By Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem —
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan condemned it for undermining morale and giving succor to the enemy. Army Chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev joked that it was raunchy enough to be performed for the boys at the front with Egypt. Members of the audience hurled curses, stink bombs and stones while critics called for its creator to be locked up in a psychiatric facility.
Last month (June) marked the 40th anniversary of the rise and fall of Israel’s most controversial play, Malkat Ambatya, (Queen of a Bathroom), Hanoch Levin’s blunt indictment of Israeli militarism and hubris after the stunning victory of the 1967 Six Day War.
And the controversy – over claiming territory captured in that conflict, over whether Israel is doing much if anything to make peace over its – in Levin’s view, self-righteous dehumanisation of Arabs – continues to reverberate today.
Levin, who died of cancer in 1999 at age 56, has become regarded as Israel’s leading playwright both inside the country and
abroad. He is recalled variously as a prophet who foreshadowed the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur war and the unending imbroglio of occupation in the West Bank, and a traitor who stabbed a country fighting for survival in the back.
”This was not another show in the theatre,” says Omri Nitzan, the artistic director of the Cameri theatre, which staged Malkat Ambatya beginning in April 1970 and then took it down in a cave in to public pressure after only nineteen performances. As a young soldier Nitzan went to see Malkat Ambatya three times and tried to protect its actors from the heckling that would invariably start up after a skit in which a fallen soldier accuses his father of sending him to needless death.
”We’ve done 500 shows. This was a historic event, a turning point, a part of the history of modern Israeli society.”Nitzan said.
During one show, after bereaved parents in the audience began shouting ”shame, shame”, and ”hater of Israel” at the stage, Nitzan, dressed in his uniform and wearing his paratroupers’ wings, got up and yelled out, ”Let them put on the play. It’s a free
country.”
Actor Yossi Graber said the cast was taking its life into its hands by performing the play. Police, fearing attacks after the show, guarded the actors exit. One performance in Tel Aviv was disrupted by a bomb scare.
When the play reached Jerusalem it was even more dangerous. ”At one show in Jerusalem I decided to stop performing when stones were thrown. I am talking about blocks of Jerusalem stone,” Graber recalled. ”I said ‘I am not willing to die for Malkat Ambatya‘. ”
There were also tensions over the play among the actors of the Cameri. ”One actor, Yossi Yadin, said to me: ”you should be ashamed of yourself’, Graber recalled, The older actors in particular objected to the Cameri’s staging of the show. “They were intoxicated by the 1967 victory and thought it would last forever,” Graber said of his colleagues.
Indeed, those were in many respects heady times, with many in Israel moving within just days from a feared extinction by surrounding Arab armies to a tripling of the country’s size and thinking Israel was invincible. It was time—as Moshe Dayan put it—when the country would ”wait for a phone call” from defeated Arab states who would sue for peace. But these were also tense times — soldiers were dying daily along the canal zone with Egypt in the 1968-70 War of attrition and Israel was staging deep penetration air raids into the neighbor with whom it would eventually sign a peace treaty nineteen years later.
Levin had no tolerance for the wave of nationalism fueled by the capture of the ancient biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank. Even secular intellectuals had begun to lose their heads and were advocating annexation.But for Levin these territories were not essential and were certainly not worth losing lives for.
”The kingdom is whole,’ went one of the Malkat Ambatya songs, then adding caustically ”Most of my uncles have one leg, but the kingdom is whole.”.
Another skit showed Prime Minister Golda Meir, the queen referred to by the title of the play, clutching foreign minister Abba Eban by the crotch at a cabinet meeting to prevent him from making any dovish proposals.
As for Dayan, who would later declare he preferred retaining Sharm al-Sheikh in Sinai to giving it up for peace, he is cast by Levin as saying: ”I promise you blood and tears and I am as good as my word. If I promise you blood and tears than everyone knows it’s blood and tears, not to mention sweat. Soon it will be very bad and I am as good as my word.”
In another skit, Israel returns the Ten Commandments to God, rescinding them one by one for reasons including ”state security” and being a ”state under siege”. After they are returned, the Israelis voice relief that they can now breathe.
Many critics vociferously attacked the show, and Levin personally, although Malkat Ambatya also had its defenders, who argued that Israelis could learn a lot about themselves from it. Much discussion focused around Levin’s depiction of Israelis as not letting Arabs fulfill their basic needs, for example by hogging the bathroom when an Arab needed to urinate. The play became integrally associated with peepee and kake, the Hebrew words for urine and feces.
Indeed, one critic, Reuven Yanai, writing in Maariv at the time, termed Levin’s mind ”satanic” and ”disturbed.” He added that Levin should be treated the same way as a dog who has defecated in the living room. ”You take its head and dip it thoroughly in what is has left behind.” he wrote
Moshe Dayan entered the audience one night to an ovation. But then the show that skewered him and his mindset also received applause.
Dayan termed the show a gift to the Egyptian army. ”I can’t imagine anything more encouraging” for the Egyptians, he said during a radio interview. Dayan characterised the play as being ”something between a bathroom and a bathtub and they enjoy being in this stench of a bathroom. ”
Gershon Solomon, at the time a 29-year old member of the Jerusalem city council who unsuccessfully tried to stop the staging of the show in the capital, said ”Without doubt Hanoch Levin sewed the seeds of what we see today when not unsubstantial groups in the left, including the moderate left, are ready to give up the heart of the land in which the Jewish people were born.”
Solomon, who went on to found and lead the far-right Temple Mount Faithful group, still justifies the throwing of stones at the stage. ”What do you expect people to do when from inside of the nation arises a man who vilifies in the same way that the worst antisemites did throughout history?”
However Levin’s brother, David, who directed Malkat Ambatya, said in a phone interview from Edinburgh, where he lives, that Hanoch stood out for discerning where the occupation would lead at its very inception. ”Malkat Ambatya identified an illness,” said David Levin, himself an accomplished poet. ”At its basis, this illness has not really been treated. They have kept giving aspirin to cancer all the time. Today it is a forty years
illness. Go cure it. How, with what tools?”
A version of this Ben Lynfield story originally ran in the London-based Jewish Chronicle, here.