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A cat named Jesus By Ariel Hirschfeld This is a play about occupation; about the life of the occupied, who are fighting for the remnants of their humanity; and about the occupiers, who know nothing about the taste of occupation. Nothing here is untouched by destruction; it is a reality of sheer affliction. And it is one of the most beautiful plays I have encountered in recent years. In what way is it beautiful? A great new work gives new meaning to the beautiful. "What is this blood on the ground?" asks the occupying soldier, who is guarding the street and enters every home. Advertisement "It is the blood of Jesus," replies a solitary woman who lives in the house. "Are you laughing at me?" "Jesus - that is my street cat." This is the only place in the world of the occupied in which the word "Jesus" is not devoid of all content. Only the wounded cat, which frightened a soldier who was sitting on the turret of a tank and who broke its leg, can carry this vestige of the world of belief. But the cat is not the heir of Jesus. It does not have even an iota of the value or the power that resided in the son of God. Nevertheless, its blood still carries a final echo, thin but real, of Jesus. The cat and the people who surround it in "Terre Sainte" inherit nothing from the living world of tradition, beliefs and values. They are ground into the dirt, dispossessed of all the instruments of belief and trust, clinging to the absolutely last remnants of the world of life and love; and when the last threads of that world unravel, they too no longer possess life. Nola Chilton's strong direction is capable of grappling with the power of the feelings, disgust, despair, anger and gentleness that the play contains - without whining and without being tempted into the cynical and the grotesque. She has set "Terre Sainte" as a proximate reality, and above all as a living, intimate dialogue among people who are clinging to their human image with their last remaining strength. With Kacimi's rare text, she has transformed talk of occupation from a conceptual cliche into a precise human place, a way of entering mental states still undefined and not yet fathomed by the conventional tools of description. This is most telling in the Jewish-Israeli context, where discourse on the Holocaust appropriated words meant for other situations of destruction and blunted receptiveness to their content. The actors create a flow of emotional movement that grows constantly deeper, and present what is so special about this play: the situation of occupation and of being occupied as an emotional state. The use of the body, the notion of the whole "character" takes on special meaning here. The actors are perched on the border between subject and allegorical symbol, between an individual person and a figure in a picture. In both forms of existence they are deprived of their rights, and all prospects of feeling are denied. It is only in the brief moments of transition between the "roles" that a vestige of the people they were still flickers. The play makes brilliant use of a number of cultural allusions, such as the presence of "The Idiot" in the life of Iyad, the father (an extraordinary performance by Arye Tcherner). Iyad loans the Dostoyevsky novel to his neighbor just before her home is demolished with the inhabitants inside. The allusion is intriguing: what is important for Iyad is not the story of the earthly Jesus, but the characters of Rogozhin and Nastassia Filippovna in the scene in which Nastassia burns the money and in Rogozhin's comment, "We sometimes dream with such intensity that we become guilty." These characters bear no resemblance to the poor, downtrodden people in the play, and do not even constitute a model of longing for them. Iyad talks about Rogozhin and Nastassia Filippovna because the story of the fierce desire between them lays bare something that is similar to the world of occupiers and occupied. The extreme desire that leads people to the suicidal shattering of their lives is the plateau from which literature was once seen as a conjuring that resembles occupation: a scene that emanates from the psyche. From the power of desire arises destruction, which is "borrowed" from the imagination (the "dream") and manifested in reality. The play dramatizes with great power the singularity of the destruction that belongs to occupation as a "situation," the gradual trickle and spread of the "situation" into the most delicate corners of practical, emotional, religious and imaginative life. Home, city, landscape, sky, thoughts, God - all undergo a transformation fomented by the destruction. In each of them a "hole" is wrought. The character of the son, Amin (sensitively and touchingly played by Vitaly Friedland), enables a fascinating discussion about shahids (martyrs). The play does not extol them in the least. Amin's father is revolted by the term and by the whole metaphysical world it implies. He is "fed up" with the "oriental" elements within him. The notion of honor that resides in him seems to be no less false than the honor of the occupiers. But the manner in which the youngster is led to the possibility of becoming a shahid-hero, not by any political temptation but by the way his life is stifled, by poverty - poverty in the simple but all-embracing sense, which closes every path of expression to him - transforms the understanding of this term. Shahidism stems from the occupation situation as a psychological process that is understandable and indeed almost follows naturally; not as a genuine political expression, necessarily, but as an instinctual mental release that is necessary for a young man whose every path to self-realization, sexual and practical, is blocked. The picture created by Mohamed Kacimi unavoidably evokes Alterman's trenchant lines in "Plague Poems": "To escape it there is no way. Because go where we might the way will be leprous [...] Only do not ask tomorrow. Tomorrow's hope is leprous." Iman, the girl (Irit Pashtan in her best role), and Alia, the midwife (Florence Bloch, also wonderful) create a world within this world, not out of any animal-like will to survive like Brecht's Mother Courage, but from an ongoing affinity for the values of love, including love of a cat, even within the world of occupation. Their strength is no more heroic than that of the men, but the inner destruction that is wrought in the men is not fomented in them. From them, and associatively with them, a channel of contact with the world of peace is preserved - a small, narrow channel, but one that is durable. "Terre Sainte," by an Algerian-French playwright, is not necessarily about Israel and the Palestinians, but Israel is an ideal model for this theme (like a model for a painting), and let us hope that Israel will not turn away in panic from this mirror and will not invoke its standard friend when confronted with this trouble - lordliness. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Terror in the capital A Palestinian rammed his bulldozer into a bus in Jerusalem, killing three. Poetic injustice Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish blends sarcasm and hope in his latest work.

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