Romeo and Juliet: A Play that Planted Seeds of Peace

This week's story centers on a play that was produced 30 years ago. I remember reading news reports about it at the time, but it's taken considerable research to get details these many years later. My chief sources are a pair of then-current news articles: the Washington Post's Mideast Side Story and a transcript from NPR's All Things Considered. I have reached out to one of the play's directors. He has not responded in time for this newsletter, but if he does, I'll devote at least another article to his insights.

For five years, Israeli director Eran Baniel dreamed of putting on a peacebuilding production of Romeo and Juliet in Jerusalem. His plan was to collaborate with a Palestinian director and a balanced cast of Israelis and Palestinians, proving that coexistence, cooperation, and even friendship were possible across an explosive divide. It was a bold goal that seemed tone-deaf to potential Palestinian directors who weren’t particularly interested in collaborating with their occupiers. But then, Itzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat started making overtures toward peace and the political climate improved. Baniel met and earned the trust of Palestinian director Fouad Awad, and Baniel’s Kahn Theater and Awad’s Al Kasaba Theater gave the production the go-ahead on September 13, 1993. It was the same day that Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, announcing the Oslo Accord.

Both directors knew they were getting in over their hands. They could not have known how far. The play they had chosen connected on a visceral level with both sides of their cast. The Palestinians who played the Montagues in Arabic, and the Israelis who played the Capulets in Hebrew, had friends and family members who had actively fought against each other for generations. Actress Hatam Adalvi hesitated to accept the role of Lady Montague, afraid she wouldn’t be able to see her Jewish counterparts as human beings. Young Haled Elmasi had never spoken to a Jew except the ones wearing guns at checkpoints. He only thought of Israelis as people who kill. Meanwhile, Israeli Actress Orna Katz, who played Juliet, had a brother who lost a leg fighting Palestinians. Yet, a full cast of Capulets, Montagues and extras signed up for a groundbreaking production in collaboration with their enemies.

Local funders wanted nothing to do with it, so the directors looked abroad. They applied for a grant from the city of Berlin, but the Jewish community there opposed a play featuring a marriage between a Muslim Arab and a Jew, and persuaded the city council to turn their application down. At last, the directors managed to raise a half-million dollars from a variety of sources in the USA, Austria, Germany and France.

Early rehearsals took place in East Jerusalem, where Jewish cast members had never been, and where they felt like they were entering an enemy zone. There was no such thing as neutral space. Originally, they’d hoped to stage the show in Jerusalem’s Old City, but Palestinian playgoers didn’t want to support a show in a place that symbolized Israeli occupation, and Israeli playgoers were afraid of the potential for violence, so close to Arab neighbourhoods.

Every detail had to be meticulously balanced, including menial work assignments for the cast and crew. Cans of tea were carefully labeled in Hebrew and Arabic. Words and gestures the actors used carried cultural baggage that had to be unpacked and worked over. The relationship between both sides was tenuous and strained when joint rehearsals began in early 1994. Then disaster struck.

In the early morning of February 25th, Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli physician wearing his army uniform and packing an assault rifle and four magazines of ammunition, walked past the Israeli guards at the East gate to the Ibrahimi Mosque or Cave of Patriarchs. They didn’t stop him or question him, although he was already suspected of pouring acid over the carpets in the Muslim part of the shrine which holds the remains of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah, and is sacred to both Jews and Muslims.

It was the first day of Ramadan, a Muslim holy day. It was also the Jewish festival of Purim. Goldstein listened to a reading from the Book of Esther in a chamber reserved for Jews. Then he moved to the Hall of Isaac, where 800 Muslim men, women and children had gathered to begin their month-long fast. He positioned himself between them and the exit, and waited until they prostrated themselves in prayer. Then he threw a grenade into the crowd and opened fire. Three of the Israeli guards also fired shots into the crowd during the panic that ensued. Goldstein was overpowered and beaten to death by those he was attacking, but not before he killed 29 Arabs and wounded 125 others.

In the aftermath of the massacre, joint rehearsals screeched to a halt. For Halifa Natur, who played Romeo, a Shakespearean play seemed frivolous when his countrymen had just been gunned down as they prayed, under guard. Meanwhile, Jewish cast members were terrified by Palestinian calls for retribution. “Is art worth being stabbed?” wondered Julie Goldstein, who played Lady Capulet. Three Israelis quit the production while the Palestinian cast boycotted rehearsals until the entire cast and crew met together. They talked and sobbed and decided what they were doing mattered and they needed to carry on.

The production was threatened again in April, when Arabs from the West Bank were banned from accessing Jerusalem after a pair of reprisal bombings. Some of the cast had to be smuggled into the city for rehearsals.

The show opened in June 1994 in the closest thing they could find to neutral space; an old warehouse in West Jerusalem. After a successful run there, it toured in Europe, where it opened the Lille Festival in France. Then it returned to the Holy Land, to play in Tel Aviv. The directors, cast and crew had achieved something so stunning that it inspired people the world over. They had learned for themselves and persuaded those who watched them that peace was possible. “We can live together,” said actor Elmasi. “There is something different here… Love.”

That was 1994, before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. It was a time when there was reason to be optimistic about peace in the Middle East.

Today, that kind of optimism may be harder to muster up. The 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians at prayer and the Hamas-ordered reprisal bombings that killed 14 Jews were horrific, and almost scuttled the play. Now, the death toll since October 7, 2023, is staggering and continues to rise.

But the grassroots peacemaking done by the 1994 cast of Romeo and Juliet is not dead. The participants in that trailblazing play produced a legacy that has been built upon and carried forward by another generation of visionaries. Last month, Pope Francis met with Israeli Moaz Inon and Palestinian Aziz Abuo Sarah. Both are peacemakers who have lost family members to the conflict between their peoples. Now, they represent the Alliance for Middle East Peace, embracing 250 grassroots organizations that are working collaboratively to build peace, neighbor to neighbor, in the Middle East.

Pope Francis signed the Alliance’s letter, calling on heads of state to make them central to any plan for peace because “such programs – which build meaningful relationships between Israelis and Palestinians and are predicated on a shared commitment to peace, security and equality for both peoples – disrupt and reverse attitudes and beliefs that fuel conflict.” Peace can not be achieved by a top-down approach, the Alliance explains. “Top-down negotiations among leaders must be matched this time by a peacebuilding process at the societal level between Israelis and Palestinians.”

In 1993, when Baniel and Awad contemplated doing a play together, the kind of ventures that built meaningful relationships between Israelis and Palestinians were so rare they seemed almost impossible. Today, they are being touted as the key to lasting peace.