Much ado at Ariel

The struggle is over the meaning of art and patriotism in a country known for its deep and abiding passion for culture.

By LAWRENCE RIFKIN
ariel (photo credit: gili yaari/flash90)
ariel
(photo credit: gili yaari/flash90)
FOUR AND A HALF DECADES ago, in 1965, a bureaucrat in Israel, then a fledgling state trying to make its way in a hostile region and a world being shaken by political and social upheaval, issued an order: The Beatles would not perform in Israel. The reason was a shortage of muchneeded foreign currency – but officially and publicly, much was made of the band’s “insufficient artistic level” and its supposed inability to contribute to the “spiritual and cultural life” of the nation’s youth.
But in Israel today, artists of all types and stripes – actors and playwrights, poets and authors, rock musicians and classical performers, film directors and TV personalities – enjoy a special intellectual status, They are called upon by the public and the press to express their opinions on everything from philosophical social dilemmas to current political events.
By the 1990s, Aviv Geffen, a relative of the Moshe Dayan clan and an androgynous singer/songwriter from the fleshpots of Tel Aviv who openly encouraged his admirers to dodge the draft, had become one of the country’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed musical acts. Mainstream dance troupes, such as Bat Sheva, perform provocatively anti-religious choreography, while the national and the repertoire theaters produce plays that critique everything from the government’s policy in the West Bank to Israel’s guilt for not saving more Jews from the Holocaust. Rock and hiphop are replete with anti-patriotic, some might even say seditious, lyrics.
Artists from abroad – those who don’t boycott Israel, that is – now openly castigate Israel’s “apartheid” policies and empathize with the Palestinians. And Israeli leaders, bureaucrats and politicians generally leave them free to pontificate as they chose, often while providing funding for what they might view as subversive content.
Until recently, that is, in the wake of a high-profile petition signed by a few dozen people from the theater world, many of them top-tier, award-winning and internationally known figures, calling on colleagues to boycott a shiny new cultural center in Ariel, a large Jewish settlement deep in the northern West Bank. The center, which cost $10 million to build and seats 540, is the only facility beyond the Green Line, which demarcates the end of Israel proper and the beginning of the West Bank, that can physically and technically accommodate the productions that leading Israeli theater troupes produce.
“The actors among us declare that they will not appear in Ariel or in any other settlement,” the document said. “We ask that theaters undertake to confine their activities to sovereign Israel within the Green Line.”
The gala opening of the Ariel center – a performance by the Beersheba Theater Company of “Piaf,” a play about the legendary French chanteuse – went on before a packed house, attended by numerous dignitaries, including Minister of Culture and Sports Limor Livnat.
But the brouhaha has continued, with calls by officials for actors to sign oaths promising to appear anywhere in Israel or the areas under its control and talk of a government prize for cultural works that espouse “Zionism.” Unlike 1965, this is no longer just about rock and roll’s ostensible negative influence on youth: The struggle now is over the meaning of art and patriotism in a country known for its deep and abiding passion for culture.
According to Merav Yudelovitch, writing on Ynet, the website of the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, the names on the petition – including playwrights Yehoshua Sobol and Anat Gov, director Oded Kotler, and actors Yossi Polak, Itai Tiran and Rami Heuberger – indicate a “critical mass that will make it difficult for theater companies to send works to Ariel without being forced to make massive changes in cast members.” Yudelovitch also quotes acclaimed actor Doron Keren as saying, “This is a precedent- setting decision by Israeli theater, which to this day has never appeared beyond the Green Line. I don’t believe that this would be a good time to start.”
And the petition has continued to pick up steam with letters of support signed by such authors as Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman and a variety of professionals from the worlds of film and dance, as well as by numerous academics.
In a lengthy and frank telephone interview, Sobol, whose works are often deeply critical of Israel as a state and society, tells The Report, “As theater people, the question of crossing the Green Line touches us personally. The Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from settling its population in occupied territory. This territory never belonged to Israel. I thought it was necessary to let the Israeli people know how we feel and that we need to look at the Green Line as the border, for the time being.”
The issue of whether theater people and other performers should appear beyond the Green Line arose as Israel was deeply involved in the jerky, stop-action reel of talks with the Palestinians that have revolved around the future of the West Bank (and, to many Israelis, the future of Israel itself), and as right-wing leaders and the powerful settler movement girded for the onslaught of US enticements aimed at a renewed West Bank construction freeze.
So, it was only natural that politicians from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right coalition jumped into the fray with thoughts of their own.
“These artists can practice freedom of speech, but not on taxpayer’s money,” Avigdor Lieberman, Foreign Minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, said in a statement. “Those who refer to Israel as an apartheid state cannot enjoy its fruits. The show must go on, but the incitement against the country must stop.”
Perhaps most notable, though, was Minister Livnat, who said not only that she’ll push for legislation demanding that state-subsidized theater companies perform everywhere, including West Bank settlements, but that she’ll introduce an award that recognizes “Zionism” in art.
“You are shooting yourselves in the foot,” Livnat said in response to the petition, aiming her words at those who signed it. “Boycotts of any kind are not allowed. You are not boycotting Ariel; you are boycotting the city’s residents. You perform in front of an audience, not before a city... The fact that you are bringing politics into this arena may lead us to do the same in return and intervene in the content.”
WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE ARTS that makes its practitioners so prone to political expression?
“It’s a citizen’s obligation to express his opinions,” Sobol says. “Artists have ways to make themselves heard more loudly… I don’t want anyone to think that artists are more sensitive than others. This was not an act of art. It was one of civics.”
Yet Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science and an expert on matters concerning culture and democracy, says there’s more to the connection between arts and civics than meets the eye.
“An artist’s primary tool is emotion,” he tells The Report. “The ability to distance one’s emotion from political issues is difficult.
Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is a piece of art, but also a political statement. So is Goya’s famous painting of the firing squad. Art is a form of expressing deep human feelings that are often critical of society and government.
“But while art can inspire definitions of human values, it can also aestheticize evil,” Ezrahi continues. “Look at Wagner – his music still is not played in public in Israel. Look at Ezra Pound – many Jews choose to avoid his work.”
And is there a preponderance of leftist thinking among artists?
“Yes,” answers Ezrahi, “and it should not be surprising. Actors, painters, all artists in fact, and academics, too, belong to international communities. And these communities are much more sensitive to universal values.Unfortunately, too many people from nationalist backgrounds lack exposure to ‘otherness,’ to the beauty and value of other cultures.” Several theater directors have said they’ll ignore the petition. Noam Semel, director general of the highly prestigious Tel Aviv-based Cameri Theater, said he’d go to Ariel and stage the play, “Havdalla,” against the wishes of its author, playwright Shmuel Hasfari. A signatory of the anti-Ariel petition, Hasfari told Army Radio that “there is a clause in my contract that every showing of the play outside of Israel’s borders requires a new, separate contract,” and added that he’d take the Cameri to court.
And there are also some overtly rightwingers in the arts. Describing himself as having once been a “good Mapai-nik,” which is to say a supporter of the old guard that shepherded Israel from independence through the 1960s until the emergence of what is more or less today’s Labor Party, Ariel Zilber, a highly respected musician and songwriter, has moved not just to the right, but to the far right. In fact, he now openly supports the political heirs of the late Rabbi Meir Kahana and has embraced Orthodox Judaism.
“Today I’m not really a political person,” Zilber tells the Report. “I’m a Chabadnik – I’m trying [to be], at least. As for politics, I’m with Baruch Marzel [a political heir to Kahane]. Kahane was right. Still, sometimes I mix my art with my politics. I jump in and sometimes I bring my art. But you have to be careful.” Zilber warns that the signatories of the petition are “giving our enemies a lot of power,” he says.
It’s a familiar – and possibly true – refrain that public criticism of Israel by Israelis encourages the country’s critics abroad. Yet the charge makes Sobol bristle.
“That’s pure demagoguery,” he retorts. “I was interviewed by news outlets from abroad, and the people who spoke to me said the petition actually strengthened Israel in the eyes of the world.”
And playwright Anat Gov adds, “As an artist, I express my truth. I cannot, and I will not, take responsibility if others distort that truth. I love my country – that is why I must criticize it.”
PARADOXICALLY, ZILBER believes the petition actually benefited the settlers for whom the West Bank culture hall was built.
“Everyone’s now speaking about Ariel,” he explains. “The Holy One, blessed be He, has turned all the noise into something positive for the settlers there and everywhere else. Boycotts can boomerang. I’ll appear before any Jew who wants to hear me perform.
Goyim aren’t interested in me and I’m not interested in them. But I wouldn’t boycott any Jew. Even Peace Now. The people of Peace Now are not my enemy. They’re just people who have lost their way, and I’d like to help them find it again.”
While critics of the anti-Ariel petition accuse the signatories of mixing culture with politics, others say that Culture Minister Livnat is doing the same, but in reverse, although political scientist Ezrahi feels this is nothing new.
“I think there’s a very rich background for this relationship,” he tells The Report. “Authoritarian regimes have been interested in enlisting culture. We know about Hitler with Beyrouth and Wagner, and Italy with the futurists. The Soviet Union tried successfully to appropriate the great achievements of the Bolshoi ballet – it became the cultural icon of the Soviet Union.”
But what about democracies?
“Remember Bob Hope?” Ezrahi asks. “He and others volunteered to appear before troops during America’s wars. At the time of Vietnam, some saw this as an act of support for the war.”
Sobol, however, primarily questions Livnat’s injection of Zionism into the equation with her proposed prize.
“There are not three people in this country who can agree on what Zionism means,” the playwright says. “I think it means living in Israel, raising a family in Israel, creating things in Israel. Whoever lives here as an Israeli is living Zionism. Yet others see it differently, and that’s OK.” He even alludes to the first Zionist, who once entertained the notion of establishing a Jewish state in an area now shared by Kenya and Uganda. “I’m not sure that even Herzl would win Livnat’s prize,” he chuckles.
But someone else might. In 2008, 43 years after the initial brouhaha, Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving Beatles, appeared before tens of thousands of fans during an outdoor concert in Tel Aviv. As might be expected, his decision to play in Israel riled Arab extremists, who were incensed that the former Beatle had bucked the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions movement. The result was threats and even religious fatwas issued against McCartney’s life.
Other artists have followed, most recently and noticeably, Leonard Cohen and Elton John, who told an enthusiastic audience that artists don’t “cherry pick our conscience.”