, as a sex symbol by that society41. The monodrama is concluded with what also seems to be a reflection of Bakrī’s problematical identity: There is no place for me in this village. Why am I not packing and leaving? These people, nothing will wake them. Nothing! Whenever happy they say: “I ask God’s forgiveness!” And whenever weeping they say: “I ask God’s forgiveness!” They have learned silence and tolerance from the tree and the river. But as for me, what have I learned? What have I learned?42 Other performances included in the Festival were the above-mentioned monodrama al-Zārūb, performed by Sāmiya Bakrī; A Man under his Vine, Jewish and Arabic folkloristic tales adapted and directed by Bilha Feldman with the participation of Jewish and Palestinian actors; Dīwān by the Acre Theatrical Troupe; and al-Kawākib (The Stars), a musical troupe from Jericho, who presented a repertoire of songs of peace to celebrate the new breakthrough in the peace process.43 As mentioned above, since its foundation Israeli television has contributed to the Arabic-speaking theatre in Israel. Not only have Palestinian actors participated in its productions but also Arabic-speaking Jews, prominent among whom are Lilit Naggar (Laylā Najjār) and Jack Cohen, especially in the field of encouraging coexistence. Some were joint Hebrew-Arabic productions aimed at encouraging coexistence, and prominent among these was the series Jīrān (Neighbors), presented in the late 1980s. The dialogue was bilingual, Hebrew and Arabic, with subtitles in both languages. The actors included Gadi Yagil and Ofra and Marlen Bajjālī (Palestinian). (born Weingarten (Hebrew) and Bassām 1950), a Christian from , is one of the outstanding Palestinian actors from East Jerusalem who is involved in the Israeli and Hebrew theatrical activities, especially within the Arabic section of Israeli television. He first appeared on television in 1975 with Khalīl Stories, and later had a great success with The Grand Restaurant. He also played in the Beit Lessin Theatre in Tel Aviv in Shmuel Haspari’s Trumpet in the Wadi adapted from the Israeli-Jewish writer Sammy Michael’s novel, and as a result faced criticism from Palestinian intellectuals who were perplexed that he had agreed to act in this play.44 However, now believes he has an important role to play in conveying Palestinian messages through the medium of the theatre to the people in the West Bank, and especially in the refugee camps, despite all the obstacles.45 He recently founded the Palestinian Theatre in East Jerusalem and in 1993 together with the Palestinian playwright As’ad al-As’ad, the editor of the Palestinian Magazine

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al-Kātib, he staged the parody al-Hawā’ (The Windmill), satirizing not only the Israeli occupation but also Palestinian society. One of the great problems of the Palestinian theatre, like Arabic theatre in general, is that of the female roles, especially in light of the status of woman in Palestinian society (Abd Allāh, 1979, pp. 93–95). This problem is more prevalent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and less so inside Israel. In recent years several eminent actresses have appeared, such as Salwā Naqqāra and Bushrā Qaramān. However, as Bushrā Qaramān complains, there are not enough good roles for actresses in which the woman is shown as a human being sharing in all aspects of Palestinian life and the struggle. In most of the plays the female roles are as someone’s mother or wife or sister (Urian [in press]). There is no doubt that this situation is a direct result of the status of women in the conservative Palestinian society. The dramatic activities of Salwā Naqqāra attempt to give expression to the feelings of oppression experienced by women in such a society.46 For reasons concerning moral and social norms and the social structure in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the awakening of Islam and the , the difficulties confronting actresses there are more pressing than in the Arab sector in Israel. Most actresses stop appearing on the stage after marriage. Needless to say, apart from acting, all the other professions in the Palestinian theatre in Israel or in the territories, such as playwriting, translating and adaptation to an Arabic version, directing, producing, set designing, music, scenery, costume designing, choreography, stage movement and lighting are generally restricted to males. Although the actual Palestinian theatrical movement is active mainly in Israel and the West Bank, Palestinian theatrical activities,* and mainly the writing of dramatic literature, is not limited to these areas and Palestinian playwrights throughout the world contribute to this field. One of the most prominent of such playwrights since the 1960s has been the poet and dramatist Mu‘īn Bsīsū (1927– 1984), who was active outside Israel and the West Bank. He was born in Gaza, wandered between the Soviet Union, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Tunis, occupied several positions in the PLO and its press and publication institutions, and died in London. He published three full-length plays: Ma’sāt Guevara (The Tragedy of Guevara) (1969), Thawrat al-Zanj (The Revolution of the Zanj) (1970), and Shamshūn waDalīla (Samson and Delilah) (1971), as well as several short plays and playlets. His view of Palestine in his plays, as the critic ‘Alī al-Rā‘ī states, is “the simple one of a land unlawfully seized by an alien force, and a people that has been either expelled into the wilderness or subjugated inside Israel, and rendered subservient to the foreign master” (Badawi, 1992, p. 367). In his plays, Bsīsū exploits historical, mythical and folkloristic figures and themes representing the Palestinian tragedy and gives them universal meanings. Moreover, he advocates all revolutions seeking to liberate people from the yoke of foreign rule, internal exploitation and the loss of freedom of speech.47 Ma sāt Guevara and Thawrat al-Zanj48 draw a comparison between the Palestinians and the Zanj (Negroes) who lived under the Abbasid empire in untold misery and the Red Indians of North America. The fate of the latter is presented as a grave warning to the Palestinians who stand in the same danger of extinction as did the “redskins”. In Shamshūn wa-Dalīla, which is particularly worthy of consideration, the dramatist succeeds in translating the emotions of anger and sorrow into convincing dramatic terms. The play, a fantasy in some parts, a prophecy in others, gives an impressive picture of a Palestinian tragedy through a family in which the parents, two sons and daughter have different views as to what must be done regarding the situation created by the successive defeats culminating in the 1967 War, One of the sons, Māzin, can no longer tolerate life under the

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Israelis, and he also brands as futile his father’s action in keeping a key and documents proving that he owns a well in Jaffa, since Jaffa and other towns have fallen to the enemy, and an Arab return to Palestine, as promised in the fiery press articles and radio and television programs, is no more than a dream. Māzin therefore decides to run away from such an impossible situation. His brother, holds a different view. To his father’s protest that leaving the land to the Israelis was a fatal mistake, he points out that it is the duty of every Palestinian to shape his own destiny with his own hands. Life in exile is just another prison. Of no avail is the wailing of his sister Rīm, who is driven mad by her own personal tragedy as well as by the general one. She has lost not only her country, but also her baby in an Israeli raid, when she mistook a bundle she was carrying for the baby, and threw away the latter. Armed revolution, maintains , is the only way out, alluding to the above-mentioned Ghassān Kanafānī’s idealogy of armed struggle. While part one of the play ends with the outbreak of the revolution, part two deals with the 1967 defeat: Israel that has won more Arab lands is now stronger than ever. Nevertheless, the resistance movement has gained momentum. The Israelis try to win over Rīm, who is now in their hands, to their side. If she denounces her friends, she will be allowed to leave and then she can become a heroine overnight by pretending she has escaped. Her interlocutor is a present-day Samson, whose long hair is made of ribbons of bullets. The failure of this new Samson to win Rīm over is taken by Samson’s lover, a young woman called Rachel (a stereotypical name for Jewish and Israeli women in Arabic literary and dramatic texts), to mean that the new Delilah has robbed Samson of his strength, by once again cutting his hair. Although they were written in exile, the thematic pivot of Bsīsū’s plays, like that of the Palestinian contemporary theatre movement in general, still bears a resemblance to the habits of Palestinian literature; i.e., they concentrate on the tragic events of 1948 and their after effects. Furthermore, although the Palestinian theatre is a part of the general theatrical movement in the Arab world, it bears special traits which distinguish it from any other Arabic theatrical movement. The PLO has encouraged the distinctive Palestinian theatre alongside its various cultural activities and maintains an association of Palestinian artists and actors headed by the actor Ghassān (born 1930). Since 1967 and the reunification of the Palestinians in Israel with their brothers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, one cannot speak about two different Palestinian cultural, and certainly not theatrical, movements. A good illustration is al-Qāsim (born 1939), the above-mentioned short play in verse, Qaraqāsh (1970),49 by who has directed his concern since the beginning of the 1970s to establishing a Palestinian theatre.

VI. al-Qāsim’s Qaraqāsh Qaraqāsh is one of the first printed Palestinian plays written with an awareness to the western sense of the genre. The dramatist, one of the most prominent Palestinian poets of our time, intended it originally to be a contribution to the establishment of a Palestinian theatre with high artistic and intellectual mission, and “to impart a political message of great poignancy to the world” (Jayyusi, 1992, p. 254). As mentioned above, Qaraqāsh was also the dramatic text which served to initiate a Palestinian theatre movement. It was first performed in the West (The Family of the Theatre) from Bank after the 1967 War by the troupe ‘Ā’ilat Ramallah. This manifestation of the reunification of the two segments of the Palestinian people

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has underlined the importance of the play as the first serious dramatic text written after the 1967 War by a prominent Palestinian writer. Qaraqāsh illustrates the beginning of the professional stage in the Palestinian modern theatrical movement. Moreover, through this play one can follow some of the pivotal thematic and poetic aspects of Palestinian theatrical movement, its literary and ideological background and the general universal, as well as particular Arabic sources, of influence and inspiration. The specific personal and general political and cultural contexts of the late 1960s are essential for an understanding of the play. Regarding the personal context, one cannot overlook al-Qāsim’s own experiences in the few years preceding the writing of the play, especially in the wake of the 1967 War, his imprisonment at the beginning of the war, the censorship of his literary works (al-Qāsim, 1969a, pp. 30–32); and his feeling that “on the fifth of June I was reborn” (al-Qāsim, 1969, p. 26). On the other hand the general background of these years also clarifies several aspects relating to the play, particularly in light of the development of Palestinian literature after the 1967 War and following the reunification of the two Palestinian segments. Moreover, there is an unmistakable impact on the play of one of the main issues which occupied the Arabic general literary system in the late 1960s i.e., the issue of iltizām (commitment). That term, considered since the 1950s to be an essential part of the vocabulary of Arab intellectuals and writers, was employed to indicate the necessity for a writer to convey a message, rather than merely creating an imaginative work for its own sake. Although its significance became diffuse and generally denoted a certain measure of nationalism, one of its dominant meanings was the adoption of a Marxist stand (Snir, 1992a, pp. 7–54). The genre of verse-drama chosen by the dramatist was also very popular with committed Arab playwrights in the 1960s, particularly for political criticism.50 The play’s eponymous title, indicates one of the significant sources of influence and inspiration of contemporary Palestinian, as well as Arabic, theatre and literature in general. It alludes to the historical figure of Qarāqūsh, a eunuch whose full name was Bahā’ al-Dīn b. ‘Abd Allāh al-Asadī (d. 1201). Qarāqūsh obtained his liberty and was appointed as an Amir and then chamberlain. In this capacity he served the family of the late caliph and is said to have administered his office with great severity, such as preventing the family of the caliph from increasing by separating men and women. Apart from his strictness and cruelty a series of absurd verdicts are attributed to him in a work entitled al-Fashūsh fi Qardāqūsh (The Book on the Stupidity in the Judgments of Qarāqūsh) (Ibn Mamātī [n.d.], pp. 8–28). These verdicts and judgments, which have nothing to do with statecraft but are court verdicts, are typical and familiar anecdotes, equally prevalent among other nations. This was the historical background to a popular and folkloric figure named “Qarāqūsh” (also called “Sultan” in one of the manuscripts of the above-mentioned book) who became notorious as a byword for cruelty and stupidity.51 Al-Qāsim’s allusion to that historical figure in the 1960s was a part of a then popular method adopted by Arab poets and playwrights in order to express political and social views. This is, in fact, the strategy of qinā‘ (mask), i.e., the presentation of ideas and feelings through ancient figures generally from the Islamic or Arab heritage. Al-Qāsim apparently adopted this strategy under the influence of famous Arab poets and playwrights and particularly the Iraqi poet ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Bayyātī (b. 1926), and the Egyptian poets and playwrights ‘Abd al-Sharqāwī (1921–1987) and ‘Abd (1931–1981). It enabled the playwright not only to avoid censorship but also to give his play a universal meaning (al-Naqqāsh, 1991,

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p. 115). In emphasizing this meaning, the dramatist also defines at the beginning of his work the place and time as follows: The Time: every time The Time: every time The Place: every place (al-Qāsim, 1970, p. 7) In every time and place there exists a tyrant like Qaraqāsh and in every time and place people rebel against his despotic and arbitrary rule. In order to emphasize this universal human aspect three groups—ancient Greek, ancient Egyptians and modern Europeans—move across the stage in dumb show in the opening scene, all tied with chains and undergoing various tortures. The last group, that of the modern Europeans, crosses the stage accompanied by the voice and picture of Adolph Hitler. The scene clearly demonstrates how despotism has had various faces in the course of history but that its logic is one, and a clear analogy is made between all the tyrants in the history of humankind and between the most notorious of them in modern times. Qaraqāsh, representing despotism throughout the centuries, is the slave-driver of ancient Greece and Egypt and alludes to the modern dictator and mass murderer, Hitler. Preaching the philosophy of aggression as a way out of economic difficulties, Qaraqāsh regards human beings as cannon-fodder and lubrication for the war machine. The allusions to the Nazi characteristics of Israeli behavior are clear and unambiguous, and such allusions are widespread in contemporary Palestinian literature and theatre. The universal human dimensions of the play and its relevancy to all, including the spectators, is strengthened by a note in the printed text: The spectators may intervene in the dialogues and express their opinions whenever they want al-Qāsim 1970, p. 8). This note betrays the clear influence of the German director Erwin Piscator who, together with Brecht, whom he greatly influenced, believed that conveying social and political messages was the prime aim of the theatre in a dynamic modern society (Taylor, 1984, pp. 217–218). In his “political theatre”, and especially in his experimental productions of the 1920s in Berlin, Piscator encouraged the audience to take an active part in the events on stage. The relevant message of the play is expressed clearly in the overture by the chorus: In every time In every place He comes in the form of a human being Accompanied by death While the voice is sounding: He has lived in every time He has lived in every place Qaraqāsh, Qaraqāsh, Qaraqāsh!! (al-Qāsim, 1970, p. 9). The play is divided into four acts, or pictures as they are called by the dramatist, each of which opens with the marching onto the stage of two masked men—one laughing and the

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other crying—bearing a sign with different slogans in each act. The signs state successively (in the third act there are two slogans): (I) (II) (III)

“The false god ascends to the throne on the ladder of hunger.” “Qaraqāsh reaps others’ wheat and drinks their wells.” a. “In order to become dictator you must strip the people of their heritage.” b. “The idea of the removal of the differences between the classes in society is destructive for its originators.” (IV) “When the masses feel the knife cutting their flesh, they have no choice but to think of something to do if they want to continue living.” Mentioning the false god at the beginning of the first act is intended to construct the literary and intertextual context in which the play must be interpreted. When a nation is undergoing a severe crisis, such as the hunger demonstrated in the play, two solutions exist The first is that of the revolutionary farmer, representing the consciousness of the playwright and the voice of universal justice: the crises can and must be solved by hard work. The second solution is presented by the despot who calls for attacking the neighbors and seizing their sources. The despot’s figure alludes to the figure of the Dajjāl (the Deceiver) i.e., the False Christ, Antichrist, or Armillus: that evil personage endowed with supernatural powers who will come forth before the end of time and rule in heresy and tyranny for a limited period of either 40 days or 40 years, to be followed by the universal conversion of humanity to Islam. His appearance is one of the proofs of the end of time and he will die at the hands of the Mahdī (the Rightly Guided) or Jesus (Abel, 1965, pp. 76–77). In ancient Muslim traditions the appearance of the Antichrist is preceded by al-Sā‘a (The Signs of the Resurrection) mentioned in the Qur’ān (47:18). Some of these signs are frequently presented in the form of what is described by E.R. Curtius, who discussed the adaptation of topoi to literary use, as the topos of the “world upsidedown” (mundus inversus). Curtius has illustrated this topos through one of the pieces among the Carmina Burana, a collection of Goliardic poems whose underlying theme is the Horatian carpe diem. In twentieth century Arabic literature this topos, like apocalypticism in general (Emmerson, 1981, p. 3), has become extremely popular, acquiring new functions and sometimes becoming a cliche, “which can be used in any form of literature” (Curtius, 1952, p. 70). It has become imbued with new life in modern Arabic literature and is exploited by many poets, writers and playwrights. The alluded to appearance of Antichrist, generally illustrates the omen boding the coming revolution, which will annihilate oppression and tyranny, and launch a new era. The significant allusions of this topos to “The Signs of the Resurrection” are accompanied in contemporary Arabic poetry and prose by the hyperbolic presentation of an actual or possible rejected reality—be it personal, political, social, ethical, national, rhetorical or even aesthetic-critical (Snir, 1994). Great use is made of this topos in the play, and especially in scenes which combine realistic but unacceptable conditions and present them as the “world upsidedown”. Exploited in order to challenge a state of affairs demanding immediate reform it is intended to forewarn against the dangerous deviation from the desired reality which must be restored. Hence, a nonexistent, reversed, rejected reality is created, illustrating the dangers entailed by this dangerous deviation, unless swiftly corrected. Like the identification of Antichrist with a specific pope or political figure in the middle ages (Emmerson, 1981, p. 7), the Islamic allusions in the play indicate that the Israeli regime was perceived by the playwright, shocked

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by the 1967 War, as the Antichrist of the 1960s. Moreover, as in Palestinian literature in general, the topos is used here to indicate that a world in which vices have become virtues needs urgent reform. As this topos is inherent in the literary imagination of the Arab poets and writers, it immediately comes to mind when they witness a deviation from the desired reality, as they regard it. The signs of Judgement Day, portended by the “world upsidedown”, are no longer in the distant future, but here and now. Thus, the hyperbolic presentation of an actual or possible rejected and horrible reality, in a way which reminds the reader or spectator of these signs, powerfully challenges a situation which demands immediate reform, as manifested in Cassius’s words in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (I, 3:62–71): Why all these things change, from their ordinance, Their nature, and pre-formed faculties, To monstrous quality; why, you shall find, That heaven hath infused them with these spirits, To make them instruments of fear and warning, Unto some monstrous state (Shakespeare [n.d.], p. 723). Like archetypes, the allusions to the “world upsidedown” are, in some respect, the product of the “collective unconscious” of Arab poets and writers, both Muslim and Christian, bequeathed by the Arab and Islamic heritage. One of the advantages of this topos is that it conceals the writer’s own confusions and shifting opinions as he slowly faces reality (Hill, 1971, p. 66). Another advantage is its vagueness and ambiguity: it can encompass attacks on more than one target. The poets and writers who use its symbolism have presumably no consciously evasive purpose in mind. Like those who used the symbolism of Antichrist in seventeenth-century England (Hill, 1971, pp. 44–45), they draw on allegorical habits of mind inherited from the past. Nevertheless, its imprecision allows differing interpretations to be put upon it, either by different people or by the same person appealing to different groups. The vagueness and ambiguity also have camouflage advantages: in Egypt in the 1960s, for example, critics of the local “world upsidedown” were in fact attacking the regime. Nevertheless, even the supporters of the regime could hardly object to a denunciation of this “world upsidedown”, as long as it was not too clearly defined. Like sin, everyone was against it (cf. Hill, 1971, p. 45). Using the topos of the “world upsidedown” al-Qāsim attempts to destroy the foundations of the political and social world in which the Palestinians are living. He calls for the overthrow of the tyrant, who exploits the people and uses them for the sake of increasing his own wealth and glory. Some saw in the figure of Qaraqāsh a symbol of the Imperialist powers (e.g., alNaqqāsh, 1991, p. 121), others referred to him as a symbol of the Israeli Military establishment (e.g., Sayegh, 1990, p. 223) or even as standing for Moshe Dayan, the noted Israeli hero of the 1967 War (Badawi, 1992, p. 366). The progress of the play from its first act to the last one illustrates the inevitable development of reality, as the dramatist perceived it in the late 1960s: the first act ends with the killing of the revolutionary farmer, who calls for a solution to the internal crisis through hard work and not by attacking the neighbors. Following mock-trials, the people finally rebel in the last act and the peasants kill the tyrant, proclaiming themselves as the only just ruler. The play bears the evident influence of Brecht and his principal ideas in the theory of drama, and especially of his play The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1943–5). The poetry of al-Qāsim is in

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general heavily influenced by Brecht’s poetry, drama and political idealogies (al-Qāsim, 1969, p. 28; al-Naqqāsh, 1991, p. 116) and he even translated some of Brecht’s poems into Arabic (e.g., al-Qāsim, 1979, pp. 10–13). Like The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Qaraqāsh could be described as a fairy tale for grown-ups. Outdoor scenes and images of nature abound in both plays, which deal with extremes of goodness and evil, omitting anything in between (Hayman, 1984, p. 80). The influence of Brecht is seen in al-Qāsim’s tendency towards the balladeer: his villainous rulers, his merciless soldiers, his greedy and rebellious peasants and his eccentric judge are characters who might have stepped out of a fairy tale or ballad, but he also brings much of the human experience into focus as he modulates between stylized action and poetic narration. Al-Qāsim attempts in Qaraqāsh to present the type of epic theatre advocated by Brecht, Piscator and other German theatre people of the 1920s. According to Brecht, who also stressed the political significance of the genre and its complete exclusion of empathy, the essential point of epic theatre is that it appeals less to the spectator’s feelings than to his reason (Taylor, 1984, p. 97). Al-Qāsim also exploits one of Brecht’s principal theories of drama—the Verfremdungseffekt, known as the “V-Effect” (Alienation Effect often abbreviated to “A-effect”), i.e., the retention of a degree of critical detachment and distance from the play and performance instead of complete absorption by the actor in his role (Taylor, 1984, p. 12). The dramatist exploits various techniques in order to keep the audience consciously aware of the fact that it is a theatrical performance they are witnessing, and to limit their emotional identification and assimilation with specific characters and situations. The instructions given by the dramatist and the directional approach encouraged by him, are that the actor is not required to attempt just to be the character, to present it entirely from the inside and endeavour to lose himself in it, but, while understanding its psychological workings, to present it in such a way as to imply an attitude towards the character. It is interesting to note that the Brechtian “V-Effect” is known from the ancient theatrical tradition of the Arabs in which the actors were dressed to look like the persons they represented, but did not actually represent them i.e., they did not lose their identity as actors (Moreh, 1992, pp. 129, 147, n. 43). The figure of Qaraqāsh incorporates the figure of Brecht’s Azdak and the myth of Qarāqūsh, to both of whom were related a series of absurd and stupid verdicts. A woman who lost her son in the war is accused of treason since she is not happy with her sacrifice and Qaraqāsh’s verdict is as follows: You will stand on one leg for six days… And before the sixth day you will give birth to Seven children The seventh of them will be called up to the army And the other six will be called up also! (al-Qāsim, 1970, p. 66). This verdict, like his other verdicts (e.g., al-Qāsim, 1970, pp. 71–73), is in accordance with the “world upsidedown” situation created by the despot: the bereaved woman is condemned simply because she insists on her right to mourn her son. Similarly, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, when an innkeeper accuses a stableman of assaulting his daughter-in-law, Azdak condemns the girl for assaulting the man. “Do you imagine you can go around with a bottom like that and get away with it in Court? This is a case of deliberate assault with a dangerous weapon.” He confiscates a dun-colored horse he has always fancied, and orders the girl to go with him to

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the stable, “so that the Court may investigate the scene of the crime” (Brecht, 1969, pp. 76–77). The similarity between the two plays is also evident in what seems to be at first glance a contradiction between the abundance of scenes of men being dragged to the gallows and between the pacifist messages of both plays and the insistence that wars should and could be abolished. Despite such messages both plays indicate that social injustices can only be removed by revolution. Al-Qāsim, like Brecht, reflects his social and political interests and especially his Marxist preoccupations in his satirical attack on bourgeois society and its standards. He preaches Marxism as a socio-political order designed to remedy all the grievances of society. It is not only a local and national struggle but a universal and social one as well (cf. Kanazi, 1989, pp. 135–137). While all the characters in the play may be regarded as simple illustrations of the dramatist’s political and social ideologies, one of the figures, the son of Qaraqāsh, is an intricate and complicated character: as a noble spirit he falls in love with a beautiful peasant girl and insists on marrying her, despite the girl’s attempt to remind him of the huge social barrier that separates them. Brecht seems to have exerted a strong influence on al-Qāsim with regard to the figures in the play. The character who is reminiscent of Azdak is that of the soldier who replaces Qaraqāsh while he goes to eat (al-Qāsim, 1970, pp. 66–70): “I have not read the books of law,” he says to the defendant brought before him, “and the illiterate justice is responsible for removing injustice from you.” Like Azdak, the rogue turned judge in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, this soldier too is a contradictory human being who escapes the rigid formulation of his social and political significance. After hearing the defendant tell of the destruction of his fields by the military and the death of his son in the war, he pronounces his verdict: We know that the justice included in the formal texts Rules that you should be hanged But the illiterate justice Rules that you will take from the state treasury All which will guarantee your nourishment, till your plants forget The war vehicles’ wheels And the soldiers horses’ hoofs The justice included in the illiterate regimes adds That the grief at your dead son is your own right, Not of a vizier grieved with ink tears on the paper And since I am an illiterate ignorant of the history of antiquities And since I am an illiterate ignorant of the geography of the lands I judge in your favor! (al-Qāsim, 1970, pp. 68–69). The last six lines were chosen by the dramatist to be the motto of the play. It is only natural that on returning to his seat Qaraqāsh accepts the recommendation of the aristocracy and condemns the soldier who replaced him to death, since he “incites the dregs of people against us.” The manner in which the soldier dispenses justice reminds us of what Brecht said about the character of Azdak, the ribald, drunken anti-hero, reminiscent of Švejk, 52 elevated to the role of judge:

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First I had only his lousy jurisdiction, which made poor people come off well. I knew I mustn’t suggest that the normal laws should be bent for justice to prevail, but to indicate that with careless, ignorant, even bad jurisdiction, something emerges for those who really needed law. That’s why Azdak had to have the self-seeking, amoral, parasitical features of the lowest, most degenerate of judges. But I still needed an elementary cause of a social kind. I found it in his disappointment that with the overthrow of the old masters, what ensued was not a new era but an era of new masters. So he goes on enforcing bourgeois law, only dilapidated, sabotaged, adapted to serve the unqualified self-interest of the judicature (Hayman, 1984, p. 82). The end of the play confirms Brecht’s influence: the vizir is sent by Qaraqāsh’s son as a mediator between the prince and his father and when the despot is asked what would be his judgement if a prince in his land should fall in love with a commoner, he unhesitatingly pronounces the death of the lovers and asks that their bodies be carried to him. Discovering that he has unwittingly put his own son to death, he is driven by shock and grief to declare a new war in which his people will be compelled to take part. However, the people are unable to stand any more of the despot’s crimes and an open revolt ensues in which both Qaraqāsh and his minister are killed. A popular rule is soon set up amid universal jubilation and one of the farmers takes Qaraqāsh’s seat, with the soldiers throwing away their helmets and joining the farmers in singing and dancing. One of the farmers shouts: “Long live the righteous king!” and all the farmers and soldiers shout: “We are the righteous king! We are the righteous king!” The similarity between this scene and the concluding scene of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is striking. Qaraqāsh, written in a period during which the dramatist believed that Communism would cure all ills, could be described as a political play. It was written in order to ignite the people and inflame them to act against a political and social order perceived to be rotten. In the play, as in his poems, al-Qāsim builds a dialectic between good and evil, i.e., between the oppressed people and the tyrannical regime. The emphasis is put on the people’s power to overcome all misery, all insanity of judgement, and emerge victorious. “In fulfillment of the tradition of the fables of old,” as the Egyptian critic ‘Alī al-Rā‘ī states, “a prince loves a peasant girl. Although the result is not at all happy, the young prince’s desire that the castle should lower itself a little and the cottage rise a little is achieved, even though the union may be in death” (Badawi, 1992, p. 366). The Brechtian influence in this vision is clear, as it is apparent in other levels of the play in general. This influence, added to that of the ancient Arabic and Islamic heritage seems to illustrate some of the main origins of inspiration for contemporary Palestinian theatre in general.

Conclusion Palestinian theatre, like Palestinian literature in general, has flourished as a direct reaction against suppression of freedom, particularly since the 1967 War. The reunification of the Palestinians in Israel with their brothers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the war, the unification of the cultural movements within and outside Israel, have promoted the emergence of this theatre. Furthermore, the role of Israeli Palestinian theatre people in the rise of the national Palestinian theatre since the 1970s has been decisive. The thematic pivot of Palestinian theatre in general is still, like Palestinian literature, the tragic events of 1948 and their after

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effects. Although Palestinian theatre is a part of the general theatrical movement in the Arab world, it bears special traits which distinguish it from any other Arabic theatrical movement. The professionalization of Palestinian theatre has taken a line parallel to the escalation of Palestinian resistance and has lived up to historical challenges, defying the hardships imposed by censorship, geographical isolation and lack of education. Moreover, the theatrical processes and institutional structure have been influenced as much as the content and style by the particular circumstances in which Palestinian theatre has functioned. Political constraints, such as censorship and other forms of control, played a role in leading this theatre to develop a style of collective work. Plays are created, especially in the theatre in East Jerusalem, through a process of improvisation on agreed topics; they do not rely on written texts. Some troupes claim that their plays were written solely for the benefit of the censorship authorities, “who nevertheless fail from time to time, to grasp the real meaning of the messages” (Shinar, 1987, p. 138). Thus, much variation develops during long months of rehearsal and interaction with the audience, until the plays are finally shaped. Palestinian theatre, more than literature, has tried to fulfil the multiple tasks and roles imposed upon it by historical and socio-political conditions. Its main purpose has been to reflect the political aspirations of the Palestinian people. Therein lie both its strength and its weakness: it is a political instrument called upon to raise the level of national consciousness, to incite resistance and revolution, to record the trials and experiences of the nation as a whole, and to prepare for and project a better future. It also has the duty of being the social critic, conducting an exacting self-examination and exposure of the ills and problems of a traditional society trying to meet the challenges of progress and development. Finally, it is a part of the dynamic cultural Palestinian movement with the projected vision of self-help and education directed to and rooted in the masses of the Palestinian people. However, as a leading Palestinian critic indicates, “lacking all types of abstract and material security under occupation, it also lacks the assurance of objective criticism, for most people look to it for its didactic quality” (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 58). Moreover, Arab critics, and even leftist Israeli intellectuals, have been willing to accept unconditionally anything which is Palestinian as a positive contribution to the Palestinian, Arabic and sometimes new Israeli culture. This indulgent attitude of irresponsible panegyric has caused Palestinian writers, poets and critics themselves to demand greater honesty and responsibility from their readers and critics (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 58). Contemporary Palestinian theatre is developing under the influence of the Arabic heritage, ancient folklore and contemporary Arabic literature but also under the influence of western theatre. A major influence on this theatre is still exerted by Brecht, especially with regard to the essence, contents and techniques of the epic theatre, which appeals less to the spectator’s feelings than to his reason. One cannot overlook too the influence of the Hebrew theatre, in view of the fact that many prominent Palestinian actors are graduates of Israeli-Hebrew schools of theatre. Furthermore, due to the nature of this cultural activity which obliges direct contact with the people, the relation between the Palestinian dramatic movement in Israel and Hebrew dramatic activities is stronger than in any other cultural domain. Palestinian theatre has been adopted in its full western image and practice, but the dramatic impulse in Palestinian peasant culture is still very popular, especially that of the Dabka dances, performed on special occasions such as weddings. The two traditions currently exist side by side, and are even interwoven: various plays have combined elements from the peasant culture and some theatre troupes perform in the villages and attract large audiences. Essentially, however, the theatre is a city activity (mainly in East Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth and Ramallah), and its audience is the

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middle class, the educated and the politically aware working class. Nevertheless, the Palestinian theme and the revolutionary orientation of most plays have taken Palestinian drama away from the bourgeoisie and the elite and have made it available to a larger segment of society. Like other cultural and literary activities and productions, drama has become a serious means of political education, as reflected in the activities of . This theatre has functioned as a channel presenting some of the most basic dilemmas of Palestinian nation building. The troupe has raised questions of identity without concealing its affinity with Palestinian, rather than pan-Arab or pan-Islamic characteristics; it has given expression to the tradition-modernity dilemma, stating its preference for modernity, without however discarding tradition as a source of inspiration and reliance. Through its activities the theatre has promoted the (steadfastness) principle as a solution to the inevitable confrontation between pride and survival and between the hopes for an independent future and the pressures of occupation; and it has enhanced the two-front struggle of Palestinian women, both as symbols of Palestinian changing values and as a channel in which Palestinian actresses may enjoy equal rights. Contemporary Palestinian theatre is developing rapidly although facing various professional problems regarding the troupes, the texts, and the relationship with the audience (al-Asadī, 1989, pp. 192–205) in addition to major budgetary problems. Due to political circumstances Palestinian theatre, like Palestinian cinema (al-‘Awdāt, 1989, pp. 61–100), cannot fully develop, especially since it still lacks the budget and theatrical infrastructure such as halls in which to perform. Moreover, the severe economic problems in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip resulted at the end of 1993 in decreased theatrical activities, especially of the Theatre under its new name (Palestinian National Theatre).53 The Middle East peace process, the breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations and the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO on 9 September 1993 have given hope not only to the Palestinian people but also to the Palestinian theatre people. They are seeking now to establish their national Palestinian theatre in an independent Palestinian state.

Notes * Bibliographical items appearing in the Reference list are quoted in the notes in abbreviation. Other items are quoted in full. 1. See, for example, the comments of Būlus and Imīl in Urian [in press]. 2. Karagöz, a word apparently derived from Qarāqūsh Saladin’s official (see Section VI, below), was originally the chief character of the Turkish shadow play and his figure gave the title to these plays. The Turkish Karagöz was copied by all the Arabic-speaking countries and was introduced into their own shadow theatres, modeled on the Turkish; just as non-Arab countries were similarly influenced by Karagöz while under Turkish domination (Landau, 1958, pp. 24–25). 3. See Bama 52 (December 1947), p. 43. 4. Among the famous Egyptian troupes that visited Palestinian was that of the renowned actor and director Georges , who introduced European classical dramas before and after the First World War (Landau, 1958, p. 78). 5. See Bama 50 (January 1947), p. 110. 6. Al-Hadaf, 21 April 1946, p. 11. Cf. Landau, 1958, p. 103. 7. Bama 50 (January 1947), pp. 107–109.

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

29. 30. 31. 32.

al-Jawī wrote a book on the history of Palestinian theatre 1918–1948 (al-Jawzī, 1993) and Jamīl al-Jawzī has been active in the press (e.g., his essay in the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustūr, 29 January 1986). On exceptions see Peled, 1982, pp. 157–162. Cf. , 1990, pp. 113–124. On Brecht’s influence on the Palestinian theatre see Section VI. See ‘Afīf report about the Arabic participation in the Third Haifa Festival for Children’s Theatre held in April 1993 (Mawāqif, March-April 1993, pp. 113–119). See his essay “Save Us from this Cruel Love” [Arabic], al-Jadīd, June 1969, pp. 2–4. In July 1983 the league published a one-issue magazine entitled (The Theatre) including details about the activities of the festival and aimed at fostering the Arabic-language theatrical activity. An attempt was made in that publication, as well as in the activities of the festival, not to emphasize the Palestinian nature of the theatrical movement, hence, calling it an Arabic theatrical movement. This would appear to have been for fear of the authorities’ reaction and due to the close links of some of the participants with the establishment. To evade lack of freedom writers frequently used pseudonyms to hide their identity (Ashrawi, 1976, pp. 11). After a famous fair held in ancient times in Mecca in which poetic tournaments were held. On the relation of the Palestinian theatre to the ancient storyteller, which was “the corner stone for the beginnings of the local theatre” see , 1989, pp. 173–174. , Information Brochure, 1985 (according to Shinar, 1987, p. 135). Quotations from the English translation distributed to the audience (Shinar, 1987, p. 135). Quotations from the English translation distributed to the audience (Shinar, 1987, p. 136). Quotations from the English translation distributed to the audience (Shinar, 1987, p. 136). Quotations from the English translation distributed to the audience (Shinar, 1987, p. 136). On these activities of al-Kurd see al-Qindīl, October 1988, pp. 36–37. According to statistics published by the Association of Palestinian Writers 52 theatrical productions were staged by Palestinians from the territories during the first three years of the ( al-Tahwra, 20 January 1991, p. 30). For example, staging the plays in day time in order to bypass the frequent curfews imposed by the authorities (‘Alyān, 1992, p. 87). See, for example, Ha’aretz, 11 September 1988, p. B6; Ha’aretz, Supplement, 15 September 1989, pp. 9–11; Ha’aretz, 21 September 1989, p. 10; Ha’aretz, 24 February 1992, p. B3. For the report about the performances in Japan see al-Yawm al-Sābi‘, 10 April 1989, p. 32; in Europe see al-Yawm al-Sābi‘ , 15 May 1989, p. 32; and in the United States see al-Yawm alSābi‘, 7 August 1989, p. 32. See al-Tahwra, 31 January 1993, p. 29. A short story (1915) by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892–1927), which, together with his story “In a Grove” (1921), was made into the classic 1950 film Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa (born 1910). According to , 6 September 1992, p. 31. See a list of Palestinian plays written in the period 1948–1985 in Sayegh, 1990, pp. 235–237. On the play see Nabīh al-Qāsim’s article in al-Bayādir, August 1981; Sayegh, 1990, pp. 223–224. One of the critics wrote in 1976: “No theatre group has ever performed without having one or two of its members in jail” (Ashrawi, 1976, p. 56).

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33. Kanafānī’s novel was also adapted for the cinema (1973) by the Egyptian director Tawfīq who also wrote the script. The film, entitled al-Makhdū‘ūn (The Misled), has not been widely seen because of censorship considerations and consequently has found a place only in the archives. It is considered one of the important Arabic films due to the high level of directing. On other theatrical adaptations of the novel see Ilan Pappe, “A Text in the Eyes of the Beholder Four Theatrical Interpretations of Kanafani’s Men in the Sun” in this volume. 34. See interview with the playwright in Kolbo (Haifa), 7 July 1989, pp. 63–65. Cf.Section VI, below; Snir 1994; Snir 1994b [regarding Najīb short story al-Mizalla (Under the Buss-Shelter)]. 36. On the play see al-Yawm al-Sābi‘, 12 June 1989, p. 41; Ha’aretz, 11 September 1988, p. B6. 37. Ha’aretz, Supplement, 29 November 1991, pp. 35–36. 38. Kolbo (Haifa), 27 December 1991, p. 42. 39. The play was originally published in 1965. About the play see Sayegh, 1990, p. 222. 40. Kolbo (Haifa), 29 September 1993, p. 66. 41. See Yediot Ahronoth, Supplement, 10 April 1992, pp. 31–33. This assumption was asserted during an interview with the actor and the director broadcast on 3 October 1993 by the Voice of Israel during the Acre Festival. 42. In the above-mentioned radio interview Bakrī confirmed that those concluding sentences of the monodrama also reflect his feelings as a Palestinian living in Israel 43. The difficulties faced by the troupe in entering the festival area, despite the official invitation (according to an interview with the troupe’s members broadcast by Israeli Television on 4 October 1993), illustrates the obstacles posed by the authorities since 1967 in order to minimize contacts between the Palestinians in the territories and those inside Israel. 44. E.g., Batrāwī in Ha’aretz, Supplement, 15 September 1989, p. 11. 45. See his words in Maariv’s supplement, 6 January 1989, pp. 28–29, 42. He also indicated his new orientation in several interviews with Israeli Television e.g., on 2 September 1994. 46. See interview with her in Kolbo (Haifa), 21 May 1993, p. 81, in which she speaks about a new play she was presenting in Bet Hageffen during the Arabic Culture Month in May 1993. 47. See, for example, the foundation of national Palestinian theatre in the refugee camp of ‘Ayn in Lebanon ( al-Tahwra, 20 January 1991, p. 27). 48. See Bsīsū 1988. On the plays see Sayegh, 1990, pp. 222–3; Badawi, 1992, pp. 366–367; Ghassān ‘Abd Allāh, “Fast Reading in the Dramatic Literature of Mu‘īn Bsīsū” [Arabic], , 31 December 1986, p. 4. 49. This play was staged on 16 April 1984 by Firqat ( ) in the First Festival of the Wandering Arab Theatres held in Rabat (16–26 April 1984). It was directed by Jawād al-Asadī who stated that he decided to present this play “in order to illustrate the connection between the revolution of yesterday and the revolution of today through the figure of ‘Abd Allāh ibn the leader of the Zanj” 13 May 1984, pp. 45–46). 50. Al-Qāsim, 1970; reprinted in Al-Qāsim, 1991: V, pp. 9–69. The dramatist finished writing the play, as stated by him, on 21 November 1969 and published it in March 1970. For a detailed analysis of the play see Snir, 1994b. 51. Cf., for example, the verse-drama Ma’sāt (The Tragedy of ) (1964) by the Egyptian poet and playwright ‘Abd (1931–1981). Cf. Snir, 1994a. 52. Sobernheim, 1978, pp. 613–614; al-Ziriklī, 1984, p. 193; Naqqāsh, 1991, pp. 112–113. Cf. DeYoung, 1992, p. 197. 53. From the picaresque novel “The Good Soldier Švejk” (1923) by the Czech novelist and short-story writer Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923).

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54.

was even forced to sell some of its equipment as a result of a budgetary deficit (Ha’aretz, Supplement, 3 September 1993, p. 13).

References 1. [ The items are listed alphabetically under the author’s known last name. 2. The definite article al is not taken into consideration in the alphabetical order. 3. Titles of scholarly studies in Arabic and Hebrew are translated into English with indication in parentheses of the original language. 4. Titles of Arabic-language literary and dramatic works are listed in the original] ‘Abd Allāh, Ghassān. (1979) Palestinian Theatre between Practice and Purity of Origin (Arabic). Jerusalem. Abel, A. (1965) Dadjdjāl. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, II, pp. 76–77. Agasi, E. (1959) In the Festival of Literature (Arabic). Tel Aviv: Arab Book Fund of the Histadrut. ‘Alyān, Suhayl. (1992) Palestinian Theatre, its Development and the (Arabic). Balsam, April 1992, pp. 84–87. Anīs, . (1979) Theatrical Movement in the Occupied Lands (Arabic). Haifa: Dār Galileo. ‘Aql, ‘Abd (1980) al-’Urs. Dār al-‘Āmil. al-Asadī, Jawād. (1989) The Concerns of the Palestinian Theatre and its Problems (Arabic). al-Karmel, 31, pp. 192–205 . Ashrawi, Hanan Mikhail. (1976) Contemporary Palestinian Literature under Occupation, Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications. al-‘Awdāt, . (1989) The Cinema and the Palestinian Problem (Arabic). Acre: Dār al-Aswār. al-‘Awdāt, Ya’qūb. (1992) Prominent Authors and Writers in Palestine (Arabic). Jerusalem: Dār al-Isrā’. Badawi, M.M. [ed.]. (1992) Modern Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ballas, S. (1980) La Littérature Arabe et le Conflict au Proche-Orient (1948–1973). Paris: Édition Anthropos. Brecht, B. (1969) The Caucasian Chalk Circle. London: Methuen. Bsīsū, Mu‘īn. (1988) al-A’māl Acre: Dār al-Aswār. Curtius, E.R. (1952) European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (trans. by W.R.Trask). New York: Pantheon. DeYoung, T. (1992) Language in Looking-Glass Land al-Qāsim and the Modernization of Jinās. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 112.2, pp. 183–197. Emmerson, R.K. (1981) Antichrist in the Middle Ages. Seattle: University of Washington Press. , Najwā Qa’wār. (1958) Sirr Sharazād. Nazareth: . , Najwā Qa’wār. (1961) Malik al-Majd . Nazareth: . , Imīl. (1974) al-Waqā‘i’ al-Gharība fi Ikhtifā‘ Sa’īd Abī al-Mutashā’il . Haifa: Dār . Habībī, Imīl. (1982) The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist (trans. by Trevor Le Gassick). New York. , Imīl. (1985 [1968]) Sudāsiyyat al-Ayyām al-Sitta. Haifa: Dār . , Mīshīl & Qa’wār, Jamāl. (1954) Żalām wa-Nūr. Nazareth: Maktabat al-Jalīl. Hayman, R. (1984) Bertolt Brecht—The Plays. London: Heinemann. Hill, C. (1971) Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. & Terence, R. (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press.

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Ibn Mamātī. (n.d.) al-Fashūsh fi Hukm Qarāqūsh . Beirut: al-Maktaba . al-Jawzī, . (1991) The History of Palestinian Theatre 1918–1948 (Arabic). Nicosia: Sharq Press. Jayyusi, S.K. (1992) Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Kanafānī, Ghassān. (1963) Rijāl fī al-Shams. Beirut: Dār . Kanafānī, Ghassān. (1978) Men in the Sun (Trans. Hilary Kilpatrick). London: Heinemann & Washington: Three Continents Press. Kanafānī, Ghassān. (1981) Rijāl fī al-Shams (dramatized by ). Acre: D ār al-Aswār. Kanazi, G. (1989) Ideologies in the Palestinian Literature in Israel (Hebrew). The New East, 32, pp. 129–138. Khūrī, Iskandar. (1973) Dhikrayātī. Jerusalem: al-Ma‘ārif. Khūrī, Salīm. (1960) Amina . Acre: Dār al-Qabas al-‘Arabī. Khūrī, Salīm. (1961) Warīth al-Jazzār. Acre: Dār al-Qabas al-‘Arabī. Khūrī, Salīm. (1970) Haifa: Beaer Offset. Khūrī, Salīm. (1983) Ba’da al-Aswār. Nazareth : . Landau, J.M. (1958) Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. , ‘Abd al-Ra’ūf. (1989) The Development of Theatrical Movement in the West Bank 1967–1987 (Arabic). : Markaz ’al-Turāth al-‘Arabī. Mas‘ad, Ra’ūf. (1989) …yā al-Mutashā’il. Cairo: Dār Shahdī li-I-Nashr. Moreh, S. (1967) Arabic Literature in Israel, Middle Eastern Studies. Vol. III, No. 3 (April 1967), pp. 283–294. Moreh, S. (1974) Bibliography of Arabic Books and Periodicals Published in Israel 1948–1972, Jerusalem: The Hebrew University. Moreh, S. (1992) Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moreh, S. & Abbāsī, M. (1987) Biographies and Bibliographies in Arabic Literature in Israel 1948–1986. Shfaram: Dār al-Mashriq. al-Naqqāsh, Rajā’. (1991) Love, Justice and the New Sultan (Arabic). In: al-Qāsīm fi Dā’irat al-Naqd (Kafr Qara’: Dār al-Hudā), VII, pp. 109–122. Ostle, R.C. [ed.]. (1975) Studies in Modern Arabic Literature. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Peled, M. (1982) Annals of Doom, Palestinian Literature 1917–1948. Arabica. Tome XXIX, Fascicule 2, pp. 141–183. al-Qāsīm, . (1969) My Life, My Case and My Poetry (Arabic). al-Jadīd, May-April 1969, pp. 23–29. al-Qāsim, . (1969a) Pages from a Diary (Arabic). al-Jadīd, July-August 1969, pp. 29–32. al-Qāsim, . (1970) Qaraqāsh . Nazareth: al-Maktaba al-Sha’biyya. al-Qāsim, . (1979) Awwal al-Dunyā . Acre: al-Aswār. al-Qāsim, (1991) . Kfar Qara‘: Dār al-Hudā. al-Qāsim, . (1993) Interview with the poet ( 13th January 1993 , by Qabalān.) al-Sawāfīrī, Kāmil. (1979) Contemporary Arabic Literature in Palestine (Arabic). Cairo: Dār al-Ma’ārif. Sayegh, Anis (ed.) (1990) Encyclopaedia Palaestina. Volume IV: Studies in Civilization. Damascus & Beirut: Encyclopaedia Palaestina Corporation. Shakespeare, W. [n.d.] The Complete Works. London: Spring Books. . (1992) Should we Blame the Victim (Arabic). (Supplement), 13th November 1992, p. 12.

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(1985) Palestinian Theatre between Attack and Retreat (Arabic). al-Karmel, 16, pp. 245–253. (1989) The Palestinian Theatre of (Arabic). al-Karmel, 31, pp. 172–191. Shinar, D. (1987) Palestinian Voices: Communication and Nation Building in the West Bank. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner. Smith, A.D. (1991) National Identity. Penguin Books. Snir, R. (1989) The Arab-Israeli Conflict as Reflected in the Writing of Najīb , AbrNahrain, 27, pp. 120–153. Snir, R. (1990)‘A Wound out of his Wounds’—Palestinian Arabic Literature in Israel (Hebrew). Alpayim, 2, pp. 247–248. Snir, R. (1991)‘We Were Like Those Who Dream’: Iraqi-Jewish Writers in Israel in the 1950’s. Prooftexts, 11, pp. 153–173. Snir, R. (1991a) Figliastri pieni d’amore: Scrittori arabi in lingua ebraica. La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, Vol. LVII, N. 1–2 (Gennaio-Agosto), pp. 245–253. Snir, R. (1991b) Achilles’ Heel or Narcissus’ Reflection? (Hebrew). Alpayim, 4, pp. 202–205 . Snir, R. (1992) Step-Sons and Lovers [Hebrew]. Moznaim, May 1992, pp. 6–9. Snir, R. (1992a) ‘The Oil in the Lamp will never Dry Up’: The Dialectic of Ivory Tower/ Lighthouse in the Mirror of Committed Poetry (Arabic). al-Karmil—Studies in Arabic Language and Literature , 13 (1992), pp. 7–54. Snir, R. (1992b) Arabic Literature in Syria between Distinctiveness and Unity. Moznaim, December 1992, pp. 61–64 (Hebrew). Snir, R. (1993) The Writer as a Jester—Some Notes on the Role of the Palestinian Writer in the Israeli Culture [Arabic]. Mawāqif, March-April 1993, pp. 52–61. Snir, R. (1993a) Cognitive Dissonance in the Culture of Majority towards the Culture of Minority in Israel (Arabic). al-Thawra, 16 May, 1993, pp. 28–29. Snir, R. (1993b) The Theatrical Elements in the Ancient Literary and Popular Arabic Heritage [Arabic]. al-Karmil—Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, 14 (1993) [in press]. Snir, R. (1993c) Original and Translation on the Contact Line (Hebrew). In: S.Somekh (ed.), Translation as a Challenge—Papers on Translation of Arabic Literature Into Hebrew. Tel Aviv University, pp. 21–39. Snir, R. (1994) The ‘World Upsidedown’ in Modern Arabic Literature: New Literary Renditions of an Antique Religious Topos. Edebiyat, 5:1 (Spring 1994) [in press]. Snir, R. (1994a) A Study of Elegy for by Adūnīs. Journal of Arabic Literature, 25, part 2 (1994) [in press]. Snir, R. (1994b) The Beginnings of Political Palestinian Theatre: Qaraqāsh by al-Qāsim [Hebrew]. The New East [in press]. Sobernheim, M. (1978) The Encylopaedia of Islam, New Edition, IV, pp. 613–614. Sulaymān, . (1988) The Palestinian Press and the British Mandate Laws [Arabic]. Nicosia: Bīsān Press. , Ibrāhīm. (1990) The Other Dimension [Arabic]. Nazareth: al-kuttāb . Taylor, J.R. (1984) The Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre. Middlesex: Penguin Books. , Fadwā. (1985) Jabaliyya . Acre: Dār al-Aswār. Urian, D. (ed.) [in press]. Symposium on Palestinian Theatre. In: L.Ben-Zvi (ed.), Theatre in Israel (University of Michigan Press). al-Ziriklī, Khayr al-Dīn. (1984) al-A’lām . Beirut: Dār al-‘Ilm li-I-Malāyīn.

