Palestine - Now! And Forever..

Anyway, Robert was deeply impressed by this Palestinian poet in exile's stories and experiences and commissioned him to write a play. The second was the deliberate killing of American ISM worker ( International Solidarity Movement ), Rachel Corrie by the Israelis whilest attempting to protect a Palestinian's home from the bulldozers. Thus, the two stories became amalgamated, but instead of the ISM victim being a Yank, we made her a Scot, since we are in Scotland (besides, a British ISM worker was also deliberately shot dead by Israeli soldiers soon after) and anyway, there is too much America in the world.

So, the story becomes a piece of fiction but initially based on two real people...who obviously never really met. But the real story of the play is about a Palestinian woman called Sara who symbolises the tragedy of Palestine. She is the loved one of the poet he had to leave behind when he fled to Scotland. And our Scots ISM worker goes to his old home to try to find her...which tragically leads to her own death at the hands of the Israeli Zionist fascists.

Of course, the play is partisan, biased in favour of the Palestinian people...and rightly so. They are the indigenous people of that region who had their land, their identity and culture stolen from them by foreign invaders from Europe, USA and the Communist bloc. I'm glad we made no effort to present Israel's side of the arguement. The Zionist Cause is nearly always favourably presented in the Western media. Even though the Israeli state daily commits terrorism against ordinary Palestinian people, there is rarely international condemnation and never any punitive redresses for Israel's continual ethnic cleansing and extermination of the original inhabitants of Palestine.

The western media may criticise our play "The Jasmine Road" for not being "balanced" (I don't remember war movies such as "The Great Escape" or "Platoon" as being balanced) but if I was to write a play about the Jewish Holocaust, with total sympathy for the Jewish victims and none whatsoever for the German Nazi murderers, or made no attempt to present a "balanced" view of the Hitlerian fear of the pollution and weakening of the Aryan blood through the contamination of Jewish existence - no one would criticise me (except perhaps the usual lunatic neo-Nazi apologists like KKK etc). When I wrote a play about disabled people being the first to be gassed in Hitler's eugenics-inspired gas chambers, I felt no obligation to include the Nazi arguements for euthanasia...and as a disabled person who is at risk, why should I? And nobody criticized me either.

If we think it wrong for Palestinians to be systematically removed from their homeland, to be denied a nationhood in their country...by foreign occupation force (masquerading as agents of a mythical Biblical prophecy) then why should we in our play give a voice to the perpetrators of the injustice, oppression, slaughter, unlawful imprisonment and illegal demolition of people's homes.

Everyone talks about Palestinian or Arab terrorism...Hollywood's current favourite villain is the Arab terrorist (and no one expects these movies to be balanced)

....But no one talks or complains about Israeli terrorism....

How can I possibly have any sympathy for an Israel that refuses to punish Zionist settlers for cowardly shooting an unarmed little 10 year old Palestinian girl whilest innocently collecting water from her village well?

Although, it's not mentioned in "The Jasmine Road", my personal opinion as to how Rachel Corrie was murdered, was that the Israeli bulldozer driver was ultimately given the "green light" by someone in the U.S. embassy to lethally run her over. Israel would not dare kill an American unless they were first given permission. I imagine that just before the bulldozer moved forward for the kill, that the driver will have phoned or radioed to his superior, who in turn would have contacted the CIA liason officer with Mossad, Israel's Gestapo, for advice. Word would have come back that it was OK to "take her out" since she had been such a "pain in the ass for the Bush Administration". If you saw the Jack Lemmon movie "Missing" or Oliver Stone's "Salvador", both based on true accounts, you will appreciate that my suspicion is probably correct. I believe the responsibility for the murder of Rachel Corrie ultimately rests in the bloody footprints of the George W. Bush Administration.