Israeli Play Makes Link With Palestinians

One of Israel's most popular Jewish actors, whose son was killed while serving in the military, is to play the part of a Palestinian peace activist whose young daughter died in a bitterly disputed encounter with the Israeli border police.

Bassam Aramin's daughter, Abir, 10, was killed by a blow to the head in January last year as she walked home from a school maths exam in the village of Anata, just inside the occupied West Bank. Witnesses and lawyers for her family believe she was hit by a rubber-coated bullet fired by an Israeli border police unit. Prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone over her death. But her father has kept up a long campaign for a full inquiry and a trial of the policemen involved.

In the new play, a one-man, Hebrew-language drama, Abir's father will be played by Shlomo Vishinsky, whose son Lior was killed nearly four years ago in Gaza while serving in an Israeli military unit responsible for demolishing tunnels used for weapons smuggling. Vishinsky, 64, has long argued for a peaceful two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

At the age of 17, Aramin was jailed for seven years. In prison he was schooled in the Palestinian national struggle by fellow inmates and joined Fatah. But after his release he renounced violence and founded a ground-breaking group, Combatants for Peace, that united former Palestinian militants and Israeli ex-soldiers in a campaign for an end to the conflict.

After Aramin's daughter's death, one of the Israeli members of Combatants for Peace, Idan Meir, a former soldier who is now a playwright and director, wrote a script about the case. His play - whose title roughly translates from Hebrew as "Don't act miserable round here" - has been selected for a leading theatre festival in Jaffa next month. The play begins with one of Aramin's sons presenting him with a gun and calling for him to take revenge, a choice that the father rejects.

Meir said he expressly wanted an Israeli actor to play the part, in the hope that the story might reach a broader audience in Israel. "Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have done this kind of material so many times. I think it is time that we Israelis, we the Jewish people, should say their words, words that are screaming inside them," he said.

Meir, 32, spent five years in the military and saw at least a dozen members of his unit, including his best friend, killed in fighting in southern Lebanon in the late 1990s. "The pain was one of the things that moved me to search for different ways of dealing with the enemy," he said. "When I met Bassam I wanted to bring his story to a place where people will hear and see what is going on, and show them the pain of the others is just the same as our pain."

The actor who will play Aramin, Vishinsky, has spent 40 years with the Israeli theater company Cameri and has sometimes been a controversial figure, arguing strongly for peace and at the same time criticizing Israelis who refuse their compulsory military service. His presence in this play is likely to draw large crowds.

He said he was struck by the familiar feelings Aramin suffered as a bereaved parent. "When I read this script it touched me ... I saw he feels the same as I do and I want to feel with him on the same level, so we look at each other, eye to eye, at the same level."

Although the campaign for a full inquiry into Abir's death continues, Israel's state prosecutors last month dismissed an appeal against the decision to close the case, citing "insufficient evidence" for a prosecution.

Aramin, 39, and his wife will travel to Jaffa to see the play next month. "It's a good opportunity for an Israeli audience to know something about the other side, and that there are people who also lost loved ones," he said. "They will know I don't want revenge, I just want justice."