Bainbridge playwright tackles Israel-Palestine war at Seattle theater

SEATTLE – A lone bench draws a line nearly down the middle of an otherwise empty black-box stage. On either side are two actors – one portraying a Palestinian man, the other an Israeli woman. They circle around the scene, an auto repair shop in an Israeli town, unraveling a tense history between the two characters steeped in apartheid, guilt and confinement.

"The Return," written by a Bainbridge Island resident who left his small village in Israel decades ago, now finds its home at the Cherry Street Village theater in Seattle, a building that was once a Jewish community center, then an Islamic school. The play first premiered in Haifa, Israel, spoken in Hebrew before an audience of Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is, until the theater was shut down by the minister of culture.

“She didn't want her Israeli audience to be exposed to our material, which, in my mind, was telling the truth,” said playwright Hanna Eady, a Bainbridge Island resident. It’s important “when you have a play that turns your stomach and tells you the truth, maybe a meter or two away from you on stage.”

"The Return" wasn’t made in response to the war in Gaza today, but it’s been relevant since its first performance in Israel in 2014. Back then, bombs were falling on Gaza as well, Eady said.

“In 2014, it was timely,” Eady said. “It is timely right now and will always be timely as long as the Palestinian people are not free.”

It’s been three weeks since Hamas killed 1,400 people in Israel on October 7. On the other side of the wall, more than 8,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip, most of whom are women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Meanwhile, Israel's ground invasion has begun, marking a second phase of the war which could prove even more deadly. Satellite imaging this week shows lines of Israeli armored vehicles advancing on Gaza City from the northern border and taking position near a major road farther south.

Eady grew up Palestinian in a small village called Buqay’ah, in the northern part of Israel between the Sea of Galilee and Israel's border with Lebanon, and left as a young man to study abroad. Now 66 years old, he has made visits back to Israel with his children. When they would approach the wall surrounding the West Bank on their way to Jerusalem, Eady remembers his son asking who was on the other side. No matter which side of the wall they were on, Eady’s son asked him how everyone could live like this.

In his play, Eady pulls on his experience growing up Palestinian in Israel and questions what Palestinian people would have to do for peace and freedom, and how much they would have to give up.

“And it turns out, there's no end to it – I guess the answer is they don't want you to exist,” Eady said, thinking of Gaza’s “open air prison” and the lack of protest he saw from even left-wing Israeli leaders towards erecting barriers between Israel and Palestinian-populated areas.

“It's generation after generation of Palestinians either growing orphans or sitting on the top of the rubble of their home because their home was destroyed or demolished,” Eady said. “I think somehow we are portrayed as victims who can be blamed for their situation. Blaming the victim is the worst thing.”

In Buqay’ah, Greek Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Druze lived together in peace until Israel established itself as a country in 1948 following the Arab-Israeli War, Eady said.

In a post-British Mandate of Palestine, Israel took control of much of the land that would’ve constituted an Arab state under the United Nations’ 1947 proposal to partition the territory into two independent Arab and Jewish states. In 1948, many Muslims were forced out of areas like Buqay’ah to become refugees in South Lebanon, some of whom were Eady’s cousins. Others, like Eady’s immediate family, stayed in the Palestinian town where they lived alongside Israeli Jews, worked for Israeli companies and attended Israeli schools.

Even while living back to back, Palestinians and Israelis didn’t know each other well in Buqay’ah, Eady said, as was the same for other Palestinian towns that were under Israeli occupation, separated from larger Palestinian territories like Gaza and the West Bank.

One day, Palestinians and Israelis could be eating hummus together in a restaurant or attending each other’s weddings, but when Palestinians would protest Israeli occupation the next, Israelis would seem surprised and confused, Eady said, making the fundamental rift in their relationship all the more palpable.

As an Israeli woman contends with her role in shaping the silenced and claustrophobic life of an old Palestinian companion in "The Return," a glimpse into Eady’s own life in Israel comes into focus.

Much like "The Return," Eady began to make an impact with a play rich with political and social commentary in Buqay’ah, where children would run after him in the streets, reciting lines from his play.

Eady went on to attend college in Haifa, Israel, before coming to the U.S. to attend the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and later the University of Washington. While away from Israel, Eady felt like he finally “woke up.”

“Our identity is robbed – we know so much about them; we studied Jewish history, we know so much about the Holocaust, we studied the Torah in Hebrew and at one point in college, I knew Hebrew better than Arabic,” Eady said. “I never said the word Palestine when I was living there until I left and came to the University of Wisconsin.”

For Eady, theater became a healing practice.

“I think that's why most of my theater work has to do with Palestine, has to do with getting back what I lost for most of my childhood and trying to repair that and gain back what I lost, which is my true identity,” Eady said.

Now, as war has broken out at what seems like the precipice of a 75-year-old conflict, the gravity of Eady’s play is magnified. He watches on as his home is in turmoil.

“I try not to turn the news on because it makes me mad,” Eady said. “But it's all on my mind all the time.”

Eady has friends in Gaza and remarked on how difficult it is to know who is alive there, though he tries to keep up with friends as much as is possible. Eady also worries about his family in Lebanon as Israel and the Iran-backed Shia Muslim militant group Hezbollah have exchanged cross-border strikes at the risk of erupting into an open war. He knows they will not flee and become refugees again, staying instead in the bottom floor of their house that has no exterior walls, since they have no bomb shelter. Eady’s son, who had gone back to live in Palestine years ago, caught the only flight back to the U.S. when air space was cleared for President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel.

“The war for us, it didn't really start October 7th. It's been like this for 75 years,” Eady said. “We have something in Arabic that says if you want to mend it, you have to break it first. It's been broken so many times, and we think, okay, now the outcome of this, finally the world will pay attention and it will be resolved. And we get disappointed.”

Eady hoped that President Biden would call for a ceasefire, but was disappointed when the President spoke of the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza in terms of self defense.

“If this comes to an end, and then… nothing happens, there's no outcome to reward the victims and to recognize them as victims, I'm going to be devastated,” Eady said. “We Palestinians, who are in the diaspora, we need to unite and have a louder voice to change how the world and the media look at us. We have to gain our humanity back. We're no less human than the Israelis.”

Eady’s voice quaked as he recounted his children watching the conflict and looking at the wall in Israel as it snaked through the land on their way from the airport. They were confused, asking him why he always spoke of peace, when this was the Palestine they saw.

“I feel guilty – you're safe, you're living like a privileged person and you're always thinking about all the other people in your family and your friends who are living there, basically restricted from movement, from expressing themselves, from living with freedom,” Eady said.

“There's actually real war with bombs and rockets and you can't go help,” he continued. “How do you resist it? I never held a gun in my life, but I think my theater work, my writing is one way to fight it, which is to let people open their eyes to it, and educate, and change attitudes.”

A bulldozer was digging into the ground at Eady’s village 20 years ago to make a foundation for a school when it fell into a hole that turned out to be a cave full of ceramic coffins. It was a burial site for the village that was thousands of years old, Eady said. Immediately, the Israeli government sent examiners to determine the site had ties to Judaism, though the site far predated the religion. But land, whatever the history and value to Jewish and Muslim groups, was contested nonetheless.

“You can't separate, you can't put a line,” Eady said. “I'm 66, approaching 67 and I always hoped that when I'm at this age, there will be peace. I don't want my own country. I don't want to separate. In a country with two people, give me equal rights, give me freedom, I'll live with you.”

"The Return" shows at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Friday Saturday nights until November 18 at Cherry Street Village Theater, 720 25th Ave., Seattle. Tickets are available online.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Palestinian playwright tackles Israel-Palestine war at Seattle theater