Play: 12:37 - Bombing of the King David Hotel

King David Hotel 1946 - Image public domain

In an Advent message released last week, Catholic Church leaders in the Holy Land highlighted threats to coexistence between communities in Israel, particularly increasing violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Pax Christi International warned in late November that, "as Israel ushers in a dangerous ultra-right wing, ultra-orthodox religious administration, belligerent Israeli settlers, protected by the Israeli Defence Force, are emboldened to viciously attack, and the sanctity of the holy city of Jerusalem is put in jeopardy." This review of a new play explores the complex and controversial questions around Jewish violence, homeland and national identity.

12:37

At 12:37pm on 22nd July, 1946, the King David Hotel, headquarters of the British Mandate in Palestine, was bombed by right-wing Zionist terrorists. 91 people were killed, 46 wounded.

Julia Pascal, the playwright and director of 12:37, herself Jewish, courageously confronts the Jewish violence which led to the proclamation of Israel in 1948.

Her play also strives to help us consider the complexities leading to this violence in the best traditions of the history play, linking together the domestic with the epic.

Pascal's father and brothers graduated as doctors in Dublin; they were socialists and supporters of Ben Gurion. Similarly, 12:37 follows two Irish Jewish doctor brothers, Paul and Cecil Green, from Dublin to Palestine. Pascal identifies a common denominator in Irish and Jewish nationalist struggles: British occupation.

The brothers are subject to daily humiliations and anti-semitism, not least from the 'Holy Jos' who beat them up for 'killing Jesus'. Their grandfather, meanwhile, 'beat the Jaysus' out of them for not learning Hebrew. 'Son and son and son and on and on, the same bloody nonsense', laments Paul. The father of Eileen, Paul's Irish Catholic lover, calls him a 'filthy Jewman' whilst his mother, Minnie, cannot countenance the 'shame' of his marrying 'out' with a shiksa (a gentile woman).

After their father's death, the brothers are obliged to follow Minnie to a new life in London's East End. Paul is haunted by his lost love and takes up boxing to become a 'tough Jew'. Both he and Cecil struggle with the harsh demands of the London Hospital and witness both British and more specifically Mosleyite anti-semitism at close quarters, not least at the Battle of Cable Street where Jews and Irish dockers beat back the Blackshirts. Here they also have a spat with a supercilious, anti-Irish member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Against this backdrop of alienation, and in response to a description of attractive Jewish women settlers in Palestine, Paul asks: 'Are we Zionists?' Cecil replies: 'The Irish have a country. The Indians want one. We Jews need one.' Paul responds with the Zionist terra nullius mantra: 'Palestine. "A land without a people for a people without land."' Cecil counters: 'But that's not true is it.'

This bleak subject matter is substantially leavened by a script which is richly varied in tone, mood and register.

Cecil mocks Mosley's rhetoric with glee and pratfalls: 'You will even find a Jewish communist capitalist in your very English cup of tea.'

We are treated to dance, music hall, Yiddish, Irish rebel songs, Joycean repartee and Hebrew prayers. The five-strong cast of Alex Cartuson, Ruth Lass, Danann McAleer, Lisa O'Connor and Eoin O'Dubhghaill are very strong, musically gifted and versatile.

The two brothers have a fateful meeting with a distant relative, Rina Goldberg, a Yiddish actress visiting from the USSR. Rina is full of zest, wit, feminist agency and Communist zeal. Both brothers fall for her. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Cecil, mindful of the Kindertransport, would like to get her to safety. 'Didn't the English let in ten thousand children?' 'And turned away their ma and da,' retorts Paul.

When the three met again in Palestine in 1946, Rina is 'dead inside'. Pascal addresses a crucial and 'reluctant' history: that of the sexual abuse of Jewish women during the Shoah. The former ebullient internationalist has turned into a militant Zionist who asks why the British did not bomb the death camps. Paul, too, has taken up the same mantle. Traumatised and hardened by their experiences, both enlist in the ranks of the terrorist group Etzel-Irgun and sing the Anthem of the Lehi, its words full of suffering, defiance and resolve. They are determined to get the British out. (Ironically, it was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, recognising a 'Jewish homeland' in Palestine, which precipitated mass Jewish immigration. The British wanted their 'own little Ulster' in the Middle East.)

Cecil, however, is in Palestine with the British Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), his fine singing voice and performance skills coming into their own. He remains constant in his empathy for the Arab presence - 'When the British leave, we share the land' - and his opposition to violence against the British: 'Those lads could be me … we have no right, no right at all.'

The attack on the King David Hotel is acted out and narrated with a nightmarish vividness. 'British, Arab, Armenian, Jew': victims all.

Pascal has a record of focusing on unrepresented voices in her plays - women, migrants, refugees. The play ends here with a recital of the kaddish just as the muezzin's call starts faintly: the return of the erased, the repressed. I applaud Pascal's enlightened courage in confronting this terrorist outrage and urge you to see it on its final night tonight at the Finborough Theatre, London. I very much hope the play will be back in production again soon.

LINK

Finborough Theatre - www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk