Pinter Supported Palestine
On Harold Pinter's 'Party Time' (1991)
I am confident that were British-Jewish playwright Harold Pinter still alive he would be incandescent with rage about the genocide Israel is perpetrating in Gaza and Britain’s complicity in this atrocity. Pinter was a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature and in the last year of his life, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, signed a letter to The Guardian which condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands in no uncertain terms. It read:
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
In the nearly two decades since Pinter’s death, it has been his earlier and best known plays from the 1950s and 1960s, those classified as ‘Comedies of menace’, like The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959) and The Homecoming (1964), that have continued being revived and celebrated, rather than his later, more explicitly political works. This might be because he was – at best – an inelegent poet; it might be because his opposition to the British government sometimes led to him adopt troublingly contrarian, even perverse, positions, such as his serving on the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.
However, I also wonder if British audiences are simply more comfortable with his earlier absurdist plays that feel cut-off from the ‘real world’, taking place in working class spaces that largely middle-class audiences can feel superior to.
Over the years I’ve read quite a few of Pinter’s plays and at university was in a production of Mountain Language (1988), which was written as an allegory for the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language. Around the time Pinter wrote that play he attended a fancy dinner party with two Turkish ladies in attendance. In a 2005 interview he related the following conversation:
- What do you think of the tortures that take place every day in your country?
They look at me in amazement.
- Torture? What tortures?
- But how? Don't you know that every day dozens and dozens of men are tortured in your country?...
- No, you're wrong, only communists are tortured... (1)
It was, apparently, this conversation which inspired the writing of Party Time, which I picked up from Oxfam Books yesterday.
It is a slim play in one act, which spotlights different conversations between a group of rich and rather self-satisfied socialites and… businessmen? Politicians? It is hard to tell what the men do exactly but it is clear that they belong to some sort of elite – an elite that is implicated in, yet protected from, the horrors that are occuring just outside the elegant flat.
The flat belongs to Gavin, a man in his fifties. Gavin is one of Pinter’s quiet characters who speaks in congenial pleasantries that occasionally slip into menace. Most sinister is the pleasant little admittance he makes towards the end of the evening:
Between ourselves, we’ve had a bit of a round-up this evening. This round-up is coming to an end. In fact normal services will be resumed shortly. That is, after all, our aim. Normal service. We, if you like, insist on it. We will insist on it. We do. That’s all we ask, that the service this country provides will run on normal, secure and legitimate paths and that the ordinary citizen be allowed to pursue his labours and his leisure in peace. (2)
This is not the explicit language of genocide often used by Israeli politicians and Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is the language of the so-called rules-based international order, which then enables the more explicit language. So, David Lammy, last month, is quoted by Labour Friends of Israel, speaking of:
Legitimate concerns about security on the Israeli side and the way that Iran, sitting behind the scenes, is equipping some terrorist groups with guns and ammunition. We have to do our best to support Israel in standing up to that”. (3)
Now, consider this exchange between Ahmad Tibi, an Arab MP, and Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, recorded by Al Jazeera:
On being asked by Ahmad Tibi, one of the Arab MPs within the Israeli Knesset last week if it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum”, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, responded: “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” (4)
The point is not that David Lammy and Hanoch Milwidsky both happened to use the same random word, but that both use ‘legitimate’ to obscure the difference between ‘allowed by law’ and ‘reasonable and acceptable’. As such, the use of the word ‘legitimate’ in such a context is an assertion of power. An Israeli or a British politician calling something ‘legitimate’ is a performative speech act, like a police officer saying ‘I arrest you’ or a priest saying ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. A terrorist, like a member of Hamas, cannot pronounce something to be ‘legitimate’ since their pronouncements will ipso facto be illegitimate by virtue of their being a terrorist.
If David Lammy or Kier Starmer talk like the character Gavin, Hanoch Milwidsky and Benyamin Netanyahu talk like the character Terry, a 40-year-old associate of Gavin’s. At the start of the play Terry is telling Gavin about an exclusive club he is a member of, which he says that Gavin could easily join if he so wishes. Terry has a much younger girlfriend called Dusty who seems to be concerned about the whereabouts of her brother. She keeps asking questions about it. At first Terry just shuts her down, gaslighting: “Nobody is discussing it, sweetie. Do you follow me? Nothing’s happened to Jimmy.” However, when she continues, he becomes more aggressive and threatening:
You just have to shut up and mind your own business, how many times do I have to tell you? You come to a lovely party like this, all you have to do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality and mind your own fucking business. How many more times do I have to tell you? You keep hearing all these things. You keep hearing all these things spread by pricks about pricks. What’s it got to do with you? (5)
This is how simply a more transparent version of how politicians and the mainstream media in Britain addresses protestors or people who question the crimes their government is complicit in, using the public’s money to help perpetrate. Indeed, it even recalls how some senior MPs talk to younger MPs like Zarah Sultana who speak out against their complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
By the end of the play, while all the bromidic hobnobbing is still going on (chatter of holidays, golfing, boats etc. etc.) Terry has become explicit in his threats about what he will do to Dusty and everyone like her:
We’ve got dozens of options. We could suffocate every single one of you at a given signal or we could shove a broomstick up each individual arse at another given signal or we could poison all the mother’s milk in the world so that every baby would drop dead before it opened its perverted bloody mouth. (6)
Even at this juncture he still uses just the tiniest smidgen of humour, just the tiniest bit of plausible deniability, to imply that he might be speaking rhetorically rather than literally.
Of course, the audience knows that Terry has the power to choose whether, in retrospect, he was speaking rhetorically or literally. Whatever suits the moment. Just as, I am sure, Yoav Gallant (“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”), Ghassan Alian (“Human animals are dealt with accordingly”) and Netanyahu himself (“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”) will claim they were speaking rhetorically if they ever end up on trial in the Hague (7).
In Party Time we spend a lot of time hearing from perpetrators and collaborators, but the play ends with a monologue by Dusty’s persecuted (and likely executed) brother, Jimmy. I won’t excerpt his entire monologue (it’s quite long and the play is worth reading) but I will end this blog post with his final lines:
Sometimes a door bangs, I hear voices, then it stops. Everything stops. It all stops. It all closes. It closes down. It shuts. It all shuts. It shuts down. It shuts. I see nothing at any time any more. I sit sucking the dark.
It’s what I have. The dark is in my mouth and I suck it. It’s the only thing I have. It’s mine. It’s my own. I suck it. (8)
(1) Quoted in ‘Editor’s Note’ by Alessandra Serra, in Harold Pinter, Teatro (Einaudi, 2005).
(2) Harold Pinter, Party Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 37.
(3) David Lammy quoted by lfiIsrael, ‘Foreign Secretary: “Legitimate concerns” about Iranian support for West Bank terrorism’, Labour Friends of Israel (1 April 2025) [emphasis own].
(4) Hanoch Milwidsky quoted by Simon Speakman Cordall, ‘‘Everything is legitimate’: Israeli leaders defend soldiers accused of rape’, Al Jazeera (9 August 2024) [emphasis own].
(5) Pinter, Party Time, p. 8.
(6) Pinter, Party Time, pp. 24–25.
(7) Yoav Gallant, Ghassan Alian and Benjamin Netanyahu quoted by Owen Jones, ‘Half of Israelis support exterminating all Palestinians’, Battlelines with Owen Jones (24 May 2025).
(8) Pinter, Party Time, p. 38.