The Erasure of Erasure

Last week, our play “The Last Play in Gaza” was supposed to take the stage in Kerala at the ITFOK festival. Two performances. The play is about the erasure of Gaza and the desperate attempt to recreate what has been destroyed through theatre. It was an opportunity we had been waiting for a long time. After a year in which the play was incomplete – you can’t complete a play when the murders it documents are still happening – we finally felt we could bring it to an international audience in a complete form. It meant a lot to perform it at this festival, with the theme “Voices in Silence.” And especially in India. Despite the current government's support of Israel, India has a great tradition of anti-colonial struggle.

A visa is normally a routine job. This time, instead of automatic approval, we were asked to send a synopsis of the play. Have visa officials become theater critics? We sent the synopsis. And waited. The visa was denied.

We filed an appeal. The process was humiliating – we had to explain why our play was not “dangerous,” why our voices – calling to end a genocide – was legitimate. We received approval in principle but no visa. Approval in principle, it turns out, is a new Kafkaesque category, a limbo of indistinction.

This is far more than just a case of artistic censorship. It reveals something deep and troubling about the new world order taking shape before our eyes. It exposes the true face of the increasingly tight partnership between India and Israel – between Zionism and Hindutva – a partnership built on military, economic, and technological cooperation, but also, on a “shared culture” – if one can call such racist nationalism culture – here manifested in silencing political and artistic voices. India doesn’t only buy weapons from Israel – its partnership is deeper, seeking to replace authentic cultural production with nationalistic top down state “culture”.

India, the country that was once a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, that supported national liberation movements around the world, that recognised Palestine as early as 1988, has become, in recent decades, and especially under Modi, Israel’s strategic partner. Israel is the third-largest arms supplier to India. Israeli surveillance and monitoring technologies are used by the Indian government to suppress minorities, especially in Kashmir and against the Muslim population in India. It seems that with this case it is also sharing knowledge on how to silence resistance, how to maintain occupation, how to turn minorities into internal enemies.

And this partnership extracts a price. A price paid in silence. And silence about the genocide in Gaza and elsewhere is the legitimation of genocide, and an opening for the next one to happen. Censorship is not only a technical bureaucratic decision, it is part of a larger mechanism of erasure and legitimation of further erasure.

This is part of a sophisticated method of erasure in layers: first Gaza itself is erased – physically, in concrete and in flesh. Then its documentation is erased – journalists are killed, photographers are murdered, archives are bombed. Then the voices telling about it are erased – artists, writers, poets trying to testify find themselves silenced. And finally – the play that tries to recreate what was erased to memory, that reconstructs what was lost, is prevented from reaching the stage. This is the erasure of erasure.

Not only here in Israel-Palestine, where we could never perform it, but also in India. The circle expands.

But people stand in solidarity. The ITFOK festival dared, despite the pressure, to dedicate an entire evening to the play that didn’t arrive. An audience in Kerala that chose to come, to be present, and to understand that the absence itself is a powerful political message. Indian artists who continue to resist their government’s policies, who refuse to be part of the silence and complicit in genocide.

When I arrived at the Indian embassy in Tel Aviv for the last time and they wouldn’t let me in, I understood something: our play wasn’t meant only to tell about Gaza. It was meant to expose the mechanisms of erasure themselves - and who is complicit in them. The visa denial didn’t cancel the play. It turned the play’s central claim into tangible reality.

The play didn’t reach India. But the story of why it didn’t reach there – did. And it reveals much more than anything that could have happened on the stage in Kerala.

(Einat Weizman is an anti Zionist Israeli playwright and director specialising in political and documentary theatre. Her work addresses issues of memory, anti-colonial struggle and cultural erasure, and has been presented internationally. She collaborates closely with artists and communities in Palestine and abroad to develop testimony-based performances.)

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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