Earlier this summer I received an invite from the Israeli Embassy to spend a week in Israel viewing the best of its theatre. It didn’t suit; but in any case, I decided that I wouldn’t have gone, and wrote to explain why.

I’ve never been to the Middle East and have no first-hand experience of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But, judging from the best of the international media I was able to read during and after the invasion of Gaza in January this year, I came to believe that Israel’s response to rocket attacks by Hamas was both vastly ‘disproportionate’ and conducted in violation of the laws of war.

Journalists shouldn’t, in general, accept hospitality from those they intend to write about. This may be something “more honour’d in the breach than the observance” (myself included) but, when the country being written about is involved in a war, and when the offer of hospitality is designed to show that country in a different light to that of its military engagements, this moral proposition becomes somewhat more acute.

I wrote as much to the Embassy, saying that my view was partial and I was open to correction. They didn’t reply. This struck me as a pity, but perhaps they weren’t bothered wasting their time on an arts writer presumably infected with predictably fuzzy, left-liberal anti-Zionism.

If this was their view, they had some justification for it. Earlier this year, I wrote in praise of a small play that made a big impact, Caryl Churchill’s ‘Seven Jewish Children’. (I’ve been reminded of this now by ‘The Merchant of Venice’, which played at the Galway Arts Festival last month, more of which below.)

Churchill’s play was an artistic rapid-response to the war in Gaza: it took a few days to write, a couple of weeks to produce, and just ten minutes to stage. In seven short scenes, tracing modern Jewish history from the Holocaust through to the war in Gaza, Churchill described Jewish families trying to explain the violence outside to their children.

Reading the play in anticipation of a production at the Abbey, I wrote that, taken at face value, the play was, at best, an exercise in crude psychological determinism; or, at worst, in classic anti-Semitism.

But there was more to it than that, I thought initially: it seemed to me that Churchill had left it open to directors to find the internal conflict that would elevate her text from being a diatribe to being a drama.

That may have been the case. But the Abbey’s production, directed by Wayne Jordan, left me ruing my earlier words. Churchill had intended to write a disturbing piece of theatre – but one that was disturbing because its subject matter, chiefly the Israeli civilian response to Gaza, was disturbing. (In an article in defence of her play against charges of anti-Semitism, she cited pictures of “Israelis dancing for joy as smoke rises over Gaza” as such an example.) Instead, her play was disturbing for the extraordinary blitheness of its attack on Israeli citizenship and Jewish character.

In subject matter, each of Churchill’s seven scenarios was worthy of a play in itself, and each contained moments of pathos that could have sustained larger dramas. But conflated, and presented with such extreme concision, the sum of these moments was more an essay in political point scoring than an exercise in drama.

In the play’s climatic monologue, a distraught adult exults in the killing of a Palestinian policeman and is (at best) indifferent to the killing of children, expressing this in a litany of clichés:  “we’re the iron fist now… it’s the fog of war… We’re better haters… we’re chosen people”. This was the culmination of Churchill’s investigation of contemporary Zionism and – in the context in which it was presented – it was deeply distasteful.

There was the seed of a counter-argument in the subsequent, final words of the play: “Don’t tell her that. Tell her we love her. Don’t frighten her.” Though poignant, they were, in Wayne Jordan’s production (and, I suspect, most others), inadequate to address the force of the vitriol that preceded them. Jordan’s sombre and stylish production gave us Churchill’s play as written, uninterrogated. In the Peacock theatre, this was a disturbing experience. It was to be staged some nights later at an anti-war benefit concert: I didn’t see this, but I find it difficult to see how this piece of programming was anything other than crass.

In the next week or so, fourteen and fifteen year old across the country will be opening their Junior Cert books for the first time, and prominent amongst them will be ‘The Merchant of Venice’. Seeing this in Galway recently, I had a similar emotional reaction to that to ‘Seven Jewish Children’, and intend to tease this out in a future column. My question: should the anti-Semitism in ‘The Merchant’ be ignored, or considered secondary to the play’s dramatic quality, or seen as all the more compelling a reason to study it?

What do you think? Particularly if you’re teaching or studying the play this year, I’d like to hear from you. And if the Israeli Embassy would like to contribute to the discussion, I would, as ever, welcome your views.

Published in the Irish Independent, August 29, 2009.