Seven Jewish Children: The modern Passion Play

The passion play was a staple of European anti-Semitism. Every year at Easter, Christians would "re-enact" the alleged role of the Jews in the crucifixion of Jesus. The plays, in different versions, served as a cultural vehicle for perpetuating anti-Semitism, especially the one performed every ten years in Oberammargau, Germany. This quaint hate tradition has been mostly cleansed of its racist content, but a new vehicle has sprung up for vilifying the Jews. The play, Seven Jewish Children, is a vile and evil blood libel against Jewish parents and Jewish children who never said or did the things attributed to them.

 

Seven Jewish Children- Dr. Denis MacEoin's letter to The Abbey Theatre Dublin

Email sent to Sally Anne Tye, Director of Public Affairs, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
 
 Dear Ms Tye,
 
Barry Williams has kindly shared with me your e-mail to him, in response to his concerns about the Caryl Churchill play, Seven Jewish Children. I don't disagree with you, but I think there are two issues that really aren't being examined by anybody who is mounting the play. Gaza is, undoubtedly, a story that deserves dramatization. I'm a novelist (I write under another name), most of whose novels tell a story that enables the telling of political concerns. I am also a political liberal, and I can understand why many people have strong feelings about Gaza and the Gazan people.
 
However, what is being lost is the simple fact that there are two stories about Gaza. It is not a one-sided tale of Israeli aggression or revenge. Hamas bear enormous blame for what happened. Eight years of 8000 rockets falling relentlessly into Israeli towns (and still falling, despite the current ceasefire) are a different story, and one that is mostly about severely traumatized Jewish children. A constant spate of suicide bombings in cafés, school buses, university cafeterias is another story, and one that involves a huge number of children torn to pieces in Haifa, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.  These are narratives that don't receive much of an outing, in part because Jews do not make much public show of their private grief. There is also another important side to the recent Gaza war: that the Israeli forces took immense care to avoid civilian casualties, that most of the buildings damaged were hit because Hamas had boobytrapped them, and that Hamas used the Palestinian population as human shields, firing from among them, from schools and hospitals and private homes. There was no 'Holocaust' in Gaza, the Israelis are as far from being Nazis as the Irish are, and many, many stories of Israel wrongdoing are, quite simply, fiction.
 
That is one thing. Another is that Ms Churchill's play is a lie. I say that flatly. In truth, no Jewish or Israeli parent would dream of saying such things to their children. Jews everywhere have been outraged by this deliberate attempt to put words into their mouths, and to use this fiction (like those many Palestinian fictions) as an Aunt Sally with which to berate the Jews — at a time when anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic attacks have been rising to their highest level in decades several countries, including Ireland. Ms Churchill is manipulating her audiences. Her play is a dishonest play, not because drama cannot be fiction, but because she locates her statements about Jewish children to a real place (Gaza) and a real event (in the minds of her audiences), the recent war there. But pretending that Jewish parents say things to their children that they never actually say, she crosses certain boundaries that should not be crossed. Her play has already worked to incense people and to inflame an already burning situation, making Jews the sole transgressors in a situation where the greatest evil has been done by others.
 
More than that, we know quite genuinely that Palestinian textbooks for schools, children's theatre, children's television and more are filled with statements (what Palestinian adults say to their children) that would shake you. Palestinian children are dressed in suicide belts, taught to fire rifles, and led to believe that the greatest purpose of life is to die as a suicide martyr. That is what Palestinians really do say to their children. If Caryl Churchill can find anything remotely like that in Israeli society, she should make it plain for us. But she won't find it, because Jewish parents don't teach their children things like that. Do you see why I'm incensed by her skulduggery, by her lack of innocence?
 
I think that mounting this production of a dishonest play demeans the Abbey. I honestly do. I can remember many happy evenings at the Abbey when I lived in Dublin. The Phoenix was the only theatre outside Belfast's Lyric where I watched some of the Yeats cycle. I'm sure the Abbey has remained true to that tradition of honest playmaking. That's why I feel so disturbed that, quite unwittingly, you have been lured into presenting a piece that is, in the end, nothing but a slice of pro-Palestinian propaganda. Propaganda for a terrorist group like Hamas, whose member trawled their own hospitals after the war in order to shoot wounded members of Fatah. The truth about Gaza is ugly, and has little to do with the travesty presented by its many Western supporters.
 
I don't honestly know what to suggest. You may feel committed to the production, though in your position I would think a lot harder about what it would say about the theatre. Some friends and I have talked about writing a piece in response, to show what real Jews tell their real children. You thoughts on that would be interesting.
 
I'm sorry to have written at such great length and to have taken so much of your time. If you would like to reply, that would be great; but if you are too hard-pressed (as are we all), please at least give thought to all this. Thank you.
 
Yours sincerely,
 
Dr. Denis MacEoin