If there's one thing that's bound to irritate, annoy or even enrage some people it's to say that you're going to do a benefit show for anything to do with the Palestinians. In fact even the word "Palestinian" will inflame some people. A few months ago, the author and publisher Ann Jungmann told me a bit about the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a theatre for children that had been destroyed and was now struggling to carry on. To be honest she didn't have to tell me very much to get me on board for a benefit. The very idea of a theatre for children in the middle of that war zone seemed so quixotic, so hopeful, so full of longing that I could hardly say no. In a way, I would hope that anyone, no matter whether they think the Palestinians' cause is just or not, would be able to see that their right to have a children's theatre could be something worth supporting.
Apparently not. When notices for the forthcoming show came up on various blogs, it wasn't long before the sneers started popping up. I won't honour these with repetition but it's almost as if some people think that Palestinian children shouldn't have a theatre of their own, or that raising money for the theatre would almost certainly find its way into the pockets of people trying to buy rockets to fire into Israel.
As it happens, some of us doing the show this Sunday are Jewish. Well, I say "Jewish" but something else I've discovered is that if you say you're Jewish but you're not a Zionist or you're even an anti-Zionist, this seems to give some people such immense problems that they will declare that either that you can't be Jewish or that you're less than human, or as one blogger put it, an "animal". What a strange idea, that just because you disagree with one political event and act that most Jews think is a great idea - the founding and existence of the state of Israel - then you're not entitled to be a Jew. Now, I've always understood that the fact that I was a Jew was non-negotiable. It's a fact derived from my parents, who like me were told by their parents that they were Jews. No one ever told me that part of the deal was that I had to agree to some special allegiance to Israel.
So, as events have unfolded in and around Israel throughout my life, I've always tried to look at them not as someone who had some kind of special relationship with the place, but just as I've looked at the upheavals in other parts of the world. And that's how I come to be doing a benefit show for children in support of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, just as I would do a benefit for anything similar in other parts of the world. Of course, I can't deny that there's a certain poignancy, if not piquancy, in that I'm Jewish but doing something for Palestinians, but that's the way world politics sucks us into its whirlpool. I've discovered, however, that our political reflexes don't have to be tribal. What's more, it'll be a great show - comedy, magic, music, poetry - as good as it gets in fact, which is as it should be, I reckon.
