Soldiers of Tomorrow
I feel like I have fairly normie bleeding heart European liberal views on Israel and its treatment of Palestine and as such I found leftwing Israeli performer Itai Erdal’s storytelling piece about his time in the IDF relatively uncontroversial. Perhaps relatively unremarkable, too, theatrically speaking: Anita Rochon’s production has a few nice flourishes but it feels like the text could have gone a round or two with a dramaturg to sharpen it up.
But globally, the unassuming Erdal’s show has attracted controversy – he lives in Vancouver now, where the left attempted to disrupt performances on grounds that he was allegedly a Zionist; in Toronto and Germany he couldn’t get the show staged because it was deemed too explosive vis à vis him being fairly upfront about saying he thinks Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7 2023 constitutes a genocide.
The meat of the play concerns Erdal’s spell in the IDF and how, despite his principles, he went into his service with relative optimism and a belief in its self-portrayal as ‘the most humane army in the world’. Anyone expecting a smoking gun – literal or otherwise – will be relieved/disappointed; his story is less about a single road to Damascus moment and more about an unease about how the Israeli state and army control the movement and lives of Palestinians, entwined with a growing sense that the version of Israel’s history taught in schools was often selective when it came to the Palestine. While he now regrets...
