2 days ago
Why luvvies are obsessed with Palestine
Vanessa Redgrave's Oscar acceptance speech remains a startling watch. It was 1978 and the star had just scooped the best supporting actress award for playing an anti-Nazi hero in Julia, opposite Jane Fonda. After taking the stage in her billowing black velvet dress, she was presented with her golden statuette by John Travolta.
The run-up to the ceremony was marred by controversy and threats against Redgrave because she had narrated and produced The Palestinian, a documentary that was seen by some as supporting Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation, the previous year. An effigy of Redgrave, then 41, was burned by Jewish activists outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles; counterprotestors waved the Palestinian flag. So fraught was the atmosphere that police sharpshooters were placed on the roof of the theatre to guard against a potential assassin.
'You should be very proud that in the last few weeks you have stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world,' she told Hollywood's elite. Some booed. The actress would later claim that she was specifically referring to activists from the Jewish Defense League, but many interpreted her speech as being hostile to Israel generally. It certainly damaged her career.
Redgrave's outburst was novel at the time but now, almost two years since the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023 that sparked the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza, such overt pro-Palestinian activism is par for the course in the performing arts.
In the last few weeks alone we have seen the controversial Glastonbury sets by punk rappers Bob Vylan – one of whose members led chants of 'Death, death to the IDF' and ranted about 'Zionist' recording industry bosses – and Kneecap, a group whose career has been supercharged after making controversial statements about Israel and Palestine. Both groups have had their performances investigated by the police; the investigation into Kneecap's Glastonbury appearance was subsequently dropped.
Even the Royal Opera House, the august Covent Garden institution, has proven susceptible to the creep of this on-stage activism. The end of Verdi's Il trovatore was disrupted by a freelance performer, Daniel Perry, unfurling the Palestinian flag and wrestling it away from a backstage figure who tried to remove it. A spokeswoman for the venue said: 'The display of the flag was a spontaneous and unauthorised action by the artist. It was not approved by the Royal Ballet and Opera and is not in line with our commitment to political impartiality.'
The plight of Palestinians has, for the past few decades, been an obsession among the largely Left-wing figures who make up the leading figures in the performing arts. While Redgrave in the late 1970s was a relatively fringe figure for her outspoken support for Palestine – the Cold War and apartheid South Africa were the primary sources of geopolitical angst for most of the late 20th century – since the fall of the Berlin Wall and election of Nelson Mandela much more attention has been paid to the Middle East.
Think of Seven Jewish Children, the 2009 Caryl Churchill play that covered decades of Israeli history in 10 minutes that was subtitled A Play for Gaza. It was written hastily in response to Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military's incursion into the Palestinian territory after Hamas came to power; as many as 1,400 Gazans died, as did 13 Israelis, during the three-week conflict.
Publicising Seven Jewish Children at the time, Churchill said: 'Israel has done lots of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme.' The play was widely condemned as being anti-Semitic, a claim she has always denied, and the BBC declined to adapt it for radio because of its need to be impartial.
Churchill, now 86, remains just as committed to the Palestinian cause. Earlier this year, she abandoned plans to mount a new play at the Donmar Warehouse because the central London theatre is sponsored by Barclays bank, which has been accused of having links to Israel. More than 300 arts figures, including performers Juliet Stevenson, Samuel West and Harriet Walter, signed an open letter supporting Churchill's decision.
Disruption and boycotts are nothing new, of course. Sustained audience disturbances derailed a 2011 performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at the BBC Proms so much that its broadcast on Radio 3 was interrupted twice; the following year, Mark Rylance was one of 37 people to sign a letter to The Guardian that called for a performance by the Israeli theatre company Habima at Shakespeare's Globe to be cancelled.
'By inviting Habima, the Globe is associating itself with policies of exclusion practised by the Israeli state and endorsed by its national theatre company,' the letter read. 'We ask the Globe to withdraw the invitation so that the festival is not complicit with human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land.'
Globe bosses defended the programming decision, but the performance of a Hebrew-language Merchant of Venice was disrupted. About 15 people were carried or led out of the theatre for unfurling banners and flags, while one man was arrested.
