Joel Samuels discusses the background to his performance in Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art at the Arcola Theatre, London, from 26th November to 7th December
According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 65% of Jews in the UK identify as Zionist. Of the remaining 35%, 18% are non-Zionist, 7% don’t know and 10%, like me, describe themselves as explicitly antizionist.
There is much we can take from this. But primarily I would argue that for most Jews there is a still a notion of Zionism as being the simple idea of self-determination for the Jewish people. However, a growing number think, as I do, that Zionism as experienced by non-Jewish Palestinians is a political ideology of racial supremacy that has been imposed on an indigenous population.
I am not an antizionist, therefore, because I am morally against the idea of self-determination for the Jewish people, although many religiously Orthodox antizionists are opposed to that in general. Rather I am an antizionist because if that means stealing land, expelling and murdering, then the moral argument for Zionism is void.
Non-Zionists too, hold that Zionism is no longer the simple idea of a Jewish homeland but do not go so far as to take a completely anti- stance. Whatever your understanding of these figures and ideals, there are clearly more opinions within the UK Jewish Community than a simple, steadfast, support for Israel, come-what-may.
This view of UK Jews as a complex community, with an admittedly pro-Israel bias, is not one that is often discussed. Nor is it acknowledged that the base of support that Israel has in the UK Jewish Community is slowly shifting.
Amongst my antizionist and non-Zionist Jewish friends there is a sense that our slowly growing part of the community is either at best ignored, or at worst silenced. Perhaps we represent an uncomfortable truth for community leaders that still insist that UK Jews are overwhelmingly, rather than in the majority, Zionist?
There is a reluctance in me to discuss all of this whilst events in Palestine continue to cast a painful, horrifying shadow. What does it matter what I as a part of the UK Jewish Community and am feeling and thinking on this subject matter whilst human beings are burnt to death, still attached to IV drips? But I am also a playwright and someone who wants to continue to uphold the arts as a place for political expression. So I cannot help but centre my identity, both in my response to the atrocities that Israel is carrying out in the name of defence but also in the work that I want to put on in UK theatres. More than anything I want and need to speak from deep within my Jewishness about what I have seen and believe.
Antizionism in the arts
My relationship with the silencing of antizionist Jewish voices in the arts began in 2016 when I went to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to Hebron in the West Bank. I wanted to see for myself the realities for Palestinians living under military occupation, the realities of checkpoints, soldiers and the limitations of freedom, lack of justice and world of pain. These were my expectations. Yet nothing can prepare you for the torturous reality: streets forcibly emptied of Palestinian life; children and babies teargassed daily; teenagers arbitrarily detained under Israeli military law; men intentionally maimed; even settlers murdering a Palestinian family’s cat to intimidate them to leave their historical home. And all the while, the dull, oppressive reality that Israel inflicts on Palestinian daily life.
I will never forget the mundanity of a young man being held for four and a half hours at a checkpoint on his way to school. I watched as the soldiers took his ID and made him wait. And so he sat. One hour. Two hours. Three hours. Multiple times I attempted to talk to him only for the soldiers to lazily wave their guns towards us and gesture for me to move away. Eventually, with no words spoken, a soldier came out of the small office built into the checkpoint, handed back the ID and waved the boy through. No explanation offered. No words were required.
I caught up with the boy and through my friend and translator Imad (name changed) asked:
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Why did they hold you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did they keep you at the checkpoint today?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What did they say was the reason you weren’t allowed through.”
“They didn’t.”
“They didn’t say anything?”
“No? They never do.”
“What do you mean? Do they do this often?”
“Yes. Sometimes two or three times a week. My teachers know I might be late to class because of it.”
“They make you wait for four hours each time?”
“Yes. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They have never arrested me. I think one of them doesn’t like me maybe?”
“But they must say something?”
“No. I hand over my identity card, sometimes they give it back and I go through, sometimes they take it and make me wait.”
“But why?”
“Who knows why they do anything? I’m going to be late.”
I witnessed a lot of violence in Hebron and wanted to write about it on my return. But no one would commission theatre pieces that focused the Palestinian experience of Israeli violence without some form of sympathy for both sides. I wrote a piece about the hopes and dreams of a seven-year-old Palestinian boy whom I saw dropkicked from his bicycle by a settler in his twenties, only for the Palestinian child to be arrested. But no one would perform it. I was told that it wasn’t worth the provocation that programming such an “unbalanced” piece of political theatre could create. I was told that audiences wouldn’t believe that an adult could do that to a child. And that the idea of a Palestinian child being arrested for being kicked was too far-fetched.
What then to do when such a fundamental part of my identity, of my beliefs is deemed unstageable? What does the artist have to do to create work that is true to themselves if they must first censor themselves to fit into a narrative of acceptability?
Censorship in the theatre
When the producers of Cutting the Tightrope asked me to contribute a short piece on the subject of censorship, I felt honoured, excited and scared. I have written something that I believe has no parallel in British theatre. For five minutes an antizionist Jew speaks to a Liberal Zionist Jew. On a UK stage. Nothing edited, nothing censored, nothing held back. It is probably the only time this has happened and may well end up being the only time I get to do this. Perhaps I will find myself in trouble? Perhaps I am ending prematurely what has been a pretty unsuccessful career as a playwright just as I begin to make some headway? And perhaps you can ask yourself if someone from a particular community in 2024 should be asking themselves these questions as they express themselves in their art?
I didn’t ask the producers to put on the story of the boy on the bike. Nor did I ask them to stage something else I wrote from time in Hebron.
When I found that no one would perform the true story of the boy on the bike, I returned to the teenager sat for hours at the checkpoint. I wrote a monologue from his perspective. Held in the sun for four hours at a time. Multiple times a week. For no reason.
But writing in 2017 I changed something in him. I made him angry. Because I was angry on his behalf. I imagined his anger as a burning fire that needed a way out, that needed to resist the endless monotony of repression, the lack of freedom, the arbitrary nature of his constant detentions. I imagined in him a desire for revenge. I imagined – because in so many ways I wanted it – a desire for revenge on people that look like me, that have my name, my history, my cultural background.
I fantasized on his behalf about what he would do if he could go back to his family home within the 1948 borders of Palestine. I created a scenario, what he would do to a Jewish family living in a house stolen, a house to which his family still had the keys and to which they never returned. I removed his stoicism, his strength in adversity, his Sumud (a Palestinian term meaning ‘steadfast perseverance) and darkly fantasized about what revenge could look like.
I have never attempted to have it performed. What would be the point? No one would believe it.
Joel Samuels will be performing in Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art at the Arcola Theatre, London from 26th November to 7th December.
For tickets and more information, see here:
