Stephen Flatow: Anti-Semitism takes the stage

In My View (Opinion)

By Stephen M. Flatow

Issue of April 3, 2009 / 9 Nissan 5769

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 Klan or the “dirty Jew” or Christ killer epithet that I had thrown at me in the 1950s. The new anti-Semitism is subtle because it doesn’t scream, “dirty Jew.” Instead it is masked as criticism of Israel, its army and politicians. Its proponents claim to be anti-Zionistic. They purport to be concerned about Jews, but they stress that Israel should be recognized as a brutal, belligerent country that dispossessed native inhabitants to create a country, keeps others living as second-class people, and has a total disregard for the rule of law. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized those feelings more than 40 years ago when he wrote anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism.

Sometimes the new phenomenon reverts to the old. For instance, when Florida protesters of Israel’s incursion into Gaza shouted, “Jews go back to the ovens.” College campuses are hot beds of anti-Zionism. Following a string of incidents including 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 atrocities and 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 were primarily caused by Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields, and schools and hospitals as rocket launching points.

Now, along comes British playwright Caryl Churchill and her play “Seven Jewish Children: a Play for Gaza” to add another layer to the muck surrounding the war and the protests it has engendered. If you think the play is about little Jewish children, about how they live and go about their lives, you would be wrong. Its title strongly signals that Churchill’s take on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will not be balanced. One only has to read it to see the anti-Semitism disguised within it as 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 she [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. There are seven scenes that sound like a debate among family members arguing about what to tell the children in the family 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 independence through the Second Intifada and why it fights today. Israel, Churchill is saying, came about because of the Holocaust and since her 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:

“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 and was staged 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.” 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 in their locales and the play is sure to become the darling of the Solidarity Movement-types and 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 hard 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 Gaza in 1995 by Palestinians Islamic Jihad.