Miriam & Youssef: the story of the foundation of Israel

The transporting power of radio in lockdown

Imagine, in these socially distanced times, a type of drama that you could access any time at no cost across the world which only requires an internet connection or a radio; a kind of drama that could accompany you on your daily designated exercise, expand your horizons just as they are being closed down, move you effortlessly through time and space whilst you remain exactly where you are.  Or to put it another way, imagine as a writer a potential audience of millions of people world-wide sharing your concerns and following your characters.

It sounds just the ticket – and amazingly it exists, in the form of drama podcasts on the BBC World Service or BBC Sounds. And I have just written a ten-part five-hour drama which rolls out over two months from April 29 this year.  It’s called Miriam and Youssef.

OK, this is of course a plug for it.  But I am genuinely excited about what the form will bring to listeners in this drama directed by seasoned radio producer Marc Beeby with a startlingly vivid sound design by Caleb Knightley.

The World Service is not necessarily a go-to venue for drama and until recently its output was entirely factual. But two years ago as someone with form in writing political drama about real events for radio and the stage, they approached me to write a drama about the Iranian revolution in 1981.  Despite having a Wikipedia-level knowledge of those times I was thrilled at the scope of the project and signed up, and after months of research and interviewing Iranian emigrés, and then more months of frenetic writing,  the drama was broadcast (as The Fall of the Shah) and received an extraordinary response from listeners across the world.  When the World Service called again to suggest I might undertake dramatizing the tumultuous and controversial events that led to the establishment of the state of Israel, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Israel, Palestinians and me

This was partially because I spent a formative six months in the country back in the distant 1980s, living in a kind of protective ignorance on a kibbutz.  I was there as someone eager to fill a gap year and to experience what I imagined socialism in practice might look like.  My kibbutz, a kind of collective farm founded by halutzim, or pioneers of left-wing Zionism, was largely composed of Romanian emigrés many of whom had survived the Holocaust.  I found myself in the heart of an experiment in living which also rested upon a 100-year project to build a nation in Palestine, which early Zionists described as ‘a land without people for a people without land’.  The logic of the second part of the statement couldn’t be faulted; the first couldn’t have been more wrong.

Yet my contact with Palestinian Arabs during that time was limited and through the lens of my own ahistorical perceptions.  One of the great provocations of writing this new drama was to try and correct that misreading, whilst staying true to what I still feel is the tragic necessity of the Zionist project regardless of where it has ended up.  It became abundantly clear when embarking on writing Miriam and Youssef that it had to be a split and parallel narrative, alternating between Arab and Jewish experience during the thirty years that led up to the establishment of Israel in 1948.  One central inspiration guiding me in that was the writings of Israeli ‘revisionist’ historians such as Tom Segev in his One Palestine, Complete (2000), an astonishing nuanced and wryly detached account of those three decades with a novelist reach; equally productive was the writings of Hillel Cohen, whose 1929: Year Zero of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (2015) is constructed around the same principles, patiently documenting the entirely contradictory accounts in Arab and Jewish accounts of the same events – a series of deadly riots in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron in that year.  And of course here’s the rich vein of Arab historiography to draw on in works such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage (2006) or the exhaustive and heart-breaking mapping of deserted or destroyed Arab settlements in  Walid Khalidi’s All that Remains (1992).

The story of Miriam and Youssef, and the contradictions of the British

As a white British gentile I may seem poorly placed to enter the hearts and minds of my ethnically diverse characters; here I can only plead guilty whilst suggesting that my approach may well have been served by apparently having no dog in the fight – yet the shock of writing the drama was I came to realise that this is in fact a British story.  The frame for the plays is the three-decade duration of the British Mandate, which despite the innocuous designation was a colonial endeavour, even if a spectacularly mismanaged one.  Tracking the succession of High Commissioners, the pattern of inter-communal conflict followed by foot-dragging Commissions of Inquiry and White Papers, the buck-passing between the Foreign Office and those on the ground, is not edifying.   I have created a well-meaning British Civil Servant, Harry Lister who embodies these contradictions - whose ambivalent philo-semitism gives way to something more like anti-semitism as the Jewish community push back on their apparent sponsors; or whose romantic account of Arab culture inspired by T.E. Lawrence and others which gives way to the brutal suppression of the Arab revolt in the 1930s.  In the end, the foundation of Israel is a story with many strands and the role of Britain from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the hurried withdrawal of British forces in 1948 is central to what transpired.

This is a great deal to do justice to in ten 27 minute-long episodes and Miriam and Youssef, which melds invented characters in the foreground with historical figures – David Ben-Gurion, Musa Alami, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Rabbi Judah Magnes - in the background, is necessarily impressionistic.  The only feasible method would be to ground it in two characters and one place – a village outside Jerusalem.  Of course this will to some tilt the drama towards tendentiousness or bias and I am sure I will be found answerable to that.  But I genuinely have attempted to follow my characters parallel courses right to the end and our cast of Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian – not to mention British – actors embody the pluralist values of the drama.  The intention is to bring to you a thrilling story which may also illuminate one of the world’s more intractable political lockdowns and to that extent, may offer some hope in these dark times.