ABSTRACT
Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in early 2009. The play was about ten minutes long; it was free to all spectators, but a collection was taken at the end for ‘the people of Gaza’, via an organisation called ‘Medical Aid for Palestinians’. Free entry, followed by a collection for Medical Aid for Palestinians is, in fact, a condition on any performance of Churchill's play. The play text itself consists of seven speeches by unspecified adult relations, parents perhaps, of seven Jewish girls. The speeches correspond to different times in the prehistory or history of Israel; in each speech, the adult relative debates or agonises over what the girl should or shouldn't be told. The play was billed as a response to the Gaza War of 2008–9, which ended shortly before the first performance. The publicity material suggested (although this is not explicit in the play text itself) that the final, seventh speech was that of a contemporary Israeli relative during the Gaza War. In any case, in the most controversial and concluding part of this speech, the seventh relative says:
Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don't care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her. Don't tell her that.
Tell her we love her.
Don't frighten her. 1
