As he opens up to the audience (“yes, I am an Arab… from Israel… a Palestinian-Israeli”), Yousef is interrupted by the harsh miked-up voice of his father (also voiced by Yousef, sound design by Thomas Moked Blum). “You are not a Palestinian-Israeli,” booms the disembodied voice, “you are a Palestinian with an Israeli passport.” His father then instructs him to tell the audience about “the Arabs of 48”, indicating the Nakba, or “the Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948. When the Brits gave Palestine to the Jews and … we lost Palestine”. Yousef does a swift but extensive round-up of different “kinds of Palestinians”, living everywhere from east Jerusalem to refugee camps in Jordan to Berlin to Canada and beyond. “Like my father, Sliman, who escaped Israel,” he explains. “Not because Zionists were hunting him, no. Because of tax fraud. And he owes a lot of money to the black market.” This undercurrent of humour is what fuels Between the River and the Sea, like a sweetener to help the hard-hitting moments go down.
Yousef, we learn, has more pressing personal problems than politics, however. He is meeting with a divorce lawyer to end his marriage to his second wife. Both wives are Jewish, he clarifies, and he has a child with each of them. Now his second wife wants to move back to Israel and take their daughter with her. “Seriously? Israel?” Yousef says, confounded. “That’s the best environment you choose to raise our kid? Our mixed Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Israeli-kid?”
