Review: Walking to Jerusalem

As people of good will recoil in horror at the human suffering in war-torn Ukraine and open their homes to refugees, Justin Butcher draws our attention back to another imperialist catastrophe and human tragedy in his one-man play Walking to Jerusalem.

In Rich Mix in East London, where I saw the play last weekend, the stage is littered with wreckage and rubble. There are marching feet. The voices of politicians and the powerful are broadcast over the auditorium: the then UK and Israel premiers back-slapping themselves for the Balfour Declaration on its centenary, Trump declaring his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

At the same time, a screen shows how the state of Palestine and the home of Palestinians has, over the past century, shrunk to a hollowed out shadow of its former self.

Justin enters. '2014. A remote hilltop farm, close to the village of Al-Khader - the Arabic name for St George. A desperate sight.' He itemizes the destruction of a large Palestinian family's home by the Israeli army. 'Three times they demolish!' cries Ali Salim, the farmer. (Butcher morphs into all the characters he and we encounter with absolute integrity.) 'The settlers come here and take our land, under the eyes of their civil administration.' The reason given for the destruction? Security.

Ali Salim explodes: "They put the boots on our heads and say, 'Shekit, shekit, shut up, you can't say anything.' Could anyone live under this Occupation?" Justin and his fellow activists promise to be voices for the voiceless and to tell their story.

The screen also bears damning evidence of the humiliation and cruelty. Each sorry sight telling a thousand words.

This is theatre as witness: a genre which socked it to the apartheid regime in South Africa in the plays of Fugard, Kani and Ntshone - most notably The Island.

Justin had only been apprised of the tragic impact of the Balfour Declaration in 2011 by Ahmed, a Palestinian friend separated from his family languishing in Gaza.

A voice-over intones the words of the 1917 declaration which starts: 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.'

The full declaration is interspliced with Ahmed telling of his family fleeing to Gaza in the Nakba, the 'catastrophe' of 1948, when the British mandate hauled down the flag and 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes into exile. They have lived in Gaza as refugees ever since.

Ahmed and his mother, 'still living with the consequences', are in no doubt of the cause of their dispossession. It goes 'all the way back to your Balfour Declaration, when you promised our land to someone else, a hundred years ago.'

Justin dreamed up his walk for 2017 - the fiftieth anniversary of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the tenth year of Israel's blockade of Gaza, and the centenary of the declaration. 'To where? To Palestine, of course, where exiled Palestinians aren't allowed to return. To Jerusalem, the holy city of three faiths, the war-torn city of peace.' And what a walk it was - a crazy celebration of freedom, a pilgrimage and a penitential walk in solidarity rolled into one. Two thousand miles, starting in London, across Europe and the Middle East, 11 countries, three seas, mountain ranges, deserts, and at least three war zones.

'The lexicon of the Occupation has a brutal expression. 'Facts on the ground' - building settlements, grabbing land, bulldozing houses, erecting walls - to reset the goalposts of any future negotiations. "But isn't hope a fact as well?" asks Justin. "Putting one foot in front of the other, putting some new 'facts on the ground'."

He recites the Walk's prayer-manifesto:

'Another world is not only possible; she is on her way.

On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

You have been shown what is good, to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly.

We walk this day with those whose freedom is denied.

We walk with those who have fled war, torture and despair.

We walk in penance for broken promises and political fixes.

We walk the long road with all those who strive for peace, justice and reconciliation.

We walk with those who long to return to home.

We walk in hope that one day all people in the Holy Land will live in peace, as neighbours with full equal rights.

'Walk softly upon the earth. May its beauty surround you;

May its wisdom delight you, its music invite you.

May you love and be loved; may you know peace and practise compassion.

Rejoice in the earth and in all of creation. Rejoice in life.

'Ambulando solvitur. It will be solved by walking.'

Justin enacts the epic journey with beautiful lyrical descriptions of places and landscape, of encounters and companionship.

He has the storyteller's and playwright's gift for variety - and comedy. Some hilarious gurning and physical acting accompany his recollection of being wedged in between snorers, his soul heavy with dark thoughts. Walkers' corporeal suffering is drily summarised as the 'Melancholy of Anatomy' and we are taught that Shitet means 'for sale' in Albanian and that the most popular brand of Albanian chocolate bar is Noblice.

There is personal pathos too. Justin contends with his own psychodrama. He acts out a dream-Pietà he has in Arras in which he cradles his dead father in his lap and recalls many dead family members. The next morning, he learns that a great uncle died at the Battle of Arras in 1917. He pays his respects at the Lutyens memorial there and "glimpses a vast field of white headstones summoning you into the eternal present of the dead, forever young."

In the Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Issogne, in the Aosta Valley, "There's a Nativity scene set in occupied Bethlehem, complete with watchtower, razor-wire fence, tanks. " Justin learns that their Palestinian driver Fatima lost half her family in the Shatila massacre in 1982.

Oud-playing friend Julia Katarina enchants young refugee kids - Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Somali - in downtown Thessaloniki with her undulating Arabic laments. Thinking of his sons' mates brought home from school, Justin "wants to hug these lads, uprooted from homes and homelands, and never let them go."