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“Hawajah Bialik”* The Double Culture of the Israeli Arab in Hebrew Drama and the Israeli Theatre Dan Urian Haifa University (Translated by Naomi Paz) Texts in the Hebrew theatre since the beginning of the 20th century to the 1990s reflect an extra-theatrical reality of cultural tensions as well as attempts to reach a dialogue between Jews and Arabs. In the early days of settlement, certain Jewish writers and playwrights were drawn towards the Arab culture as an authentic expression of life in Israel. Since the establishment of the State of Israel they have been both drawn towards the strangeness of the “Jewishizing” of the Arab while also having reservations regarding it. In the last twenty years in particular, the double culture of the Arab minority in Israel has been depicted in the Israeli literature, drama, theatre, cinema and television. Jewish-Israeli writers and playwrights are fascinated by the paradox inherent in the attempt to bring the stranger closer to the culture of the Jewish majority.1 This is perhaps an echo of the difficulty faced by the “new” Hebrew literature and culture, between its “Jewishness” and the influences of other cultures—a dilemma that is realized in the image of the Jew “uprooted” from his own culture who has failed to attain a status in the non-Jewish culture.2 The Hebrew literature and drama of recent years reveals the dilemma of the Jew in the Arab double culture. The Arab is presented in literature, on stage and on screen as one who “wants to assimilate yet struggles for his own identity”. (Shaked, 1988 p. 77) The double culture of Israeli Arab education is not a literary or dramatic fiction, but the policy of the Jewish majority towards the Arab minority in Israel. Sami Smooha notes that this policy has two aims: “to prevent assimilation” as well as to help the Arabs to adapt and lessen the impact of their alienation as a minority group in a Jewish-Zionist state.3 (Smooha, 1980 p. 16) Smooha goes on to claim that this policy is directed at “de-Palestinization”, in order to sever as far as possible the cultural, national and identity links of the Israeli Arabs with their own people and to prevent the development among them of a national Palestinian consciousness.4 Since the 1980s, a turning-point has begun as a result of this double cultured Arab-Israeli education system: While the Israeli Arabs are expressing themselves in Israeli literature and theatre as if in their own culture, following the intifada they also waver between their Israeli identity and their cultural Palestinian identity.

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“Jews who were forced to convert” The “native” Israeli-Jewish culture faced a sort of identity crisis at the end of the previous century and the beginning of the present one. Several writers (Moshe Smilansky, Yitzhak Shammai, Yehuda Burla) arrived at a concept that combined their new culture with that of the local Arabs. (Even Zohar, 1980) This attempt was in the main artificial, and others pointed to its absurdity. The poet David Shimoni mocked one such writer, Bruchman, in his play A Night in the Vineyard (1911): (Bruchman enters from a path on the right, wearing an abaya—an Arab headdress—and carrying a thick stick. He carries a rifle over his shoulder. Speaks in an artificially deep voice) Bruchman: (in Arabic) Marhaba, Hawajah Aharon! Kif chalak? (He shakes his hand). I’ll translate it for you. Why don’t we ever see you? (Shimoni, 1955 p. 56)5 Other writers were certain that a completely new culture should be established; one that would also benefit the Arabs and lead them out of their state of ignorance, as they saw it, to one in which they would be almost-Jews. For, according to certain writers and members of the second aliyah (wave of Jewish immigration), the Israeli Arabs were “mainly Jews who had been forced to convert.” (Polak, 1967 p. 297) L.A.Arieli-Orloff hovered between these two trends in his play Alla Karim (1912): Ali the Arab speaks Hebrew (albeit haltingly and mixed with Arabic), and Naomi the Jewish woman is fascinated by “the eastern spirit” revealed in his character and rejects her Jewish companions whom she terms “cultural worms”. (Arieli, 1990 p. 283) The playwright Moshe Shamir was even prepared to “convert” the Arab. In a play about the time of King Yannai, The War of the Sons of Light (1956), an Arab donkey driver wants to become Jewish and the wise man Shimon Ben Shetach agrees to convert him. This would appear to be the only conversion that “went down well” in the Israeli theatre. (Shamir, 1989 p. 33)6

“Mahmoud asks himself ‘to where?’” The theatre of the 1960s saw almost no Arab characters. Occasionally they appeared on the fringes, as in The Neighbourhood (1965) by Yaakov Ben-Natan, in which Ahmed the milkman is a background character who uses Yiddish expressions, wishes others “mazal tov”, and “bridges” between the two nations in explaining mutual customs such as circumcision, based upon their common forefathers—“Abraham our father, may he be blessed”—Israeli satire was early to distinguish the problematics involved in attempting a cultural assimilation of the Arab minority, and for a period of thirty years it portrayed the travesty of such artificial conversion. Arab Fables (1961) by Chaim Hefer and Dan Ben-Amotz, contains several sketches on this subject, as well as a song, “Mahmoud”, that refers to the cultural identity crisis of the Arab double-culture: Mahmoud studied for eight years…he sang in the first grade/songs of Hannuka (a Jewish festival)/in the third grade he painted/Herzl7 with a beard/in the fifth grade, he learned about exile/Spain and the Diaspora/every Friday he donated a coin/in a blue collecting box…8 he read a great deal of Mapu9/and showed his knowledge/…now the

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Jews say/“Mahmoud is a cute gentile”./The Arabs say about him:/‘Mahmoud isn’t Mahmoud’/now he is in crisis—/neither here nor there;/and like Fierberg’s book10 he asks himself, “to where?” (Hefer, 1961 p. 86) From the 1970s, the Arab’s double-culture began to appear in Israeli satire as a false and frustrating identity. The satiric sting was directed from then on against the Jewish majority that had created this situation. In How Do We Look (1972), one sketch is about the Israeli education of the Arab. The sketch “This is Your Life”, written by B.Michael, Ephraim Sidon and Kobi Niv, is “an evening with” Abdullah Mania Bialik11, an academic from the minority group who successfully completed his studies in Hebrew literature at the University. Abdullah sings Bialik’s songs, studies Ahad Ha’Am12, and on Tu b’Shvat13 goes out to plant trees, singing a parody of the holiday song “vetu, tu tu tu/sheha’Aravim yamutu (may the Arabs die)/on Tu b’Shvat “At the end of his studies he is offered a job as a construction labourer, a waiter or a fruit picker. To work in a garage he must have an M.A., for which he is lacking only one seminar paper, and he earns his living as a shabbas goy14 in a hospital mortuary. In Matti Regev’s play Mussa and the Female Pharoeh (1978), Mussa, the Arab labourer, tempts the Pioneering Spirit when he reads to it lines from Bialik’s poem “Take me beneath your wing”. In The Patriot by Hanoch Levin (1982) Ahmed is “invited” to light the Sabbath candles: “Two push him from behind. One pulls his hand forward, and places one of his fingers over the candle flame. Smell of singed flesh. The finger blackens. Ahmed hums Sabbath songs.” (Levin, 1987 p. 126) In the satire The Wooden Pole by Hillel Mittelpunkt and Yehoshua Sobol (1984), the Arab servant of a family of settlers in Samaria is a sycophant who has become an expert on Judaism. In The Palestinian by Yehoshua Sobol (1985), which is not a satire but a play about a film which “Jews are making (…) about Arabs in order to salve their screwed-up conscience,” (Sobol, 1985 p. 48) the Arab actor playing the role of the Arab in the film decides to perform an improvisation to help him get into the role of an Arab student who will later on convert to become a radical Muslim. Fahad Edna’an disguises himself as a chassid (ultra-orthodox Jew) from the Mea She’arim (ultra-orthodox) neighbourhood, carries a prayer book in his hand, prays constantly, swaying to and fro, and cries out “gevalt!”. He also declaims prophesies of anger and doom in much the same way as one of the Prophets of Israel. Sobol attempts to present the similarity between the two extremes of Israeli society and perhaps also to indicate the possibility that the Arab educated in the Israeli educational system also has a gateway to the less expected of these extremes. Crembo in the Enemy Land by Kobi Niv (1986), a “comedy-farce”, depicts an encounter between the fighting team ‘Shooting’ and ‘Crying’ and Abu Na’al-Rabak, whose loyalty to Israel they examine by means of a suitable questionnaire: Crying: Shooting: Rabak: Crying: Shooting: Rabak: Crying: Rabak:

…To whom did God promise the Land of Israel? …To Confucius, to Jesus, to Abraham or to Ishmael? To Abraham our father, that is—your father. It’s written in Genesis, Chapter 35. Very good. Correct answer. And who was the visionary of the State? Herzl, Benjamin Ze’ev, Theodor. And who was Josef Trumpeldor?15 The Betar group was called after him….

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Crying: Shooting: Cookie:

You see, Shooting, there are also honest Arabs. Forget it, Crying, they’re all boot-lickers. It’s written in the Bible. Boot-licking’s in their blood.

It was left to Dan Ben-Amotz to discern that “The Arabs do not exist in our study books. This is apparently in accordance with the Jewish-Zionist-Socialist educational principles that we inherited: ‘A people without a country returns to a country without a people.’” (Ben-Amotz, 1982 p. 155) Ben-Amotz discovered the popular Palestinian culture when listening to an Arab story-teller from Jaffa called Abu-Nimer. The book of Abu-Nimer’s stories, collated by Ben-Amotz, later became a one man show for Dudu Elharar (1990). The Israeli satirist, who in Arab Fables mocked the absurdity of the “conversion” of the Palestinian, now became the one to bring the Palestinian culture closer to that of the Jewish majority.

“And each of them returns to his own place” “They no longer identify me as an Arab. Not the Jews. Only the Arabs are still hesitant about me” says Na’im at the beginning of the stage adaptation of A.B. Yehoshua’s novel The Lover. Nola Chilton, who both adapted the book and directed the play (1978) chose Na’im as the central figure of the play. This was a choice that differed in its awareness and significance from that of Michal Bat Adam, who wrote the filmscript (with Zvi Kratzner) and directed the film based on the same novel, but who left the Arab on the fringe of the cinematic adaptation (1986). Yehoshua himself noted that he had been drawn to Na’im as to a double-cultured character: I remember visiting a school in Nazareth in the 60s. Watching them studying the story Three Gifts by Peretz16, with all the emotional and political involvement, the fears, and the ambivalent fascination/repulsion that it produces in them. (Baretzky, 1977) The story ends (play and film) in the rejection of Na’im, and his return against his will to where he belongs, according to the author, the playwright and the filmscript writers—to the Arab village. “There is a group of people here who have lost their identity—particularly Na’im,” explained Yehoshua “and finally some sort of order is made and each of them returns to his own place.” (Aharoni, 1978) Na’im’s double cultured character forms the pivot of the adaptation of the novel for the stage. Na‘im hopes to form a connection with the Jewish garage owner through Bialik: “I could recite a poem by heart. ‘A twig alighted, for example.” To his wife, the teacher, Na’im says that “we study Tchernikovsky18 and Bialik. And about those chassidim. And about the Jewish destiny and the Jewish township and the great fire that occurred there.” Afterwards he quotes a piece from “The Dead of the Wilderness”19 about “The last generation of slavery! First generation of redemption!” Old Viduche, the Eastern Jewess, is the only one who latches onto the harm caused by Na’im’s education: “Why does he need Bialik? What’s he going to do with it? Oy, we’re driving our Arabs completely crazy! They’ll stop working and start writing poetry.”

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Israeli Arabs do in fact write Hebrew poetry; the most noted of such poets are Anton Shammas, Na’im Araidi and Siham Daoud. In Refuge, Ilan Ronen’s (1980) adaptation for the stage of a novel by Sammy Michael, we encounter one of Na’im’s counterparts—Fathi the Arab poet who writes such poems that “even the Jews applaud him when he tells them they are sons of bitches.” Israeli Arabs read Israeli poetry written by Jews. In Trumpets in the Wadi, an adaptation by Shmuel Hasfari (1986) of another of Sami Michael’s novels, Houda, a young Arab girl who lives in Wadi Nisnas, an Arab neighbourhood in Haifa and works with Jews, “can recite for you Amichai, Avidan, Natan Zach, Ravikovitch.“20 Her sister regards the Hebrew culture as “opium” making Houda forget the “Palestinian destiny”: “They send your head up into the clouds and you forget that your feet are stuck in the mud.” Amnon Rubinstein’s film, based on Galila Ron-Feder’s book Nadia (1986) also focuses on a young Arab girl who enrolls in a Jewish boarding school, where he presents the encounter as a cultural conflict. Abed, a young Arab berates Nadia with a bitterness unsuited to this optimistic film: Abed: Nadia: Abed:

What’s up? Non-stop Bialik at school. Believe me, you know Bialik better than the Jewish students. So what good does it do me?

This pattern of the Arab double-culture that appears in Na’im—first in apparent proximity to the Jews and then distanced from them—also appears in other plays: The Return by Miriam Kaney, A Sub-Tenant by Rateb Av’auda, and The Seventh Day (1980) by Dan Ilan. Three Arab characters attempt but fail to integrate into the Jewish society. All three try to use their general knowledge and specific knowledge of Jewish culture as an entry ticket into Jewish society. In The Return, by Miriam Kaney (1973, 1975) a friendship is established between a Jew and an Arab and an intimate relationship between the same Arab and a Jewish woman. Riad is educated, speaks eloquent Hebrew, and even quotes from the poetry of Rachel21 “My world is as confined as the world of an ant”. (Kaney, who is unsure whether the Jewish audience is familiar with the source of the quote adds a “clarification”: “Great, you are quoting Rachel.”). However, Riad presents himself as one who is bound to his village and is not free to marry a Jewish wife. Alona (the Jewess) contradicts him: “You belong to that village about as much as I belong to one of Shalom Aleichem’s shtetls (Jewish townships).”22 Is Kaney reinforcing a stereotype that we have encountered in satire—that the Hebrew culture of the Arab who integrates into Israeli society is artificial and only a veneer? Or, perhaps, does she present the Arab as one who does not want to undergo cultural conversion, who seeks links of friendship, but also wishes to retain his Arab identity? It would appear that this dilemma finds no solution in the play. In The Sub-Tenant by Rateb Av’auda, an Israeli Arab playwright who wrote in Hebrew (1978), we find the auto-stereotype. Ahmed calls himself Danny and pretends that he is an oriental Jew. He reveals his true identity to his Jewish girlfriend and she is prepared to continue their love affair. Finally, pressure from both Jewish and Arab society forces the girl to initiate a separation. Danny-Ahmed is a young, educated, “cultured” languages and history student, who speaks eloquent Hebrew, quotes Rabbinical scholars, listens to classical music and also to Arik Einstein23 and is a devotee of Ingmar Bergman films. He employs cultural concepts which attest to his intelligence—the use of which sometimes borders on artificiality, such as when he “humorously” describes his relationship with his mother: “she doesn’t have a Jocasta complex…and I don’t have an Oedipus one.” The self-image of an educated Arab with

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a broad general knowledge (in the Israeli version) that enables him almost to belong to the Israeli society, is enhanced when his brother’s attempt to force him back to the village ends in failure. The brother speaks broken Hebrew and an inarticulate and poor Arabic. He is crude and violent and represents the Arab playwright’s harsh criticism of Arab society. The plays and the films reveal the impossibility of creating a true link by means of a “cultural bridge”. The Jewish playwright finds the main obstacle to be the conservative Arab society, that was and remains at the core of the true Arab identity, even when it is an educated one. The Arab playwright sees the obstacle in the Jewish society that coerces the Arab into a false conversion but in fact is totally unready to absorb him in reality. This, in his version, is a society that merely wears a mask of liberalism, but in fact is no less conservative than that of the Arabs. The Arab student, such as Na’im, who leaves his village to study at the university and compete with the Jew, is also the object of fear by the Jewish majority. In Miriam Kaney’s Like a Bullet in the Head (1981), Hassan is Amitai’s rival in an academic study of Yehuda Halevy24, as well as the lover of Amitai’s wife. Hassan, who shares the same name as the Jewish poet (Abu Alhasssan Yehuda Ben-Shmuel Halevy), is seeking a common cultural basis between himself and the Jewish surroundings. He finds this in the biography of Yehuda Halevy, who lived in the Moslem region of Andalusia and whose drinking songs and love poems were influenced by the indigenous Arab poetry. Hassan even calls Halevy a “playboy”: “a sort of Byron—with the attribute of homosexual tendencies” says Amitai complainingly. Hassan and Amitai argue over the reasons for Halevy’s demise on his journey from Spain to Jerusalem. Hassan, emphasizing the universal aspect of Halevy’s poetry, accepts the version that claims he died in Egypt. Amitai, for whom Halevy is the Jewish national poet, seeks scientific support for the legend that the poet was killed by an Arab in Jerusalem “and on his lips—words from one of his Zionist poems ‘Zion will lend its captives peace!!!’—(…)! shall not let this goy, this Hassan, kill him off in Egypt!”

“Hath not an Arab eyes?” Most of the plays lay emphasis on the difficulties, the inhibitions and the restricted association between the Arab double-culture and the Jewish majority. Can a familiarity with another culture in fact provide a “bridge” to understanding and mutual respect? Three Israeli versions of Shylock’s famous monologue from The Merchant of Venice (Act 3, sc. i) on the humanity of the Jew, attempt to provide a positive answer to this question. Shimon Riklis inserts the monologue at the end of his play Black White Grey (1983), with the Arab in the play saying “Arab” whenever the Jewish boy who is preparing the monologue for a school play says the word “Jew”: I am a Jew/Arab! Hath not a Jew/Arab eyes? Hath not a Jew/Arab hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means…? The actor Khaled Abu-Ali in David Ma’ayan’s play Arbeit Macht Frei in Toitland Europa (1991), presents the impressions and reactions of an Arab to the holocaust and he, too, employs his version of this same monologue, in which he changes the word “Arab” for “Jew”. The monologue also appears in Raffi Bukai’s film Ayanti Popolo (1986). The film’s hero, Khaled,

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is an Egyptian soldier wandering in the Sinai desert on his way back to the Suez Canal after the Israeli victory. He is an actor who was called up on the evening prior to a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which he was playing the role of Shylock. Khaled and his friend, exhausted and thirsty, encounter a group of Israeli soldiers. They beg for water but are refused. Khaled turns in despair to the Israelis with Shylock’s monologue, which he declaims in English. The astounded patrol commander says “He’s got his roles confused”, gives the Egyptians water and allows them afterwards to accompany the patrol. States Anton Shammas: Except that Khaled was not confused at all, and in this scene Bukai focuses (in another wonderful performance by the Israeli Arab actor Salim Dao) on the essence of his visual and conceptual world: in which there are no defined ethnic borders in the human experience, and against the eternal sands of the human desert we are all pathetic Shylocks who have confused our roles. (Bukai, 1990 p. 15)

‘We are a Cultured People’ Among the Arab minority two apparently conflicting approaches have arisen regarding the Jewish majority culture, but in fact both object to what they term cultural colonization by the Hebrew culture. One tendency is towards what Hannan Hever characterizes as “hitting the Achilles heel”, (Hever, 1989 p. 186) and this disputes the Jewish Israeli population’s right to ownership of the Israeli culture. The second direction is that of a cultural Palestinization, in the occupied areas and within Israel proper. Anton Shammas’s work illustrates the attempt of the minority culture to infiltrate that of the “official” majority. Shammas, “an exile in Arabic” and “an exile in Hebrew” which he says is his “step-mother” language, in his Hebrew novel Arabesque demands a respected place in the Israeli culture. (Shammas, 1986 p. 45) He himself, as shown in a biographical poem, “An Arab student”, written about him by Dan Almagor, was a pupil at the Hebrew high school in Haifa: I am a pupil/the only Arab/at a Hebrew school/that is entirely Jewish.’ The double-culture that ‘speaks in Hebrew/and loves in Hebrew/and thinks in Hebrew/and dreams in Hebrew about Irit (name of a Jewish girl)/He is sometimes confused:/’how do you say it in Arabic’/(…) it’s mainly unpleasant/when there are murderous attacks/(…) the teacher says again/‘revenge of a Jewish child’ 25 /(…) an Arab pupil torn in two directions. Shammas contributed in his own way in both Hebrew and Arabic to the Israeli theatre, particularly to that group of plays that established a new Israeli-Arabic-Hebrew cultural reality. He collaborated in editing and adapting for stage the bi-lingual Hole in the Wall (1978) in which Hebrew and Arabic folk-tales were presented—one of a group of plays whose authors sought a common basis and atmosphere of inter-community dialogue. Shammas translated Athol Fugard’s The Island from English to Arabic and Hebrew. It was staged in both languages by Makram Khouri and Yusuf Abu Warda at the Haifa Municipal Theatre (1983), in a version that related more to the Palestinian reality than to that of South Africa. Of particular importance are his Hebrew and Arabic versions of Waiting for Godot (1985); in which Estragon, Vladimir and Lucky were attired as Arab labourers and played by Abu-Warda and Khouri and Pozzo was played as a Jewish gentleman, by the Jewish actor Ilan Toren.

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Shammas’s adaptation/translation of Fugard, and particularly of Beckett, to Hebrew and Arabic, made him the “author” of those production texts; an opportunity that he utilized on the Hebrew stage to present the Palestinian problem from the perspective of an Israeli Arab. The language spoken in the Hebrew version was Hebrew mixed with Arabic. A number of Shammas’s additions-amendments anchor the text in the Israeli reality and the conflict between Jews and Arabs. For example, when Vladimir, in Beckett’s play, says “What’s the good of losing heart now” (Beckett, 1954 p. 70) there are slight alterations in the text and the Arab characters on stage direct the spectator to the beginnings of the Jewish-Arab conflict in the 1890s: “What’s the good of losing ‘eart now. We shoulda thought of it years ago, in the nineties.” Creating in both languages, Shammas employs his advantage in an ironic approach towards the Jewish spectator who cannot distinguish between the original and the “adaptation”, with most of his alterations relating to the Palestinians and the reality of their lives.26 The other tendency among the Israeli Arab playwrights, expressed in particular in recent years, is that of reinforcing the Palestinian traditions, rejecting the Hebrew culture and opting for a local Arab one. Danny Rubinstein described a process that commenced in the West Bank and Gaza, and was expressed in the 1980s by a flood of publications and a multitude of nationalistic-cultural activities by Palestinians in every field, including many in the theatre. (Rubinstein, 1990) Meron Benvenisti, too, mentions the cultural revolution that took place in the Palestinian community in the wake of the intifada as expressed through the theatre. (Benvenisti, 1992). This is a process of creating a national and cultural Palestinian identity that has crossed the pre-1967 Israeli borders and penetrated into the Arab Israeli theatre. It is reflected, for example, in the professsional career of Rateb Av’auda, whose theatrical career began on the Hebrew stage, for which he wrote the play The Sub-Tenant (1978). In 1981 Av’auda staged a monodrama A House in Dispute by Toufik Fiad. The choice of Fiad’s text was connected to the author’s personal history as a teacher in an Israeli Arab village at the end of the 1960s, during which time he attempted, unsuccessfully, to teach the Arabic and Palestinian culture in addition to Bialik and Tchernikovsky. A House in Dispute was translated into Hebrew by Av’auda and presented to a Jewish audience, and it remains an attempt to establish a dialogue with the majority culture and its audience. In 1988 Rateb Av’auda returned to the village of Kafr Kana in the Galilee and established an Arab theatre there. The actors in his theatre use the story-telling techniques of the Palestinian theatre from East Jerusalem—El-Hakawati. Such techniques and themes are noted by Susan Slymovics as characterizing the Palestinian culture. (Slyomovics, 1991) The Jewish Israeli theatre absorbed these Palestinian changes into only one play, Yellow Wind, an adaptation by Ella Alterman (1987) of the book by David Grossman (a writer who chose the role of journalist) in which several of the Palestinians express their fears that the Jews will turn the West Bank and Gaza Strip into “their colony, from all aspects, including the cultural one,” and therefore they will also be dispossessed of their cultural identity: Old woman: Do we look like Gypsies to you, are we so poor and miserable? We are a cultured nation! Yes, yes, a cultured nation! You don’t know that we have a culture, you can’t understand this culture! It’s not a television culture.

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Summary The enforced encounter between the two cultures—Hebrew and Arab/Palestinian—created among the Jewish majority playwrights a pattern of approach/rejection, one of whose manifestations is the frequency of the appearance of the subject in satire. The Jewish Israeli playwrights (A.B. Yehoshua, Miriam Kaney, Sami Michael, Yossef Mundi and others) do not believe in and do not wish for a cultural intermingling, and certainly not the absorption of the Arab into the Jewish majority culture. “Sometimes it appears that we avoid getting close to them for fear of getting into trouble”, wrote A.B. Yehoshua in the program notes for Muhammad Watad’s Co-existence (1970), “in case we discover that they are prepared to get much closer to us than we are able to let them.” The liberal Israeli Jewish playwright uses the play as a protest against bias and to indicate the absurdity of forcing one culture upon another. Some of the playwrights see the dialogue between cultures as a bridge to a better future; others fear for the uniqueness of the Jewish Israeli culture. Among the Arab Israeli playwrights (and those who adapt works for the stage) the dialogue between the two cultures is like the poem “Hawajah Bialik” by Roni Somek,27 that begins with the insertion of Bialik’s “Take me beneath your wing” to the soul of an Arab girl, and ends with the Hebrew poem dissolving into the Palestinian reality, leaving behind it questions and doubts about the future of cultural links between Arabs and Jews. The last three lines of the poem interweave with those of Bialik in the Palestinian reality and lose their Jewish-Hebrew identity: And the distant prayers of the Muezzin are laid down like a blanket over the back of a donkey that has run out of horsepower

Notes * ‘Hawajah, in Arabic: Mr/Sir Bialik, Chaim Nachman (1873–1934): The Hebrew national poet. Hawajah Bialik, an ironic juxtaposition forming an oxymoron taken from the title of a poem by Roni Somek Several of the quotations in this article are taken from unpublished theatrical texts and the source is therefore not quoted. The texts can be found in the Gur Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in the Israeli Theatre Archives at Tel Aviv University. Some were obtained from the Beit Lessin Theatre, the Haifa Municipal Theatre, the Children and Youth Theatre; from Miriam Kaney, Ruth Chazan, Rateb Avu’ada and from the archives of Dan Almagor. Rateb Avu’ada, Salim Dao and Dan Almagor assisted me with their patient and fruitful discussions. 1. A.B.Yehoshua said about himself when The Lover was published: “Arab-Israeli phenomenon fascinates me; this is the first time in our history that a significant minority has deeply entered into us. Hebrew, Jewish history, Hebrew literature—sometimes they know the subjects better than the Jews.” From an interview with Nurit Baretzky in Ma’ariv February 18, 1977 (in Hebrew). 2. Tsofia Hillel. ed., Introduction to Hebrew Literature. Notes from the lectures of Shimon Haklin. Jerusalem: Mifal Hashikpul, The Hebrew University, 1960, 344–345, 383–387, etc. (in Hebrew).

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3. Sammy Smooha. Existing and Alternative Policy towards the Arabs in Israel. Megamot, Vol. 26, No. 1, September 1980, 16 (in Hebrew). 4. Smooha, 18; Peled Committee, Arab Education Panel Report. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture, Educational Planning Project for the 80s, 1975, 15–20. Among other matters, the report notes (p. 16): ‘The Arab literature text books do not contain nationalist poetry. The schools do not teach the works of any Palestinian poet or writer. In contrast, the literary emphasis in Hebrew literature taught in the Arab schools is placed on works that stress the Jewish religion and blatant nationalism and Zionism.’ The subject of the Jewish majority policy towards Arab education was also noted by: S.N. Eisenstadt, The Transformation of Israeli Society, Jerusalem: Magnes, 1989, 348; Yochanan Peres, Avishai Ehrlich and Nira Yuval-Davis, Education for National Identity of Arab Youth in Israel: A Comparison of Curricula, Megamot, Vol. 16, No. 1, October 1968, 9, 17, 35. Sa’ad Tsartsur, On the Question of Education of a Minority Group Alien in its own Land, Education in a Developing Society—The Israeli System, eds., Walter Ackerman, Arik Carmon, David Zucker, Vol. 1, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Van Leer Institute, 1985, 504. Yitzhak Platek, Muhamad M’hamid, The Mark of Coal (The World of Young Arabs in Israel), The Institute for Arab Studies—Givat Haviva, 1989, 2, 188, 49, 111. (all in Hebrew). 5. See also: Yosef Klausner. A Hebrew. Suspicion. Hashiluah Vol. 17, (1907), 574–576, in which he claims “all our hopes…[that] we shall be masters of the land…are established…on the cultural advantage that we have over the Arabs.” (in Hebrew). 6. Moshe Shamir. War of the Sons of Light, Tel Aviv: Or-Am, 1989, 33; Shamir retracted a decade later and wrote in My Life with Ishmael, Tel Aviv: Ma’ariv, 1968, 186: “A reality that forces…the Israeli Arab citizen increasingly to live and be seen as a Jew…appeared to many as a stressful framework, unnatural and immoral…many…say: ‘I prefer that the Arab will be an Arab and look like an Arab.’” (in Hebrew). 7. Herzl, Theodor (1860–1904): Visionary of a Jewish State and founder of the Zionist Movement. 8. “The Blue Box” was the collection box for donations to the Jewish National Fund. The fund was established in 1901 to purchase lands in Israel and transfer them to the Jewish settlement establishments. 9. Mapu, Avraham (1808–1867): A Jewish writer; founder of the modern Hebrew novel. He wrote in ornate Biblical Hebrew. 10. Fierberg, Mordechai Ze’ev (1874–1899): A Jewish writer who presented in To Where the difficulties of the Jews uprooted from their traditions and unable to assimilate into another culture. 11. Mania Bialik: The name of Bialik’s wife. 12. Ahad Ha’Am: Pen-name of Asher Ginzberg (1856–1927). An important Zionist philosopher and publicist. 13. Tu b’Shvat. A Jewish festival—New Year for Trees. The Zionist Movement turned it into a holiday for tree-planting in Israel. 14. Shabbas goy: A non-Jew who replaces a Jew on the Sabbath and Holy days to carry out essential work. 15. Josef Trumpeldor (1880–1920): A pioneer and Zionist activist killed by Arabs, and to whom is ascribed the dying words “It is good to die for our motherland.”, preserved as the motto of the right-wing Zionist youth movement ‘Betar’ which is named after him. 16. Peretz, Itzhak Leib (1857–1915): A Hebrew and Yiddish writer. He adapted Jewish folklore material to literature and drama. 17. “A twig alighted”. A poem by Bialik.

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18. Tchernikovsky, Shaul (1875–1943): A famous Zionist Hebrew poet of Bialik’s time. 19. “The Dead of the Wilderness”. One of Bialik’s most important works, dealing with national attitudes, such as that quoted by Na’im. 20. Yehuda Amichai, David Avidan, Natan Zach and Dalia Ravikovitch—four contemporary Israeli poets. 21. Rachel (Blaubstein-Sela; 1890–1931): A Hebrew poetess. 22. Shalom Aleichem (1859–1916): The pen-name of Shalom Rabinovitz, one of the greatest Yiddish writers. 23. Arik Einstein (born 1939): Popular Israeli singer and entertainer. 24. Yehuda Halevy (?1075–1141): A Hebrew poet and philosopher who wrote drinking songs and love poems in the Eastern Jewish/Arabic tradition, as well as nationalistic and Zionist poetry. In his philosophical essay Hakuzari, he attests to the superiority of Judaism over other religions. 25. “Revenge for the blood of a little child”—paraphrase of a line from a poem by Bialik “On the Slaughter”. 26. See: Vered Harel, Waiting for Godot at the Haifa Municipal Theatre—A Political Interpretation that Failed, Bama 109–110 (1987), 115–121. (in Hebrew). 27. Roni Somek wrote the poem Hawajah Bialik after hearing a young Arab girl on a bus singing and humming along to Bialik’s “Take me beneath your Wing”, sung by a Jewish singer, Rita, on the radio. In a note to the poem Somek added: ‘Bialik, as she hummed, was deep, deep beneath her wing.’ Somek also noted that he recalled at that time the character of Na’im from The Lover by A.B.Yehoshua. Published in Cartis, supplement to Ma’ariv, September 8, 1991. (in Hebrew).

Bialik’s poem, in the translation by Helena Frank, ends thus: O come and take thou me Beneath thy wing, safe sheltered from all cares. Thy breast the refuge of my head shall be, The hiding place of my rejected prayers. Chaim Nachman Bialik, Poems, ed., L.V.Snowman, London, 1924.

References Aharoni, M. (1977) An Arab youth in a Jewish family. Bamachaneh Gadna 3 (449), November 9–11, (in Hebrew). Arieli, L.A. (1990) Alla Karim. In: Yeishimon (Wasteland). 177–284, Tel Aviv: Dvir (in Hebrew). Avigal, S. (1992) Akko discovers women. Hadashot October 23:6–7 (in Hebrew). Baretzky, N. (1977 Interview with A.B.Yehoshua. Ma’ariv, February 18 (in Hebrew). Beckett, S. (1954) Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press. Ben-Amotz, D. (1982) Stories and Fables from Arab Folklore. Tel Aviv: “Metzioth Books”, Bitan-Zmora (in Hebrew). Benvenisti, M. (1992) Fatal Embrace, Jerusalem: Keter (in Hebrew). Bialik, C.N. (1924) Poems. L.V.Snowman (ed.), London: Zion Press.

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Bukai, R. (1990) Anton Shammas, “He confuses his role”—notes on an Arab character in the Israeli cinema after seeing Avanti Popolo’. In: Rafi Bukai Avanti Popolo 7–15 Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Film and Television School (in Hebrew). Eisensadt, S.N. (1989) The Transformation of the Israeli Society. Jerusalem: Magnes Press (in Hebrew). Even-Zohar, I. (1980) The growth and consolidation of a local and native Hebrew culture in Israel, 1882–1948. Catedra 16, 163–195 (in Hebrew). Halkin, S. (1960) Introduction to Hebrew Literature. T.Hillel (ed.), Jerusalem: Mifal Hashikpul, The Hebrew University (in Hebrew). Harel, V. (1987) Waiting for Godot at the Haifa Municipal Theatre—A political interpretation that failed. Bama 109–110, 115–121 (in Hebrew). Hefer, H. (1961) Milim Lenanginot (Words for Tunes). Tel Aviv: Amikam (in Hebrew). Hever, H. (1989) Striking the Achilles Heel. Alpayim 1, June, 186–193. Klausner, Y. (1907) (“A Hebrew”). Suspicion. Hashiluah Vol. 17, 574–576 (in Hebrew). Levin, H. (1987) Ma Echpat Le’Tsipor (What Does the Bird Care). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad (in Hebrew). Peled Committee, Ministry of Education (1975). Arab Education Panel Report. Educational Planning Project for the 80‘s. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture (in Hebrew). Peres, Y., A.Ehrlich & N.Yuval-Davis (1968) Education for national identity of Arab youth in Israel: A comparison of curricula. Megamot Vol. 6, No. 1, October, 26–36 (in Hebrew). Platek, Y. & M.M’hamid (1989) The Mark of Coal (The World of Young Arabs in Israel). Givat Haviva: The Institute for Arab Studies (in Hebrew). Polak, A.N. (1967) The origins of the Israeli Arabs. Molad Vol. 1 (24), No. 3 (213) October-November, 297–298 (in Hebrew). Rubinstein, D. (1990) The Fig Tree Embrace: The Palestinian “Right of Return”. Jerusalem: Keter (in Hebrew). Shaked, G. (1988) No Other Place. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad (in Hebrew). Shammas, A. (1986) The Babushka’s guilt. Politika 5–6, February-March, 44–45 (in Hebrew). Shamir, M. (1968) My LIfe with Ishmael. Tel Aviv: Ma’ariv. Shamir, Moshe (1989) War of the Sons of Light, Tel Aviv: Or-Am (in Hebrew). Shimoni, D. (1955) Laila b’Kerem (Night in the Vineyard). In Moledet (Homeland) 51–93, Tel Aviv: Massada. Slyomovics, S. (1991) “To put one’s fingers in the bleeding wound”—Palestinian theatre under Israeli censorship. The Drama Review Vol. 35, No. 2 (T130) (Summer) 18–38. Smooha, S. (1980) Existing and alternative policy towards the Arabs in Israel. Megamot Vol. 26, No. 1, September, 7–36 (in Hebrew). Sobol, Y. (1985) The Palestinian. Tel Aviv: Or-Am (in Hebrew). Somek, R. (1991) Hawajah Bialik, Cartis, supplement to Ma’ariv, September 8, 51 Tsartsur, S. (1985) On the question of education of a minority group alien in its own land. Education in a Developing Society—the Israeli System, W.Ackerman, A.Carmon, D. Zucker (Eds.) Vol. 1, 473–524, Tel Aviv & Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Van Leer Institute (in Hebrew). Urian, D. (1991) The land dispute in the Israeli theatre. Assaph 7, 161–191 (in English).

On Theatre and Reality—on Theatre as Reality Salman Natur Daliat el Carmel (Translated by Naomi Paz)

I do not remember the first play I ever saw, but during my childhood I do know that I was never taken to the theatre; partly because there is no professional theatre in my village, Daliat el Carmel, and also because neither my parents nor my teachers ever took me to one of the established theatres. As a child, I did not consider the theatre as part of my world, and so I never bothered to go. When I began to learn about theatre from art and history books, I naively believed that it belonged to the Greeks and Romans—not to me—just as central Haifa, where the Jewish upper classes lived, did not belong to me; neither did the Hebrew morning newspapers, nor the police force, nor the port, the beach nor the cinemas on Prophets Street. When I left the village at the beginning of the 1960s, in order to study in Haifa, these boundaries began slowly to be breached, and like someone curled up in a sleeping-bag, who unzips it, sticks out his head, blinks and takes a deep breath, and slowly unfolds his body from the sleeping-bag until he is finally fully exposed to the fresh air and sunlight—so too did I go out into the world of the “others”. And it was there that I found myself for the first time, not as a spectator at the theatre, but as simultaneously actor, director and playwright. For my first Purim festival at high-school I was asked, together with the rest of the class, to prepare a sketch for the party to be held in the gymnasium. We did as we had been asked, and it turned out to be very funny: I dressed up in the different scenes as a Saudi Arabian emir, as the boyfriend of a Bedouin woman, and then as a Turkish effendi; and finally, with oriental gestures, wearing a kibbutz hat and khaki shorts, the scene ended in a frenzied debka dance. During that Purim of 1962 theatre began to belong to me too. Perhaps because of my theatrical experiences during this festival, I was continually seeing the comic side of theatre, and between my concept of the tragic side, as I had viewed it through the books on Greek history, and this comic side, I searched as a youth for the theatrical side of life. I discovered that life is certainly not lacking in theatricality: it was to be found in our village homes, our folklore, weddings and funerals. I remember that when it refused to rain, our entreaty to the skies was real theatre: what would was happen that during November and December, when the autumn slid into winter, someone would sound a warning and propose that we begin our endeavours to entreat the skies to release their showers, and he would assign one of the group to the task of clown—whom we called karandas. After a short rehearsal we would parade out, passing by the school, and singing songs to the skies, asking for rain. Of course every door at which we

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knocked was opened, and we entered and seated ourselves in a circle in the courtyard around the fire or coal stove. The “director” would ask the clown to mimic various people or animals, or our host and his wife, for the spectators’ fun and enjoyment. The householder would donate money. All the money that we collected was donated to a holy place in the name of the prophet Abu Ibraim. We continued to hope that the next day it would rain; not that the skies always answered our prayers. Each day we repeated the performance…until it rained. Today, when I return to the past, seeking that spontaneous folkloristic village theatre, I find it not only in that particular ritual, that was based on a central figure and spectators seated in a circle—a sort of theatre-in-the-round—but also in weddings and funerals that still provide that sort of theatricality: at the culmination of a wedding, when the groom’s hair is cut, everyone, men and women, stand around in a circle and sing the zafeh song, all according to fixed ritual, in which the words of the song sooth the groom and are even directed at the barber, urging him to carry out his craft gently and gracefully, for “the groom is young and pampered, like an emir who has never soiled his hands with manual labour”. Finally, everyone crowds together in a traditional debka dance, while the family members approach the groom, kiss him and congratulate him on his “haircut and outfit” (but not on his marriage for the bride has not yet reached his house). At funerals a similar circle is formed, surrounding the coffin. Five religious elders approach the coffin and hold the service, followed by the eulogies. Hundreds, and even thousands, of people usually attend the funerals, and despite the ceremony taking place in the open air on an area of over a thousand square metres, the hush is similar to the “silence of death”; only the voices of the worshippers can be heard. Here too, everything takes place according to fixed rules, and in just the same way that I saw these ceremonies 30 years ago, so to do I see them today. Perhaps this is not exactly theatre, but the basic theatrical elements of central figures surrounded by spectators, and predetermined dramatic rules, have influenced all our visual folklore: a family visit—like Joseph’s dream, with the moon in the centre and the twelve stars bowing low—will find the parents in the centre and the children scattered around them; in a meeting of adults, the Sheikh—the dominant figure—will be in the centre, and all the eyes and ears around him will be directed inwards; the hakawati, the teller of folk-tales, as well as the folk poets, will generally be composed of one pair who engage in a dialogue, while around them the rest of the company will participate as spectators, reacting with applause or by singing the chorus. When I was a child, I had no thoughts of our lifestyle being theatrical; such things were simply a part of the way we were, of our folklore, our history, traditions and customs. Today, from a perhaps nostalgic perspective, I am discovering just how much I myself was involved in this theatre, without even being aware of the fact that it was theatre. Since coming upon the professional theatre, I am constantly trying to find the link: whether this folklore can serve as a basis for establishing a professional Arab theatre? Ten years ago I began to write for the professional theatre. Here too the thought remained with me that theatre is simply “life” on stage. Reality, whether distorted or embellished, is the performance on stage, presented through verbal and non-verbal means, movement, light, decor and all the other components of the stage. In 1982 I wrote my first play—The Swamp, a monodrama in Arabic, about the life of an Arab youth from the north who sets off for Tel Aviv to find employment as well as to seek his future and a new society. It is there that his trials and tribulations begin; there that he comes face to

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face with the vulgar, harsh, repugnant and aggressive reality of the Israeli attitude towards the Arab—automatically suspect unless he proves himself otherwise, even when working in a restaurant or walking down the street or simply sitting at home over a cup of coffee. The monodrama was performed by the actor Ghassan Abbas, directed by Riad Masarwi. On the opening night, on the main stage of the Nazareth Cultural Centre, a police officer arrived with a warrant banning the play and preventing its performance, with the claim that it had not been submitted to the censor. Following an evening of protest about the ban, the director and actor were arrested for staging selected scenes from the play, and later, after it had been submitted to the censor, it was banned with the claim that it was a threat to state security. I then attempted to bring reality to the theatre, after my first attempt had found theatre invading our own reality. Reality had become a Kafkaesque tale, an absurdity. During the same period, moreover, I was under house arrest for six months, unable to participate in rehearsals, unable to attend the first night, and not even able to take part in the protest. I was aware of a sense of helplessness and feeling that every path was leading to creative impotence. Indeed, until 1989 I ceased to think about theatre, neither writing nor reading; I also stopped going to see plays in Haifa, as if the theatre once more no longer belonged to me. In 1989, the decision to abolish censorship brought me back to the theatre. There is nothing that so harms the basic right of man to express himself freely, as the censor; not only in the theatre, but also in cinema, writing and the educational system, child-parent relationships and, indeed, each and every area of life. There is nothing more depressing than the awareness that you are creating under the shadow of the censor; with time you become your own censor, for the State or society’s censor is constantly present somewhere in the back of your mind, directing you. In actuality, it is he who is the real creative artist, not your own free spirit. In 1989 I wrote my second play Mawal. No longer under the censor’s threat, this is the tale of a simple, elderly Palestinian man, revolving around the experiences, jokes and songs of Palestinian life since 1948 and up until the intifada. He does not present all this alone on stage, but together with a troupe of young dancers. It is a blend of theatrical monodrama with debka and song, incorporating folklore, revelations and pointed satire. From this experience I began to believe once again in the power of theatre; I began to feel that it also belongs to me. In the middle of 1992, when I was approached from Nazareth to write a new play, for the same troupe of dancers, in the same style, I did not hesitate. This time I brought to the stage not only the reality of four years, but of a thousand years; one thousand years of Arab history since the Arab conquest of Spain; from the time of Andalusia until modern times. One thousand years of conquest, but also a thousand years of struggle for national liberation; and the old man, the simple, naive citizen of Nazareth, is still to be found in Shuan Square, helping the children to cross the road in safety. Reality has returned to the stage, as too has folklore and poignant emotional utterances, as well as the satire that sometimes amuses and at other times brings tears to the eyes. The public flocks to this Arab theatre. It is such theatre that I sought and, so it would appear, such theatre that our audiences love. Now, after ten years, I have found myself returning to The Swamp, the script that was banned, but this time as a new play—The Brothers. I wrote The Swamp on the eve of the War in Lebanon; I wrote The Brothers while the peace talks were in full swing, particularly, and mainly, with the Palestinians. The Swamp is a play in Arabic for one actor, directed at the Arab citizens of Nazareth. The Brothers is a play in Hebrew for two actors, directed at the Jewish citizens of Tel Aviv.

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What has changed in the past 10 years? Much water has flowed along the Jordan River.

