Day 85: Welcome to Ramallah, by Sonja Linden and Adah Kay

Another from Plays for Today by Women, and again I find myself learning about current/recent historical events that I really should have known more about. This time the topic is the occupation of Palestine, with two very different perspectives as two jewish girls talk with two men from Palestine. One of each pair are fairly open minded and have already learned something of the other side of the story when the play opens, their sister and uncle respectively are far more convinced that the story they know, whether told by family or having lived through it himself, is the only one that is true and/or meaningful. By the end a lot of information has been exchanged and while convictions are hard to break in the space of hours everyone does seem to come out of the meeting with a deeper understanding of the whole situation.

For me, what little I heard of the war/occupation over the last few years was just another war - I developed a rather awkward combination of cynicism and fear about war as a child and tend to lump together "wars" in general in my head and avoid reading about them. As something of an introvert, I was pretty much of the opinion that if everyone in the world minded their own business and didn't take things that weren't theirs, we could have an ideal world. (Sharing wasn't my strong suit...) The biggest sticking point on that theme in the play is the Jewish girl maintaining that these were "ancestral lands" that used to belong to her people thousands of years ago, and that they have, however minorly, been living there ever since so it was merely reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Obviously not the way the current locals are going to see it, and thus we have the main argument of the play. It's fairly clear to me which side the play invites the audience to take for most of the action. There is a final more personal twist at the end, but I will in this case avoid giving too much away and instead encourage my handful of readers to find the play and watch or read it for themselves, particularly if you have a very one-sided (on either side) view of the occupation, or like me have very little knowledge or opinion.

As a complete aside, I found myself considering an ongoing situation in my LARP game where an ancient race is fighting a nation for control of their land... and the ancient race has a much older claim to the land. It is a fantasy setting (and also a game) but I was seeing parallels with the in-game situation through the whole play, and may well end up taking some of the thoughts and messages from the play back to the game.