Two Plays about Israel/Palestine: Masada, Facts

By Arthur Milner

TWO PLAYS ABOUT ISRAEL/PALESTINE

“Arthur Milner’s plays are always smart, engaging and contemporary. Milner is a man of his times who never talks down to his audience, even as he courts and incites strong reactions. We forgive him, though because he entertains us with clever and funny characters. He seems incapable of writing a character without a sense of humour.”
—Patrick McDonald

MASADA

“theatre stripped to its essence…a challenging piece of work…factually fascinating and a skillful piece of writing…driven by a powerful and frightening logic.”
—Jill Lawless, Now Magazine

“one of the greatest examples of artistic moral courage I’ve ever witnessed…leads its audience onto very slippery moral ground and leaves the viewer to grope for his or her own answers…Writing and stagin Masada was an act of moral courage.”
—Brian Gorman, Ottawa Sun

FACTS>

“riveting…Milner has dared tackle one of the most difficult and explosive political questions on earth…a strong will, a confident pen, clear thinking, a well-informed human being, and a writer passionately engaged…This is a powerful play.”
—Alvina Ruprecht, Capital Critics Circle

“Facts is a stimulating and provocative piece of theatre which delivers a fascinating political and philosophical debate without reducing the characters to talking heads.”
—Jamie Portman, Postmedia News

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469774794

Arthur Milner

Arthur Milner was Resident Playwright and then Artistic Director at Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company. He taught playwriting at Concordia University and theatre history at Carleton University, and has worked as a dramaturge at the Manitoba Association of Playwrights and the Banff Playwrights Colony. He lives in Val-des-Monts, Québec.

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TWO PLAYS

ABOUT

ISRAEL/PALESTINE

MASADA

FACTS

Arthur Milner

Two Plays about Israel/Palestine

Masada, Facts

Copyright © 2012 Arthur Milner

Masada © Copyright 1989 Arthur Milner

Facts © Copyright 2003, 2010 Arthur Milner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Rights to produce these plays, in whole or in part, in any medium by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the author. Interested persons are requested to contact him at [e-mail]

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-7478-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-7479-4 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/30/2023

Cover Design: Sam Awwad

Original Photograph by Justin C. McIntosh, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

MASADA

FACTS

About the Author

Preface

I came of age in the ‘60s and was interested in politics from my late teens. When I started writing plays in the mid-‘70s, it was natural that I would write plays on political subjects, including poverty, Nicaragua, the future of work.

At one point I said to myself, It’s time I turn my attention to Israel. It was both natural that I do so, and natural that I avoid it.

My parents were Polish Jews who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. They left Poland, with a group of friends in 1938, when rumour of a German invasion was spreading. They crossed into Russia, expecting to soon return home or to be joined by their families. Neither was to happen.

The Russians moved Jews away from the front and so my parents moved east as the German armies advanced, ending up in Uzbekistan. After the war, they made their way through Poland and to a displaced persons camp in the American sector of Germany. There they waited for immigration to North America. My brother was born in the camp; I was born in Frankfurt, a year before we emigrated to Montreal. My parents’ parents, uncles and aunts, and siblings all died in the war, killed by the Nazis.

My father had been a Zionist from an early age; and for some reason he chose to be a follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the extreme right-wing group known as Zionist Revisionists. In Montreal, my father was a fundraiser, recruiter and organizer for the Revisionists, who after the establishment of Israel in 1948, became associated with Herut, led by Menachem Begin. Begin was to become a Prime Minister of Israel, but he was then better known as a former member of the terrorist gang that had blown up British soldiers and Arab and Jewish civilians in the King David Hotel.

At the time, Begin and Herut were considered unelectable and pretty close to unmentionable in Montreal Jewish circles, but my father remained loyal to the cause and, in my youth, Begin was an occasional visitor to our home.

My father became quite well off after we arrived in Canada, but he never left the small working class synagogue that he joined on arrival. It suited his temperament; but he believed, I think, that it better served his purposes to lead a small, poor congregation than to follow a large, wealthy one. He was president of that synagogue for some 30 years, until his death in 1990. He was not a religious man, but he believed that religion was necessary to the survival of the Jewish people, and he was more likely to go to synagogue on Sundays for meetings than on Saturdays for prayer. He observed some of the traditional rules—at home, his diet was roughly kosher; but away from home he would eat seafood and even pork, though only when carefully hidden in Chinese food.

His right-wing Zionism precluded our being sent—as were many of our contemporaries—to a Kibbutz for the summer. And his and my mother’s attitudes to the Holocaust had been of the get over it rather than the dwell on it variety—for which I remain eternally grateful. Still, any criticism of Israel would elicit reference to the Holocaust.

His child-rearing theories were modern—or perhaps just laissez-faire. He had absolute confidence that left to our own devices we would arrive at his conclusions. He did live to regret this approach.

My father was strongly opposed to Communism, and he believed that Israel’s Labour Party was too powerful and its economy too restricted. But he was not right wing in Canadian terms, and he had little trouble with his sons’ activist politics. He even found himself able to accommodate my brother’s Quebec nationalist sympathies. Our views on Israel were another matter.

Until 1967, most of the North American left was quite sympathetic to Israel, and accepted the prevailing myth of the Israeli David vs. the Arab Goliath. But Israel’s easy victory in the Six Day War marked a change. More and more, Israel came to be seen as the powerful oppressor and the Palestinians as the weak oppressed—though murderous attacks on civilians made them difficult to love.

It’s hard for me to remember my views at the time. I was 17 years old, and I was happy that Israel did not lose the war. But I began to listen to the criticisms of Israel, and slowly came to accept many of them.

Still, it was easier for me to just ignore the whole thing, to leave the matter to others, especially when criticism of Israel at home would often lead to shouting and tears.

Eventually I came to believe it was my responsibility to tackle the subject. And the product of that was Masada. I remember telling my father I was writing a play about Israel. He anticipated it would not be to his liking and he was quite angry. I didn’t mention it again until an opening date had been announced. He bounced back quite quickly. Then I should come see it, he said. But he never did.

Facts requires less introduction. I have paid close attention to Israeli and Palestinian politics since Masada, and it was just a matter of time before I revisited the subject dramatically. I became interested in the conflict between natural selection and biblical accounts of creation. Similarly, I grew interested in the conflict between biblical history and archaeology. When I heard about the unsolved murder of an archaeologist in the West Bank, I thought: this is a story for me.

These two plays, then, are the result of a life-long, almost genetic, immersion in the subject matter. I believe that my father