The “Other” Will Arrive Tomorrow Hannan Hever Tel-Aviv University (Translated by Chaya Amir)

At the beginning of the 1950s the Cameri Theatre of Tel-Aviv produced Nathan Shacham’s play They’ll Arrive Tomorrow [a synopsis of which is to be found at the end of the article]. Shacham was among a group of young Hebrew playwrights and authors who began writing in the 1940s and who, before and during the War of Independence of 1948, wrote about military actions, war and life during wartime. The group were dubbed “The Palmach Writers,” after the underground forces, the Palmach, (a Hebrew acronym for “striking forces”). Shacham himself served during the war as a press officer on the Southern Front. Moshe Shamir’s He Walked through the Fields (1948) and Yigal Mossensohn’s In the Wilderness of the Negev (1949) were plays of the same period which also depicted situations very similar to the contemporary reality. At the time they provoked a good deal of public interest, especially among the fighters themselves, who did not always like their stage image. They’ll Arrive Tomorrow (1949a) was based on a story published by Shacham (1949) called “They Were Seven,” and was adapted for the theatre at the end of 1949, soon after the cease-fire. Its first performance was on February 1, 1950. The play is set in the latter stages of the war, at the end of 1948, and revolves around a fighting unit which has failed in its attempts to capture an enemy emplacement. The unit takes up its position on a nearby ridge and awaits reinforcements. It appears that there are seven land mines on the ridge, laid at some time by the Israeli forces themselves, but that there is no way now to ascertain their exact location. The soldiers are struck by fear and react by discarding all disciplinary restraints. Meanwhile the local command is beset by conflict over the situation. On the one side is Jonah, the commander; on the other, Abi, his deputy. In the middle is Noga, the wireless operator, who is Jonah’s girlfriend and Abi’s sister. One question at stake is how to deal with the soldiers in the unit who refuse to move anywhere on the ridge. Does the commanding officer, in order to set a personal example for his men, have the right to endanger his own life? But the real conflict lies in whether or not to conceal their knowledge of the mines from the approaching reinforcements. Not to tell them would mean letting them die in their stead; while telling them would mean paralyzing them in the same way that their own unit has become paralyzed. When the play opened, it provoked a good deal of criticism among the public. Among other things, the discussions revolved around the question of whether it was really possible for commanders in the Israeli Army to have neither a copy of the map of the mined area they were

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occupying (the original of which has been destroyed) nor any technical means for detecting where the mines were located. Primarily, however, the play was grasped as representing officers and soldiers as individuals who were helpless in the face of a threatening reality, and unable to do anything but await their fates. Discussions of Shacham’s play revealed a persistent duality which characterized most of the critical responses: on the one hand, critics were enthusiastic over the originality of the play and the attempt to present an unvarnished view of the Palmach fighters (although they distinguish between the artistic truth and the technical-documentary one). On the other hand, there were repeated signs of discomfiture and perplexity over the moral and conceptual lessons to be drawn from the play. The critics were unable to point to a clear cut moral and conceptual theme, as a result of which they charged that the play lacked focus, and asked more questions than it answered. One of the more notable critics of the play, Yitzhak Sadeh, asked: “Why of all possible war situations did he choose precisely this one?”—since the play is based on the opposite of the logic which underlies the struggle of a people for their freedom. Instead of showing the willingness of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the collective good, Shacham “pushed us into one corner of the battlefield, precisely into that corner where death has no logic, where death is fortuitous; contrary to a situation of action either active (attack) or passive (defense), such death is neither rewarding, useful or logical.” (Zilbertal, 1950; Sadeh, 1950) Instead of emphasizing the affinity and bonds of loyalty between one soldier and another, “we have before us people in a different situation: each wants his comrade to fail, to be killed”. (ibid)1 Nonetheless, Yitzhak Sadeh and Yigal Allon, both revered commanders of the Palmach, insisted that Shacham had the right to distort known military reality. As Sadeh added, the question was not a technical one: it was irrelevant whether or not a Palmach commander “knows that aside from sophisticated instruments of detection there are numerous other means for detecting the presence of mines and clearing a secure path between them” (Sadeh, 1950); and Yigal Allon defended the play: “Nathan Shacham has the right and full authority to relate life on the battlefield the way he has in this play” (Malkin, 1950). The discomfiture of the critics arose from the fact that Shacham was not expressing a pacifist point of view, even though some critics made such a claim (e.g. Hurvitz, 1950), and that ideologically he agreed that the national war was a just one. In their opinion, if Shacham held such views, he should have done what other writers with this conceptual approach did: he should have made it clear that the war was a collective phenomenon of solidarity. However, to their great disappointment, Shacham emphasized the exact opposite—that of hostility between soldiers on the same side. The critics dealt with their discomfort by claiming that the play was immature, or the plot too dense, or there was no balanced catharsis or that there was an incongruity between the nature of the characters and the elevated register of their dialogue (e.g. Keisari, 1950; Neiman, 1950; Zilbertal, 1950). Criticizing the confusion and the inner contradictions in the play, however, merely served to conceal the fact that the critics did not know how to digest, describe and catalogue the gap between what everyone assumed to be the accepted ideology of the writer and his generation—and the aberrant conclusions of the play. The characters, according to Benjamin Tammuz: instead of revealing their independence of character, their intellectual baggage and their personal aspirations—are dragged into a whirlpool which benumbs them and makes

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them into a collective mishmash whose reactions are a function of the utter confusion into which the author has hurled them. (Tammuz, 1950) Above all, however, the critics expressed amazement that even allowing for all the soul-searching and profound disapproval of the reality, not a single ray of hope emerged: there was no positive solution. In this spirit, Yitzhak Sadeh expressed his own hope that in the future plays written by members of this generation “will emerge from the cul de sac into which this play has entered and light up our stages brightly” (ibid). The prevalent interpretation viewed the play as one which reflected the disintegration of humanist values, unable to survive the cruel reality of the war with the Arabs. Accordingly, it would appear that when prevailing conditions become extremely difficult—and choosing a minefield as a setting is extreme—the fighters-characters lose their moral rectitude. Their education and values are portrayed as not strong enough to withstand the test of an extreme reality. This interpretative position was to remain prominent in later criticism and scholarship as well (Shoham, 1950). Hirshberg, a critic at the Kol Ha’am (The Voice of the People) newspaper, who was a veteran of the interpretation of the War of Independence as a War of Liberty aimed not against the Arabs but “against imperialism, which oppresses both peoples, and against its servants within the Arab ranks, who betrayed their people” criticized vehemently the grotesque interpretation given by the director to the Arab stepping on the mine [a translation of this scene is to be found at the end of the article]: As for the direction, one cannot but comment on one element which poses danger to the audience, this is the scene of the Arab stepping on the mine. Even though Shacham’s realism in immaculate it is proper to undo this scene which makes the audience laugh as the commander calls the Arab. We are living in times of chauvinistic feelings and we should be very careful in everything, lest the play or the literary work will be misunderstood (Hirshberg, 1950; Sadeh, 1950). There would appear to be a thematic contradiction in the play. On the one hand, we have an extreme situation in which a unit finds itself in a minefield without being able to locate the mines. On the other hand the play uses the minefield, allegorically, as a representation of the situation that would come to exist after the war. More than a few critics referred to the words of Alex, the unit’s intelligence officer, who claimed that the mines planted during the war were liable to explode in the period of calm that would follow it: In the first stage of reforming the universe, I would suggest that human beings think always of the worst possibility liable to spring from their actions, and then, perhaps, they will understand that they have to behave as if the mines under their feet were not only on this ridge but everywhere else in the world, in the fish market, in the office, in the lovers’ embrace…(Shacham, 1949a p. 23) Most of these critics interpreted the original staging of the play as a representation of an extreme situation in which the collective “I” was weak. This reading presupposes a humanist, liberal stance. Accordingly, killing or injuring Others is, in fact, a violation of the norm. In the play, the violation of this norm is related primarily to the death of the elderly Arab

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prisoner-of-war—who was used as a guinea pig and made to run across the minefield. Institutional backing for a humanist interpretation of the play was provided by the censorship, which demanded that the scene in which the Arab is killed be deleted.2 However it is also possible to read the play by reversing this logic and, consequently, resolving the contradiction. One can read They’ll Arrive Tomorrow not only as a warning that the hegemonic images—sacrificing the individual for the benefit of the collective, moral rectitude, solidarity, etc., would not stand the test, or as an indication of their limits; one can also claim that the play attempts to show that this same immoral behavior, this same disintegration, is an integral part of the constitution of the national Israeli identity. In such a reading, one is not talking about a perversion or aberration but about a central component in the constitution of national identity. Using an extreme situation is not a valid way of drawing the moral limits of the “I”; that is, showing that moral rectitude is upheld as long as it is feasible. When it becomes difficult, however, and one stands face to face with death, knowing that “the death of your friend is your redemption,”(Shacham, 1949a p. 38), one falters, prefering that one’s friend die rather than oneself; or one is ready to play Russian Roulette with the Arab prisoner. It can be assumed rather, that the use of an extreme situation allows for the possibility that a certain cultural mould was configured during the war and preserved even after. The accepted reading of the play entails a full affirmation of the hegemony of Israeli identity because it accepts it as an unquestioned given, only afterwards examining its bounds as a moral identity, etc. On the other hand, the reading which identifies the process of disintegration of the collective as an immanent component of its identity does not accept it as a complete and unquestioned given. It points to it, rather, as a product of a cultural construction. The collective “I,” the national “I,” is thus grasped as a construction which is basically problematic. Its establishment through the justification of the sacrifice of the individual for the benefit of the collective includes seeing this behaviour as moral. However other kinds of behaviour too, such as wanton cruelty, which are generally seen as immoral and inhuman, become moral kinds of behaviour, by dint of their inclusion in this construction of a National Subject. The essential mechanism with which the war culture, during the period of the struggle for national independence, confirmed the need to make sacrifices was the metaphor of the living-dead. This metaphor was designed to approve of individual death by means of conferring on it a national, collective significance. It had a central place in the poetry of the period, especially in the influential poetry of Nathan Alterman. This figure of speech, the prosopopoeia, gives the poet the voices of those unable to speak. In his poem “The Silver Tray,” which might be called the hymn of the War of Independence, Alterman describes two allegorical figures, a young man and young woman, who are the silver tray on which the Jewish State is being presented to the people. The presentation takes place in an impressive ceremony at whose climax it becomes clear that “the two stood silently and there is no sign if they are living or [have been] shot” (Alterman, 1962). This is also Shacham’s point of departure: Jonah: “But the body will soon get what’s coming to it, a mine or a bullet […] Here everything is present and absent at one and the same time. We too are not existent anymore. He awaits us outside like a loving, patient woman. (Shacham, 1949a p. 57).

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What Shacham has uncovered is the mechanism for the construction of the National Subject, sustained by the physical death of the individual. Individual death is, of course, final and incontrovertible; but the death of the individual who has sacrificed his life for his people is endowed with spiritual survival in the collective memory of the nation. In his story “In Line,” which, like “Seven of Them,” was included in his collected stories The Gods are Lazy, Shacham (1949) describes the interiorization of death by the fighters in the struggle to break the siege of Jerusalem. They cope with their fears of death in war by turning it into an integral part of life. Death in life, like life in death, becomes a natural component of war culture. In this way a cultural mechanism is created whose essence is the creation of forms for coping with fear by diminishing its power. Shacham exposes this mechanism when Abi defines his generation as “we are the generation which turned its adventurousness into boldness, and its huzpah (nerve) into pioneering”. (Shacham, 1949a p. 51) In They‘ll Arrive Tomorrow the existence of the living-dead is presented as a point of departure: living with the knowledge of almost certain and ever-present death (the hidden mines) transforms the people on the ridge into the living-dead: those whose lives are threatened by certain, concrete death—and, therefore, they are dead-in-life. The play employs this basic assumption in representing the reality of war but proposes to investigate the next stage. Its primary interest is in the “day after” the war. What, it asks—as a kind of response to the then popular song “The Palmachnik is Looking for Tomorrow” (written by the “official” songwriter of the period, Chaim Hefer)—will be the character of those who “will arrive tomorrow?” In the argument between Alex and Abi regarding their life after the war, Abi says that after the war he would like to do things that will be the direct outcome of what he has learned during the war; and when he defines those things as “something which is not naive and not selfish,” (ibid p. 49) he also defines the basic components—being aware of the price of the national mission, and being committed to the collective—of the living-dead. In his introduction to the play Shacham explicitly defines the sharp change that has taken place in the situation: The time—the end of winter 1948. The War of Independence, which until now has had the character of a communications system, is acquiring the coloration of a war of conquest. Jewish soldiers are conquering villages and enemy emplacements for the first time, settling down in them and repulsing counterattacks (ibid p. 6). Shacham studies the cultural changes which occurred in the period after the second truce of the war (beginning of October 1948). What are the changes which will occur in the Subject of the Israeli fighter when the historical conditions change and with them the images of strength and weakness which nurtured the construction of the Israeli Subject? In the new situation of a minefield all the basic notions of courage are completely overturned. When the soldier Shlomo Reich refuses to return to his barracks because he is frightened of the mines, Jonah, the commander, makes fun of him, asking: “So what if there are mines? Suppose that we are attacking. You run, take up a position and cover your comrades, attack […] the fate of the war depends on whether or not you run, run!” And when the soldier answers: “Now…there’s…no battle,” (ibid p. 15) he elucidates the question of what the character of the National Subject will be when the necessity of constructing it as victim—as a member of a nation on the defensive, battling for its national independence—lessens, and in its place comes a Subject, based on an image of national might. What will his nature be when, on the one hand, the

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battles end and part of his efforts must now be directed, as in the play, to the defense of what has been conquered; while, on the other hand, the psychological mechanism of the living-dead continues to operate? According to Shacham one thing is clear: the haziness between the world of the living and the world of the dead will continue to exist actively in Israeli perception. In his introduction to The Gods are Lazy, Shacham formulated his thoughts very clearly: The war is not yet over but there are no more battles. We will once again go out to pluck youthfulness and beauty on the fields of death, and the flowers of blood will be trampled underfoot by flocks of sheep. We will step on mines, not in fright but in amazement. We are still alive and now we have to venerate life enthusiastically just as we have until now we venerated death. (Shacham, 1949 p. 16) The land remained a testimony to battles and to the dead, as well as to the psychological mechanism that made it possible to cope with the fears of war. The mines are an allegory for the dangers which will remain after the battles are over: the need to stabilize and preserve what exists. Consequently, Shacham sees the land “as the death mask of my great friend who died, large and mighty, and all the features of his character are scattered across the land.” (ibid). The construction of the living-dead is founded on a clearly visible system of oppositions—between attacked and attackers, Arabs and Jews, our territory and their territory; whereas the question of the cost of individual death is blurred. The national, normative Subject of the living-dead is founded on blurring the figurative borders between the dead and the living: the death of the individual is incorporated into a broad network of signifiers. This blurring, however, is brought into the foreground of its representation against a background, frequently unnoticed, of permanent and fixed oppositions. The positioning of the National Subject is thus signified through a series of oppositions, and as long as these oppositions are clear, then the individual death has a national, collective meaning. Furthermore, it follows that from the collectivist function of the victim, his identity is determined by a collective principle: i.e. his identity is made up of those elements which suit the collective needs of the nation: he must be Jewish, and manliness is preferable. Therefore, the fact that the victim is Jewish or, for example, that he is seen as part of a hierarchical military system of soldier vs. officer, appear as natural, taken for granted facts, intended to fill the collectivist function of establishing his identity. When the clearly visible structure of oppositions is undermined, however, then the construction mechanism of the National Subject also collapses. Jonah, who is witness to such a process of collapse, begins to make declarations designed to preserve the collective authority. Following the battle at the end of the play (which they have won by chance) Jonah makes sure that the burial of the dead is anonymous, as a collective, so that it will not be possible to identify those that were killed by the mines (Shacham, 1949a p. 72). In contrast to Abi, he disputes the legitimacy of individual guilt for acts committed during a war; and in his efforts to preserve military discipline, he attempts to reaffirm the collective which disposes of individual responsibility: I am not I and you are not you. You can ignore me, you can hate me, you can belittle me. For you I am—responsibility. I am authority. I am the Jewish people. I am its destiny and you are obliged to listen to me as if you were listening to your own conscience. (ibid, p. 28)

THE “OTHER” WILL ARRIVE TOMORROW 93

Nonetheless, none of this serves to stop the collapse of those clearly visible oppositions upon which the entire structure had rested. The new historical situation in which the play takes place is one of neither war nor peace but of a quiet interlude in the battle. In this new situation, the previous accepted balance of power has been undermined, as a result of which ordinary distinctions begin to blur: first and foremost, the dichotomy between our forces and those of the enemy completely disintegrates. From the minute your own comrade dies after stepping on a mine and thereby diminishes the likelihood of your death, his death, by redeeming you, has also turned him into the most concrete of your enemies. As Abi says to himself: The person others would sacrifice themselves for in the heat of battle and, covered with their own blood, extricate from under enemy fire, they’d be happy to see him die and release them from the last mine. (ibid, p. 20) The same is true of territory. The territory is, on the one hand, ours. It is an enemy emplacement which has been occupied by the Israeli army. On the other hand, however, it is mined and therefore constitutes a threat to our soldiers. We, it is true, are in control of the territory but, in fact, it turns out that to no small extent the territory is controlling us. Even the set contributes to this de-territorialization by locating the events in the Jewish army within the walls of an Arab house. The enemy is, then, both external and internal: both spatially (an enemy whose territory is outside of my territory but also an enemy within the same territory), and metaphorically (an enemy who is alien and an enemy who is a friend and comrade). When the existential situation of living in a minefield threatens each and every individual separately, the hierarchy between officers and men becomes blurred. One of the central conflicts in the play is the question of whether an officer should endanger his own life in order to provide an example for his men, all of whom are afraid of the mines. The “economy” of characters is organized in such a way that the family circle cuts through the army circle. Jonah, the commander, is in love with Noga, who is the sister of his deputy, Abi; and Noga disobeys Jonah’s command and endangers her own life in order to inform Boaz, a soldier from the reinforcements and her former lover, about the mines. Noga, Abi’s sister, disrupts the hierarchical system of commander and commanded. The significance of the event is two-fold: military and erotic. The distinction between private (erotic) and public (military-social) realms is reversed. In this way the subordination of the private to the public—usually a component of the living-dead mechanism—is violated: instead of subordinating the private to the public, she subordinates the public to the private. Noga wants to tell Boaz about the danger precisely because she no longer loves him, and she is afraid that the guilt of not telling him will haunt her forever (ibid, p. 90). The mechanism of the living-dead is now confronted by a new system of threatening Others. The moment that the binary oppositions collapse, the moment an entire series of dichotomies is obfuscated and a system assumed to be stable disintegrates, alternative binary oppositions evolve: the Jew becomes the enemy of the Jew whereas the Arab is conceived of in erotic terms, analogous to the erotic way in which the woman is perceived. After Abi brings about the death of the elderly Arab prisoner, he says to his sister: “Did you see how the old man looked at me, with such love. It wasn’t very pleasant” (ibid, p. 42). Alex, who gives the command to kill the Arab prisoners, confesses that the main reason for doing so was because “they saw even our fear” (ibid, p. 40). The Arab appears to the Jewish soldiers as one who

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returns their gaze, i.e., as he who has his own subjectivity which undermines the regular opposition between “us” and the “Others.” Alex: “I’ve never seen such a brave Arab. He never took his eyes off me. Also, he has such a manly face, handsome”. (ibid) The army command disintegrates in the same way. The very act of commanding is grasped in the play as a performance, a kind of play within a play: Abi: Jonah: Abi: Jonah: Abi:

At your command, my conscience. Go to sleep and get up in the morning with calmer nerves. At your command, Captain Authority. Don’t play with me. This isn’t a theatre. Be a man. What’s that, a profession?3

While the oppositions are disintegrating, and with them the dismantling of the living-dead, what had previously been natural and self-understood and therefore concealed now becomes eminently visible: it is clear that the individual death of the soldier sacrificing his life for the nation is not that of just any person, but one of ours; that is, a Jew, whose death acquires a consoling significance within the collective. In the wake of the disintegration, it becomes clear that when the death is defined as the death of the “I,” it is also a death which is positioned in opposition to the death of the national “Other.” That is to say, what is visible to the eye during the process of disintegration is the fact that the mechanism of the living- dead—which transforms the private dead man into a national living man—is a mechanism ex clusively for Jews. The dead man is chosen from the dead: he is the preferable, Jewish dead man, endowed with the status of national victim. The Jewish dead man is constituted by the fact that he is not an Arab; what creates the “I” is the Arab “Other.” The undermining of the National Subject brings into view the essential ambivalence that characterizes the relations of power and control obtaining between the “I” and the “Other.” The disintegration of the National Subject brings to the fore the internal tensions and, in fact, the disintegration of fixed representations—the stereotypes of the “Other.” The duality begins to become increasingly clear: on the one hand, a desire to identify with the Other and have him identify with the “I,” and on the other hand, the fear of being equal to the Other, a condition which is liable to undermine the “I’s” control over him. The result is an ambivalent representation which includes fear together with pleasure, or defense together with control (Bhabha, 1986). The Arab and the woman in the play are, therefore, both threatening and desirable at once. Jonah is the commander of the unit opposed to the Arab enemy. However, Jonah and Noga carry on a relationship which is both military and erotic, at the end of which Noga is seriously injured by a mine. This creates an analogy between her and the Arab who is killed by a mine. In his confrontation with Noga, Jonah excludes her from the collective by returning her to function as the classic woman: “This is not a place for girls” (Shacham, 1949a p. 31). Jonah’s and Noga’s names add yet another element to the relationship between them: in Hebrew their names form an anagram—they contain the same letters in a different order. From the moment that the oppositions are undermined, the general outlines become blurred and the functions of individual death must be examined anew. The identity of the individual dead man no longer makes him an automatic candidate for the mechanism which will turn him into a national living person. With this disintegration, additional “Others” are suggested as candidates for the negative definition of the “I”: on the stage appears the woman

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and with her the Arab and even some of the other Jews. From now on, death allows these Others to become legitimate candidates on behalf of the war and the people. Like the national “I,” the Other also disintegrates, but this process culminates in physical disintegration. Death awaits everybody; but those marching towards death are no longer fighters representing a collective but a Subjectivity breaking down into its physical components. The Jews either get killed or are mutilated; the Arab disintegrates into metonymic disconnected parts: Jonah: Alex: Jonah: Alex: Jonah: Alex: Jonah: Alex:

Well, feel better now? Now let’s get onto business. Have you interrogated those Wogs. Yes, we were still out in the field, for classification. Get anything out of them? Yes. What? Blood. Anything else? Teeth. (ibid, p. 39)

An example of the functioning of this mechanism can be seen in the way in which Abi treats the Jewish soldier, Shlomo Reich: he treats him in the same way that he treated the old Arab. In both cases, he takes them over the minefield and in both cases his conscience bothers him but he regards his actions as a practical necessity (ibid, p. 43; Shoham, 1975 p. 85). Because even when the cultural and historical fields change, the mechanism continues to operate and to examine individual deaths in national categories. However, because the hegemonic hierarchies have disintegrated, the process by which all the “Others” participate in the constitution of the National Subject is more conspicuous—each with his or her own potential. In the new situation in which the hegemonic Subject has been undermined, the accepted, “natural” significance of the “I” no longer excludes them from participating in the creation of the National Subject. They are no longer concealed in order to create the effect of a universal, national “I,” nor do they function only as those who have been pushed into the margins by the central “I.” The words “comrade” and “enemy” have lost their fixed meanings; the death of one soldier, as already noted, being the redemption of another. The play illustrates just how the collective “I” constitutes itself by making itself distinct from the “Other.” As a result, dependence on the “Other” is essential. The collective “I” in the play is put into a situation which is not only extreme but which examines its own structure “against the grain.” In the process of its disintegration Shacham shows that structurally, the enemy of the National Subject, the “Other,” was always within. Until now, in the course of the war, the enemy was marked primarily as an Arab, who had to be fought against and killed. Now, in the new situation, living in the midst of a minefield, the need for the “Other” still exists, but his identity has undergone a change. Even under the circumstances of relative calm the “Other” is needed. Even now the “I” needs an inferior and oppressed “Other,” in order to reveal himself as superior and preferable. The minefield, however, has shattered the principles of classification and existing hierarchical relations and new relations have not yet been determined. As a result the “Other” can be an Arab or a Jew, sane or insane, a man or a woman, or a combination of the two—as in Abi’s description of the way in which the soldiers looked erotically at his feet when he crossed the minefield, comparing their glances to those of

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“an impassioned virgin.” (Shacham, 1949a p. 21). When Jonah realizes that Alex gave the order to kill the Arab, he is furious: Anyway, who told you I mean to let them go on living? All I meant was that it would be a pity to finish off two Wogs when we’re in a hole like this. It’d be a waste. A waste: you understand? Two men, that means two mines. That’s how it’s going to be. Now there are six mines: after that there’ll be only four. (ibid, p. 40). Jonah substitutes exchange value for human value: to locate the mines. But exchange value means that this function can be fulfilled by Jews as well as by Arabs; thus, through such a substitution in the Jewish domain as well, the critique of Jewish subjectivity reaches its climax. In the argument between Jonah and Abi as to whether an officer should knowingly endanger his life in order to provide a personal example for his frightened men, the hierarchical relationship between officer and soldier is examined anew. Abi focuses on the existential point of departure of endangered human beings in general: There are six mines. Six people will get it. You won’t be able to arrange for the mines to blow up on people who don’t do you any good. I understand you very well. You would like to see those killed who, in your opinion, are superfluous in this world. But it can’t be done. Perhaps in battle you have to take special care of officers because they are like the head on a body and only unusual people can live without someone to head them. But here, in the minefield, it’s every man for himself. You can’t save us for the good of the world anymore than you can a good lathe operator or a good singer. Here we are like ordinary people awaiting their fate. (ibid, p. 26) Abi is capable of taking up positions which seem to contradict the humanist perspective. On the one hand, he is an unequivocal defender of moral rectitude (ibid, p. 24). On the other hand, he will also condone acts of cruelty which have been committed at times out of necessity. (ibid, p. 44) At the end of the play, it turns put that Buma, the commander of the reinforcements, knew all along about the mines and the fact that information was being withheld from him. Although this appears to censure Jonah and emphasize the worthlessness of his plan to withhold information from the reinforcements, 4 in fact the very opposite is true. Instead of reinforcing Abi’s humane position—to tell the truth whatever the price—it would appear that the practical option is the stronger. Because for Buma, too, preserving the collective, even by closing one eye and keeping silent, turns out to be the prefered option, and not a natural, self-understood commitment to truth and absolute sincerity. Holding back the information about the mines is also an effort to hold back the knowledge of the existence of death in life as a collective phenomenon. This is Abi’s demand to let each and every one of them “be a hero of his own desire,” (Shacham, 1949a p. 62) i.e., to make fear into a private, and collective, issue. Shacham has focused on the way the National Subject is constructed. He has examined this through the metaphor of the living-dead which generally excludes the “Other” from the discussion. He has turned the “Other” into a function which can be fulfilled by various elements. Since the function of the “Other” is to constitute the “I” as a National Subject, that is, as a member of the living-dead (either dead with a live national existence or alive as a person who has interiorized death and is dead within life), this function can be filled by anyone who

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threatens the “I” at any given moment. He/she can turn the “I” into a living-dead person, regardless of whether or not he/she is “I’s” national enemy. In a situation of deterioration this role can be filled by a woman, or even a friend or an Arab. The process of disintegration described by Shacham is not an aberrant situation in which a stable and humanist Subject finds himself. It is, rather, a context in which the internal structure of the National Subject has been exposed in a critically profound manner.

Notes 1. Zilbertal and Sadeh were the first to propose the existentialist interpretation, which later became central (Ofrat, 1975 pp. 37–47; Goor, 1982 pp. 29–43). 2. (1.2.1950, “Tonight at the Premiere of They Will Arrive Tomorrow, Kisilev, 1950). The censored event does not exist in the synopsis but it does exist in the book’s version of the play (Shacham, 1949a p. 42). see the playwright’s program note. 3. (ibid p. 30). See more examples on p. 85, p. 88. 4. See Goor’s interpretation (1982 p. 36).

References Alterman, N. (1962) The Silver Tray. The Seventh Column, Tel-Aviv:Hakibbutz HaMeuchad, pp. 154–155 (in Hebrew). Bhabha, H.K. (1986) The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism. In Literature, Politics and Theory, Barker, F. et al. (Eds.) London: Methuen, pp. 148–172. Foyerstein, M. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow at the Cameri, Hazofe ( 9.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Goor, I. (1982) Chapters in the Original Israeli Drama, Jerusalem: Bamah pp. 29–43 (in Hebrew). Hever, H. (1986) The Living is Alive and the Dead is Dead. Siman Kria 19, pp. 188–192 (in Hebrew). Hirshberg, Y. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow at the Cameri Theatre. Kol Ha’Am ( 21.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Hurvitz, Y. (1950) A Few Comments. Haaretz ( 17.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew) Keisari, U. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow at The Cameri Theatre. Ha Olam Hazeh ( 16.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Kisilev, Y. (1950) On They Will Arrive Tomorrow. Al HaMishmar (9.2.1950) (in Hebrew). Malkin, Y. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow. Bamahane ( 9.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Naiman, Y.M. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow at The Cameri Theatre. Dvar Hashavua ( 23.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Ofrat, G. (1975) Israeli Drama, Chericover Publishing House and The Hebrew University, pp. 37–47 (in Hebrew). Sadeh, Y. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow. Al HaMishmar ( 10.3.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Shacham, N. (1949) They Were Seven. In The Gods are Lazy, Merchavia: Sifriat Poalim, pp. 31–48 (in Hebrew). Shacham, N. (1949a) They Will Arrive Tomorrow, Merchavia: Sifriat Poalim (in Hebrew). Shacham, N. (1957) They’ll Be Here Tomorrow, translated by Israel Schen, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization (in Hebrew).

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Shoham, C. (1975) Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama, Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University (in Hebrew). Tammuz, B. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow. Ha’aretz ( 17.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Tammuz, B. (1950) Tonight at the Premiere of They Will Arrive Tomorrow. Al Hamishmar ( 1.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew). Zilbertal, M. (1950) They Will Arrive Tomorrow at the Cameri. Bashaar ( 9.2.1950 ) (in Hebrew).

Appendix A They Will Arrive Tomorrow by Nathan Shacham A Play in Three Acts (four scenes) (From the program of the play, February, 1st 1950) The time is end of winter 1948. Jewish units, enraged by loss and suffering, start their spearhead attacks, intent on conquest. The War for Independence, which up till then seemed to have been a battle for lines of communication begins to acquire the characteristics of total war. Jewish soldiers take over Arab villages, conquer emplacements in enemy territory, dig themselves in and heroically stand against bitter and cruel counterattacks. A Jewish unit which has gone out to conquer an enemy emplacement fails. Instead of returning to its base, this unit takes up its position on a hill, hoping for the arrival of reinforcements to rescue it, or to help seize its original objective. The play opens shortly after the unit’s officers have established themselves in an Arab building which is to serve as headquarters. The other members of the unit, numbering forty-one men, entrench themselves in a former British camp, spread out over the hill.

Synopsis Of The Play Act One Scene One—Evening

Jonah, the Company Commander, and Alex, the Intelligence Officer, discuss the defense of the hill. The situation is very serious. The hill has been mined at some previous date but there is no way of detecting the seven mines which lie waiting to explode when stepped on. The sapper who placed the mines has been killed and the map destroyed. As Jonah and Alex talk, a soldier who has been hiding in the next room appears. By hiding he has avoided crossing the stretch of hill to where the platoon is situated. Jonah commands him to rejoin his platoon. The soldier refuses hysterically. Abi, Second in Command, persuades him to go, by going with him. When he returns Jonah reprimands Abi for endangering himself without permission. Abi leaves on a reconnaissance tour. Scene Two—The Following Morning

Abi and Noga his sister (a wireless operator) discuss their home. Alex return from his tour, announcing that his men refuse to climb the hill. Jonah sends for the disobedient soldiers, as he fears that such conduct will jeopardize the entire unit. No technical method of detecting the mines is available. Alex returns with one Arab prisoner. The prisoner attempts to escape and is killed by a mine. Act Two Half an hour later

Noga reprimands Abi for his cruelty. Abi proves to her the logic of his conduct. At breakfast a discussion evolves in which relations among the men are clarified; Alex goes out on a job. News arrives of a reinforcement unit due to reach them the following morning. Jonah suggests not telling the newcomers about the mines as there is no escape from the situation anyway.

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Their ignorance will be paradise compared to the hell his people have been living in. Abi disagrees: “Let the men be heroes out of choice,” he says. Neither does he believe that this plot will remain secret for long. On one of his tours Alex is killed by a mine. Abi is badly shaken. In a harsh argument between him and Jonah he reprimands Jonah for never setting an example himself to the men of whom he expects the bravery of walking in a minefield. Jonah believes his first duty is to preserve the C.O. even if this means the loss of his personal prestige. Act Three The following night

The reinforcement unit under Buma’s command has arrived. Two of the new men are killed and secretly buried by Jonah’s soldiers. Abi returns from helping the newcomers. Noga hears that Boaz, her former friend, is among the new men and she wants to go out to warn him. When Abi refuses to let her go she admits that she must do this precisely because she no longer loves Boaz. She is in love with Jonah. She leaves. Abi discusses Jonah’s bravery with Uri, the latter’s driver. Noga steps on a mine. When Jonah runs out to her aid, Abi tells him that “he has no right to endanger the C.O.” Jonah shows Abi the withdrawal orders in which it is specified that the command is now to be placed in Buma’s hands. Noga dies from her wounds. Buma the new C.O. orders the unit to retreat and leave nothing behind. “Leave nothing behind…” says Abi thinking out loud of the lives the hill has taken. “Nothing besides the seventh mine,” blurts out Buma, who has known about the mines all along.

Appendix B Excerpt from They’ll Arrive Tomorrow: Nathan Shacham (1957 pp. 27–31)1 Jonah: Well, feel better now? Now let’s get down to business. Have you interrogated those Wogs?2 Alex: Yes, while we were still out in the field, for classification. Jonah: Get anything out of them? Alex: Yes. Jonah: What? Alex: Blood. Jonah: Anything else? Alex: Teeth. Jonah: What sort of joke is that? Did they say anything? Alex: Not a word. Jonah: What’s the problem? Alex: The old one is just a stupid old fool: he doesn’t know anything. Jonah: And the young one? Alex: Stubborn as a mule. You won’t get anything out of him. Jonah: (incredulously) What d’you mean? Alex: If an Arab doesn’t start talking after one kick in the face, he won’t talk at all, and there’s no use giving him the works, I don’t want to open a butcher’s shop here. Anyway, what more can he tell me than I’ve already seen for myself? There’s at least a platoon posted on every ridge. They’ve got wise to the driving-in-a-wedge idea, and

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they’ve decided to choke us. Serves us right, too. It’s about time we stopped planning on the assumption that they’re complete nitwits. Any force that tries to break through in order to re-establish contact with us will have to be at least a company strong. We’ve got to weigh up whether it’s worthwhile wasting another company here. Jonah: That’s a decision which will have to be taken elsewhere. By the way, what have you done with your two pigeons? Alex: What could I do with them? Would you like to have to feed them? I gave orders to finish them off. Jonah: (shouting) Idiot! (Calms down) Sorry; that was stupid. Has it been done? Alex: Not yet. I handed them over to Gideon. Jonah: (goes over to window and calls out) Gideon, send those two over here at once. You come too. Abi: Oh come on! Why finish them off? Let the Wogs go on stinking. What harm can it do us? A few rations of bully beef? Alex: Don’t make me out to be a murderer, for God’s sake! You know damn well that in situations like this one can’t afford to have any passengers. First, because we haven’t enough food for them. Second, because they’ve seen too much. They’ve even seen our fear. Third, if you fell into their hands, they’d soon make mincemeat out of you. I know that isn’t a proper reason; but it’ll help you carry out the rotten job that’s got to be done of sending them express to kingdom come…Alright, if you want to be obstinate about it, have it your own way. But remember, I’ve warned you. You know, that young fellow’s a right lad: I’ve never seen an Arab as tough as that. You should have seen the look he gave me. Good looking bastard, too. Jonah: (contemptuously) Hell’s bells! For once in your life you see an Arab act like a man, and you’d let him have your sister. Anyway, who told you I mean to let them go on living? All I meant was that it would be a pity to finish off two Wogs when we’re in a hole like this. It’d be a waste. A waste—you understand? Two men—that means two mines. That’s how it’s going to be. Now there are six mines: after that there’ll be only four. (Gideon appears in doorway) Gideon: Here they are. What d’you want ‘em for, anyway? Abi: How d’you propose to do it? Jonah: Very simply. We’ll just let them do a bit of running up and down on our sports ground out there until they find their mines. Gideon, get the young one outside. Give him some parade-ground drill. (Gideon stands in the doorway and shouts commands to the Arab, Abi and Alex stand at the window. Alex immediately returns to his place. Noga does not move) Gideon: (with back to audience) Ruh hunak! Ta’al hon! Yallah, yallah, ruh hunak! Kaman marra.* That’s it, and again: it won’t hurt him. Ruh, ya ibn al-kalb. Leish btistanna?** Why’s he standing still, the stinking carcass? Does he think we’re playing games? Give him one! No, you fool, not a bullet: hit him with the butt of your rifle. That’s better. Ruh, ya ibn sharmuta!*** If he doesn’t get a move on, fetch him another one with your rifle butt. Hey, careful there! You’ll kill him that way, and what good will that do? Look how the poor bastard’s bleeding! Get a move on there, will you! Doesn’t want to, eh? Well, we’ll

*

Go over there. Come here. Move it! go on, over there! Again! Get a move, you son of a bitch! What are you waiting for? *** Get going, you son of a whore! **

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soon make him want to. (shouting) Hey, look out, he’s running off! Where are your eyes, blast you! Go on, let him have it,—shoot him! (sound of several shots) You missed him. He’s just shamming dead. Give him a burst. No, stop wasting so much ammunition. Give him single shots. Call yourself a marksman? Look he’s getting up. Ah, that’s got him. Stop! He’s as dead as mutton by now. The bastard thought he’d get away did he? Good looking bastard, wasn’t he though? Jonah: You’ve simply killed a human being. Abi: It won’t work that way. You’ve got to use different methods. Get him to go of his own accord. Watch me make the old fellow do it. Here, give me some bread (Alex passes him a hunk of bread. An old Arab, dirty and disheveled, appears in the doorway. Abi goes up to him) Khud lak.* (The old man takes the bread and starts gnawing at it hungrily. He is full of wonderment and alarm, but his mistrust soon disappears, and he blinks his gratitude with watery eyes. He seizes Abi’s hand and attempts to kiss it, but Abi snatches it away) . Off you go, you son of a whore! Take this. Old Arab: (sobbing) Ya ibni, ya ibni, ana baheeb el-yahud. Ana baheeb el-yahud ktir.** Jonah: He loves the Jews very much, does he? Trash, that’s what they are, not men. Abi: Ruh ya’ammi, u-jibli shwaiyet khashabat.*** If he gathers enough firewood he’s sure to find his mine. (the old Arab goes out) It really is a shame. However, he hasn’t much longer to live anyway. Old Arab: (turning back) Min sha’nak, ya ibni, kull ma baddak.| (the Arab goes out, they wait tense with expectation. Then the Arab returns with a bundle of wood) Abi: Kaman, kaman|| (the Arab goes out again) He mustn’t come back again, he mustn’t: I can’t stand it. If he comes back again, we’re finished. I’ve had enough. Did you see the way he looked at me? (Noga looks at Abi) What d’you want of me? What’s the matter? Noga: (expressionless) Nothing. Avi: Oh, damn it all (breaking) Curse those mines (A heavy explosion) Jonah: (looks outside, returns, and says quietly) Five mines. (Curtain)

Notes to Appendix B 1. The following is a slightly revised version of the original translation. 2. The word used in the original is “arabushim” which is no more complimentary.

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Take this. My son, I love the Jews. I love the Jews very much. *** Go on, uncle, fetch me a little wood. | For you, my son, (I’ll do) whatever you like. || More, more. **

Interview with Emil Habibi

Interviewer: Siham Daoud Siham Daoud: Let’s begin with your memories of the 1940s—of the cultural life in Palestine under the British Mandate? I’d like to focus particularly on the theatrical activities at that time. Emil Habibi: I would have prefered to talk about the general literary activities and cultural life of that era, then I could contribute more with my memories. I was less familiar with all the aspects of the theatre. S.D.: Were there any plays performed that you might not have heard about then? E.H.: Naturally, there were many plays presented by non-professional groups, and maybe that’s why we didn’t get too excited about going to the theatre. It was apparent to me even then that there were amateurs and there were professional theatre people, who really deserved to be termed such. S.D.: Can you give me an example? E.H.: There were the El Juzee brothers, who I remember very well. Some of the theatres also used to use the clubs for a base, such as the Orthodox Club in Haifa and The Moslem Youth Club in Jaffa. They would also bring actors and actresses and theatre troupes over from Egypt; for instance Yusef Wahbeh came over and Amina Rizk came over repeatedly. The clubs used to sponsor them. I remember seeing several Egyptian plays on the Cinema Ein Dor stage in Haifa. S.D.: Do you mean that there was no established theatre here and they depended entirely on Egypt? E.H.: Yes, mainly on Egypt. S.D.: Imported theatre? E.H.: We brought singers over from Lebanon too, and writers and poets from Iraq. The Radio Broadcasting Service played an important role. During Ramadan evenings there were suitable broadcasts on the radio, and the Palestinian community here used to bring artists from different Arab countries to celebrate Ramadan evenings, in cinemas and cafes.

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At that time you were in charge of plays for the broadcasting service. Was all the theatrical activity confined to radio? No, but the theatre groups and actors certainly used to struggle to get on to radio; but they were all amateurs and non-professionals who couldn’t make a living from theatre. What did they perform? Which plays? Mostly translated or adapted plays, such as Majdolene which I remember from my childhood, or Under Milkwood. I remember that one of my brothers acted in it, but that was a Church club production. I played in a scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in the The Bishop’s Candlestick taken from Les Miserables, about the thief—it was Jean Valjean, if I’m not mistaken—who stepped on a coin and refused to lift his foot. Then he stole the bishop’s golden candlestick, and was caught by the police who brought him to the bishop for identification. The bishop in turn gave the candlestick to the thief so that he wouldn’t be jailed. I can never forget it. How did you get to act in it? Who asked you? How, in fact, did you become an actor? It started at school; we used to act in school plays. And what made you write a play? We know you were asked to do it, but if you hadn’t felt the need to do so, you wouldn’t have been able to. I believe you also had an earlier experience, writing Luka Ben Luka (Luka, Son of Luka)? Not only that but I also wrote Imm Eddunia, of which I’m very proud. When did you write Imm Eddunia. Prior to 1967. And it was published in The Six Day War Sextet? That’s right. In a collection of my complete works: The Six Day War Sextet and Other Stories; it was among the other stories. I also wrote a play which was performed in 1940 which I don’t remember now, but I do remember that my older brother used to act and we, the children, would divide ourselves into two groups; one group would get on stage and the others would be the audience, and we used to fight over who would act and who would watch. No one wanted to be in the audience; we all wanted to act; we even used to get into fist fights. We didn’t just fool around, we used to really act plays. Not only our neighborhood kids did so, but all the kids did. It was as popular as football matches today. It was contagious: a dozen or more of us used to take part. Where did this acting spirit come from? I don’t know, I have to think about it. We’d always seemed to have this desire to act, since childhood. But the other reason why I wrote plays, is that I always felt we sufferered from a shortage of this particular kind of art, especially since there are many adapted and translated plays but only a few original Palestinian works. I tried every once in a while to write what I could, but there was generally no repertoire available. This used to occupy my mind and it still does. There is no doubt that I read a lot of translated plays, but there were few local works. In the British missionary schools we had to memorize whole acts of Shakespeare’s plays, and obviously this has affected us. The plays in verse by Ahmad Shawki also influenced us a lot, Qais & Laila etc., and these were

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performed as a literary activity organised by the Arabic Language Department at school. What about your move to writing for the theatre? As I said, I was influenced, and there was a need for local original writing for the theatre, and in all modesty I claim that my experience in novel writing helped me. I’m a miser with words and I always choose a deliberately concise style, which I consider to be superior. I am all for brevity and steer away from using too many words. This led me to believe that I was capable, if I wanted, of writing for the stage, which also requires a concise brief language, and direct sentences. One of your most important theatrical works is the Pessoptimist [The Opsimist in the Hebrew version] which you did not actually write for the stage. It was adapted for the stage by others, on the basis of a script which you had prepared for television. Do you have any comments on the play now, as it is, after it has already become famous and popular? What did you learn from that experience? I learned more from writing Im El Rubabika for the stage. But Im El Rubabika came later. The Pessoptimist was the beginning. The style, that of monodrama, is a confining one: it could have equally achieved great success or been an utter failure. So, what I got from the Pessoptimist was limited, and did not enable me to write a play based on what I learnt from this particular experience. Was it more difficult to write a monodrama than a regular play? It was difficult because I had to make choices of which individual scenes to take from the original whole. Someone who watches The Pessoptimist, as it is performed by Muhammad Bakri, should still read the novel, because that is almost an entirely different thing. The monodrama nevertheless stands as a success in its own right. Now we can move on to Im El Rubabika, which is a complete experience. Even though it is also a monodrama, unlike the Pessoptimist I participated daily in its production, directing and acting, which is how I benefitted from it, and I learnt that there is a difference between novel and story writing, and writing for the stage. There are differences of which I was not previously aware, but which became clear as we started working on the play. There are mental associations that the novelist can leave to the reader and his imagination in a novel but, it seems to me, and from working on Im El Rubabika as I learnt during rehearsals, that it is difficult to leave out such things in a play written to be performed to an audience. For every action and scene in a play there must be clear reasons. Even in such a short play as Im El Rubabika if it is not tightly built in one movement you find that it unravels in another scene or movement. I learnt all this from this experience and of course from watching other plays, as well as from my experience in co-writing a movie script. There was an attempt to make a film about the Intifada— an Italian/Palestinian production for which I co-authored the script; and I learnt more during that experience. There is no doubt that writing for stage or the cinema is different from novel and story writing. In writing a novel I allow

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myself not to make out a plan or framework in advance and I let things flow naturally on their own; but I have discovered that this will not do for stage where there must be a framework even if it is skeletal. I know the difference between writing novels and detective stories for instance, and I cannot imagine writing a detective story without having a plan in advance: How was the crime committed; how was it discovered; and the ending?—something which I do not see in advance when I write a novel. It seems to me now that in writing for the stage, having a framework is a prerequisite for success; merely letting things develop with the writer’s train of thought is not possible. Do you have an explanation why, even though there are Palestinian and Israeli Arab poets who publish poetry, and there are stories and novels being written, and there are Arab actors who are some of the most famous in the country, there has been an absence of Arabic plays being written. There are theatre troupes and companies but they are all at a very primitive stage; it cannot be called a truly vital theatre movement. Do you have an explanation for this? I’m not so sure that its true; that there is no repertoire of plays written locally in Arabic. I believe it to be a generally accepted fact. I disagree. Many plays have been written, by Salim Khoury and others for instance. What I’m saying is, that all that’s available is still at an experimental and primitive stage. Salim Khoury wrote school plays, for elementary schools; not even at the secondary school level. If we talk about the present time, about today, you’re right. There really is a disintegration, a dismantling of the old social order and the old thoughts and values; a sort of turmoil in its early stages; a social and economical unrest. More critical, however, is the intellectual unrest which actually exists. I am talking, however, about the last few years. And if we consider a longer period—the last ten years? There are certainly reasons for the lack of original plays, some of which I consider fundamental. The complications presented by the Arab-Israeli conflict have affected not only the literary life within our country, but have also led to the curtailing or extinction of the enlightenment movement which started at the dawn of this century. The complications which have resulted from this conflict, rather than being a product of internal developments and internal turmoil, have been caused by external elements. This has been a conflict between different nationalities; it is not a class conflict for example, or a conflict within the Arab community itself, but one which has hindered the normal development of internal conflicts and directed all local conflicts, which were very often disfigured and disfiguring, outwards from the Arab community. I think this is one of the main reasons. Later on it became difficult for one to produce anything ignoring this conflict even if one wanted to ignore it, and if one didn’t ignore it the honest writer felt a great fear. There was not only a conflict but there was also a denial of its existence. Could you be a little more specific?

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There was complete alienation, social and political, between the Arab community and the Jewish community. Why could poetry be written and not plays for the theatre? It’s not that there was no literature being produced; there were poets and novels, but playwrights writing for the theatre were absent. Could it be because no actual framework of a theatre existed? The political issues were overwhelming. It is true that slogans and the pursuit of slogans weaken theatre work. Theatrical works of a suitable Arab political and national nature were available and still are, if not in the Israeli society then in the Arab countries outside of Israel. I still say that this imposed political situation is nevertheless what weakened theatre work. Theatre has social channels also, and not just direct political channels, but we were not given the space to deepen our social thinking. You believe that the fact that there is no professional theatre has no bearing on the matter? I was waiting for things to become normal and for the Israeli Hebrew theatre to have with it—alongside it—an Arab theatre. But it seems that it will take a long time and the results now show that I might have been wrong. It is said that there are changes now in the monies earmarked for the Arab cultural community, but it is distributed haphazardly and instead of being concentrated in one professional company or theatre it is distributed among dozens of amateur groups and companies. I believe that there should be a council. An Arab theatre council of theatre professionals as well as other interested people, with an organized directorship and by-laws. It’s true as you say that the situation is poor but is it better any where else? Let’s compare it with the Israeli theatre, for example. How long did it take the Israeli theatre to become established? To whom should we apply for a theatre? Should we ask the government? It is in fact our right to do so. I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just wondering what other factors are involved, there is no Palestinian theatre outside of Israel either. There have been various attempts and a Palestinian theatre was founded in Syria, a theatre that was not too bad. When was that? It doesn’t exist at the present time. No it no longer exists, except in name. But before the rift with Syria, before the PLO left, there was quite a good theatre which performed a number of rather good plays, Palestinian plays, one of which was Luka Ben Luka. That was a Palestinian theatre? Yes. The director was Syrian, Waleed Quwatly, but it was nevertheless a Palestinian theatre. A company was formed but later it dispersed. Before the war in Lebanon there was also a theatrical movement there. What about a specific Palestinian theatre? Palestinians are everywhere, and we should not forget that the disaster [of 1948] which the Palestinian people suffered, uprooted the foundations upon which a Palestinian theatre could have been born. The roots of an entire

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civilization were torn up. It is true that the main theatre groups in Egypt and elsewhere used to go from the cities where they were established to the villages to perform. But there were also the theatre groups that were formed and nurtured in villages and then went to perform in the city? These Arab Palestinian villages have now ceased to exist. We cannot deny the conditions: expulsion, unrest, occupation, transfer, all make it impossible to have a theatre. In the occupied West Bank there was quite a strong theatre movement right after the Israeli occupation, but it was not able to continue. Maybe the Israeli authorities will claim that it did not fight this movement, but the actions of the occupation itself outside of the theatre—prisons, curfew, limited movement, all life’s problems and difficulties—made theatre superfluous and out of place. Theatre is not like poetry, it is not even like novels. Theatre demands an audience, people who take the time to come and sit, to leave their homes and work and come to the performance, while a novel can be read in one’s home and a poem can be written and published by the poet. Theatre needs direct contact between the audience and the artists. It is not because we lacked theatrical history or culture or tradition, and not because we have no theatre education. The unnatural and abnormal conditions forced upon the Palestinian people are responsible for the fact that the Palestinian theatre did not develop. This can never be denied. Editor’s note: The plays mentioned in the above interview are dealt with in the article by Reuven Snir.

