Jews means Jews

The public row over the BBC documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone has focused on the fact that one of the child narrators in the programme was the son of a minister in the Hamas government. After an initial investigation the BBC admitted to “serious flaws” that are “significant and damaging” and is now holding a deeper inquiry (albeit not an independent one, which is a problem in itself). I hope this inquiry will also look at another troubling feature of the programme: the repeated, deliberate mistranslation of “Yahud” as “Israeli” rather than its actual meaning of “Jew”.

The BBC has form for this, and they are not the only ones. It involves a wilful distortion of reality and a whitewashing of anti-Jewish prejudice, and it is hard to avoid the feeling that its purpose is to make the statements - and presumably the sentiments - of Palestinian interviewees more palatable for a Western audience. The excuse the BBC gives is usually that when Palestinians say “Jews” they mean “Israelis” (even though Arabic has a different word for “Israelis”), but of course this conflation doesn’t make things any better: looked at from another perspective, you could see it as evidence that antisemitism is commonplace in Palestinian discourse. Either way, it is misleading to say the least, and the BBC should stop doing it.

It is true that sometimes the literal translation of a word does not convey its real meaning, and I do not underestimate that challenge. However, there are others beyond the BBC, people writing and performing in English, who do not have this excuse but who do the same thing: they say “Jews” and expect us all to accept that they mean “Israelis”.

This brings me to today’s news that Caryl Churchill’s atrocious play Seven Jewish Children is making a comeback, this time as a film. Written at the time of the 2009 war between Israel and Hamas, it imagines a series of scenes in an anonymous Jewish family (or perhaps in every Jewish family - it isn’t clear) from the pogroms and the Holocaust through to modern Israel, in which the parents anxiously try to both protect and inform their children about antisemitism, war and terrorism. This is fertile ground for dramatic exploration, but Churchill fails miserably: as I wrote in Everyday Hate, rather than ask how antisemitism makes Jews feel about our identity and belonging, and empathising with Jewish efforts to navigate these challenges, she instead asked the antisemitic version of that question: what do these screwed-up Jews teach their children to turn them into baby-killers?

The play concludes with a monologue which features a combination of antisemitic tropes:

Tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out… tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.

The thing that connects Seven Jewish Children to the BBC’s Gaza documentary is that Churchill’s play doesn’t mention Israel or Israelis (or even Zionists) once in the entire script. It is a play explicitly about Jews, as the title indicates: the first two scenes (at least) aren’t even set in Israel, so it really is about Jews, some of whom are Israeli, rather than about Israel and its politics.

And yet, of course, when people raised objections about the antisemitic features of the play (I wrote about it at the time), we were given the same old excuse: they are just criticising Israel. The Royal Court Theatre, where the play was originally performed, defended it in exactly these terms at the time:

While Seven Jewish Children is undoubtedly critical of the policies of the state of Israel, there is no suggestion that this should be read as a criticism of Jewish people.

I expect we will hear a similar excuse now from the Prince Charles Cinema that is showing the new film version of the play. We will be expected yet again to swallow the idea that “Jewish” doesn’t mean “Jewish”, just as the BBC wanted us to believe that “Yahud” doesn’t mean “Yahud”.

It’s a conceit that works in the opposite direction too. David Miller’s antisemitic conspiracy theories about “Zionists” colonising British institutions and subverting the British state were ruled by an Employment Tribunal to be a protected belief, “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, because he used “Zionists” rather than “Jews”. In this scenario we are told we have to take someone’s words literally and cannot place our own interpretation on their meaning; whereas with Seven Jewish Children - and the BBC - we are told we must do the opposite, ignoring their literal form, as if the words we hear and read do not mean what they quite obviously mean.

In both situations the effect, and perhaps the purpose, is the same: to downplay and disregard antisemitism and to deny the validity of the Jewish experience. It’s gaslighting, ultimately, adding yet another layer to the expression and denial of antisemitism that Jewish communities have had to put up with since October 7.