Anti-Israel propaganda sells out on London stage

April 27, 2005

This is an update to two previous dispatches on this subject.



[Note by Tom Gross]

SOLD OUT, WITH PLANS TO READ THE PLAY IN SCHOOLS

"My Name is Rachel Corrie," the new play that opened at the prestigious London theatre recently described by the New York Times as "the most important theatre in Europe," has sold out. It has become one of the fastest-selling plays in 50 years, and is probably on its way to the US, with plans to distribute the text of the play in schools.

The theatre at which it is playing (the Royal Court) was lavishly refurbished in 2000 with the help of large donations from Jewish benefactors.

"HER DELICATE AUDREY HEPBURN FACE"

The play is co-directed by "Harry Potter" and "Die Hard" star Alan Rickman and by Katharine Viner, the editor of The Guardian's weekend magazine.

In one article for The Guardian in 2001, Viner described the notorious PLO terrorist and airplane hijacker of the 1970s Leila Khaled, as such: "The gun held in fragile hands, the shiny hair wrapped in a keffiah, the delicate Audrey Hepburn face... the symbol of Palestinian resistance."

The new Rachel Corrie play has not only been praised in the British press, but beyond – on Al Jazeera's website, for example, and in the Beirut Daily Star, and elsewhere.

Below, I attach my article on the subject from Monday's Jerusalem Post.

At the foot of this email, there is a note about websites and readers' comments on the article.

-- Tom Gross

 



THE FORGOTTEN RACHELS

The forgotten Rachels
The Jerusalem Post (Opinion Page)
By Tom Gross
April 25, 2005

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1114322084559&p=1006953079865

"My Name is Rachel Thaler" is not the title of a play that is likely to be produced anytime soon in London. Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following the February 16, 2002 attack, when a suicide bomber approached a crowd of teenagers and blew himself up.

She was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live. Yet I doubt that anyone at London's Royal Court Theatre or most people in the British media, have heard of her. "Not a single British journalist has ever interviewed me or mentioned her death," her mother Ginette told me last week.

Thaler's parents donated her organs for transplant (helping to save the life of a young Russian man), and grieved quietly. After the accidental killing of Rachel Corrie, by contrast, her parents embarked on a major publicity campaign. They traveled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicize them.

Among those who published extracts from them in 2003 was the influential British leftist daily The Guardian. This in turn inspired a new play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which opened this month at the Royal Court Theatre, one of London most prestigious venues. (The New York Times recently described it as "the most important theatre in Europe.")

The play is co-edited and directed by Katharine Viner, the editor of The Guardian's weekend magazine, and by film star Alan Rickman (of Die Hard and Harry Potter fame). Their script weaves together extracts from Corrie's journals and e-mails.

For those who don't recall the story, Rachel Corrie was a young American radical who burnt mock-American flags at pro-Hamas rallies in Gaza in February 2003. A short while later she died after jumping in front of an Israeli army bulldozer that was attempting to demolish a structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.

Partly because of the efforts of Corrie and her fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through these tunnels. Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and elsewhere.

However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published worldwide in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have Rickman and Viner, leaving almost all the critics who have reviewed the play completely clueless about the background of the events with which it deals.

"Corrie was always a progressive with a conscience ... she went to work with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza," wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian last week, without a shred of explanation as to what the ISM actually is.

The ISM is routinely described as a "peace group" in the western media. Few make any mention of the ISM's meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Assif Muhammad Hanif, who a few days later blew up Mike's Place, a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens - including British citizens. Or of the ISM's sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukia, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement, the ISM said "armed struggle" is a Palestinian "right."

"'Israel' is an illegal entity that should not exist," wrote Flo Rosovski, the ISM "media co-ordinator," clarifying the ISM's idea of peace.

Unfortunately for those who have sought to portray Corrie as a peaceful protester, photos of her burning a mock American flag and stirring up crowds in Gaza were published by the Associated Press and on Yahoo News on February 15, 2003, before she died. But the play doesn't mention this.

So British reviewers are left to tell the British public that the play is a "true-life tragedy" in which Corrie's "unselfish goodness shines through" (Evening Standard).

"Corrie was murdered after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organization," writes Emma Gosnell in the Sunday Telegraph. ("Murdered" is a term that even Corrie's staunchest defenders have hesitated to use up to now.)

Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, talks of "Corrie's concern for suffering humanity... ones leaves the theatre mourning not only Rachel Corrie but also one's own loss of the idealism and reckless courage of youth."

Not surprisingly, the play has also been praised on Al Jazeera's website and in the Beirut Daily Star.

In one of the most astonishing comments, Michael Billington, the Guardian's critic, writes of the play: "The danger of right-on propaganda is avoided."

It is ironic to reflect that there have been several real victims of the Intifada called Rachel - and it is hard to believe that these critics have ever heard of them. All these other Rachels died within a few months of Corrie, but - unlike her - in circumstances that weren't disputed. They were deliberately murdered:

Rachel Levy (17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home).

Katharine Viner, the co- director of the Corrie play, is certainly familiar with Palestinian terrorists. For example, in 2001, she described a Palestinian hijacker she interviewed in The Guardian as such:

"The iconic photograph of Leila Khaled, the picture which made her the symbol of Palestinian resistance and female power, is extraordinary in many ways: the gun held in fragile hands, the shiny hair wrapped in a keffiah, the delicate Audrey Hepburn face refusing to meet your eye. But it's the ring, resting delicately on her third finger. To fuse an object of feminine adornment, of frivolity, with a bullet: that is Khaled's story, the reason behind her image's enduring power. Beauty mixed with violence."

(Since that interview Viner has twice been named British Newspaper Magazine Editor of the Year.)

Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times of London) dismisses parts of the play as "unvarnished propaganda." At one point Corrie declares "the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance". As Davis notes, "Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed at that one."

Rachel Corrie's death was undoubtedly tragic. But ultimately this play isn't really about Corrie, but about fomenting hatred of Israel. The production is now sold out and there is talk of it being staged in America. The Royal Court is also rushing out a printed edition of the play to give to schools.

(The writer is a former Jerusalem correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph.)

 

A NOTE ABOUT WEBSITES AND COMMENTS ON THE ABOVE ARTICLE

Dozens of websites and weblogs have cited this article since its publication on Monday, including those of commentators Melanie Phillips and Clive Davis of London, Prof. Steven Plaut of Haifa, and Charles Johnson (of Little Green Footballs) in northern California. (All are subscribers to this email list.)

Others commentators, such as Andrew Sullivan, have sent me encouraging personal notes about the article.

Readers' comments on this article have also been left at many sites and weblogs, for example at http://web.israelinsider.com/views/5396.htm

On Little Green Footballs alone, 244 comments have been left so far
(http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15604_The_Forgotten_Rachels#comments)

* I disagree with both the tone and content of many of these comments and would ask that anyone leaving comments do so in a considered and moderate manner.

For a photo of Corrie of the type not seen at the Royal Court Theatre, see http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0405/rachels.php3


All notes and summaries copyright © Tom Gross. All rights reserved.