Interview with Bushra Karaman

Interviewer: Siham Daoud Siham Daoud:

We will start with Im El Rubabika. How did you come to play in Im El Rubabika? How and why did you think of making it into a play? Bushra Karaman: I was looking for a play with a good strong female role. In most of our plays, and in the roles I have played, the woman tends to be a “follower” or “support” for a man. She is either a mother or a wife or daughter whose role is tied to a man. As in a traditional patriarchal society, she’s not complete on her own. I had read “Im El Rubabika” in the Six Day War Sextet and loved it. I loved Hind’s character, I loved the story and the idea of her finding the old objects, keeping them, looking through them and hoping that their owners would return. S.D.: Weren’t you scared of this new experience, of the fact that it was basically a novel and not a play, and also that it was a monodrama and this was the first time you had performed in a monodrama. B.K.: Yes I was scared. At first I wanted to start with a feminist play, with several actresses, and I thought that this would lead to Im El Rubabika. However, although a monodrama is very difficult, since in this case the text is so strong it was easier. The thing I dreaded most was being unable to maintain the interest. I always feared that the audience might get bored during the one hour performance and all through rehearsals I worried about it. The text helped a lot, it is so lively, complete and strong. Perhaps if the text hadn’t been so complete I would have been more scared. S.D.: Emil Habibi said more than once that he had in mind the fact that you, would play this role. He also said that Im El Rubabika not only deals with Hind but also with your own particular age group. Do you have any comments on that? B.K.: I empathise with Hind, I feel very close to her. First, she is a woman from Haifa. My own family did not flee in 1948, and although we lost a lot of our property in Haifa, we still live there and we still hope that things will

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get better one way or another. As for my age group, I don’t know. It is not exactly my age group; Hind is older than I am, she would be in her eighties now. She was an adult before 1948 and is familiar with the events of the period. But she was your present age in 1968, when the events took place. Yes, now when I play her I feel what she might have felt in 1968. I don’t have memories of the time of Hind’s youth or childhood, but I am able to feel now, through my own being alone, what Hind might have felt in her loneliness during the play. The fear she feels, the hope, the anger, the love—all of this I feel now as a woman in her fifties, as Hind was during the Six-Day War period in which the play is set. I also identify with her in that I too have lived through this unfulfilled, uncompleted love story, for which she still feels anger, and asks herself why it happened this way and not that, and whether things would have been different had she acted in another way. Perhaps every woman has lived through such a story, but I personally empathise and identify with Hind. As I never got married, however, or had any children, I have to imagine her maternal instincts and emotions and draw from my memories of my mother. But that is not the main focus. No, that is not the prominent theme, which is what I was getting to. The main point is that Hind is an independent woman. A woman who decides for herself on what steps to take; and she then takes them. She has no regrets, really; she never regrets what she has done. She has her fears and she has hope. I personally have these feelings often. I have taken steps and made decisions in my life that some people might consider crazy or out of the ordinary or unconventional, and maybe they talk about me, but I’m not too aware of it and it really does not concern me. I think that Hind, in spite of the fact that she always fought with her neighbors, did not really care much. Maybe Emil Habibi, the playwright, was thinking of this similarity when he said that he had me in mind: a woman in her fifties, who has lived independently, who has not followed the norm and who had the guts to say “no, I don’t want to follow, I want to create my own path.” Yes, there is a similarity. I understand that when he wrote the play he probably did not concentrate on the feminist side, but whether he wanted it or not, many of those who saw the play or read the text see this element in it. The question is: Did Emil Habibi, a man, succeed in truly expressing a woman’s emotions and feelings? For the play does deal with her feelings and not just events. Very much so; strangely, maybe better even than some women writers. He isn’t superficial at all and when one reads the text one feels as if one is entering the woman’s self, deep, deep into her innermost self. Emil Habibi knows and portrays her weaknesses and strengths, and whenever she’s about to break he depicts her as pulling herself together to appear as she likes to be perceived. He also sees her defiance of the whole world—her immediate surrounding world and the extended world—and he is aware of the price a woman pays when she dares break her society’s

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bounds. He portrays all this in a way that is never judgemental; nor does he show her as a weaker person. One never feels that Emil Habibi writes about women as inferior or less intelligent, as some writers do. On the contrary, he greatly respects her intelligence, respects her abilities—literary and political, and he sees her as his intellectual equal. I never had the feeling, either in the novel or in the play, that he sees Hind other than as his equal, despite her weaknesses and fears. After all, a man might have these fears and weaknesses too. At the same time she is not a symbol or slogan. She is real. Talking of men, several actors have asked Emil Habibi to let them play this role as Abu [father] El Rubabika. I don’t know if they were aware of the extent of the feminine side of the role, but they believed that it could be played by a man too, what do you think? The story of Hind is that she is a woman who stayed behind when others fled. Her husband took her children and left and she stayed and faced everything…If a man had stayed behind no one would have said he was unfaithful or a traitor [unfaithful and traitor are the same word in Arabic. Trans.], no one would doubt him. That’s first. A man also would not wait for the return of his long-gone love of twenty years; he wouldn’t imagine her return, how he would meet her. I think that this is a very feminine trait. But most important is that her staying behind makes her unique, because she is a woman and not a man. Many men stayed behind and no one saw it as out of the ordinary. In some cases women took their children and left while the man remained; then they called him a hero and respected him because he stayed behind to keep his house. This woman here, on the contrary, was not considered a hero. They said she was a traitor (unfaithful). This is what makes Im El Rubabika more meaningful, precisely because she is a woman. The play would lose its essence, its meaning, were she to be played by a man. You’ve been in theatre for a long period of time. Could you relate briefly to your experiences in both theatre and movies? I came to theatre by chance really. In 1969 I had friends in the Rising Theatre (Al Masrah Al-Nahid). They needed a substitute in a female role and asked me to do it. I started as a game, a joke, and loved it and stayed on. Later after I had worked for some time in Al Nahid and Al Hurr in Haifa and Assadaka in Nazareth I decided to go and study theatre in the United States. Surely this was not just a chance decision? Perhaps not chance, but none the less I was not like those who dream from childhood “I want to be an actress” etc. No, I was a teacher, but apparently I had the talent. I worked and it was very difficult. We used to build the set, sell the tickets from door to door, make our costumes, travel and perform, all for free; we were not paid. We all had other professions, we were teachers, builders, house-painters, welders, etc. In the evenings we used to rehearse and perform, after our regular paying jobs. It was very tiring and very difficult. We had no “father”, no “home”.

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Maybe that’s why all the theatres and attempts at having theatres failed so much and groups kept splitting up, and new groups kept forming new theatres. I quit after Zaghroodat Al Ard (The Ululation of the Land, written by Suheil Abu Nawware, Nazareth, directed by Antoin Saleh at the Al Hurr in Haifa). I went to the U.S.A. There I got my M.A. in Theatre at Goddard University, Vermont at their Cambridge, Mass. extension, and worked there with the Cambridge Ensemble under the direction of Maxine Klein. After that Michel Khleifi who had seen me in Zaghroodat Al Ard contacted me and asked me to take part in his film Wedding In Galilee in 1987 and after that there were other films, such as Canticle of the Stones. Even before that, however, there there was Hirbat Hizha, in 1975. My experience in theatre here in Israel, however, was really an incomplete one. I never really gave it my whole self. I always worked as a teacher and theatre was on the side. I only recently started to give all my time and attention solely to the theatre. Previously, even when it was tiring and frustrating, it never mattered, because it was a hobby. But now, in the last two and a half years, I feel the pressure, since this is now my livelihood; it is a financial pressure as well as a need to establish myself as a professional actress. It is no longer a hobby. You mentioned hardships that are equally applicable to men. But what special difficulties did you, as a woman, face, knowing that there weren’t many women in the theatrical profession? How did people and society regard you? Of society, I am not really aware. The honest truth is that what society feels or thinks does not affect me; if they regard the fact that I have chosen not to marry and to work as an actress as that I’m strange or mentally unsound, it doesn’t bother me. Now or earlier? Earlier on they also did not bother me. I felt and feel lonely, isolated, probably because my lifestyle is different from others. There is always this loneliness…but it is not enough to make me conform. The young men I worked with were very decent and there was mutual respect. They never treated me differently or bothered me. But society must not have approved of women working in theatre because it was extremely hard to get women to participate in our plays. It was harder to find an actress than a wife! We felt this whenever we went to the home of a girl to try and ask her family to allow her to work with us. It felt like we were asking for her hand in marriage. We had to promise to protect her, and escort her back to her house. Maybe the most important factor as far as I was concerned, was the atmosphere at home. My family never objected, and they all come to see my plays and films. They constantly encourage and support me. My mother would sometimes say “What will people say when they see you driving around with all those guys?” or “How are you going to hug this guy on stage?” I remember in one play Suheil Haddad played my prodigal son, and I hugged him on his return home; my mother was shocked: You hug him in front of everyone?” and I said “But he’s my son”

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and she said “But he is NOT your son!” That’s all, she never really interfered or tried to stop me, or made scenes when I came home late, no, never. Perhaps there were some social problems and I have forgotten them. Also the fact that I was older than the other young women working or trying to work in theatre then helped. If anything negative did happen, I have blocked it out. You mentioned the TV film Hirbat Hizha. I’m glad you did, even though it’s a film that I and everybody else saw once only. We all know it’s not allowed to be aired on TV again, and neither the director nor the actors, nor anyone else owns a copy of the film, and at that time there were no home videos so no one could make a copy. I remember, even though you appear in that film for seconds only, maybe one minute, and maybe because the film itself became like a fable, and I saw the other films you played in, with all due respect there is something in that role that one cannot forget. In Canticle of the Stones you’re on screen for half an hour and in the other film it was a big role in a big movie, but there is something here in Hirbat Hizha that is memorable; something in those seconds that is very very powerful. What is your opinion? True, because it was so clear, pure and concentrated, it is unforgettable, and not just to the Arab audience, but also to the Jews. The situation in the film is powerful: an Arab woman is sitting with the other women who were rounded up in the village in 1948; she sees her house being blown up, runs towards it then returns to be loaded on a truck to be deported across the border. The situation in itself is touching but it’s more than that, it is how Ram Levi directed it. It was clean, with no distractions to interfere with the character, and she stuck in our minds. You recently took part in a foreign film. Can you talk about it? The film is a 6-hour mini-series for Channel 4 in London. It has a long story and parts were filmed in London, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and a small part here. One of the main characters is a young Palestinian architect living in London who gets involved in rebuilding a church into an inter-faith center. This young man’s father had taken him away from his mother when he was six and she has not seen him since. He starts looking for his roots, goes to Mecca and then comes home to meet his mother and sister in Jerusalem. I play the mother, a school principal living with her daughter. We meet, get re-acquainted and he is introduced to his homeland, Jerusalem and his history. He arrives during the intifada, and comes face to face with the demolition of homes and the injustices done in the name of religion. Our segment ends when he accidentally gets shot while a Palestinian youth is being chased and as he lies bleeding the Israeli medics refuse to take him in the ambulance to a hospital and he dies in my arms. The mother and daughter give him a quiet, private midnight funeral under the eyes and guns of the Israeli army. You were the mother? You played an older woman? Yes, I was the mother, but she was my age.

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Why do we get upset with directors who show women in supportive roles when, as in real life, there are some women who really are the backbone of their families and others who are not? They are simply saying “well, this is part of our society”. I prefer the role of a woman both as I see her and as I want to see her. There does exist a segment of our society like that, the way I want to show it. Why should we deny it? Why should we do as most popular films do: show a woman whose main concern is to find a husband, to be beautiful, get married and have children. I want to show another face of woman, a face that exists. I’m not inventing anything. You worked in films and in theatre. How do they differ in their effect on people? Do they react more to movies or to theatre? Movies are more widespread, more people see them and recognise me from my films. Some people now tell me “We haven’t seen you act on stage” even though I was in the theatre for a long time. I stopped, it’s true, but I have actually worked in theatre more than in films. However, people see more films, and I’m fortunate in that two of my films created great echoes and publicity. Hirbat Hizha caused a big political stir in Israel and everyone watched it on TV, and Wedding in Galilee won 17 Arab and international awards and people still discuss it. There is also a sort of halo around films and movie actors, even though theatre work is much more difficult. Which do you prefer? I’m in the mood for a film now. The good thing about film-making is that it does not tie you up for long periods of time, you prepare, shoot, and get on with your life. But it lacks the audience and the instant feedback, and interaction between actor and audience. Sometimes, when you have a good performance and there is a current going back and forth between you and the audience, you feel like you’re soaring, I feel like I’m flying and I’m embracing the whole audience, it is a real high which you don’t get in film-making. Films are more technical. They’re fun in a different way and of course there is more money. But the pleasure in theatre is greater. You have rehearsals during which you build the character, evolve it, go deeper into it, and improve it as you go along with performances. In films you can be good or not so good but once you’ve finished you cannot change or improve, your mistakes are recorded for eternity! Also, a lot depends on the director and the editing. I definitely prefer theatre to cinema even though it ties you up and does not pay well. I understand you are about to enter into a new experience, you’ll be performing Im El Rubabika in Hebrew, and you’ll be on stage facing an unfamiliar audience. It is a good challenge. Regarding the Hebrew language, maybe because I haven’t started rehearsals yet, I’m not so scared or worried. As for the audience, I’m looking forward to facing theatre-goers who are used to different plays and actors; maybe they’ve seen more theatre. I’m excited.

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Do you see something special in the content of the play, that will be seen by the other audience—the Jewish one? Very special. For the woman’s side, for Hind herself. They rarely meet a woman from the pre-1948 era. They don’t know that we had educated women, that we in urban societies had mixed gatherings, where women and men sat together, and the women would read and write like Hind; and that it is possible that they would have friends of the opposite sex. As far as women are concerned, they seem to have a stereotype of the Arab woman which will be broken by this play. She is not an imaginary character, she is factual, real. It is our story; from then, the Palestinians of 1948. Many of them don’t see it or don’t want to see it. We remained here, we’re keeping our identity and every minute in our life is a confrontation and challenge. Do you feel that there are things that need to be brought out or emphasized more for the Hebrew-speaking audience? Yes, our agony and pain after the Six-Day War, our longing for the Palestinians in the Diaspora. How we feel ourselves a part of the rest of the Palestinian people and as if we are waiting the return of our family. This is a feeling I would like to show more. For Hind, poor thing, this desire was never fulfilled; she kept on waiting and no one came to visit her. Maybe this needs to be clarified; we are one people, we are part of them. When we talk it’s not just about some people living out beyond whom we don’t know. No, it’s as if I’m talking about my brother, my father, my mother and sister—my family. This should be made clear. The story of the returning Palestinians after 1967, who came looking for their homes, should not be passed over quickly. It is true, it happened and still does. We are part of them and they are part of us. Maybe it’s only that they are part of us, not that we are part of them. Yes, I don’t know if the Israeli audience thinks that we’re part of them, maybe it’s important that they understand this relationship. We wait for their return. I remember the first time I visited the West Bank after 1967, I saw the hills and the fields and I felt at home. My home is wider and bigger now, I saw my people, I heard Arabic spoken in the streets and felt it’s an extension of my family. Could you tell us how you got into the character of Hind? I started from the general to the specific. I walked around Wadi Ennisnas [Arab neighbourhood in Haifa, D.U.], which I’ve done hundreds of times before, but now I was looking for Hind, her street, her home, the sounds of her neighborhood, the sights and smells. I visited the flea market several times and watched the vendors. There are a few old women stall-keepers and I watched them and walked through their stalls. There was one vendor who attracted my attention most. She was always preoccupied and she had a baby’s carriage with a doll in it, which she kept in a specially cleared corner. It was not for sale. I wondered what memories, or stories were attached to this carriage. Hind had her treasures and memories too. Tokens, clothes and letters that were her friends in her loneliness. Then I

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listed all of Hind’s character traits and compared them to mine. Some were the same and some were different; so I knew where I had to concentrate and work hardest. For instance Hind is extroverted, I’m introverted. Then I thought of a few women who had traits that would help me, my mother for instance, and I imitated or drew from their behavior or reactions. My mother had a son in jail, and she went to visit him every other week. I remember her walking stoically with his basket of permitted gifts. She also lost a son, he was 27 years old, and I remember her quiet, private grief. I remember that she kept his photo inside her closet, she would open it and stand there looking at it and talking to him and weeping silently in private. She was always dignified and controlled in her grief. During the rehearsal period I also read all I could find written by Emil Habibi, and went to lectures or seminars in which he participated. I watched him and tried to understand him, his views and ideas as much as possible. I wanted to be familiar and comfortable with his language and expressions. Then the director and I, as is the case in rehearsals, worked on improvisations to bring out certain moods and feelings. I worked on my endurance. I walk daily, and during rehearsals I increased this and started jogging so that I would have the energy to perform at a high energy level for one hour; all the usual things an actor does to prepare. The fact that the playwright and author was present, was very positive and important. Even though he did not interfere, I watched him and the way he talks and thinks gave me an insight into Hind, because even though she is a woman I felt that she has a lot of Emil Habibi in her. It helped me that I saw the playwright and knew he was there. Many things he said or the way he said them, I’d think “that’s Hind”. I know that you asked him to read it to you several times. Yes, that helped a lot, I understood what he meant and what he wanted the audience to understand. I was very nervous. Would you have preferred him not to be there? No. I was anxious that when the play was performed I would give it its due. I wanted to do him credit. The most important thing for me was not the critics and not the audience but whether he approved or not. So it was very good that he was present to keep me on my toes, I demanded the best from myself and was constantly sensitive to what he was intending. Maybe if the playwright had not been around I would still have worked as hard but I wouldn’t have been as aware and careful of the slightest nuances. This made me explore more and open up more. It was positive, it scared me but it was a positive fear. A monodrama is not easy, especially when it is by a known writer who is present, and people are used to reading him rather than hearing and seeing his words played by an actor. The text is so beautiful and each word is important. This is crucial in the Hebrew version. The audience should not only get the content and message, but also the beauty of the language and expressions. Talking of language, some persons in the audience commented on the use of mixing colloquial with literary Arabic in the play.

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That’s right. Some people liked that while others criticized it. Why do you think this happened? First, it’s the playwright’s prerogative and choice. In some instances I like literary Arabic, and when we speak, there is a certain class of people who use literary words and expressions. This woman, Hind, was an educated woman, a woman who wrote poetry, and had a vivid imagination and at times her language was literary and poetic. And urban. She is an urban woman, not a villager. Many times I find myself, and I have not studied Arabic extensively, I find myself using literary expressions, or what some people might consider literary language, but which I find is the language which expresses exactly what I want to say in that instance. Language should be used for us to express ourselves best, we should be able to choose the language we deem appropriate and not be limited and constrained by this usage or that. One critic said that he sensed that the actress felt that this language was a burden, but I had no trouble with the language, and I felt completely at home in it and would not have it any other way. Wherever there were working or theatrical problems with expressions or words the writer changed them to suit our needs. There isn’t very much literary language in it, just one passage and this passage would never have its beauty and power if it were said in colloquial Arabic. I think we’re simply not used to hearing it in movies and on stage when it is not in a classical setting.

Editor’s note: The plays mentioned in the above interview are dealt with in the article by Reuven Snir.

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Figure 1 “The Match Box” from the early days of the Palestian theatre. Photo Provided by Fu’ad Awad

Figure 2 Scene in an abandoned Arab house in Natan Shacham’s They’ll Arrive Tomorrow, directed by Yosef Milo, Cameri Theatre, 1950. Photo: Haramat

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Figure 3 Scene of an Arab attacking two Israeli Jews shopping in Jericho market in Yosef Mundy’s The Governor of Jericho, directed by David Mukhtar, Cameri Theatre, 1975. Actors: Aviva Gere, Yitzhak Aloni and Shlomo Vishinski. Photo: Haramati

Figure 4 Opening scene of Ghassan Kannafani’s Men in the Sun, adapted and directed by Riad Masarwi. Photo: Riad Masarwi

Figure 5 El Hakawati troupe in Mahjub Mahjub, directed by Francois Abu Salim, 1980. Actors (from right): Da’ud Kuttab, Idwar Al-Muallim, Muhammad Mahamid. Photo: Philippe Gabel

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Figure 6 Doron Tavori as Otto Weininger and Tehiya Danon as his double in Yehoshua Sobol’s The Soul of a Jew directed by Gedalia Besser, Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1982. Photo: Morel Drefler

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Figure 7 El Hakawati troupe in Ali the Galilean, directed by Francois Abu Salim, 1982. Photo from El Hakawati archives

Figure 8 Makram Khouri and Yussof Abu Warda in Anton Shammas’s translation of Athol Fugard’s The Island, directed by Amit Gazit, Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1983. Photo: Morel Drefler

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Figure 9 Liora Rivlin, a Jewish actress, playing the role of an Arab woman and Salwa NaqqaraHadad as the Arab woman whose story is being filmed, in Yehoshua Sobol’s The Palestinian, directed by Gedalia Besser, Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1985. Photo: Morel Drefler

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Figure 10 Ilan Toren as Pozzo, Doron Tavori as Lucky, Yussuf Abu Warda as Vladimir and Makram Khouri as Estragon in Anton Shammas’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed by Ilan Ronen, Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1985.

Figure 11 Muhammad Bakhri in Emile Habibi’s The Opsimist, directed by IIan Toren, Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1986. Photo: Morel Drefler

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Figure 12 Dina Bly and Michael Morim in Yehoshua Sobol’s The Jerusalem Syndrome, directed by Gedalia Besser, Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1987. One of the Jewish-Israeli plays that predicted the intifada. Photo: Morel Drefler

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Figure 13 Sa’d Allah Wannus’s Ja’abar’s Head, adapted by Adnan Trabshe and Fu’ad Awad, directed by Fu’ad Awad, Bet Hageffen Theatre, 1989. Actors (centre): Sa’id Salameh, Arin Amari, Khaled Awad, Sanna Mghezel; (left): Mil’ad Matar, Mahmmud Subah.

Figure 14 A Reservist’s Diary, choreographed by Rami Be’er, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, 1989. Photo: Vivienne Silver

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Figure 15 “Pieta” scene from Arbeit Macht Frei in Toitland Europa, showing the Arab victim lying in the arms of the Jewish holocaust survivor. Directed by David Ma’ayan, Akko Theatre Centre, 1991. Actors: Khaled Abu Ali, Smadar Yaron-Ma’ayan. Photo: Zion Cohen

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Figure 16 Tehiya Danon as “mother of all wars”—Jewish-Arab (a Middle Eastern “Mother Courage”) in Hillel Mittelpunkt’s Gorodish, directed by the playwright, Cameri Theatre, 1993. Photo: Haramati

Chasing the Subject: The Tragic as Trope and Genre and the Politics of Israeli Drama Avraham Oz University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University

Despite its lack of immediate bearing and only slight influence upon the Zionist project, the theatre has none the less lavishly endowed the Zionist discourse with a convenient terminology for its historiographical endeavors. Tragedy in particular figures as a ready trope accounting for various conjunctions within ancient and recent Jewish history, as well as their apparent convergence into contemporary contingencies. Predictably, this rhetorical profusion varies in cogency and viability. It ranges from candid (if not necessarily sound) figurative readings of insoluble moral crises to common platitudes, such as aestheticizing the political in recruiting Hegelian notions of colliding rights to account for the Intifada as allegedly inhabiting equal moral claims: a fearful symmetry, which could be appropriately countered by recalling Hegel’s own fable of the Master and Slave, whose context, one may be reminded, is self-consciousness (Hegel, 1977 pp. 111– 19). Ignoring the latter case in its blatant hypocrisy, the candid approach merits a closer scrutiny. The practice of applying the tragic to a political concept, particularly such whose charged embodied presence in the realm of institutionalized politics still governs the lives of millions, implicates its agent of some measure of bias, for fear of which it will be shunned by cautious academics, lest their claim to professional objectivity be put in jeopardy; but it will also be avoided by both champions of Zionism and its radical foes, neither of whom would find it advantageous for their respective projects. Thus more often than not it will be implied rather than expressly articulated. Gilbert invokes the term “tragic” in his title to designate the holocaust experience (Gilbert, 1986): in that he follows many, some of whom would share no other ideological conviction with him except the actual use of the term: The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives…Perhaps a modern Aeschylus and Sophocles could cope with this theme: but they would do so on a level different from that of historical interpretation and explanation. (Deutscher, 1968 pp. 163–64) When it comes to the narrative of Zionism, however, tragedy is often applied without such fine (though unspecified) distinction between its metaphorical and direct use. Whereas Avishai

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relates the term to Zionism in general (Avishai, 1985), Kohn appropriates it solely to designate the “tragic historical coincidence” whereby “the Arabs were…awakening to national consciousness and undergoing a process of profound psychological change” (Selzer, 1970 p. 198), while Arendt views the construction of an “insoluble ‘tragic conflict’” (inverted commas in the original) as a deliberate, manipulative ploy on the part of Zionist leadership after the holocaust (Selzer, 1970 p. 214). Most writers on the subject, however, tend to go only as far as Elon (1971), who figuratively entitles one of his chapters on the history of Zionist settlement in Palestine ‘A Chekhov Play by Dürrenmatt’, while investing his narrative throughout with tragic sentiments of pity and fear without addressing the actual term: “The sins of the Zionists”, he would typically quote historian J.L. Talmon in a side phrase, “call for censure, but also for compassion” (Elon, 1971, p. 83). This, on the face of it, sounds like a reasoned and conscientious liberal approach, for the maintaining of which its upholders will still have to engage in exhausting and futile ideological debates with partisans of crude nationalism (as did Talmon with former Israeli prime minister Begin). The question remains, however, whether the invocation of the tragic in this context is a laudable act of moral codification manifesting a sane intellectual trajectory in thematizing problematically, and exposing the ideological fallacies of an accepted narrative; or is it rather a manipulative ruse designed to exonerate one’s own complicity with the corrupting consequences of such a narrative? Does it bear the moral resonance of, say, Adorno and Horkheimer’s desperate caveat against the self-destructive potential of Western enlightenment half a century ago? It is not intended here to explore meticulously the ideological function and rhetorical validity of the tragic imagery furnishing Israeli historical and political writing, though such an enterprise is indeed called for. Rather, a further step will be attempted to scrutinize the consequences of that project in attending the resonance of such a rhetoric in the halls of its original surroundings; namely, to ponder what one can make of the dim presence, or rather the virtual absence of the tragic as a theatrical genre from the large repertoire of Israeli drama as opposed to the abundant use of the term as a figurative device in the context of Israeli political discourse, which has been known to provide Hebrew drama with much of its vitality and popularity. Surely much more is involved here than a plain one-to-one relation, since modern tragedy forms a special and complex case in theatrical history: whereas some, from Nietzsche to Steiner, have bluntly proclaimed its death, others have detected its return “like the repressed…in strange and often deforming guises”(Kuhns, 1991 p. 6), and Raymond Williams, for one, has warned us against reading the term too rigorously (or “academically”) in the light of much too unified traditional connotations. Yet it will be argued here that raising the question in this context is not necessarily an exercise in encoding reality and its representation in cultural production merely for the pleasures of taxonomy. Rather, it will be attempted to deploy the charged interrelations between patterns of meaning and forms of subjectivity in the tragic domain—whereby an experiential rehearsal of the action of an exemplary subject betrays the presence of a universal law which, paradoxically, cannot in turn be read as separate from the human contingencies evoked by the narrative—in order to illuminate the core of Zionist discourse as represented through the perspective of its solemn dramatic production. Complex and possibly unrigorous as modern tragedy may be, modern Jewish history equally constitutes a special case which defies conventional historiographical formulae, and whose binding principles, to the extent such may be inferred, ask for irregular modes of explication. Our quest, therefore, is double-edged: if indeed the Zionist saga, whether in its very foundations or its current phase, lends itself to fundamental tragic qualifications extending

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beyond dilettante formalization, it may be instructive to enquire how is it that the genre itself, for all its formidable complexity, has failed so far to emerge as a significant constituent of Zionism’s prolific theatrical crop; and what is it, in terms of historical understanding, that this failure may signify as regarding the nature of narrative that Zionist discourse has been able to promote as well as the moral fibre of those active in its reproduction. It is important at this point to qualify the present discussion as addressing exclusively the relation between Zionism and the medium of stage drama. With just a few exceptions (notably Matityahu Shoham, Ya’acov Kahan and Nathan Alterman’s curious diversions into poetic drama) most significant Hebrew drama in the twentieth century has almost invariably maintained an overt openness to the political discourse, in spite of the differing, sometimes opposing attitudes various dramatists may have entertained as to the grasp or reading of that discourse. On that count the cultural production of Zionism in that domain differs in important ways from other branches of literary, performing and cinematic arts, which (as will be occasionally noted throughout the present discussion) have more often developed more personal responses to the legacy of European modernism that invite different modes of critical inquiry.1 The theatre has always been at the focus of interest of political authorities and institutions, for better or for worse, in ways in which the written word has not, which often makes for greater caution on the part of its makers in the delivery of dissenting views. The difference may be assigned to the more immediate nature of the theatrical medium in encountering its audience and its attempt to capture the moment, a factor which is particularly intensified in the context of the testimonial vocation much of the Hebrew theatre has ostensibly undertaken vis-à-vis the development of the Zionist project. If there is any strength in the general view of tragedy attempted above, it lies in its deliberately yielding itself to an infinite variety of closer readings of the tragic phenomenon. Shunning too rigid constraints, the tragic, as Raymond Williams has amply accounted for Greek tragedy, “is deeply rooted in a precise structure of feeling” (Williams, 1966 p. 18). Tragic procedures change with the development of cultural circumstances, but the particular blend of failure and elevation that we associate with the tragic is offered us constantly as the terrifying and redeeming sensation of our fatal imperfection. Benjamin, reproaching Nietzsche’s “aesthetic.” ritualistic claim for tragedy (the “best aspects” of his work vitiated by Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian metaphysics), contends that by virute of “the hard, historical actuality of Greek tragedy” human consciousness has made in it its first significant leap beyond the amoral vagaries of myth (Benjamin, 1977 pp. 102– 03). In its extraction of human actions and subjects from their crystallized immersion in mythical predestination, tragedy confronts the subject with the ethical paradox of its dual subjection to the external forces of fate (having, as Lukács puts it, “incorporated accident into its world forever” [Lukács, 1974, p. 155]) and the rational claims of justice. The immediate representation of that paradox in tragedy, one may add, is the image of both the displacement and immanent multiplicity of the tragic subject There is a universal resonance in experiencing Oedipus as being simultaneously a hero and criminal, Hamlet a scourge and minister, Lear a king and a beggar, without breaching their genuine and vibrant humanity. Yet this exemplary position of being the one and the many is not fully referential in terms of human reality. There is no effective moral bearing sustaining this final position of tragedy on human conduct within historical frameworks. It may bring to mind Adorno’s proclaiming art as rejecting reality “not as a form of escapism” but as a way of vindicating reality, while also insisting that“the enigmatic quality of works of art is intimately connected with history” (Adorno, 1984 pp. 2, 400). Myth, under the auspices of which such

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multiplicity had always existed but never been paradoxical, has lost its ultimate grip on human destinies released by rational morality. But once myth is ineffectual, it may be ennobling; and so it still has its aura spread over the moment of tragic anagnorisis, precisely because the subjects of tragedy no longer pretend to partake in its formidable, violent unity. Rather, they resign to a realm symbolically dissociated from, though recognizing the validity of worldly consequences, of the kind in which Kantian pure ethics may be proclaimed to reside beyond the pressures of historical contingency though (contrary to readings of Kant offered by radical deconstructionists such as J. Hillis Mller2 still laying claim on the world inhabiting the latter. This final acceptance by tragic heroes of human fateful fallibility and displacement may retrieve their initial stature even in the brave new world of rational humanism, but at the price of that particular form of resignation which Benjamin (influenced by Hegel and Franz Rosenzweig), accounts for as the silence of the tragic hero. In terms of its “hard, historical actuality,” this may lead modern tragedy to at least two different modes of response. It may, on the one hand, stress the sense of ultimate withdrawal, as Franz Rosenzweig reads the tragic situation: In his silence the hero burns the bridges connecting him to god and the world, elevates himself above the realm of personality, which in speech, defines itself against others and individualizes itself, and so enters the icy loneliness of the self. The self knows of nothing other than itself; its loneliness is absolute. How else can it activate this loneliness, this rigid and defiant self-sufficiency, except in silence.3 But it may also look to the redeeming energies the tragic experience is capable of releasing, in which process the tragic hero, with us, does recognize himself in others. This is the view which Raymond Williams has to offer us, in reconciling the tragic impulse with the modern cultural condition: The tragic action, in its deepest sense, is not the confirmation of disorder, but its experience, its comprehension and its resolution. In our own time, this action is general, and its common name is revolution. We have to see the evil and the suffering, in the factual disorder that makes revolution necessary, and in the disordered struggle against the disorder…We follow the whole action: not only the evil, but the men who have fought against evil; not only the crisis, but the energy released by it, the spirit learned by it. We make the connections, because that is the action of tragedy, and what we learn in suffering is again revolution, because we acknowledge others as men and any such acknowledgement is the beginning of struggle, as the continuing reality of our lives. Then to see revolution in this tragic perspective is the only way to maintain it. (Williams, 1966 pp. 83–84) The tragic signifies its “historical message” to its modern addressees in the space between these two options. Neither of those would subscribe to loquacious self-pitying diatribes blaming the human condition on fate or the gods, and thus attempting to clear humanity, or a particular fraction of of it, of any guilt concerning insoluble moral predicaments. At the end of the road where the tragic hero is assumed to be led by forces beyond his or her control awaits the revelation that it was the hero who prescribed the rules, hence it is he or she who must justifiably bear the consequences. A genuine tragic version of the Zionist narrative would imply, for instance, that the conflict between the Jewish contingent in Palestine and the

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Palestinian Arabs is an outcome of an historical necessity which, however, contradicts the claims of justice in an insoluble way. Amos Elon cites the case of the 1909 Poaley Zion party conference in Segera as a pertinent instance: though the tension between Zionist settlers and Arab Druze workers not properly compensated by the landlord who sold the land to the Jews soared and incurred casualties on both sides, both the record and resolutions of the conference fail to take notice of the fact that a battle between rival national movements was taking place (Elon, 1971 p. 151–52), a failure the likes of which are commonly condoned as “tragic errors” on the part of the settlers. Israeli accounts of the Zionist narrative to this very day, whether in fiction or non-fiction writing, abound in allusions to such errors, while in themselves betraying covert semantic tokens of ideological blindness to the presence or significance of the other.4 Neither of those is compatible with the above, fairly loose parameters of modern tragedy; nor would be any versions of the narrative investing the drama produced by the Zionist discourse. At best, such accounts would yield to formalized versions of the tragic bound to apocalyptic procedures on which the unified subjects of tragedy have no control; hence their sins, calling “for censure, but also for compassion” are scarcely accountable in terms of the world and left for the gods (or the superpowers, or whoever is currently in charge of the World’s Order) to rectify. Significantly enough, most Israeli playwrights who addressed, directly or indirectly, the Zionist narrative and its fundamental consequences, deliberately avoided the tragic premises. Rather, the narrative informing Israeli drama leans heavily on the heroic and ironic modes, both partaking as tropes in the framework of tragedy, but constituting its utter opposite as independent genres. Before embarking on the ideological constituents of Israeli drama, it may be helpful, then, to rehearse the basic (hence also schematic and inevitably incomplete) historical narrative underlying the political discourse informing a large part of its current canon. While the narrative supporting the everlasting dispute concerning historical rights over the holy land invokes ancient biblical scenes from the charged repository of national memory, the inception of Jewish drama (with the exception of a few historical curiosities) barely precedes the birth of the Zionist movement (several of whose founders and early leaders, like Herzl, Nordau or Zangwill, could themselves boast some playwrighting careers of various degrees of success): hence its political concerns date from the rise of Jewish nationalism at the end of the Nineteenth-century, its occasional forays into ancient and historical scenes hardly ever transcending an allegorical procedure. This makes for the notable testimonial undertaking of Hebrew drama mentioned above, which involved it with the special complexity of such an undertaking.5 As on other occasions during their tortured voyage through history, the Jews as a social group have embarked on the secular European idea of nationalism a moment too late. The nations for whom that version of the idea was primarily designed were already settled in the colonialist phase of the nationalist project, and the territorial claim of a social contingent traditionally regarded as interrelated in terms of religion or, at most, race, was far too irregular and complex to be contained within the simplified agenda of Eurocentric nationalism. Models for understanding such anomalies were provided by several prominent Nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals: Heinrich Graetz, a historian whose thought is shaped by both Hegel and Ranke, offered a theoretical reading of Jewish history accounting for its special case of developing national awareness (“in contradiction to all historical principles”) even before reaching, or when exiled from its territorial harbor (see, especially, Graetz, 1936); Moses Hess, Marx’s “communist rabbi,” offered an interpretation of Jewish nationalism leading to the constitution of a Jewish socialist community in Palestine (Hess, 1862).

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Such theoretical models were considered too complex or premature for pragmatic use by early political Zionists, while the latter, for their part, have contributed their own share of simplification to the precarious moral implications of their young ideology. “A country without a people…for a people without a country,” that telling phrase by Israel Zangwill (Zangwill, 1901 p. 627), represents a good deal of the agenda of early political or “territorialist” Zionism. “People” may not have been in Palestine (or, later, in Uganda, brought up as an alternative locus to harbor the Zionist dream), but a tangible human presence was certainly evident on the premises. The view implied by such a phrase was well in keeping with fast-spreading Eurocentric colonialist ideology, but could hardly agree with a dream woven around nationalism as a means of liberation from the fetters of racialist subjectivity applied to all Jews. Significantly, the moral confusion containing the Zionist idea converged from its very inception on hierarchical dissemination of subjectivity, similarly affecting tragedy from Sophocles through Arthur Miller. One of the several avenues in which the tragic narrative traditionally advances is the process whereby self-awareness is finally extracted out of moral blindness through the recognition by the tragic subject of his or her position on a universal scale in relation to others. The narrative sustaining the Zionist claim from its initial phase was controlled by a seemingly independent and exclusive assertion of national subjectivity, which in time was to be revealed as constructed at the expense of another (if yet putative and scarcely self-conscious). It remains to be determined (if such awareness is at all achievable) what role did Zionism’s own insistence on liberating itself from the complex identity of traditional Judaism play in fostering the counter-move which was to involve the very narrative it had produced. With the Zionist project getting under way following the creation of a settlers’ contingent in Palestine,6 that claim for independence initiated a growing cleavage in what was depicted as the current Jewish identity. On the whole, the subject of the new settling community, as represented in the first dramatic enterprises contributing to what would become the corpus of Israeli drama, embraced a romantic yearning for a union with the land, both in terms of working the soil and assimilating with the oriental dream (conceived by settlers of Eastern European origins, who became the cultural hegemony of the newly established community from its very inception, as a remote vestige of the biblical dream investing their adopted narrative of the return of the prodigal son).7 The Other, whose indispensable role in constructing any such newly forged subject could not be transcended, was not so much at that point the Arab native, who in several plays of the period had acquired the position of the noble savage, slowly but surely awakening to his Eurocentric redemption through the agency of Zionist Europeans turned oriental of sort.8 Rather, the role was primarily assigned to the Diaspora Jew, who would stubbornly stick by the notorious strictures of traditional Jewish identity without perceiving the new light of resurrection coming from Zion. A conspicuous token of this break with the Diaspora identity was the institution of a new language. If in the 1580s, as Richard Helgerson amply shows, the “new wave” of Elizabethan poets such as Spenser, Daniel or Drayton offer to appropriate a new concept of nationhood through the use of poetic language (“why…may not we…have the kingdom of our own language?”),9 the Jewish theatre in Palestine, other than some minor ideological skirmishes that died out at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, let its characters from its very inception assert their newborn identities in terms of the totally new linguistic framework of Hebrew. Stage Hebrew, having become a standard practice even at a faster pace than in real life, marked yet another token of acquiring a new identity, and its simultaneous positions as newly innovated and reviving an ancient system of sound and

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meaning served the new Zionist project (on stage as outside it) to appropriate the entire historical narrative of Judaism, excluding the decrepit Diaspora contingent from any legitimate claim to genuine nationhood or prospect of national regeneration. These, basically, were to remain the major constituents of the self-image of the newborn Jewish subject informing Jewish-Palestinian and then Israeli drama (as distinguished from prose or poetry) at least until the 1970’s. Nor did the trauma of the holocaust of European Jewry, whose atrocious dimensions had taken some time to be conceived by the Jewish community in Palestine,10 shatter that self-image, the compassion for the massacred brothers intermingled with the rationalized vindication of the Zionist project. Be it the guilt-feelings of the survivors or the genuine self-esteem of “a newly liberated nation,” holocaust survivors who started to arrive in Palestine and then Israel in the late forties did not escape the self-righteous indictment of being diaspora “soaps” (a macabre expression whose origins lie in the Nazi practice of producing soap from the bodies of massacred victims). At the same time, however, the growing fierceness of the Jewish-Arab hostilites in Palestine under the British Mandate (particularly since the rising flow of Jewish immigrants from the German Reich’s territories during the 1930’s) and then the 1948 war wiped out any residual admiration for the Palestinian Arab as remote relics of sought for biblical models of identification. This mythical function was now totally absorbed by the Israeli born tsabar, whereas the Palestinian Arab had been allocated solely the function of the arch-enemy. The culmination of the tsabar construct as the subject of Israeli drama is well represented by one of the major dramatists of the early stage of the Israeli State. In his programme note for his war melodrama He Walked in the Fields, played to enthusiastic audiences in the middle of the 1948 war, playwright Moshe Shamir states what may be considered the general case for most of his contemporary dramatists in the assertion of a collective subject: If there is a vocation for the Hebrew literature, for the Hebrew culture in the forthcoming periods, it is the function to eternalize the figure of the fighting Hebrew youth, the whole figure, in all its glory, in its faults and angles, in its laughter and anger. A nation whose descendants will be educated in the light of this eternal figure, who would look up to it as a model for living—cannot be destroyed by any instrument of death. In the same line with the conquerors of Canaan, the Judges, the Prophets, the resettlers of Zion, the Returners to Zion, the Hasmoneans, the zealots of Jerusalem, the martyrs; aligned with them—there are our contemporaries, the hundreds and the thousands, the humble and the unknown. Aligned with them—for ever and ever.11 The image of the Israeli born hero as aligned with all the heroic figures forming the continuity of the nation’s past transports the historical narrative into a timeless mythical sphere, inhabited by heroes conceived as monolithic in their political existence, if not necessarily in their personal attitudes and motivations. In this, the theatre rigorously follows the paths paved by the Zionist dream. A significant property of the “new Jew,” according to David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, was his integrated identity: no more divided against himself and living at once in two milieux, in the new Israeli Jew the “cleavage between the Jew and the man” was “healed” (Ben-Gurion, 1958 p. 5).Various accounts of the Zionist idea of a “newborn Jew” have adopted such therapeutic terminology, extended its potency to the realms of consciousness and self-dignity (see Almog, 1987 ch. 1&2 and passim), or, indeed, carried the transformation as far as Zionists’ endorsement of racial stereotypes as correctly delineating the

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normative Jewish identity (see, e.g., Almog, 1987 p. 36–37; Shapira, 1992 p. 11ff). Their reading of that concept, however, differed to what Deutscher understood when he applied the term to a whole line of Jewish thinkers from Spinoza through Heine and Freud. Rather than transcending their Jewishness into what Deutscher describes as “the message of universal human emancipation” (Deutscher, 1968 p. 41), the exponents of Zionist “un-Jewish” Jews attempted to reaffirm their national identity in a stricter way. A typical case is that of the covert otherness of the woman. Otto Weininger, a contemporary of Herzl and Freud in fin-desiècle Vienna (later to become the subject of Yehoshua Sobol’s play), developed a complex theory explaining the inferiority of the Jew to the Aryan in terms of Jewish “femininity” (See Weininger, 1906). Generally denounced by all Jewish prescribed for women within the tsabar myth proved in total uniformity with that Kraus), such theories nevertheless indirectly affected the Zionist construct of the producing an allegedly “un-Jewish” Jew:12 an expression attuned to many early “new Jew.” The women among the first settlers were presented as equal to the men in duties and position (a fact revealed to be totally untrue when one reads the diaries of the first women settlers), and Shamir’s above quoted list of heroic models offered to the “new Jew” omits any mention of women. The role of the men: a crude, heroic warrior. The “feminine” woman, is nothing but a comic or melodramatic adornment within a conflict of men, as exemplified by the daughter in Shamir’s A Stormy Night (1954), invented for the sake of the stage version but missing from the original short story from which the play originated, Israeli drama of the 1950s felt more at home when addressing even the holocaust through the (genuinely) heroic figure of Hannah Senesh, who parachuted behind the Nazi lines in occupied Hungary, and was caught and put to death, than in the refined character of Lena, the delicate survivor in Leah Goldberg’s sensitive play The Lady of the Manor (1955). This may have been one cause of the deferment of feminist writing in Israel which in the theatre is still in its very inception to date. Even a novelist like Amos Oz (whose novel My Michael (1968) assigned his misgivings regarding the Zionist mistreatment of the Palestinians to a sensitively portayed young woman) gave way in his later novel to the pseudo-tragic inner struggles of the residual male-heroic representation of the tsabar myth. In reality, the idealized processes of renovation promoted by the Zionist dream tackled of course complex historical contingencies. But whereas in the more reflectional domain of prose writing the faults of the Zionist projects were occasionally indicated (as in S.Yizhar’s early stories, such as Hirbet Hiz’éh: the story of evacuating an Arab village during the 1948 war and making its inhabitants refugees; a story whose televised version thirty years later created public outcry and was temporarily suspended from being shown), the dramatic representation of the idealized processes of “Jewish renewal” gained a smoother pass. The anticlimax following the establishment of the Zionist state may have bred some rotten apples, conveniently catering for a better dramatic conflict. Such, for instance, is Shlomo, the corrupt son of the innocent and righteous farmer Kalman Yaffé in Shamir’s Stormy Night; but whereas Shamir is allegedly trying to invest his action with “an air of tragic destiny” (Gour, 1982 p. 104), the dramatic outcome never circles (with the exception of a few individuals of eccentric views such as Karl achieves more than an allegorical melodrama, in which Yaffé (“beautiful” in Hebrew) accidentally kills his son when the latter is trying to steal his father’s horses. The father’s voluntary, non-tragic choice to live and farm an abandoned Arab property does not become a major issue in the play. Even when criticizing reality, Nathan Shaham (A New Chapter, 1954) accounts for the climate of his play (both literally and allegorically) in terms of heroic suffering, at times bordering on the verge of the tragic:

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The action takes place at Sodom, not for the events that have occurred at that place. Sodom as a symbol of a climate too hard to bear. But that is the land, the fatherland. And whoever cannot suffer its climate is evading the great responsibility put upon him by Israeli history. Sodom is the spiritual climate of those who have faith in the vocation of man, which lends them power to suffer. An ancient myth is growing on an Israeli soil, memory-ridden, and transcends to acquire a new meaning. (Shaham, 1954 p. 5) It is, indeed, the climate of tragedy, but the play itself is nothing more than a problem melodrama, which brings in the “old” holocaust chapter to assimilate within the new, Israeli-Zionist chapter: a former Kapo in a Nazi concentration camp is to confront the righteous, but eventually forgiving Israeli reality. An insoluble moral problem concerning the tragic situation within the mythical iniquity exerted by the Nazis is measured by “the new chapter” of the Israeli State. No tragic residues are transported from the past to the present, since no analogy is allowed between the mythical uniqueness of the holocaust and the ephemeral corruptions of new Sodom. The synthesis, for Shaham and his generation, is the new race of pioneers and warriors: The past is dead. Now a new chapter starts, For the sake of its ten percent of righteous ones our whole nation is granted the right to exist. For the sake of the warriors, and those who tied up their lot with these desert regions, (Ibid, 36) Zionist ideological eagerness to construct its renovated subject through binary negations, whether of the effeminate or petty diaspora Jew (of which the crooked tsabar, the fallen “new Jew,” is a distorted image) or the native Arab, has thus produced a synthetic cultural construct to animate the fast accumulating canon of Hebrew drama. It is that stance of positively regarding the tsabar, or the “new Jew” as a one-dimensional, monolithic, mythical subject against which the criticism of post-1967 Israeli drama is most fiercely targeted. What the traumatic tilt of the holocaust failed to do, still absorbed into, and even enhancing by reaction the unfinished process of constructing a heroic Jewish identity, the effect of occupying and controlling an entire nation (experienced by most Israeli males and some of the females in serving as soldiers and reservists in the IDF, the ‘D’ (for ‘Defence’) in the acronym of which was put in question in widening circles for the first time since the founding of the state in 1948) has managed to bring out from a new generation of playwrights. Historical contingency seemed at once to provide the dramatist with the utter culmination of the victorious ideal of Zionism as well as its morally vulnerable facet, its ruthless and vindictive shadow, subtly expressed in Nissim Aloni’s suggestive metaphor of “black hole” in his Aunt Lisa (1969), which not fortuitously marks the very juncture in which he chooses to transport his allegorical narratives back from imaginary foreign orbits to Middle Eastern landscapes. Such a move may hardly be deemed a coincidence when read against the general change of dramatic tone in the period following the June 1967 war. The heroic syndrome, underlying the plays of Shamir, Mossenson and most of their contemporaries even when harshly criticising social injustice or institutional corruption, rapidly drained of its dramatic impetus. Its crumbling legacy soon gave way to several versions of displacement of subjectivity which have become in their variety the major focal point of current Israeli theatre. Aloni, who in regard to age belongs to the Shamir and Mossenson generation, never participated in the tsabar celebration. His first play, Most Cruel the King (1954) invoked the biblical scene of the division of the

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kingdom to serve as an acute allegory of current political disruptions. Later he disguised his topical messages, to the extent that he prduced them, through heavy veils of symbolism and stylistic ingenuity. Even after 1967, when his plots were more often planted in Middle Eastern landscapes, his practice of hiding political message behind imaginative melodramatic fables (most becoming a succès d’estime rather than drawing large audiences) never made any clear topical point, until he retired from playwrighting in the early 1970s. The immediate harbingers of the post-1967 change were political satires, in which Hanoch Levin, a then newcomer to the scene of Israeli theatre, particularly excelled. Ironic parodies of the tsabar myth had abounded years before. Political stage satire, which flourished under the British mandate but was particularly pointed at the British, died out with the foundation of the state. Some dramatists, such as Aharon Meged and notably Ephraim Kishon, wrote successful satires during the first two decades of the state’s existence, but their satire responded to a curious technical term later coined by right-winged journalist turned dramatist Joseph Lapid, in a program note: “a constructive satire” (the most radical opposite imaginable, it would seem, to Benjamin’s “cannibalist satire”), namely topics accepted by the wide consensus as suitable targets for satire, such as the beaurocratic system, modern art, the mother-in-law or marked European or oriental stereotypes of new innigrants who failed to accommodate themselves into the tsabar myth were profusely ridiculed. The tsabar figures themselves, however, merited no more than a “constructive” pat of endearment. It was that satirical tradition onto which Levin’s post-1967 satire intruded. His telling portrayal of “the cream of the earth” couple in “The Courtship,” a scene from his satirical review The Queen of Bathtub (1970), was not just another satirical distraction; it was a palpable hit at the soft belly of an entire myth:

Hulda: Boaz: Hulda:

Boaz:

