The culture budget war

The culture budget war New Culture Minister Miri Regev’s efforts to cut funding for unpatriotic institutions causes a fuss.

By SHULA KOPF
Likud MK Miri Regev (photo credit: TOVAH LAZAROFF)
Likud MK Miri Regev
(photo credit: TOVAH LAZAROFF)
It’s been dubbed the “Culture War” with battle lines drawn between the provocative Likud firebrand Miri Regev, newly appointed as Minister of Culture and Sport, and the country’s left-leaning Tel Aviv artistic elite.
She is all for freedom of expression, but not at taxpayer expense and not on her watch when, in her opinion, the institution or artistic work in question seeks to delegitimize the State of Israel. “Whoever wants to throw dirt at Israel will have to do it on their own,” she said at a recent theater awards ceremony where she was heckled by the audience.
“We will not be partners to that and will not fund it.”
The culture cognoscenti were offended by her appointment even before she opened her mouth. And open her mouth she did.
“If it is necessary to censor, I will censor,” Regev declared from the outset, when she took office on May 15. She called them a bunch of “tight-assed, hypocritical ingrates,” but that was after a veteran actor called her a “beast” and another, a prominent director, labeled her constituents as “a herd of beasts chewing straw.”
“We are in the midst of a reality show and she is one of the protagonists,” says Haifa University Sociologist Oz Almog, who is amused by the hoopla and not at all concerned that freedom of expression is in any real danger in Israel. “She says things most Israelis can identify with. It’s how she puts it that is sometimes a bit over the top,” he explains to The Jerusalem Report.
“I would say it is funny and tragic that a person who is very blunt and provocative was nominated to be minister of culture. It’s almost an oxymoron. They [the artistic community] are also blunt and impolite and they think of themselves as representing high culture. This is also part of the circus, the reality show.”
The problem for the artistic community is not fear of censorship but their political defeat and humiliation in the last election, posits Almog.
“They thought that they would defeat the Likud, but the opposite is what happened. They are hostile and depressed,” he says.
“Not only do they feel defeated, Miri Regev is sticking a finger in their eyes. I defeated you and now I’ll put you on your knees. I am the queen and you will beg for my money. ” Regev, 50, a brigadier-general in the reserves, who served as IDF spokeswoman for many years, walked right into a trap when the chairman of the Israeli Actors Guild met with her shortly after she took office. He said he had been writing a script for two years and would like to know what’s allowed and what’s prohibited. The sarcasm was lost on Regev, who said she would soon publish criteria.
The Culture Ministry supports more than 800 cultural institutions in accordance with criteria set by law. In the past, Israel had censorship laws inherited in 1948 from the British, but these were abolished by the Knesset in 1991.
In the less than two months since taking office, Regev has criticized or threatened to cut off funding to several institutions, including the Elmina children’s theater in Jaffa after its Arab founder, Norman Issa, refused to perform in a Jordan Valley settlement in a production of the Haifa Theater.
She has since met with Issa, backtracked and the two made photogenic peace, their hands clasped together in a photo posted on Regev’s Facebook page.
Also threatened was the Jerusalem International Film Festival if it screened the documentary film “Beyond the Fear,” which shows the human side of Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Since his incarceration for life, Amir managed to find love, marry and father a child. In the film, directed by the late Latvian-Israeli director Herz Frank, you can hear Amir telling his son bedtime stories over the phone. As a result of pressure from the Culture Ministry, the film was only due to be screened for the judges as an entrant in the festival’s documentary competition and at a private theater.
“Does the State of Israel have to fund a movie that glorifies the murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin?” Regev asked rhetorically, during her speech at the theater awards ceremony. “I am quite sure not. I have no problem with the movie being aired in every home and every private theater. The freedom of expression gives it protection, but when it comes to a question of funding, I say no.”
Also incurring Regev’s displeasure is the Arabic language theater in Haifa, Al- Midan, which has staged the controversial play, “A Parallel Time,” inspired by letters written by prisoner Walid Daka, an Israeli Arab terrorist serving a life sentence for being part of a terrorist cell that abducted and murdered Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. Tamam’s body was located four days after his abduction; the 19-year-old had been shot and his face badly mutilated.
