It is a personal attempt to tell my version of the story of Palestine, the origin of the conflict, and the tragedy of this accident-prone piece of land. I hate the word conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian clash is not a conflict, it’s a one-sided hostility on Israel’s part. 

I call it a theatrical essay because it is not a theatre piece, not even a performance piece, but a mishmash of scenes that construct an evening. It is a collection of semi-independent narratives, an unfinished lecture, a haphazard homily on a topic I wish I didn’t have to do a show about. 

I didn’t come up with the combination. The Israeli army quoted Gordon Matta-Clark’s work in one of its reading lists. Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts’ pieces were mentioned in the army material as examples of how to create incisions into Palestinians’ homes in the occupied territories. 

The desire to unveil and ‘go beyond’ the walls of Palestinian cities could explain the military interest in transgressive theories and art from the 1960s and the 1970s. The techniques of walking through walls were a way to imitate Matta-Clark’s technique of ‘un-walling of the wall.’ His approach to architecture (anarchic architecture) using hammers, chisels, and bow saws, he sliced buildings and opened holes through domestic and industrial interiors. This could be understood as his attempt to subvert the repressive order of domestic space and the power and hierarchy it embodies. The Israeli army operational manual juxtaposed Matta-Clark cuts with the holes cut through Palestinian walls during several operations. But the army attempt was the exact opposite of Matta-Clark. It was a way to exercise power and control via aggressive maneuvers into Palestinians’ private homes. 

I couldn’t just do the original piece I planned in 2020 and ignore October 7. So UnWalling the Walls weaves together some of the original ideas with new scenes that react directly to the Gaza atrocities. The Palestinian situation didn’t start on October 7, and some of the problems I wanted to examine originally are still there. 

There is a text that didn’t make it into the show that talks about how not to talk about a problem. And maybe I ended up including October 7 in UnWalling the Walls because the show I dreamt about in 2020 looks so out of touch in 2025. 

Since the problem doesn’t exist, you mustn’t talk about it. Because if you talk about it, it means the problem exists, and therefore you are guilty of creating the problem. And if the problem doesn’t exist, and you dare to talk about a non-existent problem, we will silence you, eliminate you, ensure you are fired, so that people learn not to talk about non-existent problems.