Israelis stage daring saga of the abandoned Palestinian raised as a Jew

In one of the many electric moments in The Return to Haifa, the Cameri Theatre's compelling new play opening in Hebrew here tonight, there is a heart-rending struggle between the adoptive mother of a young soldier in the Israeli army and the natural mother who has arrived with her husband in the desperate hope of reclaiming their son 20 years after she last saw him.

"Your legs did not hurt when he was in your belly," the natural mother exclaims. "Your ribs didn't hurt when he was beating you from inside. When you kissed him for the first time after he was born, your lips weren't filled with blood."

Breaking down, the adoptive mother, a much older woman, declares: "I taught him to eat, to walk, to speak, and to love. When he had bad dreams he called me 'mum'. Please go. For the kid. I'm asking. Begging."

As sheer human drama, the play, which will switch to the Cameri's main theatre in Tel Aviv next week, would be powerful enough. But what makes the – distinctly allegorical – subject matter unprecedented for one of Israel's leading theatres to tackle is the historical context: the natural mother is a Palestinian refugee who involuntarily abandoned her baby son, Khaldun, in the flight from Haifa during the Jewish-Arab war in April 1948. The adoptive mother is a refugee too, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who took over the Palestinian couple's house – and brought up their son under the name of Dov.

There will be many glitzier events to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel's foundation as a state next month. But there is unlikely to be one more intellectually daring than this production – with a uniformly impressive mixed Jewish and Arab cast – of Israeli writer Boaz Gaon's play. Daring first because it is adapted from a famous novella by Ghassan Kanafani, widely regarded as the 20th century's greatest Palestinian writer.

Kanafani, who was also the editor of the newspaper of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was killed at the age of 36 in Lebanon along with his niece when his car was blown up – almost certainly by Mossad – in an apparent reprisal for the PFLP-claimed killings of 26 people by three Japanese gunmen at Lod airport in 1972.

And daring second because the story goes to the heart of how what for Israelis is the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that ushered in the state, is also for Palestinians that of the Nakba or wartime catastrophe in which some 700,000 people had to flee their homes.

There has already been one right-wing Jewish demonstration outside Jaffa's Ennis Theatre as the play was in rehearsal and the cast are bracing themselves for another at tonight's opening.

"The play deals with the very basic elements of the conflict," the Israeli director, Sinai Peter, said after a final rehearsal this weekend. "Who are the parents of the kid? Who owns the kid? Who owns the land? ... The big victory for the play will be if people on both sides are able to start listening to the narrative of the other."

Kanafani's family, including his Danish widow, Anni, gave the Cameri rights to the story, which Peter says is a "great example" of why there shouldn't be a boycott of everything Israeli.

But while the controversy is hardly surprising, it may be missing something essential about the play, historically radioactive as it undoubtedly is. Certainly, the Kanafani narrative is much newer – and for many highly provocative – territory for the mainstream Israeli audience it is mainly targeting, than for Palestinians. "Of course I had read the Kanafani story," says Norman Issa, who plays the child's natural father, Said. "Every Palestinian knows it." Mr Issa is himself from a Palestinian refugee family and is well known to Israeli television viewers as the star of Arab Work, the successful Israeli sitcom about a Jerusalem Arab journalist.

But playwright, Boaz Gaon, points out that Kanafani's 1969 story – in which Said and his wife, Safiyya, make their fateful journey to Haifa from Ramallah when the borders open in the wake of Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War – was exceptional at the time for also treating the Jewish adoptive parents with humanity.

"He was able two years after what was for the Palestinians [another] catastrophe to look at the Jewish side and not belittle the suffering during the Holocaust," he said.

Like several of the Jewish actors, Mr Gaon comes from a family of holocaust survivors. Mira Awad, who plays Safiyya, says she thinks that both Israelis and Palestinians may react against the sympathetic treatment of the other's narrative of 1948. "Equal weight is given to both sides in the play," she says. "And neither side is exactly going to have an orgasm about that."

Erez Cohen, playing the 19-year-old Israeli soldier whose initial wholehearted identification with his adoptive parents, Miriam and Ephraim, is compounded by anger at being abandoned by Said and Safiyeh, agrees about the "balance" of Gaon's script. "The opposition to the play is quite problematic as they haven't seen it," he says.

There are some changes from Kanafani's story: Miriam, played here by the leading Romanian-born Israeli actress Rozina Kambus, has lost a son in the Holocaust, whereas in Kanafani's story she watched her 10-year-old brother gunned down by theNazis.

But the main alteration is that while the novella in effect ends bleakly with Said's declaration that only another war will solve the problem, the play, while retaining the passage, ends with an, albeit uncertain, hint of possible reconciliation between the families. At the very least, says the director, the ending is about the need "to begin a dialogue".

Mr Gaon says that Said's declaration was prophetic about the conflict that followed. "But after 30 years of war to end the play by saying you need another war doesn't seem to benefit anybody," he says. Mr Gaon insists the play is not trying to force a message on anyone. "We are trying to open people's hearts to other hearts, to other realities, to open one's eyes to see what the other side saw."

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