(Hulda sits on a bench, enrapt in her inner magic. Boaz passes, stops, looks back to her, glancing at her lengthily. She looks up and sees him. A long mutual look) I sit, therefore I am. I’m not of the sitting sort. My name is Hulda. Hulda Dever.13 I was born in Tel Aviv in a solid atmosphere to my architect father and my essayist mother. I grew and flourished like a flute melody, and at the age of seventeen, while still giggling with the boys at the gymnasium, I was elected as “the paratroopers’ charmer”14 for the Gazza Strip and North Sinai area for the fiscal year 1967/68, owing to my breasts being flexible on the one hand and solid on the other. Now I specialize at university in the principles of war-damages law and plan for a light and easy life to the glory of the country and nation. I am lieutenant Boaz and I’m M.M.A.Z. [pronounced ‘mamaz’].15 Friends, Government ministers and foreign reporters like to call me “Mamaz Boaz the Courageous,”16 which I do not accept since I see myself but as a common soldier doing his job, and everyone else in my place would have acted the same way as me at my famous tank raid for which I won a special accolade from the Pope what for I do not know, since everyone else in my place would have acted the same. My frisky forelock

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Hulda: Boaz: Hulda:

Boaz: Hulda: Boaz: Hulda: Boaz: Hulda: Boaz: Hulda: Boaz:

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and my mischievous eyes are the heritage of my frivolous childhood at the bosom of my essayist father and my orthopaedist mother. At the age of fifteen I was anointed as the high priest of the premilitary youth corps, and to date I am a brilliant army officer and a tactical fox, and proving myself hour by hour to the glory of the country and nation. (Sits by her) I’m flexible. Autumn. I’m not one of those who regard whether it’s autumn or not autumn. Neither do I express myself normally in such a manner, which is why most of my acquaintances and followers think of me as a merry, light-hearted and shallow girl. Little do they know that beside being a mathematical intellect I also possess a sensitive and inhibited inner world. In fact I am an autumnal girl in whom seeps a secret existential sorrow. I’m entirely not a simple bloke. Also I am entirely not a simple girl. And also I am not a simple bloke. (Pause. His voice slightly dim and hoarse, like that of one falling in love) Hulda… Yes. (Stamps a hasty kiss on his right shouder). This is my right shoulder. (A hasty kiss on his left shoulder). And my left as well. (Her voice choked with lust, starts to kiss heatedly both her shoulders and arms) Hulda, Hulda’lé mine… (Kisses his shoulders and arms like her) My mamaz…My mamaz Boaz the Couragious… I love you…17 Mine, mine…You’re mine and I am yours…18 (Levin, 1987, pp. 66–67)

A necessary counter-balance for the narcissist attitude the tsabar entertains towards his or her identity is of course their view of the Other. And so the Palestinian Arab is allegorized, in another short piece from the same satirical cabaret, as a fly, to which the Israeli “new Jew” compares himself point by point to reach the inevitable conclusion that he, the Israeli, is definitely the superior being: And if they come and argue against me that the flies, in despite of their inferiority, they multiply much faster than us…and they can pester us and infect us with typhoid…and that there’s many more of them than us and surrounding us on al sides—I will not deny… it But never—never!—will the flies reach our human quality! They do not know our history, our pledge not to give up an inch to our last drop of blood, our roots in this land and our national hertiage! (Ibid., 72) The Queen of Bathtub, timely satirizing the aggressive, egotist stuff the “new identity” propounded by the Zionist dream is made on, or at least has come to, caused havoc and was

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violently forced off stage shortly after having been mounted by the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. However, Levin’s more significant contribution to the shattering of the tsabar image in the long run proved to be the characters of his full-length plays following his initial short sketches. The Huldas and Boazes, to the extent they figure in those plays, remain but markers, a dream whose initial cruelty is doubled by its inaccessible exclusivity. Transformed into Fogra, Vardah’lé and their formidable likes, they are excluded from partaking in the social processes informing the narrative. Ricoeur reminds us of Max Weber’s assertion that “action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (Weber, 1978 1:1, §1; Cited in Ricouer, 1992 p. 155). If Hulda and Boaz’s self-courtship is a parody, their monstrously infallible successors may exert death and ruin in their total self-suffīciency. The common subject of Levin’s early dramatic milieu, that finds itself at the receiving end of Levin’s amoral deadly Narcissists, is ironically reappropriating some conspicuous features of what early Zionist drama had rejected as the diaspora components of Jewish identity. And though its notable grotesque elements prevent the early Levinian subject from becoming entirely realistic, its vitality deliberately overshadows the dramatic presence of the exaggeratedly monolithic vestiges of the tsabar myth (the “Fogra-Vardah’lé” figures), to expose the marked Eurocentric nature of the Zionist dream of a renewed subject: beyond the blurring pseudo-oriental elements of the Shamirian heroic paradigm (or its more marked Cana’anite versions), the “new Jewish” subject conceals nothing but a worn-out European Romantic ideal. It is no coincidence that Levin later accommodates the Fogra figure within the more naturally fitting context of the French princess Champinieu-Chandelieux (Everybody Wants to Live, 1985), while his common subjects, who (give or take some personal traits of Levin’s distinct discourse) make those monolithic figures in their shallow bliss the objects of their desperate desire, might be easily accommodated with the East European, Nineteenth Century shtetl folks of Shalom Aleikhem’s novels. These traits do not significantly change in the later phase of Levin’s writing, where he extends his vision to mythical horizons in abstracting the Fogra-figures into “murderers” or “torturers” and his main subjects into “victims,” as he often does from Execution, (1979) and The Sorrows of Job (1981) onwards. There is no room for a tragic space between his ironic subjects and their heartless, thoroughly egotistic objects of desire. Even in his most afflicting and shocking scenes (and such moments abound in his later plays), Levin contains the pathos within his deep-rooted ironic vision which serves him as an appropriate metaphor for the Israeli universe.19 If Levin turns to immediate ideological structures to construct his dramatic subject, Yehoshua Sobol delves into historical material to dig out the ideological origins of the Zionist constructed subject. His Night of the Twentieth (1976), in which he traces the beginnings of Socialist-Zionism settling on the land, simulates a tragic process in its structure of disillusionment; yet it is revealed to be a trivial process whereby the heroic pose is shattered into ephemeral reality, devoid of any cathartic grandeur. It will take him time to embark on the more ambitious project of retrieving the very cradle of Zionism in fin-de-siècle Vienna (The Soul of a Jew, or The Last Night of Otto Weininger, 1982). That is the very moment in modern Jewish history where the genuine process extracting the Zionist subject from the complex national identity which gave it rise may be reconstructed in all its dramatic, possibly tragic poignancy: for here the tragic terminology seems amply to serve the historian accounting for the essential displacement of Jewish subjectivity in that particular time and place:

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Tragically enough, Austria’s Jewish intelligentsia, with the exception of that of Galicia, was almost entirely German in language and culture, which was not of course calculated to endear it to the other nationalities of Austro-Hungary. A man like Herzl…is an Austrian tout court. For indeed, the Jews were the only Austrians, or if one likes, Austro-Hungarians, of the Empire. (Talmon, 1970 p. 112–13) Indeed, if there is truth in any of the tragic attributes predicating Zionist history, that would be the juncture in which the seeds of this tragedy were initially shaped. In an interesting move of dramatic strategy, Sobol chose as the major constituent of the complex Jewish subject to figure in his play not the Zionist contingent, but that represented in Otto Weininger, for whom the burden of his national identity is but a coercive source of sorrow and despair. For Jews in the Austrian Empire such a predicament was especially the outcome of the 1848 Revolution, which at once liberated them from ghetto life and confronted them with modern anti-Semitism (See Wistrich, 1989, p. 32f). Whereas, as an Austrian Zionist leader later argues, “throughout the Nineteenth century the Jews as a whole were German,”20 the enforced categorizarion of the Jews as a national group leads Herzl at the turn of the century to define the very term, “nation,” as “a historic group of human beings of evident kinship held together by their common enemy” (Cited in Almog, 1990 p. 47). The effect such a coercion has on Weininger does indeed turn him closely to the boundaries of the tragic. In the attempt to escape his Jewish identity he develops an involved philosophical-anthropological model in which Judaism is condemned for its alleged propensity for transgression, adaptability, mimicry and utilitarianism, which is why he expresses his disbelief in the possibility of Zionism (a positive idea in itself, he maintains) being carried out by the Jews: Clara:

Otto:

Clara: Otto: Clara: Otto:

We all feel guilty for the manner of our Jewish existence. You too! …There is only one way of cleansing ourselves of that guilt: to get back to the same place where we sinned against ourselves, where the heaviest guilt occurred, and there to relive everything in just the opposite way to that by which we have caused but ruin and disaster. Jews will act out of guilt? The Jew cannot accept any guilt He is just looking for a way to blame his guilt on others. Had Jews been able to accept guilt, they would have left his life in exile long ago…But exile is the distinct manner of life of the Jew, and he chooses it of his own will. It will change! Nothing will change! Zionism will create a new kind of Jew. Rubbish! Zionism will sink in the abyss of Judaism and be swallowed like a stone in the mire! ‘A new kind of Jew’! Character is eternal and isn’t given to any change! (Sobol, 1982 pp. 38–39)

Judaism and the feminine are tied up together as the inferior side of the “Aryan” and masculine principles in the priority the former give to family over state, emotion and sex over the rational, and in their upholding “the pairing instinct,” which obstructs man’s privileged claim for individual perfection. It is here that Weininger comes nearest to verge on the tragic, but not

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quite: for in his desire for monolithic unity of character, as opposed to what he condemns as the proclivity towards transgression ingrained in the Jewish nature, Weininger does not differ from his Zionist contemporaries who likewise endorse stereotypical traits in the Jewish constitution but relate them exclusively to the “diasporic Jew.” Hans Tietze, contesting Theodor Lessing’s “Jewish self-hatred” theory (See Lessing, 1930), sums up the latter’s account of Weininger, Trebitsch and Kraus, notable instances of Lessing’s paradigm, in accepting the legitimacy of such an attitude within a crisis splitting Jewish identity (Tietze, 1933 pp. 268–70). Both in reality and in Sobol’s drama Weininger succumbs to despair for not being able to sustain the paradox of tragedy, which, as noted before, leads towards an acceptance of immanent multiplicity rather than permanently lamenting the absence of unity. Weininger is barely tragic: whereas he falls into despair, Sobol knows only too well that his views could be represented by potential victors in the militant nationalist Zionists he depicts in The Palestinian Woman or their forefathers in The Jerusalem Syndrom. If a tragic potential awaits any of Sobol’s dramatic subjects, it is neither Weininger nor his rather shallow Zionist friends: it is Freud, who “as indeed also pre-Zionist Herzl, may be taken to represent the liberal Jewish frame of mind in Vienna around 1900” (Talmon, 1970 p. 113), for whom his self consciousness of his Jewish identity vouches for a wider understanding of humanity, and accepting the Other is a warrant for sanity: Freud:

Otto: Freud:

Listen Otto…Your remarks regarding my style were very telling. I say something, then qualify it thoroughly, as you have said, which makes my discourse difficult, sometimes tortuous. This Jewish Rabbi said: know, that where you found the truth, there it is no more, so do not celebrate in that place where you have found it, but go seek it at another place, a darker one… That exactly is the Jewish sickness! [Shouting.] No! [Thumps the desk with his fist] That’s its healthier side! The doctrine of substantiation is a lie! Truth has no substantiation…Scientific is everything that will be refuted tomorrow! And that which will never be refuted lacks any scientific value…We have been and always will be Jews; the others will always use us without ever understanding us nor respect us. And they will use you, and how! (Sobol, 1982 pp. 61–62)

It is Freud who, while acknowledging his Jewishness in the open, wished “that the Psychoanalytic movement join forces with an ‘International Fraternity for Ethics and Culture’ to fight for common progressive ideals of world improvement and cultural reforms,” but was rejected by Jung (Wistrich, 1989 pp. 568–69); and it is he who, formulating human multi-dimensionality on a universal, rational basis to release humanity from the prison of myth, had to finish his life as a Jewish refugee. But in Sobol’s rewriting of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Freud looms as a side agent of Jewish subjectivity, as indeed he was to the Zionist enterprise, the origins of which the play is attempting to dramatize. However, rather than bringing up Herzl himself on the scene or foregrounding one of the Zionist characters in the play, Sobol chooses to situate Weininger, who yearns for human perfectibility, as the subject of his play. Weininger attempts to construct the perfect subject in reaching the point where universal

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dualities will be totally effaced: woman will give way to man, Jew to Aryan; and Sobol, in a clever dramatic strategy, devises a female Double for Weininger, ever to confront and contain him and expose him to the ineffaceable other, to the moment he compulsively shoots himself. He who wished to substantiate human perfectibility in the world of rational morality would wind up embraced by the mythical Doppelgänger, whose extensive history and psychological implications were thoroughly studied at that particular juncture in time and place by Freud’s faithful (Jewish) disciple, Otto Rank (see Rank, 1979, passim). Sobol drew on the origins of the Zionist idea to find no tragic abyss in it: just an ironic fall into the illusion of myth. His later study of the next putative locus of tragedy in modern Jewish history, in Ghetto, invokes the most touchy case of monolithic subjectivity in the Zionist discourse: the iniquity of the Nazi era has been ardently asserted to be an ineffable sui generis case, the uniqueness of which verges on myth and the ineluctible issues it raises should rather be left as permanent aporias. Sobol’s dramatic reconstruction of the Vilna ghetto theatre, promoted by the Nazi authorities as a devious instrument of both camouflage and domination, is self-referential in more than one way. Addressing the tension between the theatre and reality, it explores the areas in which reality reaches such extremes as to put in jeopardy the possibility of artistic representation. One of the nastiest stories in the Israeli theatrical lore (verified to me by more than one person who claimed to have witnessed the occasion) tells about an audition conducted in the 1950s by one of the legendary directors of the Israeli theatre known for his theatrically effective, though scarcely profound productions. One of the candidates, rather than performing a standard audition piece, presented a dramatic speech which was soon realized by everyone present to be his personal story. It was a relatively short time after the holocaust, and the candidate was telling a chilling story about a hidden child witnessing extreme atrocities performed by the Nazis against his own family. When he finished his story there was a dead silence in the audition hall, to be broken by the voice of the legendary eminency asking: “and did you prepare any singing piece for us?” The holocaust experience per se seems often too traumatic to provide for the cathartic effect of tragedy, whose balance of emotion and intellect requires a certain measure of distantiation. Sobol’s theatrical study results in moral debates about acquiescence (to the point of collaboration) and refusal (to the point of foolhardiness) in the face of mythical evil, the implications of which stretch far beyond the moment of the holocaust. Sobol’s Ghetto is about the resistance of contradictory ideologies in the face of myth: extracting the terrors of myth, it is fully situated within the premises of rational morality. Extending the Zionist discourse to embrace holocaust and Middle East together, meets a particularly strong resistance in Israel on two major counts: in ultimate terms the breach of the mythical matrix of the holocaust narrative is considered a sacrilege; in more pragmatic terms, it threatens the unity of the Israeli subject as a permanent victim, threatening to flesh out the ideological incoherence which has always invested activist Zionism. I had a hand in composing The Poisoned Mushroom (mounted at the Haifa Municipal Theatre in 1984, but conceived and developed throughout the whole preceding decade), a collection of authentic speeches, songs, adapted documentary material and theatrical scenes from Germany between Nazi coming to power in 1933 to the outbreak of war in 1939 (depicting the rise of the ideological monster without reaching its terrifying practices), with most of the material bearing striking similarities to analogous Zionist material. No attempt was made, however, to specify the similarities but for the selection of the appropriate material. It went well with the audience, which perceived it as another condemnation of Nazi Germany. When, however, in a series of after-show discussions with various audiences

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we delicately drew attention to the disturbing analogies suggested by the texts, the same audience who had applauded the actors enthusiastically several minutes earlier suddenly became stiff, hostile and radically defensive. Any displacement of the subject of the holocaust foreboding its appropriation into the realm of rational morality was perceived as blasphemy. During the 1980s, several plays, using diverse dramatic strategies, attempted to deal with the Jewish-Arab conflict through experimenting with forms of subjectivity. Two of those predicted the Intifada situation, having been written a couple of years before its outbreak, but had waited to be performed until after it started. Both were set in army units on the occupied West Bank. In One of Us by Benny Barabash, an investigating officer arrives at a military camp to conduct an official military enqiry into the death of a young Palestinian who had been detained on the premises for questioning following the killing of one of the unit’s officers on his way to home leave. The officer in charge of the questioning of the Palestian turns out to be an old chum of both the investigating officer and the one who had been killed, from the time of their common basic training. The investigating officer finds out that his friend’s version concerning the death of the Palestinian detainee is a cover: in fact the officer has killed the Palestinian as an act of revenge for the murder of their friend. The investigator is torn between the myth of friendship and his moral duty to disclose the truth, and finally chooses to destroy the evidence. This may have been a strong indictment of the Israeli handling of the occupation, but this background is never made clear. The dead Palestinian has no specific identity other than some marginal details hastily mentioned, some of them incongruous; the words “Palestinian” or “occupation” are never mentioned; the plot could happen anywhere; the political, like the Other, is totally effaced. Thus the irony intended in the title contains the playwright himself. Itzhak La’or’s Ephraim Returns to the Army (paraphrasing the title of a well-known story by S.Yizhar) is the polarized opposite: constructing the complex subject of the liberal commander of an army unit, one of whose soldiers has deliberately shot into a group of demonstrating Palestinians, killing one of them, it represents the impossibility of imposing tragedy on the circumstance of the occupation. His officer, sincerely suffering but morally and politically impotent, arouses nothing but bitter ridicule in his representation of the derogatory phrase reserved for such cases since 1967: “shooting and weeping.” A commissioned stage adaptation of a sucessful children’s book by Daniella Carmi, The Blast in Ahalan Street, was staged first at Tel Aviv University and then at the Israeli Children and Youth Theatre: in it the main character is a mixed subject, twelve-year old Natasha, daughter to a Jewish mother and Arab father (hence her non-Hebrew, non-Arab name) who live together, unmarried (for in Israel only religious marriages are legal, and there is no technical possibility of inter-religious weddings), in a Jewish neighbourhood in Jerusalem. When a blast is heard one evening near the local supermarket, an anonymous informant (later revealed to be Natasha’s schoolteacher, who is also the volunteer head of the local “civil guard”) tells the police that she saw the father nearby earlier that evening (in fact he and Natasha were looking for her missing hamster). The police arrest the father that night, and the story tells of the ten days that the father is detained before it is revealed that it was a gas container which had accidentally caused the blast. Natasha, the “mixed-subject” of the story undergoes deceptions, betrayals, frights and recognitions. The theatre was closely attached to the ministry of Education and Culture, and the minister, though not banning the play, did not give it his blessing either, “lest it promotes inter-religious marriages,” which caused the play to be removed from the repertory.

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With the tightening up of the commercial dependence and orientation of the subsidized theatres, dissenting political theatre had a lesser chance to fare well on their stages. The more controversial political enterprise in the theatre was relegated to the fringe. In 1982, Joe Chaikin came to the small Nevé Tsedek group in Tel Aviv to explore the mixed subjects of Israeli Jews and Palestinians in They, a dramatic text by Miriam Kayni. It was, however, mainly under the auspices of the fringe Akko Festival that the theatrical displacement of the Zionist subject was most extensively attempted. A new dramatic strategy, an Israeli attempt to speak through an Arab Palestinian subject, produced a mixed crop. Ilan Hatzor’s Veiled (1990), a dramatic account of a conflict between two Palestinian brothers in the occupied West Bank, each defending a polarized position on the charged span of Palestinian political agenda, from passive complicity with the Israeli military authorities to a radical terrorist activism, manipulated some of the Jewish audience (to whom it was presented) through smooth dramatic craftsmanship to believe it represented a tragic-like insoluble conflict. In fact it left the Palestinian at a clear remove from the Israeli Jewish subject, leaving the prime mover of the conflict, namely the agency of the Israeli occupation, far behind the scenes and the dramatic discourse altogether. From this condescending and dispassionate vantage, Hatzor could apply to his Palestinian subjects the same Hegelian parameters of tragedy some would assign to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but at a cheaper emotional price, since he had nothing to lose at the bargain. It was a convenient instrument of self-exoneration in the tradition of Liberal Zionist applogetics, its political idiom infected by condescension and voyeurism. In an interview, the playwright revealed that one of the early versions of the text (it had been conceived as an exercise at a university course in dramatic writing) located the action in pre-1948 Palestine, the characters being Jewish supporters of the Lehi (known also as the Stern Group: an anti-British underground movement resonsible for numerous terrorist activities); but, he added, who would care for the Lehi now? The irony, enhanced by the fact that former chief of operations of the Lehi, Yitzhak Shamir, was serving at that very time as Israel’s Prime Minister, escaped most of the cheering audience. Hagit Ya’ari’s Abir (1992) was perhaps less dramatically accomplished, but in its fragmented structure and tentative dramatic idiom much more sincere and successful in entering and speaking through the Palestinian subject. A feminist, all-women play set in the West Bank during the Intifada, it depicted the process of self-enlightenment of a young Palestinian woman whose husband, like many others, is detained in an Israeli military jail. Operating first a bakery on a cooperative basis, she is drawn to political leaflet printing, but her action is stopped when her husband, who while in jail adopted radical Moslem beliefs, is released and curbs her activities and freedom altogether. The candour and compassion investing the play may be assigned to its tone of female solidarity (in a moving key-scene Abir, the main character, voluntarily undergoes a secret sewing up of her maidenhead by an old woman of the village, having had a single sexual relation at the university in the past; an act, however, which eventually does not help to save her marriage). But the most significant piece of theatrical displacement of the Zionist subject to date, in which genuine tragic potential is emerging in spite of the fragmentary, ironic juxtaposition of the holocaust, was mounted in 1991 by the Theatre Centre, Akko, a group which has emerged from the fringe festival to work permanently on part of its premises. Arbeit Macht Frei in Toitland Europa, is a five-hour long theatrical event devised and directed by David Ma’ayan, blissfully drawing on the kind of work Kantor, Strehler, Brook, Ronconi, Barba, Stein and Mnouchkine have been producing since the late sixties.21 In it, the total displacement of the Israeli subject (Jewish and Arab alike) reaches its utter culmination. The show ties up together

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the holocaust memories with the present Israeli situation in one, completely fragmented theatrical collage, with the main theatrical maneouvre being the total blending of the various identities pertinent to the Zionist narrative in a permanent mix invested with versions of dominance: Nazis and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, men and women. The strong historical presence is theatrically deployed as a continuum of Foucauldian archeological genealogies, involving open-ended associations permanently juxtaposing the holocaust experience with the Israeli-Palestinian muddle. Performed to groups of thirty at a time, the event starts with a bus trip departing from the old Arab quarter of Akko, conducted by an actress deceivingly dressed in army uniform: so habituated have the Israelis become to seeing the military every where, that many of them assume at first that it is an educational tour sponsored by the army education branch. The destination is the nearby holocaust museum at kibbutz Lohamei HaGetta’ot (The Ghettos’ Fighters’—a kibbutz founded by holocaust survivors), where the group is met by Zelma, a supposed survivor, who guides them through the museum’s exhibits, throwing out, in a heavy central European accent, occasional remarks which bring to mind charged topical associations. She finally annotates a film reconstructing an early exercise by the Nazis, in which a group of Jewish schoolchildren with their teacher are taken for a ride in an ambulance-like vehicle, the exhaust-pipe of which is secretly directed to the passangers compartment. Next the group is handed over to another guide, who in fact is an Israeli Palestinian member of the company who plays up his Arab accent in his Hebrew guidance through a model of the death industry in Treblinka: many of the spectators instinctively take exception to the “Arab commenting on the holocaust,” a practice reserved in the collective consciousness for Jews alone. Travelling back to Akko, the show continues in suitably constructed spaces of the Theatre Centre’s premises within the Crusaders’ Knight Halls of Old Akko, mixing together: Israeli commemoration rites of the holocaust which have become stale with the years; personal interviews with each member of the audience concerning their own associations of the holocaust, conducted by the actors facing the audience in small groups in cell-like confessional spaces, with personal material collected in this intimate manner being later surprisingly used as part of the performance; breaking bread in a condensed, low-ceiling “last supper” scene with a typical Israeli family where the husband, a paratroop reserve officer dominates an aggressive political routine-argument in tsabar rhetoric involving racist anti-Arab witticisms, shutting up his wife’s persistent liberal interventions with arguments which bring to mind Levin’s anti-fly parody; this culminates in a “singing together” session, another common Israeli rite, in which the audience joins in singing nationalist songs which at an earlier stage, in a musical talk given by Zelma at the piano, were proved as terrifyingly analogous to Nazi popular songs; coffee served by the Palestinian actor, telling the audience about his home village, is intercut with a delegation of Israeli schoolchildren visiting Auschwitz; and the show culminates when the audience is suddenly released from its claustrophobic surroundings upward to a theatrical museum of cruelty in which most of the former experiences converge, to end in a naked pieta ‘image in which the former Zelma holds the Palestinian compassionately on a pedestal constructed like the model of the death-camp formerly explained by him. Discussing the show with a group of my students in Israel’s leading academy of acting in 1993, the first year students were enthusiastically thrilled by the theatrical event, the like of which they had never seen before, whereas the more into-routine-trainmg second year students qualified their excitement by what amounted to a comment on the lack of “convincing” (namely realistically represented) character. The strategy of subject displacement met a radically hard-core resistance here.

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As most Israeli dramatists of various political persuasions have sensed or found, almost any attempt to account for the Zionist experience in terms of modern tragedy is bound for failure. At best, such enterprises have wound up in melodrama. The historical narrative underlying Israeli political drama in its variety does not provide for a genuinely tragic dramatic account. Its versions of displaced subjectivity, to the extent that they furnish genuine dramatic energies, fail to converge on any symbolic integrity looming beyond the moral horizons of current predicaments. Hovering above a moral abyss, the narrative avoids the pitfalls of nihilism by strength of irony; but far from being the redeeming irony of tragedy the latter is built on the paradoxical cohabitation of despair and necessity. This, again, is a far cry from the ennobling paradox of tragedy. Its routine continuity draws on moral ennui as a habituated component rather than a driving force towards a hypothetical bliss. Whether that representation is borne out by any cogent reading of the history of Zionism itself (if such exists) is beyond the scope (or admitted proficiency) of the present discussion.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

For an illuminating critical discussion of the Israeli film see, e.g., Shohat (1989). See Miller, 1987, 23. But see counter-argument in Norris (1993), esp. 200ff. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption; cited in Benjamin (1977) p. 108. See, e.g., a criticism of such a typical writing in La’or (1992). On this complexity see in particular Felman and Laub (1991). For the matter of this brief, functional summary no distinction will be made here between the early colonial enterprise in the last wo decades of the Nineteenth Century and the official Zionist movement, whose initial effect on the settlement in Palestine dates around the turn of the century. For extensive studies of the plays of that period see, e.g., Shaked (1970); Ofrat, 1980. See, e.g., Ali in Arieli-Orloff’, Allah Karim (1912). From a letter by Spenser to Gabriel Harvey; see Helgerson (1992) p. 1. For an extensive discussion of that chapter in the history of the Jewish community in Palestine, see Porat (1990). Translations from the Hebrew are mine, unless otherwise specified. Elon (1971) p, 122. This will lead a rather simplistic reading of “the Zionist character” by a Syrian critic to ascribe to Israeli novelist Yaël Dayan the radical conclusion ‘that only through becoming Gentiles can the Jews achieve their desired regeneration’; see al-Raheb (1985) p. 201. While sounding as a typical “Hebraicized” surname, in the vein of the common Zionist practice of changing freign-sounding names into Hebrew ones (Hos=Oz), the parody is maintained since the Hebrew denotation of “Dever” is “plague.” Since the early days of the Israeli Defence Forces until the 1980’s, the paratroopers, a unit formed out of volunteering conscripts and responsible for numerous (some legendary) operations beyond the borders, were considered the most admired representatives of the heroic tsabar myth. In 1958 theatre critic Leah Porat (later to be the head of the Israeli Arts council) condemned Yig’al Mossinson’s play Throw him to the Dogs since “it offended the favorite son of the IDF, the paratroopers battalion.”

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15. A parody of the routine use of acronyms in the army. The attribute does not mean a thing, though its sound recalls acronyms in use. In the Hebrew such acronyms are pronounced as full words, and thus “mamaz” rhymes with Boaz. 16. Pronounced as rhyming with the former. 17. In the Hebrew the address is in the feminine gender. 18. Addressed in the masculine. 19. I have dwelt elsewhere on Levin’s dramatic development of Israeli subjectivity; see Oz (1994). 20. Isidor Schalit, cited in Wistrich 1989, 31: a pronouncement sounding ironic when reiterated in 1917 by Social-Democrat Edward Bernstein, in the very years when Hitler was conceiving his Mein Kampf: “I am no Zionist. I feel myself too much a German to be able to be one;” see Wistrich (1976) p. 73. 21. See Urian (1993) for a detailed and perceptive analysis of the show, which relieves me of the need to account meticulously for this impressive theatrical event, as it certainly deserves.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory, Trans. C.Lenhardt, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Eds.), London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Almog, Shmuel (1987) Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness, New York: St. Martin’s Press/Jerusalem: Magness Press. al-Raheb, Hani (1985) The Zionist Caracter in the English Novel, London: Zed Books. Arendt, Hannah (1945) Zionism Reconsidered. The Menorah Journal 33 (2, 1945). Reprinted in Selzer (1970). Arieli-Orloff’, L.A. (1990) Allah Karim (1912), in Wasteland, Tel Aviv: Dvir (Hebrew). Avishai, Bernard (1985) The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Ben-Gurion, David (1958) A new Jew arises in Israel. The Jerusalem Post ( 16.5.1958) p. 5. Benjamin, Walter (1977) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB. Deutscher, Isaac (1968) The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, Tamara Deutscher (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, 163–64. Elon, Amos (1971) The Israelis: Fathers and Sons, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1991) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York and London: Routledge. Gilbert, Martin (1986) The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, London: Collins. Gour, Israel (1982) Pirkei Ha’Mahazé Ha’Mekori Be’Israel (‘Chapters of the Israeli Original Play’). Bamah 91–92 (1982). Graetz, Heinrich (1936) Die Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte. Berlin: Shocken (originally published 1846). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Trans. A.V.Miller, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Helgerson, Richard (1992) Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hess, Moses (1862) Rom und Jerusalem, Berlin. Kohn, Hans (1958) Zion and the Jewish National Idea. The Menorah Journal 46 (1&2, 1958): reprinted in Selzer (1970).

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Kuhns, Richard (1991) Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. La’or, Itzhak (1992) Kotvim et Ha’aretz (Writing the Land), Ha’aretz 31.1.1992, B8 (Hebrew). Lessing, Theodor (1930) Der jüdische Selbsthass, Berlin: Zionisticher Bücher Bund. Levin, Hanoch (1987) Ma Ikhpat Latzipor (What Does the Bird Care), Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uhad (Hebrew). Lukács, Georg (1974) Soul and Form, Trans. Anna Bostock, London: The Merlin Press. Miller, J.Hillis (1987) The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin, New York: Columbia University Press. Norris, Christopher (1993) The Truth About Postmodernism, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA. Ofrat, Gideon (1980) Adama, Adam, Dam (Earth, Man, Blood: The Myth of the Pioneer and the Ritual of Earth in Eretz-Israel Settlement Drama), Tel Aviv: Tcherikover (Hebrew). Oz, Avraham (1994). Dried Dreams and Bloody Subjects: Body Poligics in the Theatre of Hanoch Levin. JTD 1 (1994). Porat, Dina (1990) The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust 1939–1945, Cambridge, Mass & London: Harvard University Press. Rank, Otto (1979) The Double, Trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. New York, London and Scarborough, Ont.: Meridian Books. Ricouer, Paul (1992) Oneself as Another, Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Selzer, Michael (Ed.) (1970) Zionism Reconsidered: The Rejection of Jewish Normalcy, London: Macmillan. Shaham, Nathan (1954) Heshbon Hadash (A New Reckoning, or: A New Chapter), Massach 1 (June 1954) (Hebrew). Shaked, Gershon (1970) Hamahazé Ha’Ivri Hahistori Bitkufat Hat’hiyah (The Hebrew Historical Drama in the Period of the National Renaissance), Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik (Hebrew). Shapira, Anita (1992) Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 , Trans. William Templer. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shohat, Ella (1989) Israeli Cinema: East-West and the Politics of Representation, Austin and London: The University of Texas Press. Sobol, Yehoshua (1982) HaLaila Ha’Aharon shel Otto Weininger (Nefesh Yehudi) (The Last Night of Otto Weininger [Soul of a Jew]), Tel Aviv: Or’Am (Hebrew). Talmon, J.L. (1970) Israel Among the Nations, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Tietze, Hans (1933) Die Juden Wiens: Geschichte-Wirtschaft-Kultur, Vienna and Leipzig: E.P. Tal. Urian, Dan (1993) Arbeit Macht Frei in Toitlanld Europa at the Theatre Centre, Akko, Israel. Theatre Forum ( 1993), pp. 60–66. Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press. Weininger, Otto (1906). Sex and Charater. London: William Heinemann. Williams, Raymond (1966) Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus. Wistrich, Robert S. (1976) Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky. London: Harrap. — (1989) The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, New York: Oxford University Press. Zangwill, Israel (1901) The Return to Palestine. New Liberal Review 2:11 (December 1901).

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A Text in the Eyes of the Beholder: Four Theatrical Interpretations of Kanafani’s Men in the Sun Ilan Pappe Haifa University

In recent years, the most noticeable influence on the writing of history has come from the social sciences and hermeneutics. This article is inspired by both these disciplines, in particular by their treatment of the question of understanding, be it the understanding of literary texts or of human actions. The search for the meaning of understanding is also evident in other disciplines, as part of what Quentin Skinner has called the return of the Grand Theory in the human sciences, i.e., the search for a universal and interdisciplinary methodology (Skinner, 1985). The new methodology is based on two principal assumptions: it rejects science as a model for human sciences and it injects scepticism into the scholar’s ability to treat with objectivity any “body of knowledge”, be it the original meaning of a literary text or a reconstruction of past events. In other words, whether we are dealing with the understanding of a literary text or the analysis of human actions in the past or in the present, we can apply the same approach. In the following I will treat the process of theatrical interpretation of a literary text as similar to that of understanding. Moreover, the literary text used here and its theatrical adaptations are handled as historical material. The most relevant contribution to such a treatment is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method.1 In this, his major work, he compares the understanding of social action to the reading of a literary text. The historian, the sociologist and the reader of literary texts in the past, shared a common desire to discover the truth about their object of inquiry, whether this was the independent original meaning of a literary text or the reconstruction of human action “as it really happened”. Gadamer, like the “New Historians” of the post-Annales schools, sees the search for a text’s original as pointless and impossible. In this he rejects the main claim of traditional hermeneutics that understanding is an exercise in putting aside one’s prejudices and subjectiveness. For Gadamer a text is understood only through our prejudices and subjectiveness—our understanding contains the original meaning, whatever this may be, but we can not and should not, try and separate between the two. That is to say, we have included the original meaning, or a “genuine” reconstruction of a human action in our understanding, since we share with the text and the action a common experience. This common experience comprises an awareness of the historical context which produced the text and the effect the text itself has had on history. Understanding, therefore, is not a matter of relieving ourselves of our own prejudices and

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culture but, rather, fusing this experience with that of the cultural context of the text, be it an alien or familiar one. Gadamer differentiated between a universal hermeneutics, i.e., understanding which involves the general human experience in the treatment of texts, and a historicist hermeneutics, i.e., the influence of a specific cultural reality on the process of understanding. We have found this differentiation very useful when it comes to analyzing the theatrical adaptation by one political group of literary texts written by another. Gadamer warns us of the futility in trying to reconstruct in one cultural context, another, alien context. This can be illustrated by pointing to theatrical adaptations of classical literary texts. These always appear to carry a universal, timeless message and yet they are invariably set in an historical context often so different from our own that one is hard put to maintain the feasibility of a “genuine” reconstruction of the original text—even a performance that tries to remain faithful to the costumes and languages of the past will always be, at the end of the day, a modern adaptation of an historical text. As Hayden White has commented, there is no guaranteed reconstruction of history, let alone when this reconstruction is done through the medium of theatre or film (White, 1974). In these more fictional fields, the playwright, certainly in fringe theatre, is encouraged to contemporize the classical work and derive from it, whether a universal or a local message. Plays or films based on modern literary texts on the whole are not confronted with the question of what a valid reconstruction would consist. Since the author of the original work is still around, play or script writers often have the possibility of enlisting his or her advice. Failing that, they, at least, benefit from sharing the same chronological and cultural context in which the works were written. In any case contemporary theatrical or film adapters seldom set out to reconstruct the original text. Instead we find an explicit effort to create a new one. Pierre Bourdieu claimed that the transformation of a literary text into another medium inevitably produces a new text since each medium has its own audiences and its own marketing considerations.2 Thus theatrical adaptations are what Gadamer sees as “objects with a secondary cultural existence.” They were born from an original text through a process of understanding which he terms the “fusion of horizons”, i.e., the fusion of the cultural world of the “subject” (the reader) and that of the “object” (the text). In this article we will present different understandings of a literary Palestinian text, first by the author of the present article and then by Jewish and Arab playwrights in Israel. Apart from their common human experience, they all, including the original writer, have shared in the experience of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the Palestinian question. As readers, they have come to understand the text by fusing the “original” meaning and their own particular reading of the situation described in this text. We have also tried to discover the particular “cultural horizon” which contributed to each of the readers’ understanding of the text. Since, in our own understanding, the text we have chosen carries a political as well as a general human message, it was possible to try and assess the contribution of the “subject” to the original text. However, we still remain with individuals reading texts. Can we assume that they represent collective groups? We assert that each of the particular readers we have chosen represents a collective understanding. This assumption is also adopted by theories such as that developed, among others, by Itamar Even Zohar, who sees the cultural world of a society as a system controlled by a hegemonic group that determines the society’s identity, history and polity. It provides a canonical self and outer image for every one else in the society. The other groups

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either reject or accept this hegemony.3 Thus, the literary text we have chosen and the theatrical adaptations of it according to this approach are products of an autonomous cultural sub-system which also reflect the general ideological and social canon of the human society in which they were created. Individual understanding reflects a more general collective understanding, but is in any case a fusion of the prejudices of the playwright, his cultural context and his canonical system. He or she may in this fusion reject or accept the canonical self and outer image. Treating the literary and the theatrical text as part of social and human activity implies that the history of literature and theatre represents the history of a given people no less than political archives or memoirs do. Adopting the conventional division of a political attitude by sociologists to three components—cognitive, behavioral and emotional—we can say that the theatrical adaptations teach us about the emotional component of a political attitude.4 A final comment, in the case of the two peoples discussed here, the Palestinians and the Israelis: very little has hitherto been written in this fashion and therefore it should be treated as a caution case-study in need of further confirmation or revision. The case-study which has been chosen for this article concerns a short story written by a Palestinian nationalist and Marxist who was also one of the leading novelists of the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s. Hence, the text in our reading or understanding is both nationalist and internationalist, and carries a social message which transcends the concerns of the Palestinians and the larger Arab Society. We shall try to reveal this ambiguity in the story, since it would seem that this is what inspired others to transform it into a play. We shall then proceed and show that its adaptations stressed either the nationalist or the internationalist message but that none of them conveyed both.

The First Reading and Understanding of the Text: The Historical Context

Ghassan Kanafani was the spokesman for the PFLP (Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and the editor of Al-Hadaf, the movement’s weekly journal. He is considered by many as one of the leading Palestinian prose writers. Born in Acre in 1936, Kanafani fled Palestine with his family in 1948 and after a long journey settled in Damascus. He began a career as a teacher, first in Syria then in Kuwait, and in the 1960s moved to Beirut where he joined the PFLP in 1969. He was assassinated in July 1972, possibly by the Israelis although they denied these allegations.5 As a member of the PFLP, Kanafani was committed to a pan-Arabist and a socialist national ideology. Palestine could only be liberated by the masses, with the help of the USSR, and would become a socialist state helping to transform the reactionary Arab world as a whole (Cobban, 1984). This weltanschauung is present in almost all his works after he joined the organization.6 Men in the Sun, however, had been written some time before the PFLP was established or its particular brand of Palestinian nationalism was articulated, i.e., in a period when the Middle East was still under the spell of Nasserism and Arab socialism and when Palestinians still lacked a leadership of their own or a compass that could help them out of the misery and tragedy of the 1948 war. Kanafani completed the story in the early 1950s when he

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was hiding in Lebanon, having failed to obtain official papers allowing him to stay in the country (Cobban, 1984). Kanafani’s move from literature to a committed ideological stance is typical of the early socialist writers such as e.g. William Morris who moved from romanticism to socialism, though neither Morris nor Kanafani ever sacrificed the aesthetic side of their art for the sake of their ideological commitment (Thompson, 1961). Dickens made the same move when his sombre and realistic social criticism took the place of humor.7 As a Marxist, Kanafani was caught on the horns of a dilemma common to artists who create in order to convey an ideological message. Ruskin, throughout his life, debated whether he had been right to proclaim that making “social art” was more important than “good art” (Briggs, 1983). Even Marx himself never solved the dilemma; repelled by the nature of the political and social systems which had produced Greek art, he had none the less been fascinated by their aesthetics and beauty. He also pondered the timeless nature of great works of art and concluded that they had a lasting value even if they had been created in a different, primitive time: Is Achilles conceivable in an era of powder and lead? Or for that matter the Iliad in these days of printing presses and press-jackets? Do not song and legend and muse necessarily lose their meaning in the age of press? Yet the difficulty is not that the Greek art and epic were connected to certain forms of social developments, but rather that they give us aesthetic satisfaction today and that in an sense they act as a norm, as an unattainable paragon.8 In Men in the Sun Kanafani was certainly loyal to such a Marxist view of art: a social message delivered with a genuine concern for the literary quality of the message. As we shall see, the theatrical adaptations have solved the dilemma too easily, either by stressing the ideological message, or by totally ignoring it. Kanafani tried to blend art with ideology, not to capitulate to the one on account of the other.

Understanding the Story9 Men in the Sun is quite typical of Kanafani’s early writings. It contains his main recurrent theme—the world of the Palestinian refugees. Kanafani tries to universalize the refugees’ dilemma. He often portrays them as passive victims of events and is less interested in who caused their misery. The Israelis or the British are never properly mentioned in his work. He expects his reader to be familiar with the historical story.10 The story tells the tragic journey of three Palestinian refugees from Iraq into Kuwait. They are the elderly Abu Qais, the younger Asad and the youth Marwan, each of whom had earlier reached Iraq from a different place in Palestine, each by his own devices. They are to be smuggled over the border by another Palestinian, Abu Khaizuran, who will hide them in an empty water tanker while crossing the Iraqi border posts. Abu Khaizuran does not own the truck but operates it in the service of a rich Kuwaiti named Haj Rida. The three protagonists hesitate before agreeing to be taken inside the tank, but are persuaded when told they will spend only a very short time inside it. It is the height of summer, and they barely survive the crossing of the first border post. At the second, Abu Khaizuran is delayed by dumb Iraqi border guards who insist on hearing the tale of his sexual liaisons with a dancer in Basra—an irony in itself as Abu

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Khaizuran lost his manhood during the war of 1948. The delay costs the three men in the tanker their lives as they suffocate to death. The major theme in this story is universal, the secondary one is national. The four Palestinians represent a universal plight; their memories and particularly their solutions for their predicament represent typical refugee, rather than specific Palestinian, behavior. None of the plays to be discussed below have succeeded in fully capturing Kanafani’s brilliant portrayal of the refugee state of mind, in which past and present are blended and confused. This is particularly evident in the case of Asad who cannot make head or tail out of times and places and suffers from a constant feeling of deja vu which blurs the picture for him even more. This inability to organize the memory clearly is the result of constant mistreatment by other Palestinians, Arab “brothers” and Jews. All three travelers are being repeatedly deceived and “taken for a ride” by Arabs: Palestinians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis. They are lost not only because they do not know their way into Iraq but also because they have lost track of the chronology of their own lives. Not only Asad suffers from this; so too does Abu Qais, the historian of the group, and the one who tries to make some sense of it all. As with many old people, his immediate memory is disturbed by a clear vision of the past. The third person, Marwan, barely educated and the youngest, is less bothered by the past and all the more concerned about the present. Thus, he is clearer about what he is looking for than the other two. Marwan is still a schoolboy, in search of his brother and wanting to earn money to send to his family. He despairingly seeks a place to resettle. Characterizing the youngest of the three, i.e., youth on which every national movement in the world would pin its hopes, as so materialistic is highly unusual in nationalist literature, and indeed Kanafani has been criticized for it. Even more bothersome for most Palestinian and Arab readers, however, was the pathetic death of the three refugees. In a film version, The Deceived11 the end of the story was duly changed so that the heroes do not die in silence but as they suffocate they beat on the walls of their hiding place in order to attract attention. That is, they die a more fitting death for members of a liberation movement. However, Kanafani did carry a nationalist message. It can be found in his portrayal of the secondary heroes. They are more one-dimensional, representing either Palestinian nationalism or heroism on the one hand, and the general Arab abuse and disregard, on the other. The mother of the youngest of the three, Um Marwan, represents Palestinian Sumud steadfastness; and a fat Iraqi smuggler, whom the Palestinians in the end do not chose as their guide, represents Arab smugness, cruelty and exploitation of the Palestinian refugees. The office of the fat smuggler is cynically called the “Office for Assisting the Uprooted Palestinians”, a reference to the hypocritical double-talk of the Arab qawmiyya (the commitment of Arabs to a Pan-Arabist cause). There is more than one smuggler’s office in Basra, Iraq. Together the smugglers run a monopoly of prices, indicating the equal guilt of all those who profiteered from the lives of Palestinians. Um Marwan is at the other extreme, that of human devotion and sincerity and is the symbol of purity. Marwan’s father and brother have fled, leaving her behind. By so doing, they neglected their moral duty. Abu Marwan left his wife for a woman who had lost her leg in the battle in Jaffa—her disability had dissuaded others from marrying her and her rich father offered anyone willing to take her the comfort of a concrete building instead of the mud hut in which most refugees lived. Throughout the Palestinian struggle, the refugees have prided themselves on their willingness to go on living in miserable conditions in order to show their

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refusal to settle down elsewhere and forget their homeland. The father thus symbolizes the inability of the older generation to cope with the national struggle. The brother and elder son, Zachaira, is also culpable of shameful behavior as he had left for Kuwait and at one point had stopped sending money from there. This brother is also indicted directly for sending Marwan on his fateful trip. He refuses to support Marwan’s education and claims he should join the “frying-pan” of life—an awful, symbolic description of what in fact was to happen to him in the end. Um Marwan appears several times in Kanafani’s other works. In 1967 Kanafani wrote a short story called Um Saad (Kanafani, 1967) in which the heroine is an illiterate woman representing the revolution and the determination to free the homeland. She teaches an intellectual—the author himself—about reality, generosity and about determination to stand against the system. Kanafani chooses a peasant—because for him Zionism meant the uprooting of the peasantry. The peasants are the main victims of Zionism and the principal bearers of the Palestinian revolution,12 an attitude similar to that ascribed by Lutfi al-Sayyid to the Egyptian farmer as the symbol of Egyptian nationalism (Gershoni, 1980). The following episode from the story may help illustrate the importance of the peasant woman in the eyes of the writer: When the youth Marwan is slapped in the face by the fat smuggler, he painfully feels how this has crushed his honour as well as his hopes of getting to Kuwait. However, a pleasant calm feeling pervades his body, which at first he is at loss to explain but which he then understands when a letter from his mother enables him to cope with even this abuse. Another vehicle for conveying explicit political messages are the descriptions of the physical and geographical surroundings of the plot. Most of the story takes place in the desert, which forms the symbol of the field of fire through which the Palestinians have to pass. It is, of course, reminiscent of the Hebrews’ exodus through the Sinai on their way to salvation and it seems that Michael Walzer may have included this version in his analysis of the exodus as a story of national liberation (Walzer-Fass, 1990). In other works, Kanafani makes use of different techniques to convey political and national messages. For example, he quite often idealizes horses,13 their fate identical to the fate of Arab nationalism: tragic but honourable in both cases (Kanafani, 1961). To sum up, we may say that Men in the Sun first and foremost portrays a human tragedy. That it took place in the Arab world and to three Palestinians is secondary. The link between the universal, human tragedy and the particular, Palestinian tragedy is achieved by Kanafani’s technique—in the way he blends the Palestinian past and the universal present in the perceptions and consciousness of his heroes. Those familiar with his political career may find it surprising that an idealist such as Kanafani could show himself to be so remote from politics. However, they will find that A Hand in the Grave carries an even more universal message (Kanafani, 1962). Both stories, nevertheless, relate the universal message to the fate of Palestine and the Palestinian refugees. Hence, it is to be expected that any Palestinian adaptation of the story into a play will capture the particular rather than the universal and that any non-Palestinian interpretation might be attracted more to the universal.

