Writers: Isabella Sedlak and Yousef Sweid
Director: Isabella Sedlak
Yousef Sweid openly acknowledges that the title of this piece of stand-up theatre, co-written with director Isabella Sedlak, is provocative, referring as it does to the use over decades of “from the river to the sea” in the battle between Israel and Palestinians.
To defuse any potential protest, Sweid brandishes a variety of protest banners from all sides, before proclaiming that they are all unnecessary because he is not going to talk about October 7th, or the war in Gaza, and instead concentrate on his divorce.
Sweid is delightfully informal throughout as he talks about his life in Berlin, struggling to get his young daughter dressed for kindergarten in time to make his appointment with his divorce lawyer, while at the same time talking to his sister in Haifa, where rocket attacks are so commonplace they make jokes about sleepless nights.
But as much as Sweid claims this is a story of a domestic life, his own identity is at the heart of the piece. Sweid describes himself as an Arab and a Palestinian Israeli – although he also plays his own father, insisting that Sweid’s identity requires precision: he is a Palestinian with an Israeli passport.
From there, Sweid goes into his young childhood, attending a predominantly Jewish kindergarten and not noticing any difference between the children until a bully started calling him slurs that neither of them fully understood. Throughout, abrupt lighting changes and sound design help Sweid portray the characters around him.
As he progresses through his life story, much emphasis is made on how little the difference between Jewish people and Palestinians seemed to matter to him and the people around him, although telling a girl he liked that his name was Yossi, the Hebrew version of Yousef, hints that he is aware of other people’s tensions.
And it is that exploration of the difference between someone whose life is on the fence, and whose friends and family expect him to take sides, that really begins to surface. Sweid distances himself from Jewish friends who come back from national service with anti-Palestinian slurs on their tongues and moves to Tel Aviv to study theatre. There, he meets his “first Palestinian friend… a real Palestinian, not like me.”
That friend, Salma, becomes a recurrent voice in the play, alongside Sweid’s childhood best friend, Daniel. And it is their voices Yousef is plagued by when Between the River and the Sea does, after all, talk about October 7th and the war in Gaza. Both friends berate him for not declaring a position and condemning the other, causing Sweid’s performance to become more frenetic as he switches between three characters at pace. After the shortest of whiles, the characters of Salma and Daniel merge into a unified ball of anger, ire focused on both the war and Yousef’s reluctance to join their side in the fight.
Those arguments do not, could not, get resolved, so instead Sweid returns to his fracturing family, wishing that his kindergarten-age daughter would have the same sense of community throughout her life that he had at her age. Sweid’s family – two children from two Jewish ex-wives – are a symbol of unity from lands where that utopian ideal seems ever distant. Sweid’s warmth and the passion he has for his children’s future offer an optimistic view, suggesting the fence on which he sits is a pretty good place to be.
Runs until 9 May 2026
