A blow to complacency
‘THE YELLOW WIND’
By David Grossman Adapted for the stage and directed by Ilan Ronen
Jaffa Theater, August 6
‘You had better listen, or you’re doomed,” The Yellow Wind rails at and censures us from the stage. It is a 70-minute excoriation of the occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 Six Day War that David Grossman wrote in 1987, following a series of interviews with its various Arab populations – in refugee camps, villages, courtrooms, etc., 20 years on. And here we are, 52 years after that seminal war, and “the occupation” has become Judea and Samaria to the privileged Some, and “The Occupation” to some of the Privileged Others, and certainly so to some very Unprivileged Others (UOs).
And it’s the UOs who occupies The
Yellow Wind, the endless litany of abuses (as the UOs have come inevitably to see it), from arbitrary detention, to torture, to land seizure, to the destruction of homes to collaboration (willy-nilly), to cooperation (willy-nilly), and in among the tales of arrest, intimidation, the sowing of distrust and fear and the fostering of enmities, there’s the boasting tone of ownership, of inalienable rights to all of this land, of the chainmailed fist in the velvet glove.
The actors Raida Adon, Murad Hassan, Menashe Noi and Ghassan Abbas most competently do their thing on a
bare stage. With only a few chairs and a rear screen as punctuation in a production that is as much choreography as staging – and one may easily imagine the Arab actors in the cast gagging during the rehearsals – they hurl forth their indictments of the Jews.
There. It’s said.
The Yellow Wind was and remains a blow to the complacent gut of people who should know better. In 1987 it was deeply unsettling and created a furor. In 2019 it barely raises a ripple. It belabors the obvious. Been there! Done that! The Territories? Shrug, shrug.
And perhaps that is precisely why Mr. Ronen decided it was time for a dramatized revival because, as one character remarks toward the end of this docudrama, “If the Palestinians don’t have a home, neither will we.”