The Australian Jewish News

Media Week 

Allon Lee

Debate continued over the propriety of Victorian year 12 students studying the play “Tales of a City by the Sea” written by pro-BDS activist Samah Sabawi and set in Gaza during the 2008/09 war. (Our analysis of earlier media coverage of the issue ishere).

On ABC Radio National “Book and Arts” (May 14), Sabawi claimed attempts to stage the play in Gaza in 2014 were prevented because “two-thirds of [Gaza] city was turned to rubble” during that year’s war.

Data compiled by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs shows that Gaza City itself was largely unscathed.

On ABC Radio 774 Melbourne‘s “Drive with Rafael Epstein” (May 27) Sabawi disagreed with B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich’s statement earlier that day to ABC Radio host Jon Faine that the play was “unvarnished anti-Israel propaganda”.

Sabawi said “the play does not have one Jewish…or Israeli character simply because inside Gaza, it’s a Palestinian realm.”

Or, maybe, because being identifiably Jewish or Israeli in Gaza can put you at risk of becoming a hostage or dead.

In the Age (May 28), Monika Wagner, President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, defended the play’s inclusion writing, “I can’t think of any text that does not have the potential to offend at least someone.”

But as Dvir Abramovich explained in the Age (May 31), because the play excludes vital context, including Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, its repeated peace offers, rockets fired from Gaza at Israel and Israeli efforts to minimise Palestinian casualties in Gaza, “impressionable young students” might absorb “the message that the immoral, faceless Israelis kill Palestinians out of sheer evil.”