Via Dolorosa

In 1999 English playwright David Hare undertook a short visit to Israel and the occupied territories in search of... what? Material for a play? A better understanding of a major contemporary issue? A feeling that Hampstead, London, is not perhaps quite at the hub of the modern world? What resulted was not a play, but a stage monologue, and Hare, not a trained actor, chose to perform it himself, met with some success, took the production to America, where Via Dolorosa, as he called it, was filmed in performance at the Booth Theater.

Via Dolorosa, the pathway of sorrows, is a plain man's journey through the complexities and impossibilities at the heart of the Israel/Palestine problem. Hare is by turns puzzled, amused, infuriated and deeply moved by the opinions, some deeply held, others casually prejudiced, which he meets. He brings to life for us the various people encountered on the way: his translator, a British Council worker, an august Palestinian politician, a desperate Israeli lawyer, all of them opening his eyes, up to a point, to the tragic situation in the Middle East. Yet he returns to Hampstead a sadder man, certainly with no ideas for a play, with no solutions to the problem, but perhaps with a little wisdom to share with us.

As cinema, Via Dolorosa probably works better than some other efforts to preserve stage performances on film. It is simply photographed, with no more than brief bracket-scenes shot outside the Booth Theater. As a playwright, Hare knows all about pacing and varying his story; just occasionally you wonder how better an accomplished actor might have handled the material. But since it is such a personal tale, and since Hare seems to have no political axe to grind, it is easy to lose yourself in the spellbinding narrative and forgive the odd arm-flap or vocal swoop.

Strong partisans of either persuasion may find Hare's even-handedness hard to take. Those of us of his generation who share his bewilderment are grateful for his honest attempt to turn sadness into art.

This is thought-provoking and dramatic. Being based on fact strengthens the points which may be drawn from it. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is an excellent commentary on the situation in the Occupied Territories. Viewers can make up their own minds about resolutions to the problems.

Very moving and extremely enlightening filmed one man play, written and performed by the British playwright David Hare. Directed with a light, deft touch by Stephen Daldry (The Hours)

It recounts Hare's experiences visiting Israel, as he interviewed people on all sides of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Not only is Hare's writing terrific (no surprise), but he reveals real charisma and emotional accessibility as a performer (yes, he's playing himself, but ask any actor - that's one of the hardest things to do).

I felt like I learned more in this 90 minutes, while also being more touched (and occasionally made to laugh) than I have from any other 5 dramatic films or documentaries on the subject combined.

Quite special and overlooked, and well worth seeking out.

I missed his performance of Via Dolorosa in New York but was intrigued by what he thought of Israeli/Palestinian issues and therefore rented the DVD of his performance.

Many of Hare's expressed assumptions are false. Thus, for example, though Hare may be nominally Christian, Hare believes that Christianity no longer has any essential meaning for Westerners; I don't know why - he seems only to speak for himself. And thus, the Jewish settlers' application of religious belief as a basis for anyone's "real present day world" belief about politics or morality is treated by Hare with "slap on the forehead" incredulity. It is offensive, and more indicative of Hare's absence of religious belief than of anything peculiar about the settlers, to hear Hare speak of religion as an absurd basis for action or belief.

Time and again, Hare states the central problem for Israel as the necessary primacy of a certain consciousness, set of attitudes or "thoughts" over mere "ownership" of "stones" (i.e., sovereignty over land). It is apparently this reluctance to cede ownership of territory that Hare believes is at the root of the mutual enmity of Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Hare assumes that the Palestinians' central desire is mere sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip - and with these desires granted, all will be well: Arabs may want stones - Israel should not care about them.

Yet even by this double standard, Hare is mistaken. If the Arabs formed the PLO years before 1967 with the express intention of destroying any Jewish homeland in the Middle East - and in fact the vast majority of Arabs sought the eradication of Jews from Palestine before 1948 - then what does this say about Hare's assumption that somehow relinquishing control over particular land acquired in 1967 would end the enmity? But the desired conclusion of the Arab "struggle" is the termination of a Jewish state - check any opinion poll.

The majority of Jews in Israel have no ancestors who ever lived in Europe - they or their parents or grandparents fled from elsewhere in North Africa or the Middle East. Hare gives no sign of understanding this - and sees Israel somehow as an offshoot of Europe. It was not the absorption of the West Bank that caused Jews to be persecuted and expelled from the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.

Thus, Hare's astonishment that some Israelis could disagree with the Oslo Accords in 1993 because those accords contemplate the emergence of a Palestinian state, is strange when the existence of such a state would constitute another step in the intended destruction of Israel.

Hare is also blind in his reference to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "conquered territories". All inhabited territory on earth has been conquered from other peoples. E.g., England IS conquered territory - certainly from the time of the invasions by Jutes, Angles and Saxons through the Danes to the Normans. They didn't leave.

Following World War II, within a few years of the creation of Israel, there were expulsions of people from territories, and expropriation of property, on a vast scale around the globe - in Tibet, in Inner Mongolia, in Taiwan by the retreating Nationalists, in the Sudetenland by the Czech government. Such expansion and contraction, the emergence and disappearance of peoples and states are true throughout the world and throughout history.

Thus, even if Hare were correct in his assumption that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian enmity were the cession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- --why is Israel (a very small country) alone to be required to lose much if not most of its territory? Simply because they failed to force the Palestinians to emigrate to surrounding Arab countries? This makes little moral sense.

Hare also speaks of the terrible poverty in the Gaza Strip. There is poverty - but neighboring Egypt and Jordan are more impoverished. Indeed, the West Bank is the most affluent non-oil producing Arab majority area in the world. If the Arabs in the West Bank are indeed wealthier there than in neighboring countries - and continue to live there rather than emigrate - obviously the humiliation of checkpoint searches (and who can say THOSE are unnecessary given the horrors of the violence against civilians?), is insufficient to motivate people to improve their lives by moving. There's no Iron Curtain preventing emigration.

Hare strangely appears to assume that a nation's sovereignty should never cost the lives of those in its defense. At one point, he repeats the statement by an Israeli military officer that though Israel had lost 20,000 lives to violence since its creation, the loss had been justified by the creation of a sovereign country for the Jews. Hare sees this as somehow wrong - an improper elevation of "ownership" of land and of "stones" over human lives and "thoughts".

Would Hare say that the vastly greater losses by the USSR in World War II were not worth it to avoid the loss of "land" (i.e., the country) to Germany? How much of the USSR should have been given up to Nazi Germany to avoid those losses - because its "real value" lay in the performance of Tchaikovsky's symphonies or the reading of Turgenev, rather than there mere "stones" of Russia? The preservation of sovereignty always costs lives - many of them - and if successful, is deemed worthwhile by survivors.

Hare's assumptions that religion is a terrible basis for conduct and belief, that acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute the whole of Palestinian desires, that Israel's acquisition of these areas was somehow different from all nations' acquisition of their own lands, that defense of the homes of countrymen constitutes a wrongful elevation of mere stones above the "intellectual heritage" of the people - all strike me as very wrong-headed.