It is well known that anger is a bad adviser. And some of Israel’s artists and creators are very angry. It is well known that bitterness is counterproductive. And some of Israel’s artists and creators are very bitter.
Thus, on the evening of June 14, a protest of cultured people against the government turned out to be a fiasco on a grand scale. Rather than rallying Israelis for their cause, the cultured people turned Israelis, including their natural allies, against them. Rather than making sense and advancing their causes, the cultured people advanced the prospects of their rivals. If anyone needed proof that the pretense of being a cultured person does not immunize anyone from utter stupidity — the proof could be found at a protest rally by some of Israel’s cultural elite against Minister of Culture Miri Regev and Minister of Education Naftali Bennett.
The battle has been brewing for quite some time. You can trace it as far back as you like. Maybe it really began with the rally, a few days before election day, in which an Israeli painter damaged the left by denigrating traditional Israelis. Or maybe it began on election day, when Israel’s left, deluded into believing that it was on the verge of victory, could not calmly accept yet another victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Or maybe it all began when Netanyahu decided to appoint Regev as culture minister — I suspected at the time that it was a move reflecting “a desire to annoy his opponents more than a desire to have an able, functional, government.”
You can trace it back as far as you like, but the basic story remains the same. Israel’s cultural elite is leftist. Israel’s public, for a long time now, has tilted to the right. Israel’s cultural elite is frustrated with the government and with the direction in which the country is headed. Israel’s right is upset that it has not yet conquered the cultural sphere — it is upset that the realms of theater, film, music, art and literature are dominated by the tiny left.
So the clash was somewhat inevitable.
On the one hand, a group of people refusing to accept political realities and insisting on questioning the legitimacy of a democratically elected government calls that government’s every move undemocratic. On the other hand, there’s a culture minister who is the most in-your-face unapologetic right-winger and who would surely annoy and harass the resistant cultural elite — as well as an education minister with a similar agenda.
The clash culminated at the rally, when Oded Kotler, a dumb, if famous, Israeli theater actor-director-manager took to the stage to call all Likud voters “a marching herd of beasts chewing straw and stubble.” The crowd, apparently as dumb as the speaker, cheered. But the cheer is not what left the lasting impression. Israel responded to these words with fury and disgust. Right-wingers pointed at Kotler as proof that the opposition does not accept the legitimacy of the right. Left-wingers quickly realized that in continuing on this track, the left will never recover its standing with Israel’s voters.
The denunciations were many and blunt. Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog distanced himself from the statement. Novelist Amos Oz criticized it. Regev — naturally — said it reveals an “ugly and condescending approach.” For her, a hard-core street fighter for the Likud agenda, a battle with the likes of Kotler is a blessing. Her voters, as a result, will love her even more than before. They loved her as they watched Kotler struggling to re-explain his intentions, half apologizing for using the wrong words.
Behind the politics and the anger and the frustration and the hot temper, the issue at hand is a serious one. Regev wants to make “culture” less left wing and less elitist. Last week, she threatened to take away government funding of an Israeli theater whose head declared he would not perform before audiences in the West Bank. Bennett, who is less blunt but also far from being pleased with Israel’s cultural elite, used his ministerial position to cancel government support for a play that tells the story of an Arab terrorist serving a life sentence for abducting and murdering an Israeli soldier.
These two cases are not identical — Bennett’s is the stronger case. He does not want schoolchildren to have to see that play; he doesn’t want Israel to fund it. Regev is treading into murkier waters, but she also has a case. She doesn’t want the state to fund artists who boycott the settlements. Settlers are Israeli citizens and were sent to the West Bank by Israel’s government. Israel could say to government-funded cultural institutions that they cannot choose which Israelis they accept and which they don’t.
Yet the Regev and Bennett cases were lumped together by Israel’s cultural establishment as it began its protestations. On social media, in newspaper articles and on the radio, the ministers were tagged as undemocratic, enemies of culture, boorish, dangerous. It got even worse when Regev, also someone who is somewhat immune to nuanced expressions, declared that the government is under no obligation to fund culture (true) and also (but not accurate) that Likud “got 30 seats in the Knesset and you [the artists] only got 20 seats” — as if the artists have a party and now have to pay the price of losing the elections and hence lose their government support.
Instead of a respectful debate — even a “culture war,” as Oz said we ought to have — we are having a shouting match. Instead of questioning whether, and why, the government should fund culture, and what type of culture, and what restrictions on funding would be acceptable, and what restrictions would constitute limiting Israelis’ freedom of speech — instead of all that, we have a cultural establishment that wants no debate, just the money, and a political establishment that has little real interest in culture.
Israeli dancer Ohad Naharin suggested that the role of the culture minister is to pressure for more funds for the artists and then have no role in distributing them — as she has no understanding of art. The culturists are condescending — as if they are the only ones smart enough to decide where the money should go — and also quite dumb — they want Regev to do something that no politician would ever agree to. They hide behind the argument that “professional” committees should be the ones giving away funds, knowing full well that the only people they’d recognize as professionally up to the task are their friends — artists with political tendencies that match their own.
Bennett — when he decided to cut funding for the play about a murderer’s struggles — ignored the recommendation of a professional committee. The committee had approved the funding; Bennett overruled the decision. Support for his move is overwhelming. The public supports him, and so do most politicians, from the right to many members of the center-left Labor Party. Knesset Member Itzik Shmuli of the Zionist Camp (Labor) posted on Facebook a statement highly supportive of the right-wing minister. “I’m sorry about having to ignore the right-left paradigm, but Bennett’s decision … is right on the mark … a country does not have to shoot itself in the head,” he wrote.
Shmuli then moved on to the next battle, another interesting case that comes just in time for all the participants in the shouting match to re-examine their beliefs. It is a documentary about the life in prison of Israel’s most famous murderer — Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin almost 20 years ago.
The documentary was supposed to screen at the Jerusalem Film Festival next month. The festival is supported by government funding, including money from the Ministry of Culture. Should it screen under such circumstances? Shmuli said no, it should not. Bennett was right not to fund a play praising a murderer and showing him in positive light — Regev should insist on not supporting a film on another murderer, a film that might show him in positive light.
(Update: As the Journal went to press, it was announced that the film would not be screened at the festival, but at another time at a private venue.)
If life were ever so simple.
It isn’t. If the state doesn’t fund art that is controversial, if it doesn’t fund documentaries that raise hard questions, if it doesn’t support theater that makes waves — should it fund culture at all? On the other hand, maybe sending schoolchildren to a problematic play is not quite the same as giving adults a chance to watch a problematic documentary at a festival? There are many considerations that complicate any mechanism of government funding of culture: Should the government refrain from funding a sympathetic documentary about Amir but fund an unsympathetic documentary about him? And if the government has to fund a company that refuses to appear before settlers, should it also agree to fund a company that will not appear before Charedis or Arabs or women or green-eyed citizens? And if the government is allowed to set priorities in funding the arts, can it decide to fund only art that’s supportive of its political agenda? And if the government is not allowed to set any agenda when funding culture, whose agenda should be the one dictating the allocation of funds?
There are no clear-cut answers to most of these questions. For most of them, the right answer is that some form of delicate balance should be established, based on mutual respect, between competing agendas and interests. A good answer to such questions must be based on civility, elegance in debating the issues, responsibility for Israel’s culture at large, appreciation of sensitivities and an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of competing points of view.
In short — a good answer to these questions must begin with things the current debate is lacking.
