Amos Gitaï’s stage version of his filmed verbatim documentary trilogy known as House gives us a collection of conversations about a house in West Jerusalem from its Palestinian owners to a sequence of subsequent Israeli occupiers. There was such outrage at the first part of the trilogy completed in 1980 that the commissioning Israeli television station banned it.
Amos, a citizen of Israel and France, says, “the film is rather serene, I was always surprised at the hysteria.” Indeed, every character is treated with compassion in this gentle performance.
We even get a rich sense of how multicultural Israel has become. Palestinians beaver away throughout the show hewing rocks to build more Israeli homes, while other Palestinians repair existing ones. The Israeli Jewish character Haïm Barkai has recruited them from loads of local villages and, smiling, says, “they are almost like a family.”
Along with the Palestinians speaking Arabic, the Jewish migrants add the languages of Hebrew, French, English, Yiddish, Armenian and Turkish. One young Palestinian even says she speaks English when Israelis are around to avoid one of them shooting her. Their words in English surtitles are projected onto the back wall, along with pictures and a video of a stonemason cutting rocks for building work.
Accounts are given of the Jewish people joining Israel, some of them carrying with them disturbing memories of the Holocaust. A French youth is very artistic, drawing multiple faces on the floor of the stage, with Palestinians working away nearby. He’s even proud of making a stand over his French-sounding name. “At the airport, they wanted me to Hebrewise my name but I refused.”
Dr. Mahmoud Dajani, the Palestinian owner of the house in 1948, explains that he fled from his home because of the massacre at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem for fear of what the Irgun, Lehi and the Stern group might do to other Palestinians in Jerusalem. The empty property of the fleeing Palestinians was then taken over by the occupying government under the Israeli Absentees’ Property Law and handed to Jewish immigrants to Palestine.
Although he has a son who wants to buy the house, he admits that won’t be allowed. His son, Dr Raji Dajani, refers to the house as an “analogy of the whole situation of the Palestinian-Israeli question as like a house which was taken over by the Israelis and the Israelis open a small crack in the window and tell you: ‘let’s talk and settle the problem’. But the Palestinians say, ‘if you want to settle the problem, open up the door, we come into the house, we sit in the house and then we discuss the problem’. Palestine being a house that all of a sudden the owners change and the new owners discussing with the old owners how to settle the problem, but keeping the old owners out."
One of the stonemasons working on an Israeli home for 1.5 dollars an hour says he used to live in the area but the Israelis bulldozed his village, including his home, his brother was killed and his son has now gone. He admits, “when I see my house being destroyed and they brought the bulldozer to tear down the stones and my village, no one can recognise it anymore, certainly I hate.”
The Israeli son of the contractor describes being dissatisfied with another stonemason who didn’t turn up for work on days when there were demonstrations, so he grabbed him, slapped him against a wall and sacked him on the spot.
Later in the show, a poem by Brecht is projected onto a front-of-stage scrim screen for enough time to read it a few times. The early section read as follows:
“Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them?”
Property relations, oppression and exploitation are central to this slice of Israeli history and identity. Palestinian stonemasons and other workers are still needed in Israeli-occupied Palestine. We all should support the right of Palestinian families to return to Palestine and be compensated for the crimes of murder and theft committed against them.
The pace of this thoughtful 140-minute show can sometimes feel a bit too leisurely, and, given the atrocities and war crimes being committed by Israel, seem a bit unbalanced, but it has something important to say with moments of conversation and song which are quite moving.