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The Second Reading of the Story: Nationalizing the Text The Historical Context

Since the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, each group of Palestinians, as they were scattered in the aftermath of the war, developed its own particular version of nationalism: refugees in the camps, residents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, citizens of the State of Israel and exiles in the world at large. All chose different ways of expressing their nationalism. Men in the Sun was written through the prism of the community of refugee camp dwellers. It was first turned into a play by an Israeli Arab, who adapted it to his, and his group’s, particular nationalism. The result was a far more nationalized text than the one produced by Kanafani. In doing so, however, he understated the universal message in the story. This process of highlighting the nationalist message and thus producing a new PalestinianIsraeli text out of a Palestinian-refugee text sheds light on the particular problem of Palestinian identity in the Jewish state (Pappe, 1994). The historical and cultural context of this particular reading of Kanafani’s text dates back to 1948. The 160,000 Palestinians who found themselves after the 1948 war within the State of Israel were immediately put under strict military rule which lasted until 1967. During those years, political activists and leaders of the community formulated their own version of nationalism. The Israeli restrictions, on the one hand, and the isolation from the rest of the Arab world and the Palestinian people, on the other, led many to opt for internationalism and communism. Never a complete conversion, such a move did not constitute a denial of Palestinian nationalism, but as the years went by this conversion did mute the nationalism emerging among the Arabs in Israel. Those who adhered directly to Arab nationalism or Palestinian nationalism were arrested or expelled; some chose the way of collaboration with the Israelis and joined Zionist parties. The majority looked for a “golden mean” between Israeli citizenship and Palestinian nationalism. Common to the artists among them was a constant reference in their works to their Palestinian background and this became probably the strongest component in their identity. Whether communist or collaborationist, the artists were explicitly nationalist in their literature, theatre and poetry, but presented a more cautious approach in their political writings. We can say that the political writing is the cognitive component of the artists’ political attitude and their artistic works reflect the emotional component of that same position. After 1967, identification with Palestinian nationalism could become more overt, which the reunion with the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a less paranoid Israeli attitude did much to reinforce. In the meanwhile, the Palestinians in Israel began developing their own agenda of particular discriminations exercised against them by the Israelis in all fields of life: constitutional, legal, economic and social. The main topic was land expropriation which was widespread, especially in the Galilee. It was there that in March 1976 Palestinians in Israel staged their first national day of protest (‘Yawm al-Ard, The Day of the Land). From then on Palestinian nationalism went hand in hand with greater involvement in Israeli politics for the sake of the community itself. On the more general national level, all Palestinians in Israel, regardless of their party affiliation, identified with the PLO mainstream FATAH movement. Not until 1981, did this involvement in the Israeli scene on the one hand,

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and identification with the Palestinian struggle on the other, generate any explicit contradictions. In that year, Israel and the PLO entered a phase of direct military confrontation, initiated by General Sharon, the defence minister of the Likud government. At first he tried to crush the PLO leadership in the occupied territories, and, failing that, he then went on to attack the PLO headquarters in Lebanon. An historical cycle was closed—as in 1948, the Palestinians and the Israelis were once again directly involved in a military confrontation. The Arabs in Israel—now that “their” State was involved in a war against their people—found it easier to express their support for their people and national movement in literary and theatrical media, although this time more direct support was heard even in political manifestos and newspaper articles. It is against this background that the Arab Israeli interpretation of the story should be understood.

Understanding and Interpreting the Story: Riad Masarwi’s Men in the Sun15 The playwright is an Israeli Arab who completed his play in 1981. In an article he published later Masarwi described his principal conclusions from the story. He explained that in his play he sought to stress Kanafani’s main message which is a loud cry against futile human death and fatalism (Al-Hadaf, 1988). He sees the play as a study of the question of human death: how one dies and for what purpose. This is similar to our reading of the universal message included in Kanafani’s work. When Masarwi came to adapt the story, however, he stressed the Palestinian tragedy rather than the human one. He does not study, as Kanafani did, the causes of human death, but rather wishes to explore the link between death and nationalist devotion. Masarwi sees the story as a cry against nationalist fatalism, while to us Kanafani appears to cry aloud against human fatalism. Masarwi also points out that for him the human folly of the three men was their decision to move far away from their homeland, while as a second tragic element he sees their failure to simply knock on the tanker’s lid and call for attention to their plight. Such an interpretation inevitably blurs the universal dimension and reflects the growing interest of the subject (Masarwi) in the national message of the object (the story). In order to stress the political message Masarwi elected to construct his play along the lines of classical Greek drama. As in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King there is no suspense: the end is known from the start and the heroes are drawn towards their inescapable fate. It is both the fault of their own actions, and the result of circumstances. As in any Greek tragedy, the protagonists will all lie dead on the stage at the end of the play. Also loyal to classical Greek tragic staging, the ordeal performed on stage is meant to benefit future generations. Although there is no heroic grandeur here as in Oedipus, the audience is asked to draw national and collective lessons. For this purpose, Masarwi enlists the help of two figures who did not appear in the original story: a narrator who explicitly provides a running political commentary and a veiled person who represents the freedom fighter of the future. The play begins with a conversation between the narrator and three dead men. Basically this is an indictment of the three. Although the youngest of the three, Marwan, objects to the narrator setting himself up as the judge of their “crime”, the narrator pays no heed and asks the spectators to cast a verdict. He explains to the three that their death was not in vain: “Thou are dead but thy people is alive!”

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Only towards the end of the play do we understand why the narrator could rightfully indict the three. The night before their trip, in true Shakespearian manner, both he and the veiled person had warned the men of their follies. The three men justified their action by referring to their experience of the ma’asa (the 1948 tragedy). They are rebuked for that: there are many others who passed through the same ordeal and yet showed sumud (steadfastness); some even opted for struggle. Only Marwan is let off the hook and enjoys a relatively more positive portrayal than in Kanafani’s story, as befitting the expectations from the young generation in a national struggle. He is the only one who is honestly concerned about his family and home. His eldest brother had already gone to Kuwait but, once there, had forgotten all his family connections, whereas Marwan believes he can work in Kuwait and support the family. Both in the original story and the play it is the role of Abu Khaizuran to teach Marwan about the complexities of the emigrants’ world. He warns Marwan that he too will follow in his brother’s footsteps and learn that the natural thing to do is to put money considerations above everything else. According to Masarwi, he needed the narrator to clarify and sharpen the basic contradiction between the commitment to the nation and the land on the one hand, and the desire to live and succeed, on the other. The narrator, quite often, opposes the positions of the heroes and thus allows them to explain themselves. Since Masarwi was particularly concerned to explain the death situation, the narrator is allowed to tell each one of the condemned the “truth” about himself. The veiled person has an even more didactic role: he is there to teach a moral lesson. He is the representative of the future generation, who, like the founders of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the late 1950s, began their revival by criticizing the old mandatory elite. He proclaims that the failure of the older generation should be the motivating force for the younger one to try again and not give in (Masarwi, 1982, p. 18 and 1988). The difficulty arising from having both the narrator and the veiled person as critical figures is what probably led Masarwi to offer an alternative opening to the play 16 . This is a scene in which the narrator indicts Abu Qais alone for running away from his homeland and family. As the eldest, Abu Qais could be expected to behave more maturely and responsibly. Abu Qais replies: “I had no choice.” In Kanafani’s story, Abu Qais is a very ambivalent figure, and the decision for his trip to Kuwait was not easily taken. At the beginning of the story we find him immersed in an imagined dialogue with his son’s teacher, Ustaz Selim, wondering whether escaping to Kuwait for a crust of bread could be considered a worthy goal. The more nationalist interpretation misses out on this ambiguity in Abu Qais’ character. In Kanafani’s story, Abu Qais’s fears and aspirations are very human, and he seems too old for Kanafani to have intended him to portray more than that. In Masarwi’s play, Abu Qais epitomizes fatalism. When told by the narrator that he would find no trees in Kuwait, he replies that it does not really matter as he would never again find anything of what he had had in Palestine.

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The Third Reading of the Text: A New Emplotment in the Service of the Political Message The Historical Context

In this third reading it would appear that generally speaking the historical context has not dramatically changed. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was in the background of the first play, forms the principal background for the new one. This war created new dilemmas for the Israeli Palestinian population. The direct Israeli military confrontation with the PLO strained Arab-Jewish relations in Israel. The delicate balance Israeli Palestinians had been forced to create for themselves between Palestinian nationalism and Israeli citizenship was in constant danger of disruption. Again it was easier to find vent for these frustrations through the medium of the theatre.17

Understanding and Reversing the Story: A Station Called Beirut 18 Masarwi answered the challenge with a new adaptation of Kanafani’s story. In 1983 he wrote a sequel to the story bringing it from the 1950s into the 1980s. In it, the three men are brought back to life and Masarwi even uses the very same names of the original heroes. The year is 1982, the year of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Asad and his fiance, Nada, work in a hospital in Riad, and decide to join Abu Qais, Marwan and Abu Khaizuran on a trip back to the northern borders of Palestine where they join the Palestinian resistance and die; this time in an heroic national death, in the battle against the Israelis. This is a route very similar to the one eventually taken by Kanafani himself. When they arrive in Beirut they are not the only ones; hundreds of others have come to join the struggle. The climax of the play is Abu Qais’s heroic death in the battle; that is, not before he manages to tell the younger generation that Beirut is only.a station on the way to Jerusalem. There are two journeys in the new play: an imaginary one, over much of Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon; and an actual one led by Abu Khaizuran, by foot, through the desert to Lebanon. The imaginary trip is inserted in order to stress the national message. With this imaginary trip Masarwi reverses the negative role played by dreams in the original story and turns it into a positive tool in the service of the national movement. In the article on his first adaptation, Masarwi stressed Kanafani’s tendency to connect unfulfilled dreams with a futile death. Abu Qais, in the play Men in the Sun, hoped the trip to Kuwait would free him from a constant expectation for something to happen, Marwan hoped to build a divine heaven and Asad wanted freedom. They all were dreaming of their escape from hell to heaven but in reality they ended up in another hell. Hence in the new play, the reincarnated Abu Qais refuses to dream. But the younger generation, Nada and Asad, are entitled to dream—so the narrator tells them—and they can imagine that they have found the magic carpet, Basat al-Rih, to take them to Beirut to help their brothers in their struggle. The imaginary trip takes them first over the occupied territories where they witness the Israeli oppression and over Hamat during the massacre of 1982. Lebanon in those days was regarded as a more important front than the occupied territories. An updated version would

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probably have led the heroes to Jerusalem rather than to Beirut. The reference to the Hamat massacre illuminates how Masarwi chose to ignore the particular dilemma Kanafani’s association with the PFLP poses for anyone adapting his novels. In theory, a PFLP member ought to treat the Hamat massacre with the same urgency as the Palestinian tragedy; however, realpolitik forced George Habash, the chairman of the PFLP, to base his headquarters in Damascus, thus crippling his ability to criticize his host, Hafiz al-Assad. Masarwi circumvents the problem by treating Kanafani as a FATAH person (the mainstream PLO group) and thus his heroes are only interested in the Palestinian fate and no one else’s in the Arab world. The heroes have to make the actual trip by walking through the desert, assisted by Abu Khaizuran who leads them in the opposite direction to the unfortunate trip of the three men in the sun. This is his trip of repentance and he provides spiritual guidance as well as material assistance. He teaches the four that if there is a will they can go for a whole day in the desert without water. His wish is to see the next generation born (from Nada and Asad) and thereby attain his absolution. The next generation also appears in this play in the shape of a thirteen old boy who commands the group after Abu Qais’ death: an RPG (bazooka) boy who became the symbol of the PLO fighters in the 1982 Israeli invasion. In fact, Kanafani also used such a young hero in another story, a story which is more in the vein of Masarwi’s adaptation than our understating of the original story (Kanafani, 1961a). The intifada would provide many such young heroes who would lead the struggle for independence. Compared with his earlier adaptation, Masarwi’s second play is even more explicit politically. We hear about the actual fighting in Lebanon, the bombing of refugee camps and of the thousands of wounded and hundreds of dead. In fact, we may say that the heroes have a political character only and are thus quite the opposite of what they were in Masarwi’s original play. Abu Qais, a much more politicized figure, this time spells out Kanafani’s symbolic metaphors. He talks about the betrayal of the Arab governments and their imprisonment of Palestinians which is as bad as the Israeli treatment. The main culprits are the Hashemite and Saudi dynasties which throughout history betrayed the Palestinian cause. At the center of the new play stand Asad and his fiance Nada. In the original story she was Asad’s intended bride whom he forsook for the promised land of Kuwait. In this play, they jointly leave behind them all that the three men in the sun had been yearning for: the “Prince’s Villa” in which they now live and the American car which they are driving. Whereas in Men in the Sun they were lured by the riches of Arabia, here they are forced to leave when they realize that the paradise is a false one. Therefore, Asad and Nada find it easy to dismiss the local Saudi doctor who ridicules their death wish. Asad replies: “we die every minute every day”. How can they trust the doctor (who is actually the owner of the hospital) who blames the Palestinians for everything that occurred. It is clear that in his new play, Masarwi provides the political content lacking in the original. Thus, Asad and Nada severely criticize the Saudi king’s passivity towards the Palestinian tragedy as well as constantly blame themselves for having left Palestine rather than remaining there in their people’s hour of need. Nada appears to be even more assertive and determined than Asad. This matches Kanafani’s attitude to Nada in the story which preceded the bolder and revolutionary presentation of women in Palestinian stories and plays in the wake of the intifada. 19 In Men in the Sun he ridicules the matchmaking that Asad’s father and his uncle, Nada’s father, have arranged just because the two old men recited the Fatiha (the opening chapter of the Quran) together in their childhood.

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Abu al-‘Ala, the uncle, agreed to Asad’s trip to Kuwait because he hoped he would earn enough money and come back and marry his daughter. It is also he who helps Asad with the first leg of his trip, from Amman to Baghdad, even for free, or at least postponing his demand for payment. Kanafani is actually insinuating that Asad’s flight was a protest against pre-arranged marriages of children, although he was ambiguous towards the old traditions in general. As a nationalist he admired these traditions and saw them as the most solid foundations on which the refugee community’s survival depended. As an internationalist, and particularly in stories written after he joined the PFLP, Kanafani would be more critical in his attitude. Already in his first adaptation of the story, Masarwi decided that Nada, although hardly playing an active role in the story, is a symbol of sumud. The play’s prosecutor, the veiled person, blames Asad for allowing Nada to take his place in the battle for the homeland. In Kanafani’s story, Nada only appears as a symbol of old traditions and their contribution to disruption of the national struggle. Masarwi does not conceal his criticism of pre-arranged marriages when he makes it clear in A Station Called Beirut that the ‘new’ Nada and Asad are bonded by love and not by matchmaking. Moreover, as Asad and Nada put it, it is their objection to family connections which enables young people such as themselves to act freely in the best interest of their nation (Masarwi, 1982). Indeed, in this respect this new play offers a very radical version of nationalism. Family plays no role in the national struggle. Marwan’s father shuns any responsibility for his son. He is not even called Abu Marwan (father of Marwan), but bears the same name as the director of the hospital in which Asad and Nada worked, Faisal the Second, indicating that whether as the father or the Saudi citizen, each should be judged according to their attitude towards the Palestinian revolution, and not on the basis of anything else. Marwan’s father brings the following message: biological fatherhood is meaningless in a world of national struggle and imperialism. You can be a son of either the one or the other. Masarwi, like many young Arab intellectuals in the area, expresses this dismay in the face of American technological and military expansion into society and culture. His own remedy is nationalism, as was Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s. Since he wrote his play many have found in Islam a more attractive remedy. However, faithful to Kanafani’s image of the peasant woman, one member of the family is still important in the national struggle—Um Marwan. The mother appears as a symbol of purity, sacrifice and unselfishness. Her purity makes her the ideal repository for the memory of Jerusalem: she constantly carries with her the earth from the holy city. Marwan in the new play is worthy of his nation’s trust, which is why his mother gives him a sack with Jerusalem’s earth to keep until the liberation of the city. The mother seems to accept the possibility that only the sack may return to Jerusalem, while her son sacrifices himself in the battle. The young heroine Nada, in A Station Called Beirut, on the other hand, is an antithesis to Kanafani’s peasant women. Nada is educated, outspoken and brave. She brings the wrath of the Saudi hospital owner on her for being unveiled and free. The Saudi’s contempt for women intertwines with his contempt for the Palestinians. The narrator curses him and ridicules his hypocrisy for being one of those princes who spend time and money on women in London, but mistreat their womenfolk back home and do so in the name of Islam. In this more feminist interpretation Masarwi indicates that even before the intifada, a new generation of Palestinian activists had come to realize that there was a link between the national struggle and a possible transformation of women’s status in Arab society.20

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On the way to Lebanon thirst forces Asad to quench Nada’s thirst with a kiss. As the narrator spells out for us, this is the inevitable result of the new Palestinian reality. Intimating that he would wish to see the old ways abandoned, he asks the audience: “Will it also change the way people think about women?” The end result is a nationalist radical text very different from Men in the Sun, not only in name but also in content. Nevertheless, it is part of the continued dialogue between the subject and the object, the reader and his text.

The Fourth Reading of the Text: The Internationalization and Translation of the Text The Historical Context

A far more complicated case of adapting national literary texts to plays is when this is done by a member of an opposing national group as is the case with Jewish-Israeli interpretations of a Palestinian national text. Such an example is very rare and the one we chose is possibly the only one to date. The Jewish Israeli difficulties of relating to the nationalist message go back to the late 1940s. The absence of any clear manifestation of Palestinian nationalism until the late 1960s enabled most Jewish Israelis, on both the left and the right of the Zionist spectrum, to live “comfortably” with the events of 1948. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip revived Palestinian nationalism as well as the old Mandatory conflict between the two peoples. Nevertheless, Israelis on the whole agreed with Prime Minister Golda Meir who ignored the existence of a Palestinian people altogether. It was the election of PLO representatives to most of the important municipal posts in the occupied territories on the one hand, and the change in the PLO’s policy towards Israel as expressed in the 1974 PLO “stage by stage” political program, on the other, that generated a change in the Israeli attitude. Still, to this day, even after the intifada and the Oslo accord, Israelis view the problem between them and the Palestinians as emanating from the 1967 war, which explains why the Israeli Zionist left wing is willing to withdraw from the territories and allow for the creation of a Palestinian state. Very few among them understand that a true reconciliation has to entail much more. Only recognition of the destructive role Israel played in 1948 by contributing to the Palestinian catastrophe can lead to a mutual search for a solution to the problem of the refugees. This obvious Israeli repression comes clearly to the fore in the two adaptations we will consider here.

Understanding and Universalizing the Story: The Journey21 The first Hebrew adaptation was made in 1988 by Joseph Shiloah and Moshe Kalif and consists of a monologue by Abu Khaizuran taken from the story (while the adaptation was prepared by both, Kalif directed and Shiloah acted). The monologue was accompanied by Palestinian music composed by Taisir Elias and formed a one-man show devoted to Palestinian poetry and novels. With this reductionist approach, highly criticized at the time by the Israeli press, Shiloah focused on the drama in the tragedy.22 Although, he could not, of course, capture everything in the story, he did, I think, succeed in finding its quintessential, universal: the futile death of the three men as part of Kanafani’s universal cry against fatalism. While Israeli Arabs may find it difficult to identify with the more universal message and will seek to stress the nationalist one, it is clear that Israeli dramatists will feel more at home with a

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universal approach and will tend to neglect the national one. Any national misery, as performed, whether in Kanafani’s works or in the work of other modern Palestinian authors, is the direct result of Israeli actions. Dealing with the national dimension—which is as evident in Men in the Sun as the universal one—would require soul-searching of a magnitude and scope which the Israeli stage and novel has as yet been unable to produce. Thus it is not surprising that the Israeli-Jewish understanding of the text highlights the universal message. This is not the result of a better understanding of the hidden layers in the text but rather the consequences of the psychological complexities that characterize Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinians. Very few Jewish Israelis can come to terms with the negative, sometime diabolic, image they occupy in the Palestinian collective memory; it is much easier to universalize it. The monologue is therefore devoid of any reference to the role played by Israelis in the Palestinian tragedy or to the specific physical characteristics that would clearly define the homeland as 1948 Palestine or Jerusalem as the coveted capital. Nevertheless, in this particular story by Kanafani, Shiloah and Kalif were right to emphasize the universal message more than the national one. Kanafani the writer, more than Kanafani the politician, comes over very clearly in the Hebrew monologue as one who sees fatalism as part of the metaphysics and superstition he so strongly opposes. As his If you were a Horse showed, he is trying to dissuade the Palestinians from succumbing to a fatalistic approach to life as there is enough human folly which produces tragedy without resorting to imaginary problems (Kanafani, 1961). The universal prism highlights aspects of Kanafani’s work neglected by the nationalist interpretation. Whereas in his concern with nationalism Masarwi reduces the ambiguities of the heroes’ death, the stress on the universal message allows Shiloah to focus even more closely on the cynical circumstances of the tragedy. When reading the story one is apt to overlook the fact that although Abu Khaizuran is in a hurry to save the three men left in the tanker, he nevertheless unintentionally delays the opening of the lid. Instead of saving them he ponders about his lost manhood and his abortive liaisons with the dancer in Basra and only then does he pry opens the lid. Thus, whereas Masarwi is puzzled by why they did not knock as proof of their desperation, from the way Shiloah presents the episode it is clear that whether they knocked or not does not matter much—no one would have heard them. In Shiloah’s interpretation, the human tragedy always borders on the absurd. This is why he chose to concentrate on the final episode of death and to amplify the tragic-comic exchange at the last border post which leads to their death. It is of course unfortunate that nationalist versions cannot afford to make room for humor, even of the macabre kind that Kanafani, the writer, allowed himself. Shiloah’s Hebrew adaptation comes close to Masarwi’s Israeli-Arabic one when the question of devotion is touched upon. Both Shiloah and Masarwi include Kanafani’s belief in a “dedicated death”, which appears in others of his stories. In The Falcon, for instance, he expressed his admiration for the nexus between death and dedication. Jaddan, its Bedouin protagonist, patiently awaits his death following his devotion to the ideal life (Kanafani, 1961b). The three heroes in the Men in the Sun die without any ideal. A voluntary death is idealized therefore but not the desperate, pathetic death of the three Palestinians in Men in the Sun. Another point in which the two interpretations meet is that they are all unhappy with the lack of a detailed description of the last moments in the heroes’ lives. As Masarwi conjectures

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what would happen in the aftermath of the tragedy, so do the Jewish-Israeli interpreters want to know more about what happened in the crucial and awful moment of death. Finally, Shiloah and Kalif bring into their interpretation the social, even Marxist message of the play. The monologue has several references to the futility of material ambitions in life. Abu Qais’s trees make a salient appearance. Abu Khaizuran confirms Abu Qais’s fears that there are no trees in Kuwait but that instead he may find money growing everywhere. Shiloah is more loyal to the ambiguous portrayal of Abu Qais as one who debates the importance of material comfort and luxury. In the original story, the plot begins with Abu Qais on the bank of the river Shatt, pondering the riches of Basra and Kuwait about which he has heard from his young relative Saad who came back with sacks of gold. At first, while still wondering whether it is worthwhile to leave it all behind for the sake of gold, he decides to go on the trip, hoping to return to something better than living in a mud hut. In the Hebrew monologue the desire to built a permanent home is mentioned at the worst moment of the trip and money loses all attraction.

Understanding and Translating the Story: Men in the Sun (Hebrew)23 The second adaptation of Kanafani into Hebrew was written in 1989 by Miriam Qaini but has never been staged. This text is less universal than the monologue and stresses, like Masarwi, the historicist hermeneutical component; not, however, the Palestinian one but rather an Israeli one. This adaptation transforms the Palestinian reality into an Israeli one by means of a mirror-image technique in the adaptation—a technique common in many Israeli academic and political writings about the Palestinians. Many Israelis explain to themselves the predicament of the Palestinians or the Arabs in general by injecting the Palestinians’ into an Israeli context. This point is illustrated in a long scene devised by Qaini—which does not appear in the original story—in which the heroes discuss manhood, bravery and women. This is reminiscent of many Israeli plays on the experiences of the Palmach or Hagana (the Jewish underground organizations of the Mandatory era), portraying young men who are excited by nationalism, chauvinism and militarism. It is a mirror image of Masarwi’s romanticization of the play in his A Station Called Beirut. Before his heroes die on the Lebanese front, and during a lull in the fighting, they engage in a similar conversation. Our own reading of the text did not discover, as Shiloah and Kalif did not discover, these romantic features. However, compared to Masarwi’s nationalization of the text, Qaini’s is more universal. The universal component is stressed here through highlighting the secondary, assisting, characters. We hear therefore more than in any other version, including the original one, about the fat Iraqi smuggler, who receives a long exposure and is portrayed in a way similar to Israeli military governors in the 1950s as they are described in Emil Habibi’s Opsimist (Habibi, 1984). Abu Khaizuran also appears in a more central place and leaves an ambiguous impression. In Qaini’s adaptation, Abu Khaizuran shows compassion and seems to be the victim of his circumstances. This is a far cry from the Abu Khaizuran of Kanafani. The Father of Cane (the literal translation of his nickname), who looks like a cane and who drives the three men through the blazing desert to the gates of hell. In Masarwi’s play, Tariq Qopti, the actor who plays Abu Khaizuran neatly fits the description in Kanafani’s story: tall and cane-like. As such he resembles Charon who ferried the souls of the dead over the Styx to Hades but only received those souls upon whose lips the passage fare was placed when they died and who had been duly

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buried. In the story, the heroes pay for the ride through the desert, a ride which brings back the most formative memories for all of them. The universal impression is also achieved by the emphasis on the drama and the tragedy in the story. Qaini allows for additional time in which the protagonists have another chance to change their mind. For example, in an episode in which the car breaks down because the engine overheated, they have ample time to ponder their situation. Despite the absence of any explicit reference in the Israeli reading of the text to a particular Palestinian experience, we may, if we go back to Gadamer, assert that this inability is an inevitable consequences of the process of “fusing the horizons”. However a fusion of one cultural context with another is also the beginning of a dialogue. Hitherto, mutual denial of the other was the main feature of Israeli-Palestinian relationship. The attempt to understand may lead to the legitimization of the other understanding of texts. So far, on both sides, the subject has succeeded in understanding the other only on its own terms. Whether this is enough to enable some sort of co-existence, only time will tell.

Conclusion We have chosen four adaptations by Israelis of a Palestinian novel: two written by an Israeli-Arab and the other two by Israeli-Jewish playwrights. We chose to view them as psychological and emotional expressions of a political position. This is not a substitute for a political analysis of the attitudes of Jews and Arabs in Israel towards Palestinian nationalism; it is a complementary analysis which helps to understand better some of the contradictions and inhibitions in the attitudes of these two groups towards their Palestinian neighbors. Finally, it would appear that a comparative analysis of this nature can also teach us more about the story itself and its political and literary significance. It transpired that in some episodes the adaptation did justice to, and even benefited, the original literary text whereas for others the opposite happened. The text was benefited when the play script succeeded in turning obvious political passages in the story into messages of a universal nature; and the text was harmed when the playwright limited passages imbued with an apparent wider universal message, to a political interpretation.

Notes 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, (London, 1975); see also William Outhwaite. “Hans-Georg Gadamer” in Skinner (1985) pp. 21–40. 2. Pierre Bourdieu. Sociology in Question, (London, 1993) (translation from the French by R. Nice). Chapter 8 in this book, which is a paper given by Bourdieu at the conference of the AFEP, pp. 60–71; A recent study has analysed the Israeli cinema on the basis of this and other theories—Nurit Gertz, Motion Fiction; Israeli Fiction in Film. (Tel-Aviv, 1993) (in Hebrew). 3. This is of course only part of the theory and it is inspired by it and not necessarily a direct reflection of it. See Ittamar Even-Zohar. “Polysystem Studies”. Poetics Today 11/1 (1990) pp. 1–30. 4. This definition appears in The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. 1:450.

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5. The information given here is based on the introduction written by Hilary Kilpatrick, the English translator of Men in the Sun, (Washington, 1978), pp. 1–9. 6. A typical example for later works is Ghassan Kanafani, Um Saad, (1969). 7. This is the general view on Dickens and can be found among other places in Humphrey House, The Dickens World (London, 1942). 8. Assa Briggs, A Social history of Britain, (London, 1983), p. 191. 9. This refers to Kanafani (1956). 10. A similar treatment existed in Ghassan Kanafani, The Land of Sad Oranges, (Beirut, 1958) (in Arabic). 11. Al-Makhdu’n was shown in 1972. 12. The importance of peasantry in the formation of Palestinian nationalism has been recently discussed in Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians, (Washington 1993). 13. According to Kanafani’s wife the horses were symbols of Arab idealism, in Kilpatrick, Men, ibid. 14. A discussion on Nationalism and Marxism can be found in Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?, (Berkeley, 1990). 15. This sub-chapter refers to Riad Masarwi, Men in the Sun, (Acre 1982) (in Arabic). 16. The alternative opening appears in the published version of the play. 17. Some of these frustrations are explained in Ilan Pappe, “The Israeli Arabs and the Gulf War”, in Amazia Bar’am and Barry Rubin (Eds.), Iraq Under the Ba’ath, (London, 1994) (in press). 18. This refers to Riad Masarwi, A Station Called Beirut, (Acre, 1983) (in Arabic). 19. The theme of women in the intifada is discussed by many authors; see, e.g. three of the main works: Islah Jad, “From Salons to the Popular Committees: Palestinian Women, 1919–1989”, in Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock (Eds.), intifada—Palestine at the Crossroads, (New York, 1990) and Eileen Kutab, “The Participation of the Palestinian Woman in the intifada”, The intifada—A Popular Initiative, (Jerusalem, 1990) (in Arabic). Recently it has been discussed in Philippa Strum, The Women Are Marching, (New York, 1992). 20. The same commitment can be found in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence from November 1988. 21. This refers to Moshe Kalif and Yossef Shiloah, The Journey staged in Tel-Aviv in 1988. I wish to thank Dr. Oryan for providing me with the text for this play. 22. See for instance Miri Paz in Davar, 11 December 1988. 23. This refers to the version written by Mirrian Qaini in 1989, and who has kindly allowed me to see the manuscript.

References Briggs, A. (1983) A Social History of Britain, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Cobban, H. (1984) The Palestine Liberation Organization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press pp. 139–148. Gershoni, I. (1980) Egypt Between Distinctiveness and Unity, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad pp. 25–55 (in Hebrew). Habibi, E. (1984) The Opsimist, Tel-Aviv: Am Oved (in Hebrew). Kanafani, G. (1956) Men in the Sun, Beirut: PLO Publications (in Arabic). Kanafani, G. (1961) If You Were A Horse, Beirut: PLO Publications (in Arabic). Kanafani, G. (1961a) The Blind and the Deaf, Beirut: PLO Publications (in Arabic). Kanafani, G. (1961b) The Falcon, Beirut: PLO Publications (in Arabic).

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Kanafani, G. (1962) A Hand in the Grave, Beirut: PLO Publications (in Arabic). Kanafani G. (1969) Um Saad, Beirut: PLO Publications (in Arabic). Masarwi, R. (1982) Men in the Sun, Acre: Dar al-Aswar (in Arabic). Masarwi, R. (1988) Al-Hadaf, no. 919, 17 July . Pappe, I. (1994) An Uneasy Co-existence, Arabs and Jews in the First Decade of Statehood. In Israel: The First Decade of Independence, I.Troen and N.Lucas (Eds.) New York: SUNY Press (in press). Skinner, Q. (Ed) (1985) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E.P (1961) William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary; London: Merlin Press. Walzer-Fass, M. (1990) Exodus and Revolution, New York: Basic Books. White, H. (1974) The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact. Clio, 3/3, pp. 277–303.

Between Text and Counter-Text: Theatre in Search of Political Meaning Shifra Schonmann Haifa University

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.” (George Bernard Shaw, in: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1883, Act II.) This spirit of innovation and determination, as expressed by Shaw in the above quote, is perpetuated in the notion of political theatre. If the desired for political circumstances are not forthcoming, the theatre mobilizes them into a microcosmic representation of its own. It creates a montage entity in which the political and the universal phenomena are integrated to present the world from the point of view of the class ideology of the artists who seek political change. In this article we examine how a classic script can be given a unique political production, while analyzing the fate of an artistic work that attempts to present theatre from within the perspective of everyday life. The play we shall relate to is Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. The production is that of the Municipal Theatre of Haifa, (1984), who chose to celebrate the opening of a new auditorium in Wadi Salib (an Arab neighborhood in down-town Haifa) by presenting a bilingual Arab-Israeli version of Waiting for Godot. The analysis of the play and its performance is based on theoretical discussions using the terms text and counter-text, to help disclose certain basic problems of political theatre. It is argued here that political theatre, especially in a multicultural society, is a weapon that must be used cautiously. Political theatre in such a society has many opportunities to expose the discrepancy between reality and the desired state of affairs as interpreted by the artists who take a stand in the production to press for change (Schonmann, 1992 p. 3). The possibility of expressing one’s political viewpoint through the medium of theatre is a cultural option in any democratic society; but at the same time it should be borne in mind that inappropriate use of the medium can act as a boomerang. Israel is a multicultural society par excellence as perceived on three levels: 1. the national—Jews and Arabs, and a further differentiation between Arabs, Bedouins and Druze;

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2. the religious—secular and religious. There is a further differentiation between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform communities within Judaism; Moslems and Christians within the Arab communities; Tolerance and Fundamentalism; and 3. the sociocultural—the established population and newcomers (immigrants), and a further differentiation within the immigrants based on country of origin as well as multicultural groups (Ashkenazim and Sefardim). Thus Israel is a nervous and sensitive society in which drama is an imminent and unavoidable component of everyday life. The complexity of conflicting structures leads its inhabitants towards volatile behavior. This is a society where war is constantly a possibility; death and mourning leave their mark, and peace is yearned for. Given the predominance of the drama of the art-of-living in daily life over the art of theatre reminds us that: “Theatre is the shadow of the everyday from which performance attempts to take its leave” (Read, 1993 p. 104). Political theatre is a clear example of attempts to make practical changes in society or at least to raise issues, explore problems, and ask questions. Kirby (1987), argues with those who say that all theatre is political and claims that there is some confusion between “political”, “social”, and “economic”. Of course, all theatre exists in a definite socioeconomic context and is involved in that context, but this does not mean that it is necessarily concerned with government or that it must take sides in politics. Kirby reinforces his argument by Webster’s definitions of “political” and states that: Theatre is political if it is concerned with the state or takes sides in politics… Political theatre is a performance that is intentionally concerned with government, that is intentionally engaged in or consciously takes sides in politics…Political theatre makes explicit reference to contemporary government problems and issues. (Kirby, 1987 p. 85).

The Concept of Text and Counter-Text Text is a concept easier to characterize than to define. Usually the concept text means the written words: a group of sentences which, when put together, serve to express an idea. The theatrical text has a wider meaning. The distinction will be formulated as follows: the world created through words will be called here a text; while the world created through visual, vocal and action means will be called here the theatrical-text, i.e. the performance of a play, the production, as opposed to the written literary text. For the purpose of the analysis which follows I will present the theatrical text as the counter-text . Shoham (1989) clarified the special status of the play as a theatrical-text and claimed that the measure of difference between it and the literary text determines the character of the relationship created between the theatricaltext and the spectator. He maintained that the theatrical-text is less open to interpretation than the written text, if only because the physical space as it is portrayed on the stage is not open to a different realization. He thus makes a claim which goes beyond a simple comparison, in saying that the play is a theatrical-text which “programs” the reaction of the audience and arranges the way in which the meaning of the play will be grasped (Shoham, 1989). This claim receives additional weight in the political theatre which intends to “program” the reaction of the spectator. Brecht’s ideal spectator, for example, would follow the example of Walloon’s audience which, one hot summer evening in 1830, inflamed by Auber’s Opera la Muette de

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Portici, ran out into the streets of Brussels and started one of the most successful revolutions in modern Europe (Demetz, 1962). In this context I wish to offer the concept of counter-text and define it as a term of reference to be used whenever the theatrical-text refers to an intentional interpretation which causes a premeditated gap between the original written text and its production, aiming at intensifying the emotional and intellectual state of mind of the audience in order to provoke political activism. The relationships between the text and the counter-text are dialectical: they are mutually constitutive parts of one another and at the same time they are opponents. The dialectical relations are determined to a great extent by the context of the play and the raw materials which shape the world of the spectator participating in the theatre event. Hirsch, who expressed the concern that putting the text in focus would give rise to an anarchy of interpretation, claims that “If the meaning of a text is not the author’s then no interpretation can possibly correspond to the meaning of the text since the text can have no determinate or determinable meaning.”1 If, however, we insist that a work of art becomes autonomous the moment it leaves its creator and starts a life of its own, then different textual approaches can be offered. One of these is the counter-text approach presented in this work, referring to the theatrical-text. The text, in this case, does not bear a unique, absolute and well defined meaning. Its reception is based upon the background characteristics of the spectator, the raw elements with which s/he arrives at the theatre, and the collective social political context in which s/he lives. In the counter-text, therefore, ideas contrary to the written text can be expressed on several levels: structural, linguistic, visual and pragmatic. The director who allows himself the liberty of endowing the theatrical text with an interpretation designed to create discrepancies in advance must also suppose that different groups of audiences will understand the text in different ways. The division between text and counter-text rests largely upon the theoretical understanding expressed by Patrice Pavis: …interpreting a text, after all, is not a matter of searching for an intention hidden behind it, but of following the meaningful movement toward the referential, i.e. toward that kind of world opened up before the text. To interpret, means deploying new mediations that the text initiates between man and the world. (Pavis, 1982 p. 80).

New Inter-textual Linguistic Choices in Waiting for Godot It is well known that all cultural modes and individual acts of social behavior are involved either explicitly or implicitly with communication, and that the communication process in every known society is language. Therefore, when Haifa theatre chose to perform Waiting for Godot using both Hebrew and Arabic in a bilingual performance, it in effect determined that the interactions in this communicative event would be encoded first and foremost on the basis of the director’s choice as to which character would speak which language. Ilan Ronen, the director of this production, clearly implied his political intentions in his linguistic choices. The most famous pair of vagabonds in modern theatrical history, Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) speak a kind of Hebrew mixed with Arabic words, trying to imitate the way Arab workers speak Hebrew. Pozzo, the master, is the only Jew who speaks

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pure Hebrew. By confronting him with all the others speaking Arabic, the classical structure of the play is shattered. Instead of the symmetrical structure of pairs of characters and duplication of classes (Vladimir and Estagon, Lucky and Pozzo, the boy who comes twice and who has a twin brother, two acts, etc), there is a fresh counter-text structure, made up of a new pattern formation whose goal is now to force the actors and the audience to confront their own extremism and/or prejudices. The basic pattern of the play in the form of precise repetitions in Act Two of occurrences in Act One is broken because this symmetry has collapsed, as a result of which the obscure elements are dispersed and a new pattern of intensification is created. With Pozzo, who is the only Jew speaking Hebrew, as the tyrannical, ugly master who suppresses Lucky, the mechanical doll-slave who speaks Arabic, no room is left for any interpretation other than the clear and damned relationships between Israel as the oppressor and the Arabs as the conquered people. In this counter-text, within this new framework (the classic tree has been replaced by scaffolding), Pozzo’s words sound like a fascist text. The political stance makes “objective analysis” difficult in the sense that the counter-text conditions the scope of meaning that the spectators can reach. The interpretation we give to the visual world, similar to the verbal world, may be suitable or unsuitable for our immediate needs, but it is never “correct”. The terms “correct” or “mistaken” do not belong to the paradigm of this analysis. We refer here to the “captive audience” who hear with absolute clarity the spoken language while observing the director’s codes, along with those of the actors and translator who collaborated to create a political counter-text. It is important in this particular case to mention the translator, Anton Shamas, who took the liberty of making linguistic choices that go far beyond plain translation. The deliberate sense of restriction created by the clear definitions, first and foremost by the linguistic choices, programs the spectator to an either/or reaction: either he, the spectator, sees himself in the mirror and is horrified; or he rebels at the artistic design to channel him into the world of the creators (that is the director, Ilan Ronen, the actors, Makram Khoury, Yussef Abu Warda, Doron Tabori and Ilan Toren, and the translator, Anton Shamas) who point an accusing finger toward the Israeli authorities and blame them for the existing situation. The non-verbal elements such as the set, the costumes and the properties, all imply the political context. Vladimir and Estragon wear Arab construction workers’ clothing. Pozzo the Jew, speaks Hebrew, wears an elegant suit, a colonial hat, holds a whip in his hand and has an attache case. Lucky is depicted as an old Arab with white hair, partly covered with a white fez, in traditional rural dress and wearing a dog collar round his neck. A long measuring tape is connected to the collar and attached to the belt of Pozzo, his Jewish master. The transmutation of the tree to scaffolding nullifies the only possibility for some kind of an optimistic interpretation because the two or three leaves growing in the second act cannot bloom on the concrete scaffold. The symbolism of the leaves which may stand for spring, as Estragon comments, or for renewals, is now associated with death since the two plan to hang themselves from the scaffolding. The existential hardship is depicted as political affliction. There is a camera lens type explicitness which dismisses the possibility of plurality of meanings and creates an intensive pattern of violence by a directed interpretation which clearly shows that the hardship is a man-made one by the conquering society. The more self-reflective the counter-text becomes, the more difficult the problem is to solve.

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Regarding the text, Vladimir raises his hand and says to Estragon “Listen!” Estragon does not hear a thing and then they embrace with a sigh of relief. Vladimir says: “I could have sworn I heard screams”. A short time later a terrible scream is heard from nearby. Levy (1993), commenting on this horrifying and unexplained scream said that it serves as one of the characteristics of the enigmatic Godot who can never arrive. He cannot exist on the stage but only send messages from the outside. Levy states that the exact connection between the mysterious outside and the presence on the stage will never be clear (Levy, 1993 p. 14). In the Haifa theatre production, in which a counter-text creates Vladimir and Estragon as Arab building workers from the territories, when the same terrifying scream is heard it is no longer transcendental. When Lucky, the Arab slave says in an indistinct, disjointed way “the air is filled with our screams”, Beckett’s theatre of the absurd is quickly replaced with a realistic placard. In the tension between the silence and the scream in the text and in the tension between the classical patterns and their breakage in the counter-text an unavoidable narrative is created in the mind of the spectator. The theatrical text in the Haifa theatre production is a counter- text to Beckett. It comes close to the genre of critical realism and thus a new inter-textuality is created. The language behind the official languages of the play is the language of despair and political impotence. The day-to-day drama in Israeli reality in this multicultural society which occurs off-stage, permeates onto the stage and becomes in actuality the action on the front stage. It is the new narrative which connects the materials to the off-stage context. The story itself is not recounted in the theatrical text. It is the audience in its own mind which puts it together on the basis of the raw materials with which it arrived to view the play and on the basis of the counter-text presented to it. An outstanding example of this is in the carrot scene. When Gogo serves Didi the carrot, he performs a stylish pantomime of a waiter serving a tray of Turkish coffee. Avigal relates to this gesture in the same way as to similar gestures which help in implanting in the play a defined context and claims that the local interpretation turns it into a fascinating experience.2 It can be concluded that as political theatre it is a considerable achievement for the director, the actors and the entire production when the outside succeeds in penetrating the theatrical text. From the viewpoint of the production’s aesthetic logic we shall examine the matter using another example, that of the famous phrase: “Let’s go. Neither moves” which ends both the first and second act. This stage instruction is an actual manifestation of the absurd existence of the two vagabonds and is essential to their existence. However, the comment from this scene is not convincing when the Arab building workers perform it. This is due to the fact that the function of Godot, which Beckett designed to preserve a “lack of awareness” in Vladimir and Estragon, is undermined here because it is the identity of Godot that turns out to be important, rather than the actual waiting for him. The subject of the original Beckettt text is not the mysterious Godot himself but the waiting for him. The waiting is the existence, and Godot’s identity is guessed at from the use of terms that Vladimir and Estragon employ about him. The interrogation of the boy by Vladimir at the end of each act has the same character. More than discovering who Godot is and what he looks like, he verifies the image in his own mind. In the counter-text, when the image of Godot to the Arab building workers from the territories is interpreted as freedom, liberty, and a Palestinian State, it is connected to the audiences’ image which is also freedom, liberty, and a Palestinian State, and thus the original verbal set does not fit. The enigma of Godot is deciphered. The story is no longer the story of two vagabonds waiting at the foot of a bare tree for the appearance of something or someone

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undefined, named Godot, but becomes the story of the lives of the workers from the occupied territories. The justification for the vagabond pair to continue in their situation is invalid once their identity as vagabonds is nullified. The Arab workers from the territories, Lucky the Arab and Pozzo the Jew all exist within the politically absurd dimension of the play and not a cosmic absurd. Instead of the eschatological dimension, this presents a demand for moral activism from the characters, and by extension from the audience as well. This is exactly the “explicit activist intention” discussed at the beginning of this paper. Thus the measured aesthetic world of Beckettt comes apart, not because of the relevancy, but because of the creation of a new inter-text full of details of the drama of life, and loaded with elaborations which are not in the original text. This new intertextuality belongs to the counter-text only.

Meaning The idea of analyzing a production using the terms of the text in contrast to counter-text is intended finally to demonstrate how we should interpret the performance. It is also intended to indicate what happens to the aesthetic qualities when a new inter-textuality is created. From the example given, we can summarize and present things schematically and say: the differentiation between the text and the counter-text can be elicited along four axes: generic, linguistic, thematic, and structural according to the following lists: Text Absurd genre One language Abstract Text obscure No place, no time Lacking a defined political and cultural background Godot is not deciphered The subject of the play is waiting An open-ended interpretation system Circular pattern

Counter-text Realistic critical genre Bi-lingual Concrete Counter-text clear Localized, present time Defining a political and cultural background Godot is interpreted The subject of the play is Godot A closed association system Pattern of intensity

The political significance was produced by concentrating on the concrete details and timing of the production as well as on the political connection of the explosive day-to-day drama. With the disruption of the classical patterns of the play a unilateral dependence on the tragic materials of the text was created, materials which invite an active referral on the part of the audience. As the personal relevance of the counter-text increases, the greater the identification. In his concise writing Samuel Beckett has succeeded more than any other creative artist in defining the tension between what is seen and given and what is desired by the artist who wishes to capture a fleeing concept (Omer, 1993). Beckett is a playwright whose works are intellectually demanding. Analyzing the Haifa theatre production via the theoretical differentiation between text and counter-text can help us understand how the components mentioned above created a new inter-texuality. This was not sufficient in itself but, when it

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was shaped into the generalized concept of the counter-text, it became in essence an impressive theatrical text. Moreover, it can be understood why the audience poured into the theatre and why this production had a broad appeal. There was an explicit intent on the part of the counter-text’s creators to seek a political meaning. This created a situation in which the off-stage narrative took over the action on the stage, and hence the meaning worked on both conscious and unconscious levels. It even challenged the spectators regarding their own theatre-going activity.

Addressing the Audience We assume that the stage is an appropriate and serious forum for the discussion of political issues. Calling on the audience to play an active role in the process of change within their society is possible only by manipulation of the counter-text, which is aimed at orienting the audience toward action. The first problem lies in persuading the audience to accept the analogy proposed to them as an appropriate description of their own political situation. They have to be drawn into the position of the characters of Vladimir and Estragon which means, above all, waiting. In the counter-text, however, the position of the characters appeals to a hidden stance: a call for activism. Thus there is an unrestrained duality in this production. Both sides have difficulty in accepting this political interpretation. The Jew finds himself facing a twisted mirror which reflects his ugliness, while the Arab standing in front of the same twisted mirror sees his pathos. Both confront a feeling of terrible humiliation. The vocabulary of enjoyment or pleasure is inappropriate for this production. The narrative off-stage is based on violence which is brought into the hall. As one Arab teacher stated: I took my pupils to see the play. One of them ran home in fury. He could not agree to see the Palestinian Arabs in the shape of Lucky who is downtrodden and weak. I told him, “sometimes the downtrodden should see themselves in the mirror so that they will know the truth about their situation. This is a process preceding any revolt. ”3 There is a world of difference between this reaction and that of a Jewish Israeli teacher who angrily addressed the players on stage: “What is this. No Jewish workers only Arabs?” Makram Khoury, the distinguished Israeli Arab actor who was playing Estragon replied agitatedly “Go to Paris Square nearby. This is a square of slaves where you will see Arab workers offering themselves to a Jewish master for peanuts.” The teacher responded with: “They should be grateful that there is work.” Bedlam broke out. Later Khoury said of this production: “It is a drama about Jewish-Arab relationships. It is our war for life and death.” The director, the translator and the actors intended to cause disturbance and debate. They consider the local nationalistic interpretation to lend weight to the play. In the program notes Anton Shamas states: During the process of translating I felt like Houdini trying every trick possible to escape the measured precise text. I get goose-pimples once again when I hear these two sentences toward the end: Boy: Vladimir

—What am I to say to Mr Godot, Sir? —Tell him…Tell him you saw me and that…you saw me

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It seems that what Shamas found intolerable was human incapacity being interpreted in the counter-text as a political incapacity. Ilan Toren, the Jewish actor who played Pozzo in the play said in a conversation with pupils following the bi-lingual play on the 21st of November 1984: “This play speaks in two languages because our role as actors is to call to the whole audience—to live in peaceful co-existence.” On the one hand it seems that the actors are so involved in the situation that they don’t need the audience, but paradoxically this is precisely the reason for having an audience whose presence compares to that in a football game: the spectators are not passive, they take up sides. The production provoked a public uproar and the performance was often interrupted by members of the audience. Even those who may never have read or seen the play Waiting for Godot recognize the famous image of the two down-at-heel figures waiting by the tree for Godot who never comes (Worth, 1990). In the production of the Haifa theatre this immediate identification is broken and the play becomes an instrument designed to create a path for cultural encounter via a piercing dialogue. “Theatre as a weapon” is an extreme image articulated in the title of the book by Stourac and McCreery (1986), who perhaps more than many others thus illuminate the view that the theatre has an instrumental power to be utilized as an artistic weapon. The authors believe it is important for all who are interested in politics to consider the role of art and culture in shaping consciousness. Dan Urian (1990), pointed out that in the last two decades there have been a growing number of Jewish plays dealing with the Arab image. He claims that the Arab in Israeli drama is a projection of “the opinions, and more so of the frustrations, of a group among the Jews whose relation to the Arabs is essentially positive. The Arab is not an entirely realistic figure but an image or expression of the wishes of this group”. Ilan Ronen as director, continued along the same line, through converting a classical play into a local political play. From this perspective the play did not break any new ground. Of course the problems addressed in this production will not be solved in the theatre. However, the spectator can no longer ask the classic questions: where are they (Vladimir and Estragon) and why? Who is Godot? Instead, the audience may become more aware of the spirit of Shaw, who claimed that those who can get on in the world are those who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, then they make them. A perfect counter-text.

Notes 1. Hirsch, 1967, quoted in Kinkkvirst 1981:56. 2. Koteret Rashit, 1984. 3. Ma’ariv, 1981.

References Bradby, D. & McCormick, J. (1978) People’s Theatre, London: Croom Helm. Demetz, P. (Ed.) (1962) Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays Englewood, Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall.

