by Stephen M. Flatow

April 2, 2009

There is no denying that anti-Semitism has been making a comeback in the past few years. But it’s not the old fashioned anti-Semitism of the Ku Klux Klan or the “dirty Jew” or Christ-killer epithet that I had thrown at me in the 1950s. The new anti-Semitism is subtle. It is masked as criticism of Israel, its army, and its politicians. Its proponents claim to be anti-Zionist. They purport to be concerned about Jews, but they stress that Israel is a brutal, belligerent country that dispossessed native inhabitants, keeps others living as second-class people, and has a total disregard for the rule of law.

Sometimes the new phenomenon reverts to the old — when, for instance, Florida protesters of Israel’s incursion into Gaza shout “Jews go back to the ovens.” College campuses are hotbeds of anti-Zionism. Following a string of incidents — which included anti-Israel protesters’ barricading Jewish students in a Jewish students’ lounge — the president of Toronto’s York University felt it necessary to issue a public statement condemning anti-Semitism.

Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, designed to convince Hamas and other terror groups that Israeli citizens had had enough of the constant rocket and mortar barrages over the border from Gaza into Israel, is the latest catalyst for outbursts against Israel based on fictional claims of atrocities and alleged genocidal attacks against Palestinians. In those protests, no mention is made of the underlying reason for the incursion or that the loss of civilian lives in Gaza was primarily caused by Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields and schools and hospitals as rocket launching points.

Now along comes British playwright Caryl Churchill and her short play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. If you think the play is about little Jewish children, about how they live and go about their lives, you would be wrong. As its subtitle strongly signals, Churchill’s take on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict isn’t balanced; one only has to read it to see the anti-Semitism disguised within its anti-Zionism.

Churchill is already on record as having said, “Israel has done lots of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme.” Despite protests in London about the anti-Semitic nature of the play, it was welcomed by one reviewer with this comment: “What [Churchill] captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter.” No mention of a decade of suicide bombings suffered by innocent Israeli civilians or Israeli communities turned into little hells because they are in rocket range of Gaza.

The play’s message is subtle but unmistakable. Its seven scenes sound like a debate among family members arguing about what to tell the children about the Gaza incursion. Starting with an oblique reference to the Holocaust, it moves through Israel’s wars, ending with Operation Cast Lead (although not by name). There is no mention of the Jews’ 2,000-year-old desire to return to Zion or an explanation as to why Israel has had to fight — from its struggle for independence through the Second Intifada — and why it fights today. Israel, Churchill is saying, came about because of the Holocaust and since its founding has transformed itself from a nation of victims to one of self-righteous superiority. Along the way, it dispossessed the Arab inhabitants, as in this piece of dialogue:

Tell her this wasn’t their home….

Don’t tell her who used to live in this house.

No but don’t tell her her great-great-grandfather used to live in this house.

No but don’t tell her Arabs used to sleep in the bedroom

The play has come to America; it was presented in staged readings March 25-27 in New York City at the New York Theatre Workshop, a publicly funded Off-Broadway theater that prides itself on the “development of innovative theatre.” A Jewish theater company in Washington, DC, even staged a reading of the play in order to “explore its meanings and discuss the controversy.” Presenting innovative theater is one thing; assisting in the advancement of an anti-Semitic agenda is another. Absent balance and context, Seven Jewish Children is nothing more than cheap art; it belongs on the garbage heap.

Encouraged by the success of the play’s presentation in New York City, other theaters in the United States will seek to present it. The play is sure to become the darling of the Solidarity Movement and other pro-Palestinian groups on college campuses.

The growing numbers of anti-Zionist cheerleaders will have a field day with Seven Jewish Children. Once again, Jews and other pro-Israel supporters will be sore pressed to explain what’s happening on the ground in Israel because we do not have a voice to speak for us all. Ben Hecht did a remarkable job writing about the Holocaust and the Jews in the 1940s. Where is today’s Ben Hecht?

Stephen M. Flatow is a New Jersey attorney whose 20-year-old daughter Alisa was murdered in 1995 by Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

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