Cabaret’s urgent warning for today’s Israel

I’ve just got back from the Cameri Theatre’s production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. I can still feel the tear-tracks on my face, and the prickle of fear up my spine. And I didn’t cry, and was afraid, for the reason I think you think I cried, and was afraid.

Cabaret, penned in 1966 by two American-Jewish boys who had as teenagers ingested the horrors of the Shoah from afar, is based on writer Christopher Isherwood’s eyewitness accounts of the Nazis’ rise in early 1930’s Berlin. Famously, it uses the outrageous cabaret acts in the show’s ‘Kit Kat Club’ to mirror and magnify the racism that is slowly but surely taking over the country just outside the club’s doors.

Of course, the show’s big moments of anti-Semitism had their punch, in Gilad Kimchi’s flamboyant and kinetic Cameri production. The revelation of an unsuspected Nazi, the out-of-the-blue picking on an elderly Jewish man, a savage beating, the anthemic singing of a Nazi anthem (actually a made-up one, but so convincing is it that Kander and Ebb received furious letters from Holocaust survivors who swore they had heard it sung in the camps).

None of that is what got me, on this occasion.

What got me, what provoked me to tears, happened during Lihi Toledano’s properly frenzied singing of the title-number, halfway through Act Two. Its a famously catchy song, but it isn’t a happy song, or a showcase. The character, our heroine Sally Bowles, is in a moment of desperate crisis, and “Life is a cabaret” becomes at once crie de cour and a stunning abrogation of responsibility. Sally will not care — even when Nazism comes, painfully, to her own door — about what is happening in the society around her. Or, maybe she does care, in some secret corner of her soul, but damned if she’ll show it, and damned if she’ll let it affect her.

“No use permitting some prophet of doom / To wipe every smile away,” sings Sally, with forced, choked gaiety, “Life is a cabaret, old chum / Come to the cabaret.”

And in this evening’s performance, Toledano threw her head back and out ripped out a long, held high note — as if the character were consciously exorcising some ghoulish vestige of conscience. If, one felt, death came while she was singing — came to her, or, more likely, to many others (Sally is not Jewish) — so be it. Singing is where death will find her. And singing will be all she will care about. “Life is a holiday,” indeed.

And as she held that note, one lady clapped brightly, and didn’t stop clapping, and  then rhythmically clapped along with the beat, and then others joined in, for all as if they were at an afternoon matinee of the empty-but-happy Abba-fest, Mamma Mia!, or some feelgood variety show.

And that’s when it hit me, and the tears would not be held back.

Because the most sinister moments in Cabaret are not the big moments, they’re the small ones, the ones where you realise that most of these characters just don’t understand what the Nazis are about to do, though it’s in front of their faces. Or they don’t care to understand. The most upsetting line in the show belongs to Sally, when her boyfriend Cliff agitatedly points out that everyone around them is joining team Hitler. “It’ll all work out,” says Sally, “It’s only politics, and what has that got to do with us?”

And I’m not making any comparisons to Nazi Germany, of course not. But.

All around Israel right now, in these fateful days, millions of people are walking around enjoying their lives (good for those that can, and I mean that) with no sense that this coming election is anything more than simply ‘politics’ and ‘what has that got to do with them?’ They’ll go and vote, or they won’t, and if they do they’ll vote for the party they like, most likely the one they identify with because Israelis tend to vote tribally, and if their party wins, great, and if not, well, it’s just an election and another one will be along in four years.

And, like Sally, though hopefully not as bad because they won’t be deliberately burying their conscience, they won’t understand that this election, if Benjamin Netanyahu and his bloc are re-elected, might be the last free and fair election that Israel has.

The government haven’t hidden the fact that they’re trying with all their might to destroy the only guardrail on unchecked government power (the judiciary and legal system), they clearly just hope that most people don’t understand the concept and complacently go about their day. In many cases, they’re right. Only politics. What has that got to do with us?

They haven’t concealed the fact, either, that they have now several times tried to establish, through various means, direct political control of the institution that governs the very rules around elections themselves, the Central Elections Commission. Such control would allow them to ban competitors from running, or to spend far more on election advertising than anyone else, for instance (both of which have been done, by the way, by Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, who lately threw a popular rival in prison; as did Russia’s President Putin, with fatal consequences for his opponent). They just trust that nobody gets what that means.

They haven’t bothered to pretend that they’re looking to establish new checks and balances to make up for the fact that they’re destroying the only one we’ve got (something that would render judicial reform actual reform and not a constitutional coup), because they aren’t looking to create new ones. They want to degrade our democracy to the point where it’s effectively a dictatorship. And if they manage to accomplish all of that and then played fair anyway (and this government’s history gives us about a hundred examples indicating the opposite), they will have set things up so that the next guys could easily and simply push us into tyranny, or the next, or the next. There will be no protection. As I say, there may not even be free and fair elections after this one.

And that, to my mind, is the terrifying message of Cabaret. Tyranny happens while you look the other way, when you turn the radio up and dance to a favourite tune, but turn it down, or don’t listen attentively, when the news comes on. Or when you listen to the news, you hear something that is disturbing, and you dismiss it.

In that moment tonight when Toledano howled out Sally’s primal scream of a note and everything behind it, that terrible warning from history, many of my fellow audience members did not take note. They just clapped along, determined to have a good time. Just as so many in Israel think, ‘Eh, too much politics, nothing to do with me,” or, “too much drama, it’s going to be OK; what was, will always be.”

And at this existential juncture in Israel’s history, if too many of us go into these elections with that attitude, if we don’t heed the bright red warning signs, we risk losing our democracy. And then? Many more of the country’s most productive citizens will likely leave, rendering Israel far more vulnerable to threats from without. As for the threat within — we will already have given it the keys to the country.

“Life is a cabaret, old chum,
Only a cabaret, old chum,
And I love a cabaret!”

That scares the hell of of me. It should scare the hell out of all of us.