Seven Jewish Children: A Film for Gaza Is a Modern-Day Blood Libel 

The new short film Seven Jewish Children: A Film for Gaza is creating quite a stir. Its recent opening event in London was sold out. As of April 2025, the 15-minute long movie is available for free online, as if it’s a vital public service.

Seven Jewish Children has a troubled history. Originally a play by British playwright Caryl Churchill written in 2009, it was meant to be a biting criticism of Israel’s war against Hamas in 2008-9 (a war that Hamas triggered by firing missiles into civilian population centers in Israel).  Churchill is a longtime supporter of Palestinian causes and opponent of Israel and was aghast at the civilian toll of Gazans in the fighting. “Israel has done lots of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme,” she said at the time.

Churchill decided to do her own terrible thing. She wrote a mini play titled Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza which was a masterclass in antisemitic innuendo.

Set in seven brief scenes, Seven Jewish Children is artistically assured. It features a small cast of Jewish characters whispering about what to tell or not tell a young girl, who is not present. Nearly every line begins with “Tell her” or “Don’t tell her.” The urgency of the play and the repetition of these lines creates a tense atmosphere, as Jewish adults embody the trauma that’s inherent in Jewish history, whispering over and over what they think a young girl ought to hear.

The opening mini scene hints at Europe during a pogrom. It begins urgently: Tell her it’s a game. Tell her it’s serious But don’t frighten her. Don’t tell her they’ll kill her. Tell her it’s important to be quiet.  Tell her she’ll have cake if she’s good. Tell her to curl up as if she’s in bed.  But not to sing. Tell her not to come out. Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting.  Don’t frighten her…

Scene two takes place during the Holocaust and also focuses on Jewish trauma; then, in the third scene, the action shifts. Suddenly, the Jews are heartless and cruel. Previous scenes about Jewish suffering in pogroms and the Holocaust suddenly appear in a different light: instead of merely suffering, Jews have supposedly internalized the trauma and cruelty they endured and are now eager to unleash it on others.

The Jewish characters just get more and more cruel as the play rushes to its conclusion.

In scene three, the Jewish family at the heart of the play packs to move to Israel and turn into cartoon caricatures of evil. Churchill’s play begins to go seriously off the rails.  She repeats the canard that Jews perpetrated massacres in order to empty Mandatory Palestine of Arabs – a lie that has been repeatedly debunked, yet persists in poisoning people’s views of Jews and Israel. Her Jewish characters rejoice in this supposed ethnic cleansing: Tell her, of course tell her, tell her everyone was driven out and the country is waiting for us to come home.  Don’t tell her she doesn’t belong here…  

So far, so wrong, but Churchill’s only getting started. In scene four, the Jewish family realizes that the entire founding of Israel has been a terrible mistake: Israel belongs to Arabs, not to a shared Jewish and Arab State of Israel, they finally understand. “Don’t tell her who used to live in this house,” a Jewish character whispers. “Don’t tell her Arabs used to sleep in her bedroom.”  Churchill’s setup is ludicrous: both Jews and Arabs dwell in Israel, and the idea that Jews only live in Israel because they turfed Arabs out of their bedrooms then settled in under the still-warm covers doesn’t capture the reality of life there today.  “Don’t tell her they said it was a land without people,” a character whispers; “Don’t tell her I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.”

Her Jewish characters just get more and more cruel as the play rushes to its conclusion. Mothers whisper that their daughters can’t be friends with Arab children.  “Tell her we’re entitled,” a character intones.  From whispering about protecting their children from anti-Jewish violence, Churchill’s characters – in a neat inversion – soon want to protect their children from the knowledge of Israel’s illegitimacy and the Nazi-like cruelties that Jews supposedly inflict.

The play dismisses Israel’s real concerns about Arab terrorism. Israel has no right to self-defense.

In another spiteful trick, Seven Jewish Children dismisses Israel’s real concerns about Arab terrorism. According to Churchill, Israel has no right to self-defense: the threat of terrorism is merely a fantasy that Jews concoct in order to deflect attention from Israel’s supposed crimes.

