“Kidnapping”: An Interview of Dominique Caillat
By Timothy Rearden (October 2004)

What is the influence of religion on the conflict?

Moderate, enlightened believers are never a problem anywhere and they are a majority.  Unfortunately, Muslim fundamentalists and “national-orthodox” Jews do play a role in Middle-Eastern politics. They are helped by the fact that in both religions, God also rules citizens, not just their souls.

On the Israeli side, religion is mostly an internal problem creating great tensions between traditionally secular Zionists and an ultra-Orthodox community that strives to turn Israel into a religious State. In contrast to the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers are active protagonists in the conflict. Although they claim to be religious, they are primarily nationalists who use the Bible to support their colonialist dream of conquering the whole of Palestine. Actually, there is nothing particularly religious about the settlers, I think, whom I mostly experienced as violent, racist and immoral.

On the Palestinian side, it is different. Islam is notoriously experiencing a wave of radical and sometimes violent fundamentalism, which is fuelled by the fact that many Muslims feel utterly humiliated. Radical religious leaders have been particularly successful in attracting disciples in regions which have failed to develop into modern, emancipated States. Karl Marx’s famous words come to mind:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Without wanting to reduce religion as a whole to this poetic premise, I do think it applies very well to the Palestinian situation. The abuse of religious faith to brainwash citizens and gain political power is an age-old device. When God comes into play, there are no compromises. God is absolute. Brought into politics, He is dangerous. God forbids dialogue.

One more comment: 20 years ago, quite a proportion of Palestinian women did not wear a veil. Now, almost every Muslim woman does. Is this a sign of oppression? Or is it a symbol of resistance, designed to distinguish oneself from the hated enemy, the „decadent West“? Or do religious rituals give women a sense of purpose and identity? All these explanations seem valid, somehow. The veil is arguably a symbol of strength and resistance as well as a sign of oppression. This is a typical Middle-Eastern contradiction.

Let’s talk about the play: five minutes after the beginning of “Kidnapping”, two of the three protagonists, Lev and Sami, get killed in a suicide bombing. Why?

Terror is a major element in the conflict. You cannot understand the present occupation, or the support enjoyed by the Israeli army even in the most obvious cases of overreaction, gross negligence or premeditated violence, if you ignore terror. In our countries, a single case of terrorism traumatizes people for months if not years. In Israel, from 2000 on there were several attacks a month, sometimes several in a single week. In March 2002 alone, there were nineteen attacks on civilian and military targets! This is unimaginable for us. In fact, if it happened here, I think we would soon have a sort of dictatorship. Israelis are traumatized, just like the Palestinians are.

So the issue for me was not whether to include terror, but where to place it. Ending the play with a deadly explosion would have destroyed any positive message and drowned the story in pathos. Somewhere in the middle, it would have paralyzed the play, which would have to be centred on this event alone, its causes and aftermath. I didn’t want to write about terror, which numbs the mind, but about the conflict as such, what it’s about, where it came from, where it is headed to and why it concerns us.

The advantage of starting with the killing is that you don’t know the characters yet. They are anonymous. It’s shattering, but no more than reading about it in the daily papers as we so often do. We don’t get to meet the desperate relatives; we see none of the infinite pain of those left behind. So it’s bearable. We hear a description of the mayhem but when Sami and Lev appear on stage, they look alive, although they sometimes behave strangely.

The assumption is that they have landed in some no man’s land and are unable, for some reason, to meet their post-mortal destiny, be it nothingness, paradise or hell. They have unfinished business on earth. First of all, they don’t want to have died for nothing: they came to this café at the request of a journalist who was going to interview them about the Israeli-Palestinian situation; now they want her to do the job. In addition, each needs to take leave of a beloved person (Lev’s son, who is doing military service in Hebron, and Sami’s cousin, his first love, who lives in Jenin).

It is left to the audience to decide whether Anna is dreaming all this, imagining it in an attempt to come to terms with the horrible death of her friends, or whether she is really held hostage by two ghosts.

What was important to me was the flexibility of travelling through the past, the present and the future, not being limited by considerations of time and space.

Isn’t it a little absurd, perhaps even comic?

This is a play, not a piece of political science. It’s about a conflict that is very tragic, very human and at times very absurd indeed. Living there, you sometimes think everyone around you is nuts and they need psychiatrists rather than politicians. It’s about three characters who have all sorts of failings and are stuck together for better or for worse. They cannot escape. They could ignore one another – indeed, in the case of Lev, Sami and Anna, accepting the others’ reality is traumatic, if not sheer impossible – but they don’t. They start talking, complaining, explaining, arguing and fighting with one another.

How representative are Lev and Sami of their respective people?

Not very! But who is typical anyway? With only three characters for three nationalities, it is impossible to show the many tendencies and “types” of the given communities. It’s another reason for killing Sami and Lev, because as dead souls, they are presumably more universal and somehow freed from the limits of their own biographies. They are not yet outsiders, but they are on their way out.

Why did you imagine a childhood friendship between Anna, Lev and Sami? Isn’t this a little far-fetched?