The Tamam family protested against the play and, following a public outcry, the Haifa municipality suspended funding while forming a commission to consider the issue. The commission decided the city should continue to support the theater, saying an authentic Arab theater must be allowed to operate in the city with artistic freedom.
“Does a state have to fund a play that glorifies the murder of its soldier? I believe the state should say that films and theater, no matter how artistic, will not get state funding if they hurt the state, attempt to undermine it and call for its being delegitimized,” Regev said at the theater awards ceremony.
Her pronouncements have spawned a storm of criticism with emergency meetings, petitions and almost daily stories in the Israeli press. More than 3,000 artists signed a petition with the dramatic title ‒ “The Blacklist” ‒ against her targeting of cultural institutions.
“Miri Regev has demarcated a field of discourse that is no wider than the opened blades of the censor’s scissors,” wrote David Grossman, an award-winning author.
NOVELIST AMOS OZ contends that almost every artistic work of value offends the public’s sensibilities in one way or another. “But the criterion should not be whether the work is infuriating or outrageous,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the Haaretz newspaper.
“The criterion needs to be whether or not the work possesses artistic value. That decision must be taken by a public, professional committee, which will undoubtedly err many times and will certainly be controversial. If what the committee decides is unreasonable in the extreme, it is always possible to go to court and appeal its decision.”
Oz relishes a “culture war. This gets the creative juices flowing. The great civilizations in history sprang from internal strife and internal tensions. In fact, we have been caught up in a culture war since the onset of Zionism, and long before that, since the days of the prophets, since the period of the Houses of Shamai and Hillel… A culture war creates a wonderful climate for the blossoming of culture, of creativity, of free thought.”
Many, however, would say Israel’s culture scene is rich enough as is ‒ in the past year 5.5 million theater tickets were sold in a country of only 8 million people.
“There is nothing like it in the world,” says Ori Levy, a veteran actor, former managing director of Gesher Theater and, most recently, head of the theater division in the National Council for Culture and the Arts.
“Despite the difficulties, Israel creates vibrant culture with lots of original plays. We are invited to all the prestigious festivals and there is no better ambassador to the world than Israeli culture.”
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is considered to be one of the world’s best, and there seems to be a symphony or chamber orchestra in almost every small city and town due to the massive influx of musical talent in the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union. Israel can boast worldclass soloists, such as Pinchas Zukerman, Shlomo Mintz, Daniel Barenboim and Itzhak Perlman.
And then there are world-class dance ensembles such as Bat Sheva, Vertigo, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company and the Inbal Pinto Dance Company. There are some 200 museums in the major cities, as well as in towns and kibbutzim, and in recent years Israeli films have been nominated for Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category and are screened at major film festivals.
“It’s the government’s obligation to invest and support, and encourage art and culture,” says Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund. “It’s not a favor or a present. It’s a basic right of every citizen to get culture, the same as water and electricity.”
Regev’s recent rhetoric, the engine of her meteoric political rise, has scored her points with her right-wing constituency.
“It’s not that she has put her foot in her mouth,” says Schory. “She is talking to her constituency in exactly the words they would love for her to say, and from that point of view she’s doing a great job for herself. She’s a politician.”
In 2009, Regev barely squeezed into the Knesset after being placed as the 27th and final candidate on the party’s ticket. Since then, however, she has morphed into a media star. Regev participated in an anti-immigration protest in south Tel Aviv and called illegal African asylum seekers “a cancer in our body,” a statement she later insisted was misinterpreted. She also went head-to-head with future-MK and then-protest leader Stav Shaffir during the beginning of Israel’s social protest in the summer of 2011. Her many years of experience in dealing with the press as the IDF spokeswoman have made her a media-savvy politician, whose every pronouncement turns into a headline or Internet meme.