To supporters of the Palestinian cause, the reason for being vocal is self-evident. I ask Juliet Stevenson why events in Gaza have so animated her and her fellow performers. 'A simple answer to the question is that, with 100,000 people killed, and about 18,000 children among them, that's the reason people are feeling strongly about the issue,' she says. 'The killing of vast numbers of innocent people in horrific ways – burning, being shot, starving, exploding with bombs – that's probably why so many people feel strongly about it. Wouldn't you think?'
For Perry at the Royal Opera House, unfurling the flag appears to have been worth the risk of committing what the Slippedisc journalist Norman Lebrecht describes as 'stage suicide'. He tells me it is unlikely that he will be booked again because 'somebody who disrupts the illusion of theatre' cannot be trusted 'to appear on stage without importing some issue of their own'.
It is notable that, for all the noise about Palestine, there is no such protest on stages across the country about what is happening in Ukraine or Sudan, two other long-running conflicts where civilians are regularly being killed. 'Those people who speak out on Palestine, you never hear them speaking out on Russia, you never hear them speaking out on Sudan or any of the other atrocities happening in the world. They tend to be single-issue protesters, and they've been corralled almost into a sense of social obligation, that this is the right thing to do if you want to succeed in the acting profession,' Lebrecht adds.
'It's trendy. If all your friends are doing it and you want to keep them as your friends then you go along with it.'
Maureen Lipman, the Jewish actress, tells me that she thinks that 'the Jews, the Israelis, have turned into the white South Africans' under apartheid: bogeymen that must be opposed. 'These people believe with all their hearts that the Palestinian cause is bigger than anything in the world; bigger than Sudan or Yemen, bigger than Burma, bigger than China,' Lipman says of the pro-Palestine activists. 'There's one cause, like there was one cause in South Africa, and it really appeals to these people.'
It can feel like the issue of Palestine is everywhere you look in the arts. The entire Edinburgh Fringe last year was dominated by Gaza after ugly scenes at a set by the American comedian Reginald D Hunter, when he was heckled by an Israeli couple who took issue with one of his jokes and they were barracked by other audience members. Separately, Hunter appeared in court this month after being accused of making anti-Semitic social media posts.
Meanwhile, musicians such as Brian Eno and Massive Attack have joined forces with Kneecap to create a syndicate for artists 'threatened into silence or career cancellation' by speaking out about Palestine. Gary Lineker left his lucrative job presenting on the BBC because of his own social media posts about the conflict.
Paul W Fleming, general secretary of the performers' union Equity, says that the pro-Palestinian activism only gets noticed because of the ambiguous position of the British government on the question of what is going on in the Middle East, in contrast to its unequivocal stance on, for instance, Ukraine. In addition, many arts bosses appear worried about programming work that directly addresses the Israel-Palestine conflict, such as when Manchester's Royal Exchange cancelled a staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream last September over apparent references to the war, as well as transgender rights.
'The arts are supposed to be a space where these injustices are challenged and we understand the world a bit better,' he tells me. 'The reason why it feels so febrile, I guess, is because of a prevailing culture of implicit and explicit censorship of pro-Palestinian voices and a general anxiety in civil society about talking about it… The reason it is made in increasingly desperate tones and increasingly erratic and spontaneous expressions is because it's harder to express solidarity with Palestine than it is over other issues.'
Fleming adds: 'Equally, the government isn't listening to artists or ordinary citizens that wish to say 'Genocide is wrong, British complicity in that genocide is wrong, the complicity of major international corporations in the systems of genocide and apartheid is wrong,' and nothing seems to change. And when people don't get their voices heard… it moves beyond the accepted mechanisms of change and debate and discourse into more direct action.'
After Redgrave left the Oscars stage in 1978, the Jewish writer Paddy Chayefsky presented the screenplay awards but, before he did so, chose to address the actress's earlier remarks. 'I would like to say – personal opinion, of course – that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda,' he said. 'I would like to suggest to Ms. Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple 'thank you' would have sufficed.' He received a standing ovation.