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Hirsch, E.D. Jr. (1967) Validity and Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kirby. M. (1987) A Formalist Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Levy, S. (1993) Between the ‘Voagitous’ and ‘Crouke’—Scream in Samual Beckett’s plays. Motar 1 (July 1993), pp. 13–18 (in Hebrew). Lindkvist, K. (1981) Approaches to Textual Analysis. In Rosengren K.E. (Ed.). Advances in Content Analysis. Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications. Omer, M. (1993) The Scream of Reflection with Beckett and Aricha. Motar 1 (July 1993), pp 28–31 (in Hebrew). Pavis, P. (1982) Language of the Stage. New York: Performance Art Journal Publication. Read, A. (1993) Theatre and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Schonmann, S. (1992) Theatre in a Multicultural Society: Play versus Game. Paper presented at the “Cultural Politics and the Theatre” Conference, Dublin. ( September 1992 ). Shoham, Ch. (1989) Theatre and Drama in a Search for an Audience . Tel Aviv: Or-Am (in Hebrew). Stourac, R. & McCreery, K. (1986) Theatre as a Weapon. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. Urian, D. (1990) Enemy to Lover: The Image of the Arab in the Israeli Theatre. Bamah, Drama Quarterly 122 pp 5–22 (in Hebrew). Worth, K. (1990) Waiting for Godot and Happy Days. London: Macmillan.

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A Diary of the Intifada by the Kibbutz Dance Company1 Eli Rozik Tel Aviv University

The original essence of tragedy consists then in the fact that within such a conflict each of the opposed sides, if taken by itself, has justification; while each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by denying the equally justified power of the other. (Hegel, 1975 p. 1196) The Arab-Israeli struggle is a genuine conflict. A conflict even in the Hegelian sense: both sides make their claims on the grounds of legitimate rights. Each side invokes its own tradition and values for support. It is very hard to find in the theatre a truly balanced conflict, in which both sides are right; but we are talking here of life. Adding human determination to righteousness on both sides of a conflict is, perhaps, the best recipe for a two-fold catastrophe. Both sides feel equally entitled, equally willing to sacrifice their lives and equally unwilling to yield. From such a thesis and antithesis a new synthesis might be born, but not necessarily include the two justified sides. In conflict, to be right is deadly dangerous. Hegel does not preach compromise. He views conflict as a mechanism of social change, which is stronger than human will. But he does advise that seeing the partiality of one’s own rightfulness, as seeing the possible justification of the other side, is a token of wisdom. This is the heart of compromise. To be fair and balanced towards the Arab-Israeli conflict means to see the possible wrong in one’s own attitude and the possible right in the other’s. It means to overcome one-sidedness. In this conflict each side claims the right to live in the land of their ancestors on the grounds of their own history and tradition, which are clearly not accepted by the other. The obvious solution is to accept them, or get used to them. Being an Israeli soldier in the occupied territories during the intifada was and still is a traumatic experience. Being an Arab citizen under these circumstances is equally traumatic. Both sides suffer. Most soldiers, if honest with themselves, developed a need to revise their views on the conflict. Some changed sides, some became extremist, even more imbued with a sense of righteousness, and some envisaged the possibility of double justification.

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The Israeli theatre is most sensitive to undercurrents in Israeli society. A new awareness was swift to find its way to the stage. In recent years there has been a visible influx of productions which directly or indirectly touch upon this conflict. It is clear that the theatre is responding to a social pressure to deal with this issue. This is not a new phenomenon in a nation which is constantly troubled by problems of sheer existence. What is more interesting is that this pressure is reflected in arts which are not usually perceived as politically oriented or militant, such as dance; in arts which, perhaps, are not apt for engaging in communication on the ideological level at all. In the following paragraphs I intend to focus on the confluence of several artists in a unitary and, in a sense, unique work of art which reflects both an ideological impulse with regard to a new perception of the conflict and, by the same token, an attempt to support each other in creating a meaningful and even distressing comment on it. In Reservist Diary 89 by the Kibbutz Dance Company these artists endeavour to confront their own dark side and the bright side of the enemy.

The Creative Process Diary 89 reflects the impressions of an Israeli soldier and artist during his reserve service in the occupied territories during the intifada. Its electrifying choreography effectively combines several media: dance, music, poetry and theatre. Most puzzling in this work is the cooperation of two artists whose arts, dance and poetry, are neither perceived as able to combine into integrated unities, nor do they usually converge in such ventures. Rami Be’er, a choreographer from Kibbutz Gaaton, and Tzvi Sternfeld, a Haifa resident poet, both shared the very same experience, policing a conquered population, and both sought to give expression to their feelings and intuitions. The poet was stationed for a few weeks on a rooftop in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza strip, watching the events from “high above”.2 In the first four days he wrote 64 poems. Gradually, his poetry “degenerated” into a mere notation of incidents: demonstrations, stones and troops. Eventually he became aware that in fact he was writing a diary. “Poetry betrayed me.” he concludes. He found that it is impossible to assimilate so much suffering into an aesthetic expression. “In such circumstances one can only become a witness.” He published the poems first in the literary journal Yiton 77 under the name “Diary of the Intifada”, and later in the format of a booklet, under Diary of a Reservist. The new name reflects his awareness of the limitations of his personal experience. The diary itself was never published.3 The choreographer’s initiative also came in response to his own experience. After a month of military service he found himself not fighting an army, but policing a population. His personal encounter with the insurrection was for him most bewildering and can be summed up in a few words: a growing sense of sympathy for their suffering and admiration for their struggle. He “knew” that the Arabs are attempting to undermine the very existence of Israel. He responded, however, to their readiness to endure pain and even die for their dignity. At the same time, there was an increasing sense of disgust with our own soldiers who far too often, and despite so many judicial inquiries, disregard the humane values of the Jewish tradition, particularly the supreme importance it assigns to any human being, friend or foe.4 We may surmise that Rami Be’er had a problem with his own art form, as otherwise he would not have looked for an additional medium. Dance is indeed not communicative in the same sense that the theatre is. Both arts are based on bodily movement but, in contrast to the

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theatre, it is most difficult to be explicit by means of dance. Whereas theatre employs a medium, including its nonverbal elements, whose messages can easily be decoded, dance requires decoding in a substantially different and abstract way. We recognize gestures of love or distress, but we are unable to assign a particular meaning to each individual movement. In principle, dance includes all possible bodily movements, but in its traditional form, it would appear, functional movements and gestures are consistently avoided. Moreover, movements are not necessarily used because they convey definite meanings, but mainly because of their expressive and aesthetic values. Dance is indeed abstract, in a way similar to music or abstract art. In this sense dance-theatre, as the name of this art form reflects, is an attempt to lend dance a dimension of articulation. We may indeed classify Be’er’s choreography as such; but it goes well beyond this. Be’er looked for a vocabulary of movements that could be easily identified and understood by the audience; for movements and props taken from the milieu of the intifada itself. Dancers would throw stones, brandish sticks and unfurl flags. The costumes would identify the Arab or the Israeli. The set would feature a huge net, similar to those erected by the army between Arab villages and main roads to prevent stoning of passing cars; the net would close off the proscenium opening. The usual vocabulary of dance prevailed, but it was enriched by an entire set of ‘realistic’ gestures. In this way it acquired its theatrical dimension. Be’er sought for more than just a dance-theatre choreography. His guiding principle was to transmit his traumatic impressions clearly and even bluntly: “The audience wants to avoid confrontation. I say to them no! Look at your own image in the mirror”. He wanted to build his work on a verbal text. In fact, he decided to look for a diary before he found it. He wanted “to express the viewpoint of a reservist caught in the intifada, with no definite political stand, with no intention of providing a solution to the problem”. He wanted “a reservist capable of looking at himself in the mirror, a human being with whom people can identify.” In this sense Sternfeld’s diary was exactly what he was looking for: the same kind of human experience and the same nonpolitical stand, neither right nor left wing; just the same feeling in the presence of conflict and fellow human suffering on both sides; and the same tragic sense of playing a game in which all lose. With the diary Be’er’s work acquired its words. Various parts were danced to this prosaic poetry. The choreographer understood, however, that confronting audiences with such nightmarish realities, which are experienced by people on a daily basis, would only alienate them. They had to be balanced by another “vocabulary”, more neutral and even abstract, capable of incorporating such raw material into a comprehensive enlightening and aesthetic experience. He decided to use music from the Six Suites for Solo Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach. This music is so diametrically opposed to the nature of the depicted reality, and so neutral, that it can compel the audience into the aesthetic detachment needed to confront again such personal experiences in terms of meaning. The abstract nature of music undoubtedly matches the abstract nature of dance itself. In the context of a work which is partly danced to the words of a diary that reflects such harsh experiences, the music becomes a kind of antidote. Not all the sounds of this work, however, are so abstract: there is also shouting in demonstrations, moaning for the dead, and gunshots. Theatrical sound is thus also balanced by Bach’s music. The theatre, I believe, is a unitary and homogeneous medium. This work, in contrast, is a clear-cut case of multimedia. Although dance remains its basic medium, it incorporates a diary, poems, a song, theatrical gestures and sounds, and naturally music. Be’er did not want

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to compromise. He confirms: “I wanted a medium that speaks. Not dance-theatre in the already well established sense, but a medium that is completely subordinated to what I have to say in the clearest way.” Be’er stresses the scenic, or rather iconic, elements of his work, thus bringing dance almost within the boundaries of theatre or literature. We may conclude that in this case what made dance ‘speak’ was the author’s awareness that in his art “silence” is not an asset. In his determination he did not respond only to himself but to an intangible pressure originating in potential audiences. It is this pressure that made this work speak in a way that is not normally found in this art form. This pressure compels the author and the audience to confront pain and disgust in an attempt to transmute such disturbing feelings not only into an aesthetic experience, but also a meaningful one. When using a basically abstract medium such a task becomes almost impossible unless one does what Rami Be’er did: he betrayed the purity of dance because in his need dance betrayed him, just as poetry betrayed the poet.

The Sequence of Scenes The work, which lasts 55 minutes, consists of 17 short scenes. Just before the performance starts, strong light beams focus on the audience, “like in a police investigation”, conveying a sense of guilt and probably suggesting that it is the audience that is on trial. The narrator—or poet’s mouth—sits at a desk under a spotlight at stage-left. 1) A soldier with a helmet5 Dim light. A female dancer with khaki cape and helmet dances to the poet’s words. The helmet identifies her as an allegorical representation of the Israeli army. During the dance she takes off the cape to uncover a white tunic. The layers of clothing reflect two basic attitudes: the soldier fulfilling his duties and the individual questioning them. The layers of garments reflect the opposing sides in this inner conflict and changing them indicates transition from one viewpoint to the other. She dances in front of a huge net that seals the entire proscenium. Dancers identified as Arabs by their clothes dance beyond the net projecting gestures of despair. The soldier is the only one who dances to the poets words: “this is his music.” His vocabulary of movements is clearly defined: swift and sharp. While in his cape his dexterous movements are an ironic comment on the ‘omnipotence’ of the Israeli army. The verbal text reflects the anxiety and the impressions of the poet. 2) A soldier with tied hands A dancer, characterized as an Israeli soldier by costume dances to Bach’s music within a square demarcated by a light beam from above and surrounded by darkness. His hands are tied. No poetry. This image is an obvious “translation” into bodily movement of a common verbal expression that conveys a sense of being restrained by an ethos or law. 3) Ahmed has three wives Dim light. A male and three female dancers, clearly characterized as Arabs by costume, particularly their kerchiefs, dance to Bach’s music. The poet’s words: “one in green, the second in red and the third in black. Every three nights Ahmed completes a [Palestinian] flag.” Ahmed holds a typical basket. 4) Women with clubs Dim light. Ahmed produces sticks from his basket and hands them over to the women. The latter remain alone and develop a violent dance to background shouting. Gestures of hitting and stabbing. These images probably reflect the perception that in the Palestinian society fighting is delegated to women. The dancers echo the movements of the soldier in the first scene.

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5) A house is blown up Sound of explosion. The soldier enters carrying large stones and throws them on the floor within a square of light. An Arab woman places them on each corner and thus delimits her territory. A destroyed house is conjured up. She dances as if entrapped in it to Bach’s music. She crouches and rises. She dances with a stone. Eventually she waves the stone as a weapon. 6) A woman with a whip Two squares of light. An Arab woman dances on the right square and an Israeli man on the left one, both to Bach’s music. The right square is still delimited by stones. Both are trapped. She produces movements of throwing stones and he—his eyes blindfolded—movements that reflect mental torture. The soldier enters the right square and pushes the woman out, into the dark area, and takes the stone away. The poet reads from The Prince by Machiavelli, chapter 8, which deals with cruelty against conquered populations. Among other “wise” advice: “One should administrate cruelty at once in order to reduce bitterness.” The Arab woman enters with a whip and whips the Israeli: “Here it is not clear at all who is holding the whip.” Eventually he manages to take the whip out of her hands and forces her to gather up the stones. 7) Two holiday blouses Dim light. Two Arab women dance to Bach’s music with white blouses stained in the colours of the Palestinian flag held in their hands. It is a dance of elation and joy. This image shows how the Arabs outwit the Israeli authorities: the dancers produce a flag with the coloured shirts. Flags are forbidden, but the colours are not. 8) Fleeing from stones Blackout. The stage is lit again and for a few seconds six Arabs throw really large stones at the net from behind it towards the audience. Background of shouting. The scene ends with the noise of an explosion. 9) Fantasy during a first-aid class Dim light. Four Israeli soldiers in a class on artificial respiration. The instructor demonstrates the procedure on a (female) doll lying on the floor. Sound of bells. At first the soldiers practice with the doll in military style. Eventually they dance an erotic dance with her. 10) Two soldiers with tied hands Dim light. The soldiers dance to Bach’s music. Their right hands are tied to their bodies while their left hands cover their eyes: “Our feelings and hands are tied up—one is not to react to stones, hatred and mockery.” Their movements are almost acrobatic. A shot is heard. 11) A soldier and a woman Dim light. An Arab man and an Arab woman dance to Bach’s music. The man wipes the floor with his kaffiyeh. The (allegorical) soldier watches. The Arabs leave the stage. 12) A soldier’s solo Dim light. The soldier takes off his cape and dances in his white tunic to Bach’s music. He attempts to leave the area enclosed by the net. He finds that he has himself been trapped. 13) Two children with flags Dim light. Two Arabs, a boy and a girl, dance with white flags to Bach’s music. “No flags this afternoon. But on the roofs linens wave in black, green, red and white. And when the colors are missing, the missing colors are replaced by the gaze.” There is a sense of victory in their dance, like in those of “revolutionary” style. Eventually, the girl climbs the net and affixes the flag to it. 14) A funeral Dim light. The image of a funeral. Three Arab men carry a corpse above their heads. Four Arab women dance behind in mourning to Bach’s music. The corpse is completely bandaged. Suddenly the corpse starts moving. Sounds of demonstration. The corpse dances. The funeral becomes a wildly joyous dance with the dead: “A living dead. Actually the deceased is more useful in his death than during his life. Every victim, even of indigestion,

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becomes a hero of the uprising and an instrument against us. Perhaps this way it is easier for the mourners. They are busy with ideology”. This ironic comment balances the ironic portrayal of the Israeli army. 15) A man and a corpse Dim light. The corpse returns to its death. One of the men dances with the corpse to Bach’s music. The scene conveys a genuine and even lyric sense of mourning. 16) Chasing and being chased Dim light. The soldier dances in his cape to Bach’s music. He resumes his own movements in the first scene. An Israeli and an Arab enter. They produce images of running: “It is not clear what the direction of the running is, who runs, who is chasing and who is chased, and running rules supreme.” The soldier takes off the military cape: In Sternfeld’s words: “In the cape he is forbidden to have feelings, whereas in his tunic he is allowed.” 17) Sachki, Sachki Dim light. The soldier dances in his tunic in front of the net and the Arabs dance behind it to a very well known Israeli song Sachki, Sachki (“I Believe”), lyrics by the great poet Shaul Tchernichovsky and music by Tuvia Shlonsky. This song expresses utter belief in the goodness of man and praises the universal human values cherished in Israeli culture. For many years it has been one of the anthems of Israeli society. In this last scene it is performed in Arabic translation. Although the original tune is preserved, the style and the voice of the singer are distinctly Arabic. Obviously, the intention is to shock the Israeli audience and it succeeds. The audience is stunned. The mere fact of translation conveys the idea of a nation that might have relinquished and transferred its most profound beliefs. The dance ends with Arabs and Israelis dancing in unison, in upright position, looking ahead with pride. The end combines irony and optimism. This sequence of scenes forms an open structure. Scenes can be added or subtracted at will. There is, however, a sense of unity, which derives from the single viewpoint of the reservist. There is also a sense of evolution from accepted views on the Arab Israeli conflict to a complete reversal, to seeing the possible rights of the other side. The piece has been performed 35 times, in Israel and abroad. The Israeli Foreign Office sponsored tours in Austria and Hungary. There was bitter criticism from all sides. The political right claimed that the company was engaging in PLO propaganda. The left accused them of speaking the language of the conqueror. The harshest criticism came from the kibbutz movement itself. There was also a police inquiry into whether or not the Palestinian flag was raised on stage. Fortunately, the company used the Arabs’ own device to outwit the authorities: they employed the colours instead of using actual flags. In all cases the criticism failed to relate to the new awareness projected by this work: how the persecutor becomes persecuted; how the victorious is also vanquished.

In perspective The arts, particularly the theatre, fulfil a crucial role in Israeli society, not only in mirroring it in various ways, but also as a major vehicle of criticism. It would appear that such criticism aims at the establishment, but, in fact, it seeks to shake the very foundations of the spectators’ beliefs. In this sense it becomes coextensive with self-criticism. Iin recent years, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become one of the main foci of self-criticism which explicitly aims at undermining the self-image of a glorious and benevolent conqueror.

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This drama of self-examination is clearly proliferating and Israelis crowd theatres that “dare” to present such works. This process, which does not affect only the “left” wing, undoubtedly reflects a genuine need. Reevaluation goes deeper than is usually acknowledged. In particular, there is a growing tendency to reexamine the rights of the opposing side. Seeing the possible justification of the other partner in the conflict is probably the only way to a solution, with no victory and no defeat. Compromise is perhaps not justice at its best, but is certainly a token of wisdom. This is the crucial experience reflected in Reservist Diary 89. This proliferation also indicates the need for producers, performers and spectators to come to terms with the devastating experience of controlling another’s nation’s destiny, and to incorporate it into a meaningful experience, whether the occupation is accepted as a necessary evil, as a fact of life, or rejected. This propensity towards a single salient issue in our communal life clearly reflects the enormous pressure that reality exercises on Israeli society. It is this pressure that is being transmuted into art. This is not at all surprising when dealing with arts such as the theatre or cinema, which are most articulate and readily become vociferous in their attempt, not necessarily to change reality, but to convert nightmarish raw material into meaningful experience. It is surprising, however, when it affects arts which are not designed, at least in the traditional view, to convey straightforward messages. Reservist Diary 89 reflects a drive “to speak”, i.e., to convey an unambiguous message; therefore, it resorts to a combination of media: music, dance, theatre and poetry. Although one can discern the boundaries between the various components and their mutual delimitation, it is clear that the authors succeeded in making a unitary comment on the conflict. All this requires a very special audience. Israel is a very small society which is deeply conscious of and concerned with its moral problems. In this sense Reservist Diary 89 indeed fulfils a crucial function for people who feel the need to confront rather than suppress the ugly sides of their national life, even if these are conceived of as having been imposed upon them. The ability of Israeli audiences—albeit not all of them—to confront their own ugliness, to live with it and to strive for an eventual change, is a good omen for a solution to the Arab Israeli conflict. A healthy society should promote art that constantly questions accepted attitudes and raises ideas that other elements of society wish to ban or suppress from consciousness.

Notes 1. A previous analysis of this work, with different aim and thesis, has been published under “Looking at and Living with our own Ugliness” in Claude Schumacher & Derek Fogg (Eds), Small is Beautiful. Glasgow: Theatre Studies Publications, 1991. 2. The quotations and explanations from the poet’s viewpoint are taken from an interview with Zvi Sternfeld carried out by myself in 1990. 3. The original Hebrew version used in this work and the English translation used in performances abroad are available. 4. The quotations and explanations from the choreographer viewpoint are taken from an interview with Rami Be’er carried out by myself in 1990. 5. The numbers and names of the scenes are quoted from the program. This work was videotaped and the tape is kept in the archives of the Kibbutz Dance Company.

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References Hegel, G.F.W. (1975) Aesthetics , Vol II . T.M. Knox (tr.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 1196 .

Imprisoning the National Identity: The West Bank in The Smile of the Lamb (the Book and the Film) and Yellow Wind Nurit Gertz The Open University

In three different works—a novel, a film and a documentary report also adapted for the stage, the Israeli authors set off for the West Bank, to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and attempt to describe it. All three works are closely linked. One is the novel by David Grossman, The Smile of the Lamb; the second is Shimon Dotan’s film based on the book; and the third is David Grossman’s documentary Yellow Wind, which also served as the source for a play of the same name. The same work lies behind the book and the film, and the same writer creates the link between the novel and the documentary; furthermore, in all three cases they are dealing with the same reality, either directly depicted or reflected artistically from the same ideological viewpoint: that of the Israeli left-wing that interprets the control over almost a million Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank as damaging to the Israeli State, impossible to maintain, and unjust. However, all three works were written according to different models, fulfilling different functions in the Israeli culture in particular and in western culture in general; and it is these functions, as well as the nature and position of the systems within which they were created, that determine the perspective of the depicted reality. Yellow Wind is a documentary text intended primarily to influence its readers’ views. Its main aim determines its nature: an attempt to reflect reality and to evaluate it clearly, reliably and authoritatively according to accepted conventions. The novel The Smile of the Lamb describes this same reality from an ambivalent point of view, accepted as a literary starting point and not directed by the need to lead the reader to any conclusions or action, but to steer him towards an understanding of the inherent complexities and contradictions. The film sets off from this same point—that of the non-committed art in western culture—but its dependence on a wide audience and on establishment funding leads it in the same directions as that of the documentary report.1 It blurs the contradictions and unifies the non-unified. These differences between the three texts are also dependent on the status of the systems within which they were created: the literary system as a stable, established system; and the two other systems—cinema and journalism—that are to a great extent dependent upon it, and which take their example from it and tend to make use of what has already become established and recognised within it. These three texts thus differ in having been written according to different models and within different systems. At the same time they were also written by the same author (The Smile of the Lamb and Yellow Wind), they are based on the same work (The Smile of the Lamb), and

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they describe the same reality from the same left-wing perspective in the Israeli culture. From their focal viewpoint in this culture the conflict between the two societies—Israeli and Palestinian—appears as a conflict without beginning or end, without hope or solution. All three works set off for the West Bank not only in order to depict the Palestinian reality happening there, but also to free the Palestinian Arab from the Zionist-Israeli dream in which he is imprisoned. To this end they adopt a means very familiar in Israeli literature and cinema—an exchange of roles between Jew and Arab and the blurring of differences in their identities. Each of the three works introduces such an exchange, each in its own way, but none of them achieves its apparent aim—and they fail to present either Israeli or Palestinian as possessing independent and equal identities. This failure is the most reliable testimony to the Israeli culture’s unsuccessful attempts to shatter the narrow confines of the national identity. The novel The Smile of the Lamb differs from the other two works in going several steps beyond the accepted exchange of roles. It not only exchanges places between the Jew and Arab, but also successively destroys any possible classification. In place of the dichotomous confrontation of the Jew with the Arab, it does not construct any other dichotomy but, rather, a pluralism of identities and outlooks. It thus testifies to a new direction in Hebrew literature; one that also characterises other novels of the period.2 In contrast to the novel The Smile of the Lamb, that shatters the authority of Israeli culture, the film and the documentary Yellow Wind attempt to devalue this culture, or to present it on the same level as Palestinian culture. The reports in Yellow Wind describe the Palestinian world realistically, and make use of the most effective literary means in order to convey the reader into this world. The film The Smile of the Lamb uses the finest cinematic means of expression to transmit the intense yearnings of the protagonists, the narrator and the author, into this same world. All of them, each in his own way, attempt to cross the borders that separate the two societies and to attach themselves to the Arab side. The border, however, remains. Neither society is able to cross it, as can be seen by the fact that the Jewish point of departure remains intact, despite the strong yearning towards the Arab world. In both the film and the documentary the Arab is examined according to his contribution to the Jewish culture; he is meant to remind this culture of what it has repressed and forgotten—the longing for his world is the longing of the Hebrew culture for “itself”—of course it remains merely an object of desire by the Jew, a naked echo of himself.3 The film and the documentary thus “repeat” the old model, that had been broken by the book The Smile of the Lamb. In that model the Jew is still engaged in a dialogue with himself, rather than with the opposing world.

The Smile of the Lamb: The Novel4 The novel The Smile of the Lamb is constructed in the form of a series of monologues that illuminates the events from the points of view of four protagonists: Uri, Hilmi, Katzman, and Shosh. Hilmi, the Palestinian, not only has his own monologues but he is also the major adressee of the monologues of his Jewish Israeli friend, Uri, and is the voice, so to speak, that guides the Israeli. It is also he who propels the plot to its climax by ordering the Israeli army to withdraw from all the occupied territories within 24 hours, and by threatening to kill Uri if the ultimatum is not met. Although his behavior actually reflects the secret wish of the Israeli hero, and in effect carries out a scheme that Uri himself had considered, Hilmi is in fact exercising his own will more than anything else.

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The novel does not merely assign its Arab protagonist a central role; it actually blurs the Arab stereotype that it invokes by constructing his values as neither derived from nor connected with the Israeli milieu. Hilmi and his son Yazdi are less troubled by the fact itself of their living under Israeli rule than by the insult and indignity that it imposes upon them. They take less umbrage at the physical indignity than at the offense that an Israeli woman soldier causes the elderly Arab when she asks him to show her his papers. It is the Israelis’ contempt, rather than their rifles, that “crushes them into the ground.” The fact that “there are no more men in our village” pains Hilmi and Yazdi more than anything else. It is in response to the cowardice of the villagers that he constructs the persona that fills his legends: a bold lion hunter, Sha’bn ibn Sha’bn. Thus the novel used models of Arab culture in order to liberate the Arab protagonist from the chains of the Jewish point of view. The Arab thus escapes, to a certain degree, the snare of Israeli concepts by which he has generally been shaped, including, to a certain extent, in this work too. While the Arab is given his own voice, several important Israeli characters in the novel sink into silence. Two of the protagonists represent two strata of leadership in Israeli Jewish culture: Avner as a leading figure and principal ideologist in the Labour Movement; and Katzman as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces. These figures, representative of the political and military leadership, are forced into silence in the novel; they are denied their own voices. Avner is not even given a monologue of his own; he is merely a player in the monologues of others. Katzman does not speak in the first person; the narrator puts the words into his mouth. The personae who set the tone and wielded authority in so many literary texts in the Hebrew cultures had, by the 1960s, become the objects of parody and satire (Lands of the Jackals, Death of the Old Man). In Grossman’s novel, they seem to have lost their voices altogether, and with them their authority; while the Arab, whom Hebrew culture dooms to silence, has acquired a voice of his own. The independence granted to the Arab values eliminates the possibility of combining Israelis and Arabs into one pair of binary oppositions. The novel does not offer a common criterion by which their two worlds may be judged. The Israelis judge the conflict in terms of power, the Arabs in terms of honor. Nothing connects these two sets of concepts, either by way of contradiction or of similarity. Each exists independently of the other; each within its own culture, with no strong link to the culture of the other. The dichotomy of Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab is further fractured when each of its domains is itself fragmented into contrasting parts. Each of these contrasts then fragments even more, until a stage is reached at which there is no point in dichotomizing the protagonists of the novel into clashing collectives. They find themselves in a dynamic whirlpool of constantly shifting and changing opposites. Both worlds—Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab—are populated by sane and insane people, dreamers and realists, “chatterboxes” and mutes. Both worlds segregate oppressors from oppressed, members of the collective from outsiders; but these new dichotomies disintegrate too. Each of the protagonists ceaselessly switches identities and group affiliations at any given moment of the plot, and each new group of affiliation emphasizes different attributes of his or her persona. Thus if the Arab is not a “true” Arab but an alien in Arab society, if the alien is a lunatic who makes common cause with the outcasts of the Jewish world, if even those who choose to live in prosaic reality fuel their imaginations with dreams and fantasies and if the dreams themselves are so different from one another that one cannot classify them under a common heading, then one can no longer determine who is the Arab and who is the Jew, who belongs

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to the collective and whom it has banned, who chooses a life of fantasy and who chooses one of reality. Each individual must be assessed separately, irrespective of his or her collective, group and labels. Even then, each of them remains complex, complicated and incomprehensible. Hilmi is clearly a Palestinian Arab. His style, his folk tales, his values are all fueled by the Arab reality around him. The legends he tells his son are not so different from those that circulate in his own village, and he sometimes uses them to reflect the life within it. His notion of passive struggle against the Jews, typified by silence and non-cooperation, is not substantially different from the Palestinian concept of sumud, “holding on by means of patient suffering” (139).5 His values of dignity and valor, too, are those of the Arabs in his village, although he invokes them to attack and criticize the villagers. Nevertheless, he is insane, a lunatic whom the villagers shun, condemn and abuse. Until an advanced age he does not speak at all; he even tries to teach his son the language of nature, not that of the collective. Father and son spend their days in the fields, amidst the flowers and butterflies, escaping together to a world of imagination and legend, far from the grasping collective hands of the culture in which they live. Thus Hilmi has one foot planted in the binary oppositions of the novel and the other planted outside them. He belongs to the Arab world and lives outside of it. He hovers above reality and rests within it as well. Moreover, although he lives at the opposite pole to Israeli society, several characters in this society resemble him more closely than do the Arab characters. In fact, Hilmi is not the only lunatic in the novel, he is not the only person shunned by his collective, and he is not the only protagonist who attempts to ascend from reality into the realms of imagination and legend. He has many Jewish partners: Katzman’s father; a boyhood friend of Avner; Avner himself; his daughter Shosh; and even Uri. Uri, like Hilmi, lives in a world of fantasies and is shunned by those around him. He obeys an inner voice that speaks to him in a language other than that of the collective. Like Hilmi, Uri prefers silence to words. The similarity between the two causes them to form a familial relationship of sorts. This is why Uri regards Hilmi as a surrogate for his dead grandfather (89) and Hilmi regards Uri as a son. The relationship between Uri and Hilmi, and between the two of them and other fantasizers in the novel, thus shatters the dichotomy of Arabs and Jews and replaces it with one of daydreamers and realists; of outsiders and members of the collective. The new set of opposites, however, disintegrates when the fantasies prove to be part of reality and the outsiders part of the collective. The collective is juxtaposed to the world of the outsider. It “sets terms” for many of the protagonists and forces them to express themselves only in a language that is not their own, i.e., the language of their society.6 The burden of this language deprives them of their personal identity and, ironically, deprives their cultures of their distinctive identity. The thickness of the cliches at first causes the two cultures to look alike. As the plot progresses, however, even this identity of cultures is breached and fragmented. The very grouping of “members of the collective” is not fully applicable. Even those who evade its grasp belong to it to some extent, and those who choose to conform with the collective norms violate them, struggle against them, and attempt to discover what lies beyond them. What they find is too complex and elusive to categorize and define under the restrictive heading of “collective.” The collective cliches are most predominant in the rhetoric of Yazdi from the moment he joins the Arab underground organization, but they also inform the remarks of the Israeli protagonists, especially those who choose to live within their collective frameworks. Even Uri

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and Hilmi are not totally free of them. The cliches of both groups are so similar that the two populations seem at times to speak the same language. When Yazdi argues with his father—“When faced with ruthlessness, you have to respond with force. The iron fist will strike the steel fist…. Our youth is fed up with humiliation”; (214) “It’s no use, O Father, all they understand is force” (31)—he sounds like a worn-out recording of Hebrew slogans reiterated over the past years. But when Uri attempts to persuade Hilmi into following his example and asserts, “Together we will smash the cycle of injustice” (205) or “The occupation is poisoning the lives of both peoples” (100), he too uses the same hackneyed rhetoric of cliches, even if his intention is the opposite. This is the language Avner has handed down to his daughter, Shosh, and this is why, while still very young, she caused general amazement when she wrote a composition on “Youth’s Hunger for Values.” The binational collective therefore imposes its own rhetoric on some of the protagonists, especially those who have enslaved themselves to it: Yazdi on the one hand and the Jewish protagonists—Katzman, Shosh and Avner—on the other. However, just as those who flee the collective sometimes prove to be its prisoners, so do those imprisoned by the collective attempt to liberate themselves from it, to find the “true core of their identity” that lies beyond the words that others have embedded in them. The protagonists are unable to reach beyond the words themselves. If the rhetoric of the collective does not allow them to touch reality, then reality, in turn, cannot reach consciousness at all without this rhetoric.7 The protagonists attempt to resolve the paradox but do not succeed. Thus the tension that cuts across the collectivist rhetoric and the personal identity melts away, like all the other tensions. By doing so, it prevents any further possibility of a simple and crude distinction between those who speak the collective language and those who repudiate it. The absolute authority of the Israeli culture is thus shattered in the novel, being replaced not by an alternative authority but, rather, by non-authority: a regime without masters, one in which full respect is conferred on numerous, diverse cultural milieus that co-exist in free, open interplay, with neither rules nor rulemaker. In this new game, every individual’s right to recognition and dignity is upheld, but there is a deep concealed wonder about the very possibility of placing the two cultures side by side, on the basis of some common factor. Such a basis is not found in the book.

The Smile of the Lamb: The Film Katzman, an Israeli officer of Polish extraction, is played in the film The Smile of the Lamb by an Arab actor, Makhram Khoury. Uri, the innocent lad, close in spirit and in views to a political movement such as “Peace Now” (comprised mostly of Jews of western origin) is played by Rami Danon, an actor of eastern Jewish origin. Finally, Hilmi, the Arab hero, is played by Tongil Kortaez, a Turkish actor. Thus Shimon Dotan’s film strives in its own way to breach the lines that demarcate the heroes’ collective identities. In fact, however, these lines are not breached. The Jewish and Arab identities struggle with each other in the film, exchange positions, melodies and languages. Nevertheless, they are posited against each other in a state of firm dichotomy in which the Arab world is the source of the Israeli’s yearnings. In the book too, the Arab world of Hilmi played the same role, but the book broke down this world into its various components, as it did with the world of the Jews. The film, on the other hand, leaves both

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worlds intact, and thus, when all is said and done, the Palestinian Arab figure is not given its own, independent contour; instead, it serves the Israeli identity. The locations in which the Jewish protagonists of the film move about are closed, dark, narrow spaces, either raucous and bustling or alien and estranged. These locations are the corridors of the military governor or the Museum of Tel Aviv. They are contrasted with the open spaces of the fields in which the Arab moves about, and with the bold, contrasting colors of the landscape in which he lives: the soft brown of the soil, the glaring yellow of the sun, the white of the rocks, and the blinding light of the blue sky. The Israeli protagonists dart about in this landscape and cross it quickly, by car and on foot, looking like strangers within it. The Arab, in contrast, blends into it by means of the brown and yellow of his clothing and his position in the frame. In many shots he dominates a landscape that spreads out behind him, in the background. The move from the Jewish to Arab landscape is also a transformation from darkness to light, and is featured prominently when the film cuts sharply from the dark screen that ends the scenes in Tel Aviv Museum to the light of the mountains in which Hilmi lives. The film The Smile of the Lamb prefers not only the Arab landscapes but the Arab voices as well. The German language spoken by Shosh in the museum is associated with American music played at thunderous volume against the background of the somnolent landscape (photographed with a slow pan that further underscores its tranquility); the German language and the American music seem to be alien implants in an alien setting. In contrast the Arab music blends into the sounds of nature, integrating with them. Not only are the Israeli and the Arab worlds contrasted with each other; their places are reversed. In the beginning of the film, Uri tries to “sell” the Arabs the Zionist dream of making the desert bloom, but fails to do so. He joins the staff of his friend Katzman, the military governor, believing in the possibility of establishing an enlightened rule of occupation. He begins his duty with a speech before a handful of villagers in which he confidently and enthusiastically promises to bring them technology and culture. These promises are viewed in an ironic light because he cannot find an Arabic translation for an expression he culls from the Zionist lexicon: “flowering garden.” Near the end of the film, as Hilmi devises his ultimatum, Uri keeps himself busy by erecting fortifications and irrigating the green patch in front of the cave. Now he fulfills that same Zionist dream that he had tried to bring to the village. However, he does this in a most “un-Zionist” and unexpected way: his self-defense and cultivation of the wasteland are now aimed against Israeli society. At this stage, Uri and Hilmi exchange identities. At first they switch positions, alternating between the foreground and the background of the picture. Later on Uri, who has been so active and energetic, becomes lethargic while Hilmi brims with vigor and motion. In the meantime the two characters also switch clothing. Uri takes off his army uniform and puts on Hilmi’s hat and robe. Now he, like Hilmi, blends into the landscape instead of relentlessly darting about within it. Just as the Zionist dream is transferred to the Arab side, so are Zionist melodies. Songs such as “Jerusalem of Gold” are sung in Arabic, with Arabic vocal affectations and the accompaniment of an Arabic orchestra; the Israelis, in turn, sing foreign songs in foreign languages. The film thus reveals a preference for the Arab world; as did the book. However, in the book this preference serves only as a starting point. It is progressively weakened as it becomes clear that the Arab world is not homogenous and that the criteria for judging it, like judging the Jewish world—are faulty. As the Arab in the film takes over the values of Zionism, so is he entrusted with the activity needed to fulfill them. In the opening scene, Hilmi is seen descending the mountain. At its end,

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Hilmi is observed ascending to the summit of this same mountain. Between the two scenes, the initiative of action is passed from the Israeli hero, Katzman, to the Arab hero, Hilmi. Thus the “cinematic” Hilmi like the “literary” Hilmi is given a central role, reserved in both the literature and cinema of previous years for Jews alone. The chief protagonist of the film, Uri, is driven by events, reacting to them rather than initiating them. At the beginning of the film, it is Katzman who propels the plot. Katzman’s affair with Uri’s wife, and the collective punishments he imposes on the Arab village, lead Uri into a sequence of reactions and counterreactions, and finally lead him to Hilmi’s cave and to collaboration in the ultimatum. However, Katzman loses his strength as the plot progresses, while the Arab protagonist gains it. Uri flees from his friend Katzman, breaks relations with him, crosses into Hilmi’s “sphere of influence” and even fills the role of his son. Hilmi now drives not only Uri but also Katzman and the entire Israeli army. In the book too the standard of values and the action passes to the Arab side. However, there the exchange of places is used to indicate the complete shattering of categories and classifications. The film uses the categories which the book has shattered, but modifies and reverses the value judgement that they make. The Arab time, space and sounds are the ones that the film prefers. The main Israeli protagonist forfeits his primacy to the Arab hero; the Israeli and the Arab switch positions, clothing and melodies. However, if the Jewish voice is a fading and false one, the Arab voice is revealed, only as its echo. Though the Arab speaks in his own voice, and plays his own melodies, he expresses in fact what the Jew has discarded: his songs, his beliefs and his dreams: in fact, everything that characterizes the Arab (the beauty of his fields, his natural landscapes, his history) are nothing but the Israeli western and Zionist dream projected onto the Arab—a dream in which the Israeli immerses himself in the East and in the country’s indigenous landscapes, colours and history. Consequently, the Arab in this case, as in many of the new political films, is admittedly granted some sympathy but is devoid of uniqueness, independence, and traits of his own. Such a situation rules out the possibility of genuine cultural exchange and true dialogue.

Yellow Wind The documentary reports in Yellow Wind are aimed at depicting a genuine rather than fictional reality, and they have a clear ideological aim: to convince the reader of the need to relinquish the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and even to act to achieve this: For 20 years we have been living in a false and controversial situation, based on illusions, on a shaky balance between hatred and fear, in an emotional and conscious desert. From this point of view the occupation is a great personal challenge. A human cross-roads that demands you take action or a stand. (174)8 The “extra fictional” reality of the reports is evaluated unequivocally through the use of several well tried rhetorical means. A situation like the one that we are hanging on to here cannot go on for long. And if it does go on—it demands a fatal price. (127)

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says the writer and lends his words a wide humanist-universal authority by basing them on claims familiar to western culture, art, science, philosophy and literature. These words are even presented as objective truth because the speaker establishes himself as a neutral authority—he criticizes the society with which he identifies (the Arab victim) while presenting sympathetically the society that he condemns (e.g. the Jewish settlers); he accuses the Palestinian leadership of time and again failing to grasp opportunities for peace;(13) he is outraged by the Arab education towards hatred (21); and, on the other hand, he is ready to recognise that the settlers have established magnificent communities, that are symbols of the land of Israel at work, of the pioneering settlement and the manual labour that accompanied it (88). The firm stand of the journalist against keeping the Arab territories under Israeli control thus “enlists” objective support for itself, under the banner of which he tries to make his voice heard and convince his readers that the occupation is “a sphinx ready to pounce on each and every one of us, demanding a clear answer. A stand and a decision.” (170). The different methods of evaluation employed by the documentary text and the novel The Smile of the Lamb are revealed as the two works introduce the same perspectives: in these cases, beliefs that were developed in Yellow Wind by the author are negated in The Smile of the Lamb; they are cancelled by the protagonists’ actions, or become the focus for argument between them. Israeli terms of speech find their place in the mouths of Palestinians and words of wisdom find expression in crazy delusions. The author’s political ideology, as expressed in Yellow Wind, becomes just one element among a far greater discussion in the novel. For example, Hilmi’s attempt at procuring absolute justice is presented in The Smile of the Lamb as both possible and impossible, as justified and unjustified, and as both the correct and incorrect way out of the private and political anguish. This same attempt fails on all counts in Yellow Wind. Grossman states: He who seeks absolute justice—he too is avoiding decision and action, and I am not looking for absolute justice, nor to settle old accounts, but for a realistic life, merely flawed but bearable, with as little suffering as possible. (36) In the novel this viewpoint is conveyed by Katzman and presented as part of a mixture of conflicting approaches that he himself does not uphold. It is in fact the opposite standpoint—the longing to go beyond the flawed but tolerated life; to soar upwards to the spheres of absolute values—that guide all the novel’s protagonists, although it too is cancelled and contradicted by events. In Yellow Wind an interview takes place with the Palestinian writer Raja Shahadeh, who states: Of the two ways that lie open to me as a Palestinian—to surrender to the occupation and collaborate, or to take up arms against it; both possibilities which I consider as inhuman—I choose the third way. To remain here. To watch how my home becomes my prison, that I don’t want to leave, because then the jailer won’t let me return. (36) This is the essence of Hilmi’s viewpoint and it leads both of them to behave in the same way: Hilmi leaves the Arab village and struggles against Arab and Jew alike. Raja Shahadeh “reveals himself (sometimes very dangerously) to the probing eyes of the Israelis, and also throws down the

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gauntlet to the Arab community”. Both of them thus shake off the collective identity and constantly reconfirm their differences, “their being” (Yellow Wind). However, Shahadeh is a respected and accepted journalist and Hilmi is a crazy visionary; and the same words spoken by each of them are accorded different weight and authority. In Yellow Wind the author’s views and those of the speakers with whom he identifies are aimed at extricating them from “a false and controversial situation, based upon illusions”. However, in actuality it is impossible to follow this course. The documentary that attempted to blur the distinction between the Arab and the Jewish worlds, in the final analysis had, as in the film and the play adapted from it, to leave in place the enormous gap between them. Each of the chapters in the book opens with a description of distance: these are the geographic or spiritual distances that the Israeli must travel in order to reach the Palestinian side. It is the narrator, writer of the reports, who crosses these distances and reaches the opposite side. In one chapter he leaves his home in Jerusalem and arrives in Hebron at the Dehaishe refugee camp. In another chapter he travels the distance from the military check-post on the road to the refugee camp. A third chapter opens with his assumption that no-one studies at the Universities of the West Bank—they only throw stones and set tires alight—an assumption that is completely refuted when he actually gets there. He appears to have made the journey from Jerusalem to Hebron, from the army to the refugee camp, from unawareness to awareness, from unfamiliarity to familiarity. During this journey he switches back and forth between the Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints, penetrating ever deeper into the reality of the West Bank. The ending of several of the chapters signifies the end of the way, with a sort of vague possibility of a link between the two societies. At the end of one chapter an encounter takes place on Allenby bridge between an Israeli and a Palestinian; at the end of another chapter the narrator returns from the West Bank to Jerusalem and discovers “a faint halo behind each person, a sort of briefly glimpsed double”—the double from Nablus or Dehaishe. However the link is a false one, and the way from “here” to “there” is a road leading nowhere. The distances, as it appears during the course of the documentary, or even from reading the play adapted from it, cannot be crossed because they separate between he who has everything and he who has nothing—not even the hope of change (9); between those who live in the open, in the light of day, in reality, in freedom, and those who live in homes that have become their prisons, existing as the “living dead”, hidden from sight (9, 12, 15), doubles and faded reflections of the people they once were (10). These are the distances that separate between those with identity and those whose identity has been taken from them (12); between those whose lives and actions take place within history and also motivate it (chap. 4), and those for whom everything happens “Not here. Not now. In another place. In a more splendid past or in a golden future.” For these people the only thing present in the here and now is “the non-existence” (10). This distance, between such contrasting and absolute poles, appears to be impassible; and a description of the deep hatred on one side and the insensitivity and disregard for suffering on the other side, increase it even further. Even the narrator himself cannot bridge these distances between the two worlds. He observes life on the West Bank but is only able to absorb it through his own experiences and memories: the Jordan river bridge check-posts remind him of his army days in basic training; the Arabs’ longing for their homeland reminds him of the nostalgic poems of Bialik and Yehuda Halevi; a child playing music on a rooftop reminds him of Fiddler on the Roof and

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the PLO reminds him of the IZL (Irgun Zva’i Leumi—former illegal Jewish guerrilla organisation). The main distinguishing features that the writer finds in the Arab society—a society that exists beyond history and lives on memories and distracting dreams—are in fact the features of the Jewish society as reflected by the Zionist vision. Throughout the years the Hebrew texts had “clothed” the Arab with this image of the Diaspora Jew, thereby endowing him with the identity that the Israeli had already cast off.9 This Jewish image of the Arab is accompanied in the documentary by an additional image of the Arab as a mythical, eternal force, who has always been and always will be a part of this place. For many years Hebrew literature described him in this way; and so too is he depicted in the film The Smile of the Lamb as well as in the documentary: the geranium plants in the courtyard in Dehaishe appear to “draw their sustenance from some distant, biblical fertile source” (8). The strongest weapon of the Arabs against the Israelis is their decision not to change, to remain “opposing you as a curse cast in concrete” (10); the future of the children of the refugee camps “is engraved on their faces like an ancient, fossilized inscription” (16), etc. The narrator in Yellow Wind attempts to turn the Palestinian Arab from a insubstantial figure into an actual one but in order to describe this actuality he has at his command only those same old stereotypes that had shaped the Arab as an image of the Israeli’s yearnings, fears and dreams. He thus confronts those same obstacles faced by the book and the film The Smile of the Lamb and deals with them in the same way as in the film, but not the book.

Three Cultural Systems In the three works, the book, the film and the documentary, the narrators and protagonists strive to set the Palestinian and Israeli cultures on an equal basis, to release Israeli society from its chains of constricted nationalism and give it a more humanistic countenance. All three works present the same ideology—one which is common to the Israeli left wing. However, this common ideology becomes splintered during the course of the various examples and the different systems, thus obtaining different ideological nuances. Grossman’s book The Smile of the Lamb maintains the conventions established in the Israeli fiction of the 1960s, but also diverges from them in proposing new directions, partially drawn from post-modernist western literature. The established status of Israeli literature and its institutions on the one hand, and the popularity that their texts have achieved in recent years on the other hand, determined the nature of this process. Israeli literature of the 1980s chose to confront those central and established motifs of the 1960s by intensifying some of the components and exchanging others for new ones. These changes were adapted to western post-modernism motifs by creating a rich, albeit loosely interwoven, collage. Such a collage demands a willingness to invest effort in reading and interpreting and the literature was able to rely on such accommodation from its readers. The book thus provided a new answer to the old demand that literature demonstrate richness and complexity. The film The Smile of the Lamb and the documentary Yellow Wind were created within a system that possessed neither repertoire nor fixed canons; it has no consistent history during which main and peripheral themes become interchanged, and it is not given the esteem conferred upon literature. In such systems, as shown by Even Zohar,10 there is a tendency to reliance on other systems as a source of change and renewal, although in general they mainly borrow the same old patterns, or simplify existing ones. In the case of political cinema and the leftist Israeli journalism of the 1980s (new journals such as Headline and Politika, local papers,

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Hadashot and others), these are partly the patterns of the literature of the 1960s, and especially the main theme of the tension between vast expanses of nature in the Arab world and confined and weary Jewish culture.11 The book The Smile of the Lamb opened its pages to a rich pluralism of beliefs and views that, although they express a humanist tolerance towards all that is strange and different, also conceal a profound sense of anguish, common to Grossman and other writers: the book presents no one single stance in the light of which matters can be examined and pursued in order to determine a way out of an impossible political situation (13). The incoherent post-modernist form of the novel also determines the nature of its ideological statement. It proposes the possibility of a world without collective identities but also rejects it. The film does not avoid this anguish but it does express it in other ways. At first glance the proffered views are described, defined and well delineated: they are the views emerging from the Arab world. However, these views are not concrete ones; there is no real possibility of grasping them and the resulting anguish is clearly revealed when death hounds the protagonists towards their sanctuary—to legend and fable. The documentary does suggest ways by which to overcome the anguish common to both film and novel. However, in the light of the described reality and the inability of the narrator to present it independently, and not bound to the Israeli view, these ways appear to be unattainable. The models are different, as are the language and the views presented, yet none the less all three works attest, each in its own particular language, to the same painful and hopeless attempt to breach the boundaries of the Israeli identity and to the ultimate failure to do so. They thereby express not only the limitations and constraints of the system within which they function, but also the common viewpoint of many left-wing levels of opinion within the Israeli culture.