In the last election, she vaulted up to fifth place on the Likud list, guaranteeing her a cabinet post. She wanted the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services but got stuck with the culture and sports portfolio. It looks like she may have an easier time with the sports part of the job.
“I will do everything I can to increase the budget for sports in preparation for the Olympic games in Brazil in 2016,” she promised a sympathetic audience at a ceremony, in June, to celebrate the achievements of Israeli athletes in the recent European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the Israeli delegation garnered 12 medals, including two golds.
Dressed in a skirt, high heels, and a floral jacket, looking beautiful and confident, she worked the room. Smiling, she called former minister of culture and sports Ophir Pines-Paz, who was sitting anonymously in the audience, to join her for a photo opportunity with the athletes even though he had been a leading member of the opposition party. Speaking to the athletes, she said, “You are our pride in the world, especially today when Israel is being ostracized. To see you standing and singing ‘Hatikva’ and unfurling the Israeli flag brings us great pride and great honor.”
During a brief interview with The Report while in the elevator and walking to her car, Regev asserts that the cold reception she received from the artistic community will not affect her actions.
“We are all adults,” she says. “I believe that freedom of expression is in the DNA of every democratic society, but the freedom of funding, on the other hand, is a freedom given to the government to consider which institutions or sectors it wants to promote. Without a doubt, there is a longstanding distortion in budgeting when it comes to towns in the periphery and to non-Jews. It’s time to make a more just distribution of funds according to clear criteria, with full transparency and in consultation with the Attorney General to the government.”
IT IS words like these that keep the artistic directors of the well-established cultural institutions, most of them in Tel Aviv, up at night. Whereas in most Western countries public support for culture is about one percent of the total budget, in Israel it is only two-tenths of a percent. Furthermore, Israeli charitable giving is directed mostly to hospitals and the poor, so cultural institutions rely on the meager government assistance.
Whereas European institutions receive as much as 50 percent or more of their budget from the government, in Israel these institutions receive 10 to 20 percent at best. And now, Regev keeps insisting that a greater piece of the meager pie be given to small towns in the periphery, the backbone of her political support, to encourage local talent.
As the recent election results show, the cultural chasm between Tel Aviv and the periphery has widened even further. The Likud’s reelection owes a great deal to the contempt residents in the outlying towns feel toward the old left-wing elites and especially the Tel Aviv liberal intellectuals, who seem to claim a monopoly on art and culture.
“She said that the periphery is being neglected. That kind of statement lacks responsibility. There isn’t a country in the world where the large publicly funded theaters go out of town to perform one or two evenings a week and return every night with all the expense involved,” says Levy.
Noam Semel, General Director of the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, points out to The Report that just about every night the Cameri performs in different locations around the country and that the theater constructs all its productions to be mobile.
“This comes from the days of David Ben-Gurion, who did not want a culture gap between Tel Aviv and the periphery, and throughout the years we have been performing along the borders of Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, and in every small city and village,” he adds.
Regev answers this by saying it is not enough that Tel Aviv artists come and perform in the small towns. “We want to develop artists and creators in the periphery, and to do that we must invest money,” she tells The Report.
“In theory it’s very nice,” counters Levy. “Money does not create theater. It takes a visionary. Today, there are all kinds of small groups with local artists in the small towns who can’t compete with the professionalism of the center. In England, there is London, and in the US there is New York City. Even the theater companies in Haifa and Jerusalem want to come to Tel Aviv.”
The artistic directors concur that Regev could do the best for culture in Israel by decreasing the rhetoric and increasing the budget.
“From outside, it looks like there is culture and creativity, and we have a lot of audiences and theaters and music, and are invited often to all kinds of high-quality festivals around the world. But this is an illusion because most of the directors of institutions wake up every morning trying to figure out to how to make it through the day and how to pay salaries at the end of the month,” says Itamar Gourevitch, head of the Culture Institutions Forum, a non-profit umbrella organization of more than 100 cultural institutions.
But, Schory says, there is still hope.
“If she manages to raise the budget to one third or half a percent of the total budget, she will be remembered for a thousand years, and everybody will forgive her for everything.”