The Brits And Israel: Walled In By Prejudice?

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

I recently went to see “Wall,” David Hare’s new play about Israel’s security barrier, at the Public Theater. It hasn’t engendered the outrage that followed Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” which ran last month, or the outcry surrounding “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” from 2006. But “Wall” is no less provocative, calling the barrier a symbol of Israel’s underlying weakness that only incites the terror it seeks to end.
Hare, who wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film “The Reader,” has actually written a much more balanced work than either Churchill or the Alan Rickman-Katherine Viner team that wrote “Rachel Corrie.” A 40-odd minute monologue, Hare’s play recounts a recent trip he took to Israel and the West Bank; it follows up on his

critically acclaimed show from 10 years ago, “Via Dolorosa,” which also recounted a trip to the region. For the most part, Hare finds the place in no better shape.

Israeli intellectuals like David Grossman tell him “we became addicted to occupation” and “we live in order to survive, not in order to live.” The Palestinians, the play suggests, appear to have shot themselves in the foot: Hare, for instance, is shocked to see the strange idols they’ve chosen. “At least now I know why the wall’s gone up,” Hare says. “The Israelis want to separate themselves from people who display posters of Saddam Hussein.” (The script is available online at The New York Review of Books Web site, www.nyrb.com, where you can also listen to Hare read it.)

I doubt people will call Hare’s work anti-Semitic, as many people did “Seven Jewish Children” and “Rachel Corrie.” I don’t think any of these plays are, but sitting through Hare’s, I did begin to think, Why is that British playwrights are so drawn to the issue? Two answers come to mind: One is that British playwrights have a long tradition of politically oriented plays, beginning with Shakespeare. American playwrights, on the other hand, build on a much younger canon — Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller Eugene O’Neill; all from the 20th century — whose greatest concerns were social issues like race, family and faith. Perhaps it has something to do with Britain’s colonial legacy, too, which gave their playwrights a heightened interest in former crown jewels.

It all felt a little thin, so I turned to Orwell for more insight. Who knew the British better than he? When I got home after seeing the play, I picked out a collection of his essays, the original purpose being to find his classic take on Dickens, where he wrote, famously, “All art is propaganda.” But I stumbled on something more useful, an essay called “Antisemitism in Britain,” written in 1945.

The context was, of course, the Second World War, when many Britons wouldn’t dare mutter a kind word about Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, but could nonetheless chide the Allies for fighting “a Jewish war.” Orwell runs through a list of bigoted remarks he had recently heard, like from a “chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected sort of way,” who says, “Those bloody Yids are all pro-German. They’d change sides tomorrow if the Nazis got here.” And from a “middle-class woman: ‘Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking.’”

One point Orwell was trying to make was that the only thing distinguishing an educated person’s bigotry from a non-educated person’s was his ability to justify it. “These people always say (as Hitler says in “Mein Kampf)” that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of facts.” But what was particularly British about its anti-Semitism was that England had a relatively clean record with its Jews, so it told itself that it didn’t even have to ask if prejudices existed. “They are frightened,” he wrote, “of discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected by it.”

I’m still confident that none of the recent British plays about Israel are driven by consciously anti-Semitic agendas. But I do think these playwrights’ tendencies to focus on Israel rests on the shoulders of attitudes they still have not fully examined. Taking up the issue will not wipe away the sense of injustice many Britons feel, I think rightly, about how Israel treats the Palestinians. But it might foster a greater understanding about the strong reaction these plays often inspire among Jews.

Hare’s play even wondered out loud why he writes so often about Israel. (He’s not Jewish, mind you. And, interestingly, Hare added this section at his Public Theater performance, which does not appear in the printed script.) “I don’t know, did Bacon choose to paint the Pope?” he said. “I guess it’s not that I choose my subjects, but that my subjects choose me.” I was almost satisfied with the answer, but Orwell made me think otherwise.

Eric Herschthal covers the arts and culture for the paper.

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