Seven months after New York Theater Workshop indefinitely postponed a production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” kicking off a debate about the willingness of the city’s theater companies to take on the subject of the Arab-Israeli conflict, NewYork is about to experience a deluge of such plays. Not only has “Rachel Corrie” itself opened, without riots and to generally positive reviews, at the Minetta Lane Theater, but now the Public Theater has folded into its annual series of new-play readings, which begins Monday, a festival of works that focus on the conflict in the Middle East.

Its timing is not coincidental. As the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, explained in an interview, he decided to organize the festival, part of the Public’s New Work Now! series, as a direct response to the debate surrounding “Rachel Corrie.”

“It was clear, when ‘Rachel Corrie’ was postponed and the tempest erupted around it, that there was a combination of silence and ignorance about the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the American theater. And I thought it was frankly embarrassing,” Mr. Eustis said.

While others speculated about the reasons for NYTW artistic director James Nicola’s decision to postpone the play, Mr. Eustis preferred to take positive action. “I thought, rather than get into the sort of ridiculous mudslinging,” he said,”let’s try and actually talk about this in the theater and see what happens.”

Mr. Eustis also invited other artistic directors, including Mr. Nicola, to participate in the festival. Saying he believes Mr. Nicola made a mistake in canceling the play –– “and I wish he’d just apologize and get it over with” ––Mr. Eustis said it also “would have been a tragedy if, as a result of this, Jim had gotten ostracized.”

(Asked in an interview if he saw the festival as a way to redeem himself after the public relations disaster of the “Rachel Corrie” cancellation, Mr. Nicola said, “No, I wouldn’t look at it that way.”)

The festival includes plays by two of Israel’s most prominent playwrights, Motti Lerner and Joshua Sobol. Mr. Lerner’s play, “The Murder of Isaac,” takes place in an Israeli trauma ward, where wounded veterans re-enact the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.(Mr. Eustis compared the play’s setup to that of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade,” in which the inmates of a mental asylum perform a play directed by the Marquis de Sade.) Mr. Sobol’s play, “iWitness,” is based on the true story of a German farmer who was jailed for refusing to wear the Nazi uniform. The acclaimed director and founder of the avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines, JoAnne Akalaitis, will direct “When the Bulbul Stopped Singing,” based on the journals of the Palestinian lawyer and activist Raja Shehadeh, adapted by David Greig.

NYTW will present two evenings of works by the Arab-American theater collective Nibras, which NYTW has taken on as a company-in-residence. Among the pieces is a one-woman play by Najla Said, the daughter of the late scholar and advocate of Palestinian statehood Edward Said.

In addition, the Flea Theater will present a reading of A.R. Gurney’s “O Jerusalem,” which it produced in 2002. And there will be a sneak preview of the Arab-American Comedy Festival.

Mr. Eustis said that he wanted to showcase voices from the region that tend to get drowned out, including those of Israelis intent on examining the complex political and moral issues involved in their conflict with the Palestinians. “Those voices are by no means unified,” he said. “But they’re voices that insist on looking at the situation in a nuanced way.And –– I think this is the bottom line for the theater –– they’re voices that insist on the fundamental equality of everyone’s suffering.”

Mr. Eustis also wanted to challenge American playwrights to respond to the Middle East crisis, so he planned an evening of short works by playwrights like Stephen Adly Guirgis, Naomi Wallace, and David Grimm.The purpose of that evening, he said, was not in the results, but in the process. (True to that philosophy, some of the plays are still unwritten.)

“[It] is really a thought experiment,” Mr. Eustis explained. “To get a group of American artists together and say, ‘How is it possible and appropriate for us to respond to events and politics and suffering that we don’t seem to be directly a part of?'”

And as for “Rachel Corrie,” at the Minetta Lane through November 19, Mr. Eustis said he was pleased that it found a good venue and that he will try to direct his audience to it, through program inserts, for example.

A producer of “Rachel Corrie,” Pam Pariseau, said that she was happy to have more plays on the subject in New York. “We thought that New York deserved to see this play,” she said of her and her co-producer Dena Hammerstein’s decision to bring “Rachel Corrie” to the city. “We support anyone out there who’s doing similar work.”