Thousands of Israelis (roughly 6,000) have been killed in terrorist attacks through the years, yet in Seven Jewish Children any talk of Jewish deaths is merely a lie meant to distract the unseen girl in the center of the play from the “real” tragedy of Israel’s continuing existence. “Tell her they set off bombs in cafes,” one adult whispers as the characters strategize how to hide Israel’s supposed crimes from her.  “Tell her they don’t understand anything except violence,” an adult grimly whispers.  (In the new movie version, this line is delivered with a malicious smile.)

By the end, Churchill’s Jews are raving genocidal maniacs: Tell her they’re filth. Don’t, don’t tell her about the family of dead girls. Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television. Tell her we killed the babies by mistake…. Tell her we’re the iron fist now… Tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out…tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.

Updated Passion Play

This is no ordinary drama. It reminds me of a Passion Play that depict Jesus’ torture and death at the hands of Jews. For centuries they were a staple of the Eastern season in European towns and villages, often served to whip up fury against Jews, as audiences were presented with a dramatic spectacle of bloodthirsty Jewish characters gleefully attacking and destroying all that is good. Seven Jewish Children is an updated Passion Play, replacing traditional Christian iconography with the modern-day religion of human rights.

Seven Jewish Children is an updated Passion Play, replacing traditional Christian iconography with the modern-day religion of human rights.

This odious drama opened in London in 2009 with a largely Jewish cast, a move that producer Dominic Cooke (a producer of the new film version too) seemingly felt would insulate his slanderous anti-Jewish production from accusations of antisemitism. It did not. “For the first time in my career as a critic,” wrote one reviewer, “I am moved to say about a work at a major production house that this is an antisemitic play.”

Rather than apologize for her loathsome screed, Caryl Churchill doubled down, insisting that writing Seven Jewish Children was somehow a public service, daring to tell the world the truth about Jews. She insisted that it be freely available and donated all her royalties to the group Medical Aid for Palestinians. The Guardian made the text of the play freely available on its website – it’s still there – allowing everyone to access her offensive drivel free of charge.

Jews Behind New Film

Now, a young American film director with Israeli roots has turned Seven Jewish Children into a short movie. Omri Dayan describes himself as having grown “up in Boulder Colorado before moving to London to study and work in film.” Seven Jewish Children: A Film for Gaza is his first feature film. He’s described discovering the play in 2022 on a trip to Israel; some of Dayan’s Israeli relatives were discussing a controversy surrounding the rescinding of a drama award for Caryl Churchill due to her outspoken opposition to Israel. “I felt myself drawn to the piece,” Dayan has explained.  Dayan began filming the short movie in 2023; his father Ami Dayan and grandmother Rivka Michaeli – who both work in film – appear in the work as actors.

The film follows Churchill’s dialogue faithfully. One difference is that in this new film version, the dates and locations of each scene are clearly demarcated. Thus, the first scene is now set in 1903 in Kishinev, instead of in a nameless European town. This leads to some weird awkwardness. An early scene in which heartless Jews are discussing violently evicting Arabs from their homes is now set in Haifa in 1954. Even Israel’s harshest critics don’t accuse Jews of rising up to kill Arabs and “ethnically cleanse” them in 1950s Haifa – though now that this movie has breathed new life into Churchill’s unrelenting blood libel, perhaps they will.

That’s what Seven Jewish Children is: a blood libel. The play and now the movie depict Jews as mirroring all the atrocities that Nazis and others visited on them: Jews in this dangerous work are the new Nazis. Their bloodlust and hatred make them different from other people.

Given how dangerous Seven Jewish Children is, it’s perhaps fitting that it should exist as a vehicle for Medical Aid for Palestinians to fundraise and burnish its image. Medical Aid for Palestinians has troubling links to terrorist organizations. It has transferred money to an organization associated with the US-designated terrorist group the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and has partnered with another organization with links to Hamas. It’s outrageous that audiences are being asked to funnel money to this problematic enterprise.

Seven Jewish Children: A Film for Gaza is useful as a textbook example of demonization and anti-Jewish incitement. That it is now circulating in the art film circuit and being promoted online is a tragedy.

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