How far-fetched is reality? This is a personal anecdote. I grew up in Paris. There was an Egyptian boy in my class who was really sweet and whom we all liked. In 1967, at the beginning of the 6-Day-War, he disappeared. We were told not to worry, there were troubles in his country but he’d soon come back. He didn’t, at least not in my class. Instead, in 1968, a new boy arrived. He was an Israeli "Sabra", had lived in a Kibbutz, spoke fluent Hebrew and taught us to write our names in his exotic language. We were fascinated! Shortly afterwards, my family moved to Holland. This was the end of my childhood, which I have associated ever since with the ’67 war and the replacement of an Arab friend by an Israeli. My own story is not important, but it helped me to build the play around an event that meant something to me personally – a writer’s device – and which had some parallels with the “bigger” story I was trying to tell: my three characters are filled with nostalgia for their childhood, which they regard as idyllic, although it probably wasn’t. On the political level, this reflects the longing of many Israelis, Palestinians and Germans for a distant past that is deemed to have been happy, or at least happier, before everything went wrong. For the Israelis, the turning point is 1967, for the Palestinians it is 1948, and Germans need to go even further back, to the 1920s, before Hitler’s rise to power. These may be self-delusions, but they are part of the people’s psyche.

It is particularly true of Israel, which practically lost its childhood and innocence as it invaded the territories lying beyond the Green Line in the wake of its extraordinary victory in 1967. In that instant, it stopped being a victim and became an aggressor. This may be unfair, but it’s how most people look at it. The invasion was certainly a mistake, looking back.

Is there any particular message in your play?

Well, I am not trying to teach anything or anybody, so let’s say there are themes, including:

1. It is important to listen to the different narratives in both camps because people need to tell their stories. It’s a question of identity and of mutual recognition.

2. Having done this, it becomes clear that the rival narratives are incompatible and that it is impossible for any camp to convince the other that it is right and the opponent is wrong.

3. Since it is impossible to agree on the past, on who is right, or who was right to start with, the only alternative is to find a compromise which enables people to live together in spite of their disagreement. In the Middle-East, people are, understandably, emotionally entangled in the past. Remembrance is essential, but it would help if politics could emancipate and begin to focus on the present.

4. Occupation and armed struggle are destroying morality in both camps, like in every war.

5. There is no real symmetry between Israelis and the Palestinians, whose societies are different, but there are parallels: most of all, both communities are deeply traumatised. In a nutshell, the Israelis are afraid and the Palestinians are humiliated.

I would like to develop this a bit since so many people see the Israelis as “strong” if not ruthless. Yet I believe that the common denominator of all Israelis is actually a deep-seated fear, arising probably from centuries of persecution, culminating in Hitler’s attempted “final solution” and permanently revived by over five decades of war with the Arabs. This is a favourite theory of Avi Primor, Israel’s former ambassador to Germany, who once told me: “We are Samsons who fear the dark, cats who are afraid of mice. This is deeply embedded in our psyche. Sadate understood this very well. His interviews in the Israeli Media in 1977 were brilliant. He directly addressed the Israeli people and said: ‘I have come to offer you security. I am really concerned about your security!’ Of course, Sadate didn’t care a damn about our security, but he pretended to and we believed him. That’s why he got every inch of his land back, which is what he was really after. Unfortunately, Arafat doesn’t understand this. The Palestinians must offer us security; this is the only way to achieve peace.”

6. Israelis are traumatised not just by the war, but by the destruction of a myth: the legend of the wonderful pioneers who built a garden in an empty desert. As the emissaries of Theodor Herzl - the father of the Jewish State – wrote in a famous telegram they sent to Herzl from Palestine in 1897: “The bride is beautiful, but she is already married”. They had found out that the land was inhabited by Arabs. Part of the myth remains true, but there is a shadow over it.

7. In the end, what is important is this: on the one hand, Israel is a lawful State established as a result of international agreements and recognized by the UN. It has a right to exist within secure borders. On the other hand, there are millions of Palestinian refugees, many of whom lost their homes as a result of the 1948 War of Independence, whether they fled or were expulsed. They need a land of their own, in which they can live as they wish, if they wish. This can only be the West Bank and Gaza.

Would you consider producing this play in Israel or in the Palestinian Territories?

Not really. The play is written for a European audience and designed to inform as well as sensitize. For audiences in the Middle-East, most of this information is well-known. In Israel, for example, one writes more cryptically and critically about this theme, focussing more on the absurd aspects. Also, starting the play with a suicide bombing, which I find acceptable here, would be deemed insensitive in Israel, where almost everyone has been affected in one way or another by terror attacks. It’s very hard to discuss all the problems we have evoked here with the real actors of the drama. I will give you an example: I have been using throughout this interview the expression “Palestinian Territories”. This alone could cause an endless discussion with Israelis, who might prefer the terms Judea/Samaria, West Bank/Gaza, Palestinian Authority, etc. I don’t think most Europeans would even notice that the terms may be controversial. In fact, I find it very difficult to discuss these issues in such a short space. This is true of the play as well, which is necessarily succinct. I cannot do justice in it to all the people who helped and supported me, spending so much time telling me their life stories and analysing the situation. This is why I have written a diary of my research, which will be published by the producers of “Kidnapping”.

Thank you and good luck.

(October 2004)