Letter to the Belfry on December 22, 2023
In regards to the play set for the 2024 lineup, The Runner
On Friday, Dec 22, 2023, a group of concerned Canadian citizens read the following letter to the directors of the Belfry theatre, Isaac Thomas and Michael Shamata. It was read again during the community meeting which was facilitated by said directors. We have yet to hear a response from the Belfry in regards to hosting The Runner in their 2024 lineup.
Dear Directors of the Belfry theatre,
Imagine, if you will, that it's the late 1980's, and the Belfry is putting on a South African play written by a Canadian who has visited the white settler community in Johannesburg. The play is centered around a guilt-ridden white settler who struggles to adapt to the racist society around him. The play begins with a black woman stabbing an Afrikaaner policeman, and ends with a black man running over a family of white settlers. The black characters are nameless, they are described in lascivious terms that exoticize and Other them, and they are given exactly 4 words of dialogue in the whole play, with almost no attempt to give them a human face, let alone explain the multifaceted reasons behind their violent acts of resistance.
Would you agree that this would be a play that justifies South African apartheid?
Fast forward to today: the Israeli apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is much worse than South African apartheid. These are not my words; they were the words of Desmund Tutu, renowned South African archbishop and anti-apartheid activist, who visited the occupied territories and expressed his horror at the daily oppression that the Israeli military imposes on the indigenous Palestinian population.
A report in 2021 by Human Rights Watch concludes irrefutably that Israel is an apartheid state. The report summary states, and I quote: "In most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution." End quote.
"The Runner" is framed to be a challenge of racist beliefs. Except that it centers the Israeli narrative, states outright racist tropes under the guise of critiquing them, dehumanizes Palestinians, and uses the common Israeli arts tactic of “shooting and crying” to bestow benevolence on them for even pretending to have a conscience.
It is worth noting that ZAKA, where the main character of the play volunteers, is an organization that is partially funded by the Israeli regime. Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the founder of ZAKA who is mentioned in the play as "the head of ZAKA", has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct against women and minors dating back to the 1980s.
In interviews, Christopher Morris, who wrote The Runner after finding out about ZAKA in the news, mentions traveling to meet with the head of ZAKA, and working closely with Israeli settlers over the course of 9 years to help him develop the play. He even says, quote: "There is no way I could ever begin to even write a play like this without going to Israel, but moreover without talking to ZAKA members." The manuscript of The Runner, the Acknowledgements, Foreword, and Dedication all centre on the Israelis that Morris sought out to collaborate with on this work. Any acknowledgement of or connection to Palestinian people is conspicuously absent. Morris gives no indication that he ever sought out a single Palestinian over 9 years of work, and he habitually fails to even utter the word Palestine when interviewed. It is more than unfortunate that as a Canadian settler himself, it is evident in his own words and writings that his bias is in favour of the humanity of Israeli settlers at the expense of indigenous Palestinians.
The first scene in the play describes a stabbed Israeli soldier lying near a nameless wounded "Arab" girl (indeed, all of the Arabs in the play are nameless, and most are violent). Immediately, a Western audience is asked to lean back into the mountain of Western propaganda that has shaped the mainstream view of the Israeli occupation (or, the lack thereof): In the mainstream, it's a heroic conflict between "civilized white European Jews" and "the Muslim, Arab savages". Indeed, nearly everywhere an "Arab" is mentioned in the play, there is either a stabbing or a hit-and-run involved!
In the script, the word "Arab" is mentioned 40 times, mostly sandwiched between the words "knife", "stabbing", "dirty", and "blood" (the protagonist repeatedly states that he has been "contaminated" upon giving CPR to the mortally wounded "Arab girl"; this thought is never reconsidered later). The word "Palestinian" is mentioned once, where the character is seen struggling, then conforming to Israeli society which refuses to refer to Palestinians as such. Sadly, the elaboration of this struggle within the character's psyche is not given any room in the play. Additionally, several of the violent acts by the Arab characters are described in detail (such as the gratuitous stabbing scene). The violent acts by settler characters are narrated at more of a remove, which makes them seem less shocking and visceral in the minds of the audience. The violence from the Israeli side never mirrors the reality of missile strikes, chemical weapons, or torture faced by Palestinians, but is framed as individual acts of self defence against "annhiliation" (as the text puts it, more than once).
But how many times did the word "occupation" or "apartheid" occur? Not once. Rather than critique Zionism and its inherent overarching violence, the play only deals with seemingly sporadic, random acts of one-on-one violence, where both sides appear equally guilty. The whole context of a brutal decades-long occupation is left out of the narrative, which leaves us with the tropes of the 'good guilt-ridden Jewish settler', the 'bad angry Jewish settler' (who does not perform any violent act in the play, mind you), and the 'knife-wielding Arab girl', who in this case happens to live above a butcher shop infested with flies, and has a "full, wet mouth". The orientalizing, the sexualizing, the Othering of Palestinians is astonishing.
When "the Arab girl" is released from an Israeli prison, and the protagonist is questioned for saving her life, his only justification is "we swore an oath to do no harm." It is notable that the girl's life is framed in this way - as owing its worth to the ethics of a settler and not because of any inherent value she may have. This is only one instance of how 'The Runner' shrugs at any opportunity to afford the smallest reverence to Palestinians.
Towards the end, the play effortlessly chronicles the historical collective suffering of Jews in a way that humanizes them and references their spirituality. But not a single sentence mentions the word "occupation", or makes even a passing mention of the horrific events that enabled the founding of the state of Israel, which involved the murder of 10,000 Palestinian men, women and children, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of 500 Palestinian villages across historical Palestine. The trauma that shapes the modern Palestinian psyche is completely left out of the picture, and their deaths are dealt with on an individual rather than collective basis. The Arab characters are given almost no redeeming qualities, no rich cultural heritage, no deep connection to the land for the audience to empathize with. There is only one scene where the nameless Arab girl criminal shows kindness, by placing her hand on a weeping, helpless Jew. Even here, the play's author somehow is able to keep Jewish victimhood at the centre of the narrative, rather than explore the humanity of the Palestinian, who lives in the midst of 700,000 well-armed settlers, 180 Israeli military checkpoints, and a daily regiment of humiliation by the apartheid Israeli occupation.
As for a solution to the violence that the protagonist witnesses - at the end of the play he concludes that the answer is "kindness." Not resistance or justice. Not the rebuilding of Palestinian society, the return of displaced Palestinians to their families and homes, the disarmament of the occupying force, the dismantling of apartheid. The protagonist in The Runner does not advocate for any actual solutions, because he ignores the larger system. He simply doesn't want to have to personally witness its bloody outcomes, or allow that blood to "contaminate" him.
The play reiterates the national mythology of Israel without an ounce of historical context that attempts to understand the causes behind Palestinian resistance, which can be explained in very few words: Israeli ethnic cleansing. Israeli occupation. Israeli apartheid.