All along the way there is solidarity with the Palestinian cause but Justin tells a Turkish journalist that he thinks Britain should apologise to both sides - to the Israelis, too.

"Set them free, both victim and oppressor, Abel and Cain, Remus and Romulus. Set them free from this bear-pit we have built for them, this fertile crescent, this tortured ground where God once walked and in the footsteps of Jesus we have sown a minefield, shining with coils of razor wire, hedged with concrete walls."

There is both humour and high tension as the group make their way into the Occupied Territories, posing as evangelical Christians.

And then jubilation. The group are feted by their Palestinian hosts wherever they go. But Justin's eye for lacerating detail is undimmed: the maimed children of the refugee camps, an ugly face-off with armed settlers in Hebron. "Here now the beautiful Ottoman streets of the Old City are roofed over with wire mesh to protect Palestinian residents from the bricks, soiled nappies and kitchen waste flung from upstairs windows by their settler neighbours. Deserted Palestinian shops line the old market street, boarded-up entrances daubed with offensive slogans in Hebrew and English - 'Gas the Arabs' and 'Die, Arab pigs' - and, even worse, the Star of David spray-painted as an emblem of hate."

Once more, Justin transforms himself. This time into Uncle Suleiman, an elderly Bedouin farmer with wild eyes: "They are choking our life! They are strangling us!"

Tensions run high at a ghastly travesty of an Israeli peace garden in the shadow of the Gaza wall. Some much needed levity comes on the eve of the Balfour Declaration centenary with the artist Banksy's satirical contribution at his Walled Off Hotel - just next to the Wall in Bethlehem. At a kind of Mad Hatter's Tea Party, an actor playing HM the Queen, pulls a cord to unveil the punning legend: 'Er …. Sorry'. Then, marvellously, the tea party is invaded by a crowd of activists from Aida Camp, waving flags and shouting, "Free, free Palestine!" In a glorious finale, the ringleader jumps on to the table and plants the Palestinian flag into a huge Union Jack cake.

An hour later, the group are marching in a huge demonstration in front of the infamous iron gate which shuts off the road to Jerusalem, before they are dispersed by stinging tear gas.

Justin finds himself next to Abdelfattah Abusrour, director of the Alrowwad Youth Theatre, who has this to say: "The governments who decide to partition a country that they do not own, and give it to foreigners, since they made those promises, they should also find the solution, and if this criminal state which was given the right to occupy us and destroy our homes and make us refugees continues to violate UN resolutions and human rights and create apartheid systems and apartheid laws, it's the responsibility of the international community to marginalise it, isolate it, punish it, one way or the other. … People can make peace, but can make peace on the basis of justice and equality. Other than this, it's complete hypocrisy."

On the anniversary of the Declaration itself, the group present the British Consul-General to the Palestinian Territories their new Balfour Declaration which favours 'the establishment in Palestine/Israel a safe and secure home for all who live there.' Then Justin presents his own letter, urging Theresa May "not to attend grotesque Balfour centenary celebrations, but instead to galvanise the government's 'best endeavours' in support of equal rights, recognition of the State of Palestine, and an end to the Occupation and the blockade of Gaza."

The day before he had apologised on National News "for the 100 years of dispossession, injustice, suffering and conflict which we visited upon your people."

Later that final day, on the final approach to Jerusalem, "Across to our right is the little tear-drop-shaped church of Dominus Flevit, marking the place, they say, where Jesus looked down and wept over the city." They walk at last through the Lions Gate down the Via Dolorosa to the Cathedral of St George (Al-Khader).

"Our preacher for the final ceremony was the great Naim Ateek, the father of Palestinian Liberation Theology. At the heart of his magnanimous vision of a shared Jerusalem and a shared Holy Land, the words of the prophet Micah burn:

They will beat their swords into ploughshares

and their spears into pruning hooks.

Nation will not take up sword against nation,

nor will they train for war any more.

Everyone will sit under their own vine

and fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid.

"Hope swelled through the hearts and voices thronging the cathedral … and in the joyous Arabic melodies of the Bethlehem Choir, who made it through walls and checkpoints to join us at the end."

This is a superb play and of the utmost urgency for the present moment. It is devastating and inspiring, showing the best and worst of our humanity. The Church has long since proclaimed its preferential option for the poor, the 'wretched of the Earth', and here we see a paragon of what the great Polish director Grotowski called 'poor theatre'. For sure, there are excellent and powerful Brechtian graphics and photos to hammer home our understanding of this lived reality. But at the same time, in poor theatre, there is a stripping away to reveal an inner vitality within poor, naked, unaccommodated humanity. In this great and intensely moving creation, Justin Butcher demonstrates once more that he is an athlete of the heart.

Walking to Jerusalem can be seen next week, Holy Week, at Amnesty International.

Monday 11th - Thursday 14th April at 7.30pm, 25 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA, Book tickets: https://walkingtojerusalem.bpt.me/