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PARTISAN REVIEW
or that we put on a women's reading. But she apologized : "That would
be 'collaboration,'" with an echo of double entendre, theatrically and
politically. Raeda went to America, and meanwhile, the violence esca–
lated. When we met in the spring, a few days after the mass murder of
young people in the Dolphinarium Club in Tel Aviv, Raeda came to the
Jerusalem festival with an Israeli ID. We hugged warmly. "Our children
are traumatized; it's awful," she said emotionally. "I can imagine," I said
empathetically, and I tried to go on. "Ours too . . . ." But she wasn't lis–
tening, wasn't willing
to
empathize. "Our children are traumatized," she
repeated, and now there was the harshness of a slogan in her words.
Backstage, she didn't introduce her friends from Milan, who came to
support Palestinian theater, to her teachers from Jerusalem.
But Raeda (attacked doubly as a Christian among Muslims and as a
woman in a militaristic male society-at least as I saw her) was not oper–
ating in a vacuum or merely on a local stage. She would not have reached
that point if not for the Palestinian policy and for the silence of intellec–
tuals, without a peace movement, without any condemnation of vio–
lence, murder, suicide bombers. Only the inflamed accusations of Hanan
Ashrawi or halfhearted declarations of appeasement exclusively for
export to an Israeli audience and not for domestic consumption . Only
when the violence of the suicide bombers started damaging Palestinian
interests did they start issuing condemnations, and even then only in tac–
tical terms. For the Western European audience, Raeda and the Palestin–
ian children, especially the Christians, played the role of suffering and
crucified victims.
In
that morality play, the Israeli, the Jew, had a set role
that did not evoke empathy. Raeda's studies and camaraderie with
Israelis did not fit the desired image. Backstage, we returned
to
the sim–
plified Manichean myth, without a trace of Brechtian estrangement, far
from the complex sharing of fate while taping the show with Khamal.
IN THE WINTER
OF 2002,
a Palestinian victory seemed possible. Arafat's
position was not damaged, despite the capture of the ammunition ship
Karin A
and the exposure of direct contact between the Palestinian
Authority and the terrorists.
In
Europe, condemnations of Israel were
ratcheted up by politicians and by boycotting organizations. Out of a
Machiavellian trap, calls for appeasement-from the Israeli peace camp
and the movement of conscientious objectors-were seen as weakness
and at once were answered by an increase of terror.
In
March
2002,
now remembered as "the month of blood," time
after time, terror struck the heart of Jerusalem. One Saturday night,
news of the suicide bomber who blew himself up in the ultra-Orthodox
