The New York Times · 1 August 2002

CP-2002-109

Drama as a DMZ in Israel

Arab and Jewish Actors Share the Stage as Partners in Provocative Works

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

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Transcribed from the clipping

JAFFA, Israel — One Friday night in October 2000, several bloody weeks into the Palestinian uprising called the Aksa intifada, the Arab-Hebrew Theater here presented an open-mike night.

It went by the title “In Jaffa, We Talk,” and it was meant to reinforce in wrenching times the theater’s commitment to partnership between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. At one point Igal Ezraty, the theater’s artistic director, began to read aloud the names of the intifada’s fatalities, and he asked the audience to stand in mourning.

But when he mentioned several Israeli soldiers who were killed, some Arab spectators shouted back that they could not commemorate “our oppressors, our murderers.” And when Mr. Ezraty listed the dead Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, some Jews pointedly took their seats. “This is the first time I ever felt such tension in the air,” Mr.

Ezraty recalled in a recent interview here, still shaking his head at the memory. “It is the first time I wondered if we can be together or not.” That episode, and its impact on Mr. Ezraty, attests to the unique burden of Israel’s several Jewish-Arab theater troupes.

Founded in less volatile times as living examples of how a Jewish majority and Arab minority could coexist in Israel, they now operate in a climate of fear, hatred, suspicion and terrorism.

The intifada, much more than its predecessor in the late 1980’s, has traumatized Arab-Jewish relations not just across the border separating sovereign Israel from the occupied territories but also within Israel itself. To the theaters’ participants, this makes their work all the more imperative.

“We are not a mirror of life in Israel,” said Haled Abu Ali, an Israeli Arab who is a featured actor in the Acco Theater Center, which is in Acre, a city in northern Israel. “We are the dream of life in Israel. The dream is that someday everyone will be able to live like this, Arab and Jew together.”

Barely three years ago such a pluralistic vision formed part of mainstream political discourse in Israel. The performing arts in particular proved receptive. Ehud Barak was elected prime minister in

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. NO DATE IS PRINTED ON THIS CLIPPING: there is no masthead, no folio, and the dateline gives the place only, “JAFFA, Israel”, with no day. The date recorded here comes from the hand-typed slide label. The article’s own references — the Aksa intifada beginning in late 2000 and Ehud Barak’s May 1999 election described as barely three years past — place it in 2002 and so corroborate the year without fixing the day. The newspaper is likewise not named on the clipping; the attribution rests on the label and on the page’s typography. The two photographs are credited to the Acco Theater Center and the Arab-Hebrew Theater, not to the paper.

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