Cirrus@Austlit

Author's note: In April 2002 Israel invaded Jenin, the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, and Sharon subsequently demolished the Palestine Liberation Authority's infrastructure in Ramallah and imprisoned Yassar Arafat in its rubble for over two years. Amateur hand-held cameras captured the collective punishment of refugee homes being bulldozed, civilians massacred and the resistance of Palestinian militants.

The 1943 Jewish Warsaw Ghetto uprising, crushed by the Nazis, was being re-enacted on TV with history's Jewish victims, now armed with the overwhelming power of tanks, missiles and assault guns, using them with impunity on history's new victims. Numbed by the savagery of the demolition, I was left with a single stark, haunting image: an enormous tank in the background with its turret gun swinging to aim its barrel at the camera, and a small boy in the foreground, crouched, facing the tank, with his back to the camera, his right arm poised, ready to pitch the rock held in his hand. Humans against tanks have become the singular image of resistance to repressive rule. The rock-throwing anonymous child has become the symbol of the second intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation. The little guy is the equal of the stone thrower in East Berlin's uprising against Soviet rule as well as the solitary figure standing in front of the tank column's path in Tienamen Square. Each is a contemporary David, battling a Goliath who keeps re-appearing in history in different clothes.

The trigger to write the play came in a dream. One night the little guy with the rock, just before he was going to throw it, turned to me and said "Don't just sit there daydreaming! Do something!" And so, the next day I began to write Crescent Moon, Yellow Star.

(Source: Belvoir Street website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/341_prod_detail_general.php?production_id=86)