Miri Regev Israeli minister of culture and sports wants nothing less than an overthrow of the nation’s elite by Ruth Margalit .(Republished with permission of the Author and the NY Times in which the article first appeared)
In that time, Regev has done just about everything she can to alienate and enrage those she considers the elites, or the “cultural junta,” of Israel. Leftists. Secularists. Tel Avivians. Ashkenazim — Jews of European origin. People who, as she told me recently, think that “classical music is better than the Andalusian music” of Morocco, or that “Chekhov is more important than Maimonides.”
Regev, who is 51, grew up in Kiryat Gat, a development town in Israel’s south, which — like many other towns in Israel’speripheria, or periphery, the areas outside the country’s urban center — was set up in the 1950s to house the influx of Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries. In person she is warm; after two minutes of conversation she will call you kapara (“sweetheart” in Jewish Moroccan dialect) or neshama (“soul” in Hebrew). Yet in public life she comes across as crass and hotheaded. That afternoon in the museum, she was venturing into hostile territory. She had agreed to speak at an arts-and-culture conference organized by the liberal newspaper Haaretz to address the interplay of state funding and cultural production. Many of those in attendance wondered if Regev had come to make amends: Shortly after her appointment, at a meeting with stage actors and guild representatives, Regev all but acknowledged being driven by a sense of political vendetta. “We got 30 seats” — in the Knesset — “you got only 20,” she told those present. She later gave an interview in which she called the Israeli creative class “tight-assed” and “ungrateful.”
When at last Regev materialized, wearing an all-black ensemble and crimson lipstick, a murmur swept through the auditorium. She is a striking, fiery presence with wide-set eyes, prominent lips and dark hair streaked with reddish highlights. Standing in front of the audience, her expression set between a smirk and a scowl, she clutched the lectern with one hand. “I was always told to start a speech with a quote; it makes for a cultured impression,” she began. “So here goes. As the famed Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu once put it” — she switched to accented English — “Cut the bullshit! Cut the bullshit!”
Stunned silence fell over the crowd. Then people began to jeer. Someone cried out, “The minister of occupation!”
“We will expose the hypocrisy and the greed,” Regev continued, her voice rising. “We will guarantee loyalty to the laws of the country!”
People rose from their seats and booed. “Shame on you!” a voice rang out.
Since joining Likud in 2008, Regev has become known for her provocations no less than for her nationalist fervor. The columnist Nahum Barnea called her “a walking graffiti wall.” There was the time she described migrant workers from Africa as “cancer in our body.” And the time she lashed out at an Arab member of the Knesset: “Go to Gaza, you traitor!” She sometimes unfurls an