Andrew Haydon has written an amazingly foolish piece at the Guardian Theatre blog on the recent crop of Gaza plays showing in the UK. The 10-minute Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill and now Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea by Justin Butcher and Ahmed Masoud (described as a multimedia verbatim testimony) both make no bones about highlighting the injustices - and death - being heaped on the people of Gaza by the Israelis.
But Haydon thinks it is 'worrying' that Churchill's play portrays 'the Jews (at least in part) as victim-turned-persecutor' and castigates Go to Gaza for presenting a 'parade of blameless innocents'. He concludes that both plays risk 'demonising a whole country - if not every single Jew on the planet'.
The problem with people like Haydon, who is quick to criticise the lack of social context in the plays, is there ignorance and reluctance to face the truth and the social context. So he finds the description of Hamas as the resistance troublesome. But don't Palestinian's have the right to resist occupation? He speaks of the 'suffering directly inflicted by Hamas' on the people of Gaza with reference to recent alleged kneecappings and extrajudicial killings of collaborators. But isn't high treason punishable by death in most countries? And what about the context - after all wasn't it the US and Fatah that launched a coup, that failed, against Hamas in 2006 in total disregard for the will of the people?
In fact Haydon lets the cat out of the bag when he reaches the end of his diatribe. He tells us that he basically doesn't like political theatre. But worse he claims the plays end up being an attack 'on every single Jew'. What he can't get his head around is the fact that not all Jews support Israel. Attacking Israel and zionism is not an attack on Jewish people as a whole. He pleads for playwrights to look 'at the situation properly'. But by 'properly' he means to look at it in a way that sees the victims as being equally to blame for their predicament as the real oppressor - Israel.
Haydon's review in TimeOut says Go to Gaza is 'moving on loss of life in Gaza. But I felt that it was also propaganda and specious justification for Islamist terrorism' because it concludes with one man joining the resistance. His view that Hamas is a terrorist organisation because it resists Israeli aggression is outrageous - by killing three Israelis as against at least 1,300 Palestinians - but is of course in keeping with the hypocritical foreign policy of western governments that fails to recognise the legitimacy of the Hamas election victory, described as the freest in the region by ex US president Jimmy Carter and the other observers on the ground at the time.
Does this man not know the real 'social context' of the Palestinian struggle to reclaim their homeland - that there used to be a place called Palestine upon which the Israeli state was built through a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing?
Also see Caryl Churchill's Gaza play is anti-war not anti-semitic
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