Clearly David Hare thinks that ‘jews’ - I think the word he wants is ‘Israeli’ - should put the feelings of Palestinians above the safety and lives of Israeli civilians.

He’s a moron, frankly.

As someone who rarely misses a work by David Hare, I was both curious and excited to see his recent Middle East monologue, “Via Dolorosa,” when it first opened in London last year. How would the master playwright who had given human voice to transforming or declining British institutions in plays like “Pravda” and “Racing Demon” deal with the political-personal-societal-emotional hornet’s nest that is the Arab-Israeli conflict? It is a compliment to Mr. Hare’s gifts that his monologue’s failure is far more interesting than most other writer’s successes.

Having tossed away the historic document on which he first considered basing a Middle East play, Hare has chosen to enter the region with a fresh mind. Unfortunately, what he considers to be a blank mental slate has already been written upon, largely by the same media he so successfully skewered in Pravda. Thus Hare’s Middle East curiously resembles the narrowly-focused one we all know too well: Jews and Palestinian Arabs struggling over the same piece of land. Could geopolitical forces or the dysfunctional politics of two-dozen Arab states which has kept the Israeli conflict needlessly boiling for decades play even a small role in the story? To consider such possibilities, even the most talented playwright must enter the set with a mind open to more than cliché, not simply an open heart.

Absent any historical compass, Hare’s moral compass has no ability to point anywhere. For instance, early in his monologue, Hare sits with fellow writer David Grossman, contemplating the “underlying moral question (of Israeli society): how does a majority which itself has been historically unloved now deal fairly with an unloved Palestinian minority it its own midst.” And yet, later in the play, the writer talks with Israelis who dare live in Hebron, wondering why these Jews do not do their moral duty and clear out, leaving a West Bank as Jew free as the rest of the Arab world. Why is multiculturalism an “underlying moral question” on only one side of the divide? The question (not to mention the irony) does not seem to occur to Mr. Hare.

While Via Dolorosa does not bring its audience much insight on the Middle East that they could not read in the stultified British media, it does tell us a great deal about its author, who turns out to be just one more European innocent abroad, supremely gifted, yet supremely ill equipped for the project he chose to take on. Years ago, a British official asked why the Jews and Arabs of Israel could not just get along like good Christians. Hare, lacking the historic and moral footing to understand why Hebron is not Hampstead, turns out to be just another befuddled pilgrim in today’s Middle East.