Notes 1. On the relation between fictional and non-fictional texts see Weiss, 1978 and Brinkner, 1980. The present article does not deal with adaptation for the theatre of the documentary Yellow Wind. This adaptation is very similar to the cinematic adaptation of The Smile of the Lamb. On the way in which the Israeli theatre shapes the Arab image see, for example, Urian (1990); on adaptation of Israeli Literature to the cinema, see my book (1994). 2. See Anton Shamas’s book Arabesques; Ittamar Levi’s book Letters of the Sun and Letters of the Moon; A.B. Yehoshua’s book Mr Manni, and others. The manner of depicting the Arab as an image of Jewish yearnings, inclinations and fears has been frequently analysed. See Shaked (1989), Alter (1977), Levi (1983), Morahg (1986), Ramraz Rauch, 1989, Ben Ezer (1983), Domb (1982), Even-Zohar (1979), Bargad (1977). See also articles by Ofir (1991), Hever (1988) and Feldman (1989). The theoretical background to the discussion of the structure of systems can be found in Even-Zohar (1990) and Bourdieu (1980); and the theoretical background to the discussion on the relationship between the Jewish identity and the Arab can be found in Foucault (1972) and Lyotard (1983). 3. And see Foucault (1972), Lyotard (1983), White (1978), Derrida (1981); and see discussions by these writers in Tavor-Bennet (1989). 4. All numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the novel; see Grossman (1983).

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5. In the predominant literature of the 1940s and 1950s and in non-literary texts of the following years. 6. For this issue see the chapter on Lacan in Tavor’s book. 7. See Shoham (1983). 8. All numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the book; see Grossman. 9. See, for example, the press of the War of Independence; Izhar’s short-story Hirbat Hizha; and see my article 1990, and also note 2. 10. Even-Zohar (1990), 53–72. 11. We refer of course to models accepted as mainstream and not to the entire literary production.

References Alter, R. (1977) Images of the Arab in Israeli Fiction. Hebrew Studies XVIII pp. 60–69. Bargad, W. (1977) The Image of the Arab in Israeli Literature. Hebrew Annual Review 1 pp. 53–65. Ben Ezer, E. (1983) Tzel Pardesim VeHar Ga’ash [Orchard shade and volcano]. Moznaim 5–6 (October-November 1983) pp. 57–59. (in Hebrew) Benjamin, A. (Ed.) (1989) The Lyotard Reader, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (1980) Question de Sociologie, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Derrida, J. (1981) Positions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Domb, R. (1982) The Arab in Hebrew Prose, London: Vallentine & Mitchell. Even-Zohar, B. (1988a) System, Repertoire, in N.Gertz, 1988. Even-Zohar, I. (1981) The Emergence of Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine 1882–1948. Studies in Zionism 4 pp. 167–184. Even-Zohar, I. (1990) Polysystem Studies. Poetics Today, 11, 1 (Spring 1990). Feldman, Y. (1989) The Other Within in Contemporary Israeli Fiction. Middle East Review (Fall 1989) pp. 53–60. Foucault, M. (1972) Histoire de la Folie a l’Age Classique, Paris: Gallimard. Gertz, N. (1983) Hirbat Hizha Veha-boker SheLeMohorat [Hirbat Hizha and the Morning After], Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad and the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. (in Hebrew) Gertz, N. (1988) Sifrut ve-Ideologia be-Eretz Yisrael bi-Shnot ha-Shloshim [Literature and Ideology in Israel in the 1930s], Tel Aviv: The Open University. (in Hebrew) Grossman, D. (1983) Hiyukh ha-Gedi [The Smile of the Lamb], Tel Aviv: Siman Keriyya, Hakibbutz Hameuhad. (in Hebrew) Grossman, D. (1987) Hazeman Hatsahov [Yellow Wind], Tel Aviv:Hakibbutz Hameuchad. (in Hebrew). Hever, H. (1988) Tchernichowsky, Einstein, ve-Tarbut ha-Kibush [Tchernichowsky, Einstein and the Culture of Occupation], Ha’aretz, 15 Jan. Levi, S. (1983) Shevuyim BeBidion [Prisoners in Imagination]. Moznaim 5–6 (October-November 1983) pp. 70–73. Lyotard, J.-F. (1983) The Different, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Morahg, G. (1986) New Images of Arabs in Israeli Fiction, Prooftexts 6, pp. 147–162. Ophir, A. (1991a) Bein Dialog LeM’avak [Between dialogue and struggle]. Masa, 12 July. (in Hebrew) Perry, M. (1986) The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a Metaphor in Recent Israeli Fiction. Poetics Today7, 4, pp. 603–621. Perry, M. and Schwartz, Y. (1982) The Thing Against Itself. Synopsis 4, Tel Aviv.

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Ramras-Rauch, G. (1989) The Arab in Israeli Literature, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Shoham, H. (1983) Ha-Matzav ha-Yisraeli: Ben Metziut le-Hazayah [The Israeli situation: between reality and illusion], Yedioth Aharonoth, 21 Oct. (in Hebrew) Shaked, G. (1989) The Arab in Israeli Fiction. Modern Hebrew Literature 3 (Fall 1989) pp. 17– 21. Shamas, A. (1990) Hu Hitbalbel ba-Tafqidim [He confused his roles]. In Avanti Popolo, R.Schorr & O.Lubin (Eds.) Avanti Popolo, Jerusalem: Kinneret. Shohat, E. (1989) Israeli Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Tavor-Bennet, E. (1989) Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Urian, D. The Image of the Arab in Israeli Theatre—From Competition to Exploitation (1912–1990) White, H. (1978) Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.

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Theatre and the Intifada1 Dan Urian Haifa University (Translated by Naomi Paz)

Art Borreca’s article on “Political Dramaturgy”, analysing the dramatic and theatrical aspects of the appearances of politicians as actors, ends with the following consoling thought: “If one chooses to argue that politics is theatre […] one is not saying that politics can or will replace the art of the theatre.” (Borreca, 1993 p. 73) The reverse might equally be applied to political theatre, in which playwrights, directors and actors try to change politicians and politics through artistic works criticizing their dealings with serious conflicts, particularly with national disputes? Many playwrights and other theatre makers have reacted and continue to react to a disputed political reality by criticizing the politicians for their past blindness or errors and for their present mistaken policies. In the last decade since the War in Lebanon, and particularly against the background of the intifada, it would appear that the Jewish-Israeli playwright, the Palestinian playwright and other makers of the Arab-Israeli theatre have not only taken stands following events in the past, but are also analysing current situations, observing those crises that the politicians were unable to discern before they arose, impartially assessing the chances for a solution and revealing the obstacles in the opposing camp as well as predicting future developments in the crisis. These theatre people in effect think and act like politicians. In the Israeli theatre in 1993 five plays about the war in Lebanon are currently being staged. Several of the playwrights are veterans of that war and their works attempt to come to terms with the trauma whose effects have been felt in the Israeli culture for over a decade since the war broke out. The War in Lebanon, which was termed “a war of choice”, and later “a cheating war”, was a military campaign that led to great discord in Israel; a war that shook national consensus and created a protest movement during the years in which Israeli soldiers as well as many Palestinians fell victim to its entanglements. Among part of the Jewish public there was an increasing feeling that no solution to the problem was possible other than an arrangement with the Palestinians, the cost of which was widely debated. The War in Lebanon and the intifada, as well as the increasing strength of the right-wing extremists in Israel, consolidated a strong artistic opposition to the policies of the right-wing and the national unity governments. In the 1980s and 90s theatre, cinema, literature, art, popular and rock music, and folk culture (such as military protest songs), demonstrated objection to a policy of force, and demanded compromise with the Palestinians. The war which had shaken their belief in the politicians,

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strengthened the desire of several playwrights to become involved in the political reality and to influence the dispute towards the direction of a solution. At first they formed part of a protest movement that encompassed many arts; later, particularly during the period of the intifada, they were partners to the process of settling the dispute, no longer being satisfied with merely expressing a desire for peace but also firmly depicting the difficulties that lay in the way. Catch 82 by Roi Reshkes, a play about the War in Lebanon that was staged in 1992 against the background of the intifada, demonstrates the changes undergone in Israeli playwriting in relation to “the Palestinian Question”. Ziv, the protagonist in this monodrama, is a kibbutznik, a soldier during the battle in Beirut, who comes across a group of several “of our mates from the Falanges” who are raping an Arab woman: Perhaps sixty years old…it’s hard to tell the age of these Arabs…somewhere between my mother and my grandmother…she lay on her back on the ground […] and one of them, sort of fat, was fucking her like an animal […] the guy who was just beginning to fuck her got really mad that she fainted just as his turn came […] he took the k’latch [nikov] from the guy who’d screwed her before him, jammed it in her mouth and blew her head off […] and I’d just finished my sandwich and climbed down off the crate. The guys asked me what was going on and I said they were fucking the hell out of some old Arab woman […] I thought that’s how it is there, and that was that. Sort of like how on our kibbutz we go barefoot to the dining hall and ride bicycles all the time; so they rape old women and shoot them in the head when it’s over. The war leads to immense changes in Ziv: he leaves the army, separates from his girlfriend and finds himself almost outcast by his family and the kibbutz. The proximity and ensuing friction enforced upon Ziv and upon many Israelis as a result of contact with a hostile and rebellious civilian Arab population, in the War in Lebanon and during the intifada, turned the Arab into a more real and violent image, thereby enhancing fears, while paradoxically also increasing the desire to settle the dispute even at the cost of a painful compromise. This proximity and fear found many expressions, particularly in the Israeli theatre and cinema and the Hebrew literature. During this last decade the Palestinians have become a part of the daily reality of violent conflict and peace talks that have brought them closer to the world of all Israelis—and not just those serving in the occupied territories. As in earlier periods, the “Arab Question” that had become the “Palestinian Question”, also awoke a sense of ethnocentric frustration among the Jewish-Israeli population. The Palestinian was perceived not only as one who was being nationally and economically wronged, but sometimes also as one who “forced” the young Jewish Israeli to commit acts opposed to his conscience and against the liberal values of his education. In particular, the increase in hostile actions by Palestinians towards Jews strengthened the sense of enmity, hatred and fear that already existed among a great part of the Jewish population. The political changes led to the Jewish-Israeli, Arab-Israel and Palestinian theatres in Israel and the occupied territories focusing their repertoires in the years 1982–1993 upon the “Palestinian Question”. Almost one hundred theatrical texts relating directly or indirectly to this subject were staged during these years, and half of them dealt with the Arabs in the occupied territories. For the first time several of the plays were staged on the “big stage” of the Israeli established theatres before wide and varied audiences. Most of the plays, however, continued

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to be performed as in the past in the “fringe” theatre: on the small stages which had traditionally provided the rival framework to the majority policy. The biographies of playwrights writing during this period attest to the influence of their attitude to the Palestinians. Young writers who served in Lebanon during the war expressed their memories and attitudes and those of their peer groups in plays, and several of them also continued dealing with the “Palestinian Question” in relation to the intifada. An increasing involvement in the Israeli theatre on the part of Arab-Israeli actors and directors and of Arab-Israeli playwrights characterized this period as part of the process in which the Israeli Arab and the Palestinian from the territories spoke on the Israeli stage, in their own language or the language of the majority, and presented the difficulties and opposing sides of the dispute. The Israeli playwright during these years took a standpoint of transindividual as described by Lucien Goldmann. In his plays he succeeded in inverting the discourse of a particular section of Israeli society and presenting it as a vision du monde. (Goldmann, 1966) These Israeli theatrical texts, mainly from the 1980s, throw light upon the attitude of a particular cultural group towards the Israeli Arabs and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The Israeli playwrights (Yehoshua Sobol, Miriam Kaney, Hillel Mittelpunkt, Joseph Mundi, Daniella Carmi, Sami Michael, Yitzhak Ben-Ner, Hanoch Levin, Ruth Hazan, Shmuel Hasfari, and others) belong to an influential minority of the mostly native Jewish population, well educated and of Western origins, whose attitude to the Arabs is generally positive and aspiring towards co-existence or at least an accord. These playwrights write for directors and actors who mainly identify with their own opinions and for an audience with whom they are familiar, and with which they clarify problems and share standpoints. In many theatrical texts in which the “Arab Question” is raised the Israeli Arab is replaced by the Palestinian. The genre too has undergone change. The majority of earlier texts from the 1970s presented the Israeli Arab or Palestinian in satire, collage or comedy. During the present period Arab characters can still be found in satirical plays or collages, but the majority of plays tend more to “realism”, perhaps because the problems are no longer repressed, and in the theatre at least the political playwright presents them as a reality that must be confronted. The scenery has also undergone change—in the earlier period as attested to by the titles of plays of the 1970s containing Arab characters (The Sub-tenant, Flatmates, Neighbours, A House in Dispute) the action of many plays was located in a closed and private area. The connection with the Arab was concealed in “interior” scenes and not disclosed in “public” places. In plays of the last decade Jews and Palestinians also encounter one another on stages depicting public areas and those serving for political discussion, such as the television studio and the coffee house; as well as other stages such as hospitals, holiday resorts and even the Holocaust Museum. In most of the plays of the Israeli theatre which introduce the Palestinian theme, Israeli Arab actors play the Palestinian roles. These actors, who have gained admirers among the Jewish audience, include Makram Khouri, Yussef Abu Vardo, Salim Dao, Muhammad Bakri, Salwah Nakara and others. The appearance of Israeli Arabs on the stage as Palestinian representatives in many ways recalls the role of mediator attempted by several of the leaders of the Arab Israeli community—from the “Joint Monitoring Committee” (heads of local councils and members of the Knesset—the Israeli parliament) in the process of establishing peace with the Palestinians.

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Political prediction in the theatre The intifada broke out on December 9th, 1987, a few days after the first performances of Jehoshua Sobol’s The Jerusalem Syndrome. The play presents an analogy between past and present. Its present lies in some unspecified future not far from the actual present of the production and its past is the time of the destruction of the Second Temple (66 A.D.). The soldiers of a contemporary army, tired and hungry, and wearing the uniform of the IDF, encounter a strange group of mentally ill patients who are presenting a play about the great rebellion against the Romans which ended in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The coupling of the playwright’s vision of the Apolcalypse, as relating to the danger of destruction of the Third Temple, with the events in the occupied territories, was perhaps the main factor in hindering the play’s acceptance. It offended those spectators who considered that the play was questioning the value of the Jewish heroic myth ethos. Sobol did not expect the uprising, that broke out at the same time that rehearsals were taking place, but he was able to imagine a similar reality: “While writing The Jerusalem Syndrome I experienced the land flowing with images arousing fear and hatred (‘the two-legged animals’, ‘the drugged cockroaches’, ‘the terrorists’), addicted to its own fears and awash in violent and destructive urges.” “Prophesies” and warnings by playwrights about violent outbreaks had been mounted on the stage even earlier. The rock opera Mammy by Hillel Mittelpunkt presented the afflictions and desire for revenge of the Palestinians as a necessary factor in the violent outbreaks. Mammy is raped by “seven oppressed/seven Palestinians” to the accompaniment of guitars and gentle rock music (by Yossi Mar-Haim and Ehud Banai) forming a counterpoint to the visual brutality of the scene and thereby enhancing its effectiveness: “Twenty years of occupation/we shall wait no longer/erect, with our seed we shall redeem Palestine.” An unstoppable violence—neither Mammy’s pleas, nor the kinship of brotherhood between Ishmael and Isaac, nor the brotherhood of the “screwed” that exists between the refugee camp and the remote town from which she comes—none of these are any use. The Palestinians are steadfast in their intentions to redeem their honour: You drove out our children/in the name of democracy/you stole our fields/in the name of geography/you closed our schools/in the name of pedagogy/you called us ‘Nazis’ and ‘Cockroaches’/from demagoguery/we’ll fuck you Mammy, we’ll fuck you/from ideology. For the Israeli and Palestinian politicians the outbreak of the intifada was a complete and utter surprise. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari called the politicians in this connection “wise after the event” in that they had possessed “no foresight” and lost “their clarity of vision in everything connected to events between us and the Arabs.” (Schiff and Ya’ari, 1990 p. 325) Among the playwrights were those who read the political and social map correctly and expected the uprising long before it actually broke out as well as close to its outset. Several of the plays staged a few months prior to the outbreak of the intifada had already predicted it, including Yellow Wind adapted from David Grossman’s book (August 1987). In Yellow Wind the play’s adaptor and director Ella Alterman chose to stage the play from a similar approach to that of Grossman’s journalistic documentary articles that “authentically” depicted the Palestinian from the occupied territories. The play deals with the occupation and its effects: the humiliation, the

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dependency, the exploitation and the fear that turn the Palestinians into “living dead”; but it also provides them with an identity “we have an identity, that we didn’t have before, and we are learning many things from you.” The Israeli is presented in a political parable as a great king “who sits in his palace surrounded by many guards and he can’t sleep at nights, for he knows that at any moment someone may come to seize his crown.” The text also contains indications of the violence and threat that the Israeli finds in the Palestinian: “We want a solution by force. What was taken by force will be returned by force” a kindergarten teacher promises her class; and an Arab intellectual prophesies: “If you leave here abruptly there will be a great slaughter […] first they will kill anyone who had any link with Israel […] and those who are suspected of collaboration […] and after they have killed half the population here, they will begin to kill one another in the struggle for power.”

Proximity and fear Deception (1990) adapted from the novel by Yitzhak Ben-Ner and directed by Ilan Toren, was the first play in the Israeli theatre to present an Israeli solder’s confrontation with the intifada. Holly (the actor Rami Hoyberger), a soldier hospitalized because of the stench he emits, recounts his life-history on the platform of some sort of research institute while flicking through a series of slides from his “photo album” revealing a typical pattern: house, garden, Jewish holidays such as Hannuka, Purim; youth movement, army…The “album” opening scene helps to create a link with the audience, many of whom have similar pictures in their own albums. He recalls how he succumbed to the “stench syndrome” that is not his alone, but is also the result of the actions and omissions of the audience in the auditorium, in particular being caused by the blunders made by the political leadership in Israel since 1967. The death of a Palestinian child who had joined them and mediated between the soldiers and the hostile Palestinian world was what had accentuated the Israeli soldier’s agony and led Holly to producing the stench: “So what, he was just a kid and so are we just kids. What?!” Fear is a principle component in the text. Fear of what awaits at each corner from inciting rioters with “keffiyes covering their faces”; fear of stones and bottles accompanied by the Palestinians’ promises of “we’ll slaughter you. Not a single Jew will remain in Palestine”, causing the soldiers to react violently against the Palestinians who “fuck up our entire country”. Ben-Ner and Toren were addressing an audience still at the stage of repression and denial experienced by Israeli society following the outbreak of the intifada, in a desperate and hopeless situation; and they demand a political solution that will end the killing on both sides and also end the moral corruption of an entire generation of Israeli youth who, to their own detriment, have become soldiers of an army of occupation against a rebellious civil population. The intifada changed outlooks and images, and awoke hopes and fears. The failure of “their” policy of subduing the uprising, the damage to Israel as a democratic law-abiding state, and the fears regarding the affect on the education of Israeli youth, strengthened the standpoint of those who advocated reconciliation. However the intifada also shook the self-confidence of Israeli society and “fears repressed for years were now renewed.” (Schiff and Ya’ari, 1990 p. 325) For the peace-seeking Israeli playwright too the Palestinian image as affected by the intifada included threatening elements, due to its violent nature, particularly the murder of Palestinians by masked members of their own nation. Kalman Benyamini’s research of the Arab image as perceived by Jewish Israeli youth throws light upon the worsening of the Palestinian image among Jews following the intifada. Benyamini compared the Israeli Arab

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image to that of the Palestinian in the years 1984, 1990. In 1984 few of those questioned mentioned any important differences between the Israeli Arab and the Palestinian, while after three years of intifada “there was an increasingly negative attitude towards the Palestinians who were considered to pose a threat.” Regarding the image of the Arab inhabitants of the occupied territories, the research found an increase in characterizations such as treachery, fanaticism and cruelty.2 These changes in the Palestinian image were marked in the Israeli theatre during the period of the intifada. Several one act plays by Aviva Gal—the only playwright to express the opinion of the Israeli right-wing—were published under the title The Tragic and the Absurd (1992) and depict Israel following an agreement with the Palestinians, and in one of them—a shocking version of the Sacrifice of Isaac, a Palestinian slits the throat of a Jewish child, the son of the leader of “the Movement for the Return of the Land to the Arabs”. (Gal, 1992) In most of the plays, the fears of other playwrights are more restrained than those of Gal and the Palestinian is not depicted as the stereotyped murderer that she presents him to be. None the less, several of the texts, particularly those staged since the outbreak of the intifada, do reveal fears similar to those of Gal, including plays from 1990 on, which focus on Palestinian characters and present a violent “anthropological” picture, discouraging and frightening, of “the other” and of his social environment. The plays are staged against the background of daily news on the intifada and their reception by the Jewish Israeli audience is possibly nourished by the enhanced image among Israelis of a threatening Palestinian society. Several of the plays from the 1990s were written by female playwrights and they deal with women in the patriarchal Palestinian society. Palestinian and Jewish Israeli women play an important political part in the uprising. Among the Palestinians, women were allotted roles not previously permitted to them, due to the need to enlist all available forces to the struggle against occupation. (Kutab, 1992) Among Israeli Jews, the “Women in Black”—changing shifts of women who have been consistently demonstrating every week for the past several years, dressed completely in black and carrying banners opposing the occupation—constitute a theatrical public protest against what the demonstrators perceive as the missed opportunities of the politicians in settling the dispute. To the above can be added other components not directly concerned with the dispute, such as the inferior status of women in Palestinian society. The plays of the 1990s provide descriptions of humiliating and violent attitudes towards women in Palestinian society that merge with the negative and threatening image that Israeli Jews already have of the Palestinian. Abir by Hagit Ya’ari (1991) attempts to trace the fate of Palestinian women since the intifada. The suppression of Palestinian women is an important theme in the play, to which the intifada serves as a background. The Palestinians are represented here as forcing humiliation upon their women as well as an insufferable economic reality and sexual inferiority: before her marriage, for example, Abir is forced to sew up her virginity in a horrific scene employing blood-stained sheets. At the beginning of the play it appears that Abir, like other Palestinian women, has gained an independent place in society thanks to the intifada and she has been given relative freedom in exchange for her contribution to the struggle—she establishes a cooperative of women that supports itself by running a bakery and carries out various orders from the Revolutionary Committee, such as distributing pamphlets in loaves of bread. There are no men in the play but their voices are heard: Israeli soldiers banging on the doors of the house during their search for suspects, as well as the voice of the Muezzin, marking the increasing religious influence in the Palestinian camp and heralding the return of women to their “true” place in conservative Moslem society. Towards the end of the play the old patriarchal order does indeed restore the woman to her inferior position.

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The husband who returns from prison is the cause of this reversal: “No Moslem man will let his wife run his life in his place”; he strikes Abir, locks her up and then throws her out without her children. The image of Palestinian society portrayed in the plays of the 1990s written by play wrights tending towards liberalism is similar to that of Aviva Gal and her stereotyped vision. In several of the plays of the ‘90s the knife as a theatrical prop represents the violent side of Palestinian society. In Masked by Ilan Hatzor (1990), set in a butcher’s shop, against a backdrop of a dirty and bloodstained wall, an intifada activist stabs to death his brother who had collaborated with the Israeli authorities. In Naomi by Ruby Porat-Shoval (1992) a razor-blade on “display” in the Beduin museum in the play is the accessory used to “circumcise the clitoris and superfluous naked nether lips of a woman’s body.” The link between knife and Palestinian also appears in Israeli satire: In Hey Rimona by Ilan Hatzor and Ilan Sheinfeld (1992) the voice of a Palestinian is heard offstage even before he enters “to cut or not to cut, that is the question.” He later asks the Jewish prostitute “come in here under the knife […] I must have a piece of Jew. For the Intifada Reception Committee.” At first glance these plays appear to complicate the inherent difficulty in reaching a possible settlement with the Palestinians, and even seem to express an aversion to such settlement. In fact, these texts constitute a late phase of a structure that has existed in the Israeli theatre since the 1970s, bridging the discrepancy between the disputed and hostile reality existing between Jews and Arabs, and the “optimistic” trends of presenting this dispute in the theatre. The majority of the playwrights belong to a group wishing to settle the dispute, but they have doubts regarding a reality which contains few conciliatory circumstances. The tension between the desire for reconciliation and the difficulties in attaining it finds expression in “contradictory” patterns in the plays. While certain theatrical texts do attempt to calm fears, generally through considerate depiction of Arab characters and the casting of their roles with Arab actors popular with the Israeli audience, the reading or watching of many such plays will also reveal concealed expressions of fear and pessimism. The most common contradiction is that between the air of reconciliation in the text of such positive plays containing Arab characters and their relations with the Jews, and an ending which is almost always pessimistic. This pattern repeats itself too often to be merely coincidental. While almost all those plays dealing with the Arab dispute appear to desire a solution, most of them fail to find a positive one and the ending wavers between an “open” one to a dead end and pessimism. This is particularly prominent in love stories between members of the two nations, that always end in either forced or voluntary separation. (Urian, 1990) Despite the Israeli theatre, therefore, appearing to take a “naively optimistic” stance regarding the “Arab Question”, the “repressed” levels of the text contain many expressions of doubt and repulsion aroused by the Arabs that complement the “matching” of what is presented on stage with the dispute in extratheatrical reality. In the theatrical texts of the early 1990s, that mostly deal with the Palestinians, the political message of the playwright is clear and out in the open. He is intent on instructing the politicians in negotiating with the Arabs: “The peace process with the Palestinians is vital and necessary, although exaggerated hopes should not be placed on the enemy and one should be careful of ‘the noble savage’ (a stereotype of the Arab that has existed in Hebrew drama since the 1920s), and particularly of his capricious brutality.”

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The Palestinian side: from theatre to propaganda There is an interesting relationship between the Jewish settlers in the occupied territories and the rebellious Palestinians, at least in regard to theatre. Both camps see theatre as a propaganda tool to demonstrate (mainly through the mediation of television cameras) the political views of the collective and the injustice or errors of those who object to their views. Both settlers and Palestinians employ the tools of satire and political street theatre to serve their purpose. The Palestinian theatre, like the Israeli theatre, predicted the intifada long before it actually broke out. Here too the political leadership disregarded the signs. The PLO leaders “fed by their own delight and self-satisfaction,” were taken by surprise by the uprising, as were certain other Palestinians considered as representative and influential leaders in Gaza and the West Bank. (Schiff and Ya’ari, 1990) While in the theatre Adnan Trabshe, an actor with the El Hakawati troupe, attested:“ the tidings of the intifada had already been given when El Hakawati staged The 101 Nights of the Stone Thrower in 1982.” (Urian, 1992 p. 38)—a play that also attracted an Israeli audience (1983) to the story of the Palestinian boy who slung a stone at the forehead of the occupying Goliath. From the outset the intifada had its theatrical aspects, widely reviewed by the media as well as directing itself towards them. The theatrical side of the uprising, its popular nature, and the closing of the theatres by the Israeli military authorities, almost silenced the Arab theatre makers in both Israel and the territories. The Palestinians themselves, moreover, tended towards a considerable decrease in theatrical activity, which also changed in character as it became oriented towards street propaganda, attracting the television cameras. Hanan Ashrawi, in an article headlined “The Politics of Cultural Revival” (Ashrawi, 1991) proposed this turnabout, that went beyond “elitist” forms in providing popular “mass-oriented” cultural expression and whose test lay in “its relevance” to the struggle. The desired cultural activity, according to Ashrawi, was one which would create involvement and identification with the aims of the uprising, while more complex works which raised questions and doubts and dealt with the search for a way and meaning, were superfluous in her view during the period of intifada. She preached about a popular culture, emphasizing the collective and a unity which had no place for expressions of individualism. Ashrawi wanted a theatre of “‘words’—Dialogue more than action, is the vehicle of significance in Palestinian theatre.” Indeed the intifada encouraged the spread of a popular verbal culture, mostly through nationalistic songs, accompanied by oral story-telling, graffiti that produced “wall journalism”, audio-cassettes of nationalist songs and music. Nationalist elements even found an outlet in the colours of clothing and garb of scarecrows in the fields; and the El Hakawati troupe, well trained in a rich and complex theatre, moved its activities from East Jerusalem to Paris.

The Settlers: from “building” to theatre The Jewish settlers from Judea, Samaria and the Gaza strip also chose to use theatre directed at the television cameras “to mould public opinion” and influence the politicians in the direction they considered correct. Since the political reversal of 1992, the settlers have no longer been represented in the government. They find themselves opposing a government whose clear policy is to stop the settlements and give land for peace. The settlers are in a minority and their objections to the reconciliation process of the Israeli government with the Palestinians are often expressed through demonstrations, part of which are theatrical in nature.

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Richard Schechner, who called such events “direct theatre”, explained that including them under the title “theatre” was not merely metaphorical: “their audiences are the participants themselves, journalists, particularly television journalists, the masses who watch television and the decision makers,” who are brought face to face with the political dilemmas and standpoints by means of short theatrical texts inserted into the news broadcasts. (Schechner, 1993 p. 86) Two “theatre performances” (as termed by their initiators) have been presented so far. The first created an analogy between Palestinian autonomy and the past trauma of the holocaust. The second related to the Jewish-Israeli fear of the Palestinians returning to their homes and lands abandoned in 1948 and 1967. When it was proposed to establish a Palestinian police-force in the territories, the Jewish settlers staged a performance for the local and foreign television cameras (on May 3rd 1993). The one-act play was about a Palestinian police barrier that prevented a Jewish family from Jerusalem from reaching the airport. The Palestinian police, a group of settlers in police uniform, with helmets and vehicles with the stickers “Palestinian Police” on them, halted the Jews and dealt brutally with them, demanding that the women and children put their hands on their heads, in order to remind the spectator of similar scenes from the holocaust in which Nazis brutalized Jews; in particular the familiar pictures of the destruction of the ghettos. The performance ended with one of the settlers forcefully drawing a weapon and breaking through the police barrier. The denouement in this drama constituted a word of advice to the politicians: “One has to use a language that the Arabs understand, and that is the language of force; they can’t be trusted or allowed to manage their own affairs.” A second opportunity to stage a political performance was provided by a mass gathering (11 August, 1993) before audience and television cameras by the seashore in Tel Aviv. Dozens of settlers and their supporters took part. The participants, who wore keffiyes and other Arab marks of identification, were divided into two groups: one of “refugee” Palestinians returning from exile to the port of Jaffa in a small ferry. The small ship contained Jews dressed as Palestinians bearing banners glorifying the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat. A second group, who had come to greet them, were also dressed as Palestinians, with faces masked by keffiyes and chanting nationalist slogans. The performance was a political act whose significance lay beyond that of an ordinary demonstration, for it forcibly depicted the hardest problem in the dispute between Palestinians and Jews—that of the refugees. As Benny Morris noted in his research on the Palestinian refugees, this is one of “the hardest problems in the world to resolve”. (Morris, 1991 p. 396) In their performance the settlers demonstrated the one insurmountable difficulty that they believed would torpedo any vision of peace; and therefore whatever would require to be relinquished in any sort of agreement (that to a great extent would be at their expense) they believed to be a mistake, costing too much and for which nothing would be received in exchange.

Mediation: Israeli Arabs From the point of view of the Israeli Arabs the intifada only increased their uncertainty regarding their identity as citizens of the State of Israel and the Palestinization process to which they had been subjected in the last decade. The discovery of the Israeli Arabs’ solidarity with the Palestinians in the territories did not really change their desire, as seen by Majid al Haj “to stand on the Green Line” [Israeli border prior to 1967] between the Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the territories. (al Haj, 1988) While they supported the establishment of a Palestinian state adjacent to Israel, the majority of them still prefered to remain in Israel

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despite their sense of alienation at living in the Jewish state. (Landau, 1993) An intermediate standpoint between Jews and Palestinians, apart from being frustrating and problematic, turned the Israel Arabs into a factor that was not satisfied with a one-sided presentation of the dispute. They objected in the main to an Israeli policy that annexed the territories, but also criticized the Palestinians and their political leadership, and attempted to present their position to the two other sides while emphasizing their anguish on both the public political and social stages and those of the theatre. The Arab-Israeli theatre presents the intifada through satire, allegory, theatrical fable, collage and adaptations of material by radical Arab playwrights from Arab countries. The choice of “unrealistic” genres is due to the political nature of the plays, that are more subtle and complex than that suggested by Hanan Ashrawi. The creators of Arab Israeli theatre have a mixed audience: of Arabs and Jews and of different groups among Israeli Arabs, some of whom are graduates of the Israeli theatre who are not prepared to watch simplistic propaganda plays. At the beginning the intifada was too traumatic and spectacular to be admitted into the theatre, or so it was claimed by some of the playwrights. Riad Masarwi chose to stage the intifada in The Ninth Wave (1990) without text but through gigantic slides of Palestinian women and children facing Israeli soldiers who were shooting at them. He explained: “As a playwright I have no words to express the intifada, my play would shrink in the face of reality.” His stage directions, that constitute all the text for the intifada scene, are instructive regarding the confusion in which he found himself as an Israeli Arab facing the Palestinian uprising, filled with amazement and apprehension: The Ninth Wave: the Dance of the intifada Scene of movement…all participants make different movements…make different sounds…an attempt at song…an attempt to find the lost rhythm…a new rhythm unfolds from within the anarchy…slides projected on stage…and in the auditorium… this scene to be performed by improvisation, without dialogue. Arab playwrights, directors and actors who prior to the intifada worked in the West Bank and Jerusalem, were forced by an increasingly strict censorship to seek alternative stages within the Green Line. The intifada arrived with them as a subject for the repertoire of the Israeli Arab theatre in Adnan Trabshe’s play El Huksh, directed by Riad Masarwi and first performed at the Monodrama Festival at Bet Hageffen (1992). In this monodrama, an Israeli Arab who is guilt-ridden over the passivity of other Israeli Arabs in the face of the intifada, volunteers to help. He is not welcomed by the Palestinians, who can not forgive the Israeli Arabs for remaining where they were rather than fleeing together with them in 1948, and therefore only the dead are prepared to speak to him. El Huksh wanders from job to job, failing to fit into Palestinian society, until he becomes a grave-digger—a trade that provides a good source of income during the uprising. In the cemetery he establishes his own independent kingdom in which he talks to the dead, including a stone-throwing intifada hero, a collaborator, his beloved who had been killed, and an old Palestinian woman who had seen many generations of conquerors and conquered come and go. At the end of the play the Israeli loudspeakers announce a curfew and everyone is asked to return to their homes. El Huksh has no home and no shelter and, fatally wounded by a bullet, he dies. Although this monodrama is poor in

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theatrical means, being set in a small grave-yard, its main assets lie in the text and the work of the actor. Adnan Trabshe himself played all the roles, thereby personifying the schizophrenia of the Israeli Arabs whose “personality” encompasses several identities. El Huksh also offers criticism of the intifada and its leadership, and the Israeli component of Trabshe’s identity appears particularly to dominate when he relates to the masked rebel and the Palestinian leadership of the PLO. The masked rebel in his monologue uses Shylock’s famous monologue from The Merchant of Venice in order to justify his brutal revenge and El Huksh has reservations regarding his methods, because “blind hatred does not help.” Another character, a collaborator with the Israeli authorities, is not only presented in a negative light, however, for he is even shown to mock the PLO leadership that sits comfortably in Tunis, leading the good life and declaring that it will sacrifice everything for the sake of the intifada. He mimics Yasser Arafat and accuses the exiled leaders of prostitution—a scene that in East Jerusalem was actually received with laughter and applause by the Palestinian spectators while in Nazareth and Haifa the Israeli Arab audience remained slightly stunned and amazed by the audacity. The uprising also permeated the Israeli Arab theatre through the children’s theatre. George Ibrahim, a Palestinian from the territories who worked at El Hakawati, produced a version of The Emperor’s New Clothes adapted and directed by an Israeli Arab, Salim Dao (1993) and staged in Hebrew and Arabic by Israeli Arab actors at the Bet Hageffen theatre. This is a topical political play aimed at the children’s parents (Jews and Arabs), who are presented with the civil rebellion in the kingdom of the naked king as an intifada. In order to remove any possible doubt, the authors have added “the territories” to the borders of the land of this same foolish, capricious and despotic king. In this play Arab actors perform in Hebrew, before a Jewish audience, a Palestinian fable for children and adults about the uprising of the oppressed against a condescending oppressor, with representatives of the oppressed present on the stage and representatives of the oppressors seated in the auditorium. From the very outset of the play the spectator’s attention is directed to the reality of the intifada: (A marketplace. A girl enters. She is fleeing from the police. Gunshots. Enter policeman dressed as cowboy. He looks for the girl. She flees. He exits. Enter three merchants.) Cloth merchant: Good morning my friends! Perfume merchant: What sort of good morning is it that begins with gunshots! […] (Enter policeman seeking the girl. The merchants trip him up.) Policeman: What, are you blind? […] Is this how you bring down the government? Cloth merchant: Oh! Many governments have fallen before you! The play’s ending was added by the director and reveals the attitude of an Israeli-Arab to the Palestinians in the territories in general, and to the intifada in particular. Dao is not optimistic and fears for the future of the Palestinians who disagree among themselves, and for their weak leadership when they finally attain independence. At the end of the play, therefore, after the king is deposed, chaos takes place on stage with everybody proposing himself for the job of ruler:

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…arguing, hitting, falling all over the stage. Enter policeman, shoots in the air and stands aside. Enter Minister of Communications, followed by the king who tramples over everyone, raises his sceptre and proclaims: ‘A new decree!!!’

Summary Four different groups with contrasting political ideologies: Israeli Jews with a liberal political tendency; the settlers; the Palestinians from the territories; and the Israeli Arabs—have chosen the period of intifada to present their views by means of theatre. In the Jewish Israeli theatre the theatrical texts staged since 1982 reveal a closer approach by the writers to the Palestinian characters, who are portrayed more realistically. This approach to the Palestinians, first by attempts at reconciliation on stage through white-washing problems in the “co-existence” plays from the 1970s, continued through a greater realisation and understanding; and perhaps also the setting aside of the repression which had previously exacerbated the presentation of the difficulties inherent in solving the dispute. In recent years the intifada aroused fears and increased the pessimism of Israeli playwrights in everything concerned with the future of the two nations. Fear of the Palestinians particularly grew in 1993 when the dispute reached the stage characterized by Baruch Kimmerling as “a conflict that is individual but also total” in which “every member of the two communities possesses the potential for dispute wherever he turns, as both the injurer and the injured.” (Kimmerling, 1993) However, among the creators of theatre and their audiences too there developed an increased awareness of the need to settle the dispute with the Palestinians. The theatrical texts constitute an expression of the tension between the desire for reconciliation and the lack of trust in the other side. The playwrights offer advice to the politicians on how to deal with this ancient reality through political means without, however, ignoring the deterrent and threat of the “other” side. Two other groups—the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians, both from the territories—maintain an ideology in which there is no place for contradictions and hesitation and for which the theatre serves them as a propaganda tool. Their theatrical texts are short, direct and “open”, lacking any full dramatic design. The settlers, for whom theatre as such is forbidden among their religious members, use it as a tool to demonstrate their views and direct them outwards, towards the majority of the secular Jews in Israel. The Palestinians need to enlist the theatre in order to strengthen the spirits of those engaged in the struggle and to present their views to the entire world by means of the television cameras. The most suitable text for such performances is deliberately shallow and direct in its statement. In the middle, as mediators, are the Israeli-Arabs. They identify with the Palestinian struggle, but are unwilling to forgo their Israeliness. The theatre serves them as a tool to express their incertitude and conflict of identity, particularly recognisable in their criticism of the politicians on both sides—Israeli and Palestinian. One of the questions that requires asking is about the extent of the theatre’s contribution to settling the dispute with the Palestinians. The Israeli theatre (both Jewish and Israeli Arab) is an institution perceived by its makers and audience alike as a forum for discussion of harsh dilemmas. A survey of the repertoire of the Israeli theatre demonstrates a constant rise in the number of plays dealing with the Arab or the Palestinian “Question”. The combination of all these factors reinforces the assumption that the Arab image as presented in the Israeli theatre, when representing a desire to settle the dispute, has contributed to the public discourse on the vital importance of peace. The theatre’s contribution has been of particular importance in the

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years in which a solution appeared to be very distant; when for a part of Israeli society and its leadership it was perceived as less important than its expected political price. From this point of view the theatrical texts that staged the conflict with the Palestinians during the 1980s, formed an artistic and political avant-garde that forged ahead and pressed for the beginnings of the reconciliation process with the Palestinians with which we are currently involved. During the years of the intifada the theatrical texts accompanied the peace process with propaganda, principally in presenting the difficulties and fears, as well as in providing a thoughtful analysis of the problematic dispute, for which the politicians are only now beginning their attempt to find a solution.

Notes 1. The writing of this article was greatly assisted by my conversations with Salim Dao, Fouad Awad, Riad Masarwi, Salwah Nakara, Danny Horowitz and Shai Bezek (spokesman for the Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank territories). Most of the texts quoted are the theatre work scripts given to me by the playwrights, directors or the theatre archivists of the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. 2. The results of the research of the Arab image among Israeli youth in 1990, as obtained from Kalman Benyamini; see also: Benyamini (1990), pp. 4–5, 6, 7, 11. Another study into the Israeli Arab image among Jews in Israel carried out by Mina Zemach in 1980 revealed a prejudiced negative opinion regarding the violence of Israeli Arabs; an additional study carried out in September 1987 prior to the outbreak of the intifada showed that the reservations of Jewish Israeli youth regarding the Arabs was higher in comparison with other sectors of the population. The two studies are quoted in: Benziman (1992) p. 29.

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Notes on Contributors

Nurit Gertz is a Professor of Literature at the Open University and teaches film studies at the Department for Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. Her publications include Amos Oz: A Monograph, Hirbat Hizha and the Morning After, Literature and Ideology in Israel in the 1930s and Motion Fiction (Israeli fiction and its adaptation for the screen). Emil Habibi is an Israeli-Palestinian writer and former Member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament). He was awarded the 1992 Israel Prize for Literature. Hannan Hever is a senior lecturer at the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He has published books and articles on modern Hebrew poetry, political poetry, Hebrew fiction and Hebrew national culture. Bushra Karaman is an Israeli-Palestinian actress. She appeared in Hirbat Hizha by Ram Levy (1978), and in two films by Michel Halifa as well as several other films. She has performed with the El-Hakawati theatre. Shimon Levy is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University Theatre Department; theatre critic, translator and director. Among his recent publications are The Three I’s (MacMillan 1990) on Samuel Beckett and The Altar and the Stage (Or-Am 1992) on Hebrew and Israeli drama. His previous positions include lecturer at McGill University and Artistic Director of the Akko Theatre Festival. Avraham Oz teaches at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa, where he is Head of Theatre Studies. Among his publications are The Yoke of Love, a study of The Merchant of Venice (Delaware Univ. Press 1994), collections of essays on Shakespeare and on Marlowe, and numerous articles on early modern and political theatre. He has been an associate artistic director of the Cameri Theatre, dramaturg at the Haifa Theatre, and has translated Shakespearean and other plays and operas for the Hebrew stage. Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University and the Academic Director of the Institute for Peace Research in Givat Haviva; the author of Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1951 (London & New York, 1988) and The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London, 1992). Eli Rozik is Professor of Theatre at Tel Aviv University. He has published several book on theatre research and semiotics of the theatre and many articles in the professional literature.

222 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Shifra Schonmann is a lecturer at Haifa University School of Education where she directs the Laboratory for Research in Theatre/Drama Education. The continuing focus of her work and research concentrates on theatre, drama-education, and curriculum planning. She has published several articles on these issues. Reuven Snir is a lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Haifa University. He has published extensively in English, Arabic, Italian and Hebrew on various aspects of Arabic prose, poetry and theatre, especially Palestinian literature, as well as on Arabic literature written by Jews and Hebrew language literature written by Arabs. Dan Urian teaches theatre at Haifa University, Tel Aviv University and Oranim College. He has published several books including an essay on Drama and Theatre. In recent years he has been researching Jewish-Arab relations as reflected in the theatre.

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Index

Abu Salim, Francois, 8, 38–40, 44–46, 121, 123 Abu Warda, Yusuf, ii, 46, 50–51, 77, 123, 174, 125 Acre Festival (Akko), 15, 46, 49, 53–54 Adorno, Theodor W., 132–37 al-Bakri, Samiya, 47, 54 al (el)-Hakawati, 8–10, 15, 40–46, 50, 64–65, 207–13 al-Jawzī, Jamil & Nasri, 30–31 Aloni, Nissim, 138 al-Oasim, Samih, 36, 46, 46–63 allegory—allegorical, 17, 60, 89–89, 91, 183, 209 Allon, Yigal, 88 Alterman, Nathan, 89, 133 Antichrist, 59–60 Arielli, Karim, 148 Awad, Fu’ad (Fouad), 3–50, 117, 127 Bakri, Muhammad, ii, 10, 20, 50–51, 53–54, 105, 125, 201 Beckett, Samuel, 3, 77, 125, 170–83 Be’er, Rami, 127, 179–92 Beit (Bet) Hageffen, 8–9, 34, 52, 210 Ben Gurion, David, 136 Benjamin, Walter, 133–38, 139 Benyamini, Kalman, 6,206 bi-lingual, 54, 76, 177 Bourdieu, Pierre, 154 Brecht, Bertolt, 23, 34, 39, 41, 48, 58, 60–64, 172

cafe-theatre, 39 Carmi, Daniella, 3, 146, 201 censorship, 8–10, 22, 32, 34, 37, 40, 84, 89, 48–2, 56–57, 63, 210 Commedia dell’arte, 9, 41 commitment, 23, 56–57, 96, 156–61, 160 counter-text, 170–83 Dabka dance, 29, 45, 64 Dao (Daw), Salim, ii, 9–10, 47, 50–52, 76, 201, 210–16 Darwish, Mahmud, 35 Eliad, Taisir, 164 Ephraim Returns to the Army, 21–24 Even Zohar, Ittamar, 71, 154, 197 folklore, 28, 39, 41, 47, 49, 54–55, 57, 64 Foucault, Michel, 147 fusion of horizons, 154–59, 167 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 151–5 5, 167 Gaza Strip, 30, 32, 35, 37, 45–48, 54–56, 63, 65 Goldmann, Lucien, 201 Graetz, Heinrich, 135 Grand Magic Circus, 41 Gorssman, David, 24, 77, 187, 190, 194, 197, 204

225

226 INDEX

Habibi, Emil (Imil), 30, 34, 43, 46–47, 51, 53, 102–11, 125 Haddad, Suhayl, 50, 112 Hegel, Friedrich, 130, 134–39, 146 Hess, Moses, 135 Horkheimer, Max, 132 intifada, 3, 6–7, 15, 43, 45–46, 50–52, 54, 71, 77, 113, 146–51, 163, 164, 179–86, 200–20 Israeli army, 41, 138 Kahan, Ya’akov, 133 Kalif, Moshe, 164–71 Kanafani, Ghassan, 35, 48, 50, 55, 120, 151, 155, 167 Kaney (Qaini), Miriam, 3, 75–76, 78, 201 Karagoz, 29 Karaman (Qaraman), Bushra, 9, 46, 50, 54, 108–21 Khuri (Khouri, Khoury), Makram, ii, 9–10, 47, 50, 52, 77, 123, 125, 201, Khuri, Salim, 34 kibbutz, 147, 185 Kibbutz Dance Company, 127, 179–92 Laor, Izhak, 22–25, 146 Levin, Hanoch, 14, 20–21, 23, 73, 139–46, 148–54, 201 linguistic choices, 173–78 magic-box, 29, 39–40, 47 Marxism, 57, 61, 135 Masarwa (Masarwi), Riyad, 8–9, 46, 48–49, 84, 160–69, 120, 209–15 Meged, Aharon, 139 metaphor, 15, 18, 41, 52, 89, 96, 163 Michael, Sami, 3, 54, 74–75, 78, 201 Mittlepunkt, Hillel, 3, 21, 73, 129, 201–204 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 8–9, 41 Mossenson, Yigal, 139, 149 multichultural society, 71–81 Mundi, Yosef, 3, 78 Naqqara (Nakara), Salwa, 50, 54, 124 Natur, Salman, ii, 82

‘Other’, the, 2, 3, 5–6, 86, 89, 93–96, 136, 140, 146 P.L.O., 35, 52, 55, 56, 65 Piscator, Erwin, 49, 58, 60 political theatre, 51–52, 58, 63, 170–85, 201–20 “positive” literature, 32–35 poster theatre, 41 ‘prisoner’ motif, the, 15–21 reservist, 182, 185 Rosenzweig, Franz, 134, 148 Salih, al-Tayyib, 53 Shacham (Shaham), Nathan, 5,15–18, 86–101, 119, 138 shadow plays, 29 Shaked, Gershon, 71 Shakespeare, 15, 50, 59–60, 104, 133 Shamir, Moshe, 136–42, 139 Shammas, Anton, ii, 3, 52, 74, 76–77, 123, 125 Shawqi, Ahmad, 33, 34 Shiloah, Joseph, 164–166 Shoham, Chaim (Haim), 21, 89, 172 Shoham, Matity ahu, 133 Sobol, Yehoshua, 3, 15, 73, 122, 124, 126, 137, 142–49, 201–204 space(s), 11–25, 205 Storyteller, 8, 10, 29, 39–41, 47, 49 Steiner, George, 132 Talmon, J.L, 132 tragedy, 130–55, 157, 160, 164–167, 179 Theatre du Soleil, 41, 147 V-effect, 61 Waiting for Godot, 3, 21, 77, 170–83 War of Independence, 7, 16–17, 23, 86, 89–90, 136 Williams, Raymond, 132–38 world upsidedown, 59–61 Ya’ari, Hagit, 146, 206, 207–13 Yehoshua, A.B., 16, 19–21, 74, 77–78

INDEX 227

Yellow Wind (Yellow Time), 24, 77–78, 188–200, 204 Zu’mut, Bassam, 54