The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated no shortage of competing and conflicting narratives and part of the potency of Yousef Sweid’s one-man play is that, by dint of his family’s multi-faceted background, he is able to bring many of them together.

Sweid, 49, a Palestinian-Israeli Christian living in Berlin, has two Jewish-Arab children through his two Israeli-Jewish ex-wives. As he explains: “We are a completely normal family; an Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli, Austrian, Romanian, Christian family.”

After opening against a soundtrack of a demonstration, courtesy of the Israeli-Brazilian sound designer Thomas Moked Blum, and brandishing a few banners ranging from “Stop the Islamic terror”, in Hebrew, and “Israeli apartheid” to “From the river to the sea. Christians, Jews and Muslims will live in peace and harmony”, Sweid relaxes into storytelling mode. 

As a child in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, he was called the Israeli Jewish-sounding Yossi by his Jewish friends at kindergarten and school and introduced himself as such to his Jewish acquaintances, only reverting to Yousef when he studied theatre at Tel Aviv University, where it was trendy to have Arab friends. He says he didn’t know he was Arab until a four-year-old Jewish boy at kindergarten called him “a stinking Arab”.

Likewise his father, Sliman, whom he impersonates as an affably shouty, lecturing “baba”, was called Shlomo by his Jewish friends. There’s a warm, witty interplay between the two of them, relayed via phonecalls as his father has decamped to Canada, just as there is between him and his teenage son, for whom he assumes a more measured demeanour.

Sweid’s sensitively relayed sexual fantasies with Carolin, whom he met at a Christian youth group in Haifa, and a more lascivious relationship with Shani, whom he fell for while apple-picking at a kibbutz in the Golan Heights close to Syria, bear testament to the uncertainties inherent in his chameleon character as he writhes around on the stage angsting over how best to present himself to them and their families. Yet it is his son’s simpler, idealistic fantasies that lift the play into the stratosphere where hope for a peaceful co-existence between people of different faiths resides. 

The conflict, where it does feature, is often in the context of Sweid’s attempts to define his identity and his place in the world, such as in his description of different types of Palestinians. “I’m a Palestinian Israeli.” “You’re not a Palestinian-Israeli; you’re a Palestinian with an Israeli passport,” he interjects as his father. “There are Palestinians in Gaza who are starving to death, Palestinians living in Canada… I prefer to call us Arabs, not Palestinians. We are the ones who weren’t kicked out [of Israel in 1948],” he continues. The human cost of the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023, also feature movingly, while referring to Israel’s war with Hamas, he says: “I don’t know if you would call it like that any more.”

It’s an evocative, nuanced and, at times, darkly humorous performance, co-written by Isabella Sedlak, the director, in which the Arab language – “it’s delicious”, says Sweid – has to contend with a downside. As Sweid quips sardonically to his son – who queries whether, given his mixed identity and the conflict he is “lucky” not to live in Israel – he is “half-lucky and half-screwed… Here [in Germany] they will fear you because you’re Arab and hate you because you are Jewish.”

One quibble: it could be argued, not unfairly, that there’s a theatrical elephant in the room, insofar as in a play that is about people of different backgrounds living together (or not living together) in peace and harmony the main character’s two interfaith marriages have broken down and there’s no attempt to examine why. On the face of it, it’s not a great advert for peaceful coexistence. But perhaps, as Sweid says on several occasions, it’s complicated.

Photo credit Ute Langkafel

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