In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,†Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, takes alook at some media commentary about the blatantly controversial play Seven Jewish Children.
Two weeks ago (May 14 issue) this column focused on the controversy over Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children. That should have been enough on that subject. This week’s column was supposed address the media’s treatment of the May 18 meeting in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama. However, since more has been recently written about Churchill’s play, and further controversy stirred up as a result, it’s important to take another look.
Yoni Goldstein, a gifted and insightful writer for the National Post, wrote an illogical piece titled “Nuanced, not anti-Semitic” (May 19). He argued that Churchill’s 10-minute play is a “nuanced piece of writing” and not, as many critics claim, “a one-sided diatribe against Israel inhumanness.”
However, Goldstein then refuted himself when he acknowledged that Churchill draws an analogy between the Holocaust suffered by Jews under the Nazis and “another, newer, genocide of the Palestinians perpetrated by Israel.” Perversely, Goldstein wrote that this is “the worst” one can say about the play. What is worse than implying that Israelis are acting like Nazis? There is nothing “nuanced” about this absurd allegation, which means any claim that the play is a “nuanced piece of writing” shouldn’t be taken seriously.
While some defenders of Churchill have argued that she is simply criticizing strongly – but fairly – the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, at least Goldstein recognized the linkage she made between Israelis and Nazis, even if he failed to denounce the linkage for the outrageous, hideous slander that it is.
For this very reason, many liberals, such as  British novelist Howard Jacobson have accused Churchill of perpetrating the big lie. How did Goldstein miss this?
Unfortunately, Goldstein only compounded his misjudgment the following day when he wrote, in response to a letter writer taking exception to the Nazi analogy, the following: “Seven Jewish Children was written by Caryl Churchill, not me. To argue, as I have, that the play links the Holocaust to the genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis is much, much different than arguing that the latter genocide in fact exists.”
This defence is, frankly, incoherent. Had Goldstein put the word “genocide” in ironic quotes where it belongs, or had he written a satire (a parody) of what defenders of Churchill are saying, he might have made sense. Unfortunately, simply repeating what Churchill’s play asserts without pointing out its factual baselessness and its absurdit, only lends it an air of plausibility.
What’s especially disturbing is that the most hideous things said about Jews and Israelis – which used to be confined to the margins of the extreme right and extreme left –  are now making their way into mainstream discourse as “fair comment.” Objections to such calumnies are often parried with the accusation, “How dare you try to silence me with the charge of anti-Semitism!” Entirely missed in this sordid affair is that words and fact matter, and that with words comes responsibility – the responsibility to be fair and accurate.
In “A distasteful display of agitprop,” (Globe and Mail, May 16), Rex Murphy, who knows a thing or two about the meaning of words and their power, brilliantly dissected what Churchill’s words amount to.
On the key point in question above, Murphy wrote: “It is the deepest, most radical insult to pass on Israel and Israelis to imply that they are now what Hitler and his demonic henchmen were then: that Israelis are the present world’s Nazis. To my ear and mind, linking today’s Jews of Israel to the Nazis – as is so frequently the case in the demonstrations and rhetoric of the ‘anti-Zionists’ – Â passes as something, in a curious and painful way, more baleful and morally astonishing than denying the Holocaust.
“About no other set of people could such a drama be written, or find audiences, than the Jews of Israel. Seven Jewish Children is a document of our age – not in the manner that ‘progressive’ thought would have it be. But as yet one more signal, though more sharply intense and fevered than all the rest, of how utterly inverted, how ferociously off track, the moral intelligence of our time has drifted.”
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