Hare on the move

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four).

‘Consider the depth of despair,’ suggested the playwright David Hare in his half-hour reflection, Wall, on Monday evening (Radio Four). It is extraordinary how Israel’s construction of a 486-mile barrier along its eastern border, at a cost of £2 billion, has been so rarely discussed, let alone acknowledged, by the wider world. Twenty years after the celebrations that greeted the tumbling down of the Berlin Wall, there’s another blot on the earth’s landscape, built so deep, so wide, so high that it can be clearly seen from space and has all the appearance of a permanent memorial to irresolution.

Hare’s monologue took us through the history from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, but he also journeyed in and out of Palestinian and Israeli territory. In Ramallah on the West Bank, the capital of the Palestinian National Authority, he goes to a garden party and eats delicious sweet meat cut from a whole roasted sheep. But the meat turns sour as he hears about the latest form of torture devised by Hamas for those presumed guilty of informing. The victim is shown a drawing of a staircase with a bicycle at the top of it. ‘Go get the bicycle,’ the victim is told. ‘If you don’t, you’ll be beaten.’