Staged: The Problem with “Palestine”

“I grew up a Jew in New York City,” Najla Saïd declares early in her autobiographical one-woman play “Palestine.” Saïd describes herself as a Semitic-looking girl who was raised on the Upper West Side in a politically left-leaning apartment packed to the gills with books and various manifestos. When, for effect, Saïd displays her extensive knowledge of Yiddish and reveals having kissed plenty of Jewish boys in her adolescent years, the audience laughs because it’s funny.

Of course, we know Saïd is not really a Jew, in fact, she is the daughter of Edward Saïd, the famous Palestinian academic, whose book “Orientalism” is considered required reading in the canon of postcolonial philosophy. Saïd does her best to both own and deflect the specter of her father by listing his many academic and political achievements and then reducing him to “Daddy,” her pipe-smoking, Volvo-driving, best friend in the world. Anyone blissfully oblivious to the workings of the Arab-Israeli Conflict will probably be impressed by the association.

However, the play is still called “Palestine,” and so anyone even slightly versed in politics initially wonders how Saïd will arrive at her own untrammeled understanding of the complexities of the Middle East when her father was the leading scholarly decrier of Israel and Western attitudes towards Arabs and Islam. And here is the problem with “Palestine.”

Unlike the growing number of recent stage productions (“My Name is Rachel Corrie” or Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children”) which do not feign evenhandedness about the intricate mire of the Middle East, “Palestine” (despite the name) does feign impartiality. Najla Saïd has no allegiances. She is an American. She is also Palestinian, Lebanese, and Christian. Yet she is also still a New Yorker and, lest we forget, an honorary Jew.

In 1992, Saïd and her family embark on a trip to Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. While Saïd has been to Lebanon a number of times, here she is eighteen and new to Palestine. To heighten her teenage naiveté, Saïd presents an impression of herself at that age using the voice of an admittedly vapid, politically agnostic princess who suffers from anorexia and the pathological quest for popularity. Upon arriving, she whines that she’d rather be shopping in Paris or sunning at the beach. But then something changes.

Saïd has a gift for mimicry and in “Palestine” she employs it to allow other characters to instruct her (and the audience) about, for instance, the misery of Gaza without claiming it as her own scholarship. When Saïd describes the Palestinian refugee camp Jabilia as "a concentration camp" and its denizens as "caged animals in the world’s filthiest zoo," she does so using her father’s professorial British voice before adding her own flourishes about barbed wire and the ubiquitous, menacing presence of Israeli soldiers. The word “apartheid” eventually follows as matter-of-factly as bad weather. Shortly after Gaza, when she and her family arrive in Jordan to meet with both Yassir Arafat and King Hussein, she is thankful that it’s not like impoverished Gaza and somehow oblivious to the complicity of Arafat/Hussein in the plight of Palestinian refugees.

The play is full of these contextual lacunae. Later, when Saïd and her family are touring an abandoned prison following the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, she channels the voice of their Palestinian tour guide, a former prisoner, who explains in graphic detail the torture methods of his Israeli captors. Saïd’s impression of the prisoner (heightened for comedic effect) implies derangement, but not unreliability. All the while, Saïd just wishes she were elsewhere so she wouldn’t have feel so conflicted about things.

In denuding her own voice, Saïd robs herself in the present day of any real assailable positions and lends unflinching credence to characters whose motives anyone with even a lay knowledge of the Middle East might question. Her few unequivocated political statements arrive without their situational counterparts: while relaying her personal account of the bombing of Beirut by Israeli forces in 2006, her prostrations—equal parts didactic and histrionic—about Lebanese civilians huddled under their beds and fearful of what might come crashing through their roofs contain no trace of worry for the citizens of northern Israel, both Arab and Jew, who were simultaneously enduring bombardments fired from Hezbollah positions mere blocks from where Saïd was holed up.

The total result is what one might call asymmetrical artfare. The omissions and inconsistencies would be no large artistic crime if “Palestine” didn’t promote its message under the guise of political equanimity. At a few points in the play, Saïd does pay passing lip service to the difficulties of life for Israelis, but only as afterthoughts to Palestinian suffering. Her vast repertoire of imitations excludes an Israeli or Jewish voice from weighing in, almost as if her adult life were devoid of their presence. (An aside: half of the funding [some $15,000] for the initial production fee of “Palestine” was donated by the Israeli composer Daniel Barenboim who was Edward Saïd’s best friend.)

By the end, Saïd is back wishing for peace and offering no solutions. In openly recognizing her own limitations as a storyteller, an ersatz assessor of intractable political quagmires, and an outsider, Saïd admits she is unable to do anything salient—the only universal moment in “Palestine.” But recognizing one’s limitations does not excuse them; a story about Palestine (like a story about Israel) can’t help but require the storyteller to inhabit the emotional space of the “other.” Saïd does not even try and so “Palestine” becomes theater.