The climate in Israel was tense and bellicose. As Hamas fighters fired rockets from Gaza at central Tel Aviv, right-wing Israeli nationalists assaulted antiwar protesters while chanting “Death to Arabs!” and “Death to leftists!” Veteran artists and public figures were labeled as traitors and received threats for even expressing regret at the loss of Palestinian children’s lives. One of Israel’s best-known poets, Natan Zach, now eighty-seven, told the Israeli website Walla! at the time: “The reason I no longer write in the papers is that I’m afraid someone will grab me on the street and beat me.” A month after a cease-fire was agreed, Israel’s then foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, decided it was time for his ministry to cut off all future support for the Israeli dancer and choreographer Arkadi Zaides for a work that allegedly vilified Israel’s military.
Zaides’s Archive is a solo dance piece set against a backdrop of video footage of Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank. The footage was provided by B’Tselem, an Israeli group that documents human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories and has become anathema to the Israeli political establishment. Last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a meeting with the German foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, after Gabriel met with representatives of B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation organization of former Israeli soldiers who publish testimonies about their service in the West Bank and Gaza. (Israel’s cabinet is currently promoting one bill that would ban members of Breaking the Silence from speaking in high schools, and another that would effectively outlaw them.) [...]
In her position as the country’s leading cultural watchdog, Regev has taken every opportunity to cut funds, or threaten to do so, to artists or institutions she deems harmful or offensive to the state. One of her first acts as culture minister was to levy financial penalties on theaters, dance troupes, or orchestras that do not perform in the settlements—and provide bonus payments to those that do. She has also said that she wanted to pull funding from several established national arts festivals because of performances involving nudity and from fringe theaters presenting subversive content. Although successive attorney generals have told her that her interference infringes on freedom of expression, that has not stopped her from crusading on the motto “freedom of expression, not freedom of funding.” [...]
While few in Israel have heard of Tatour, Israel’s war on culture has recently found a much more high-profile target. On March 13, Israel’s ambassador to France, Aliza Bin-Noun, boycotted the opening night of the Israeli Film Festival in Paris because the program was headlined by Foxtrot, a feature film about the trauma two parents suffer after losing their son during his military service. The film—directed by acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz, an IDF veteran of the 1982 Lebanon war—has won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, swept the Ophir Awards (Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars), and was shortlisted by the Academy Awards (though it fell short of a best foreign film nomination). The story includes a scene in which Israeli soldiers cover up the murder of Palestinians. Although, by her own admission, Regev has not seen the film, she said it “harms the good name of the IDF” and that its selection for leading film festivals is “a disgrace.” And she used the occasion to repeat her threats about funding: “Whoever wants to make a movie like this can do so with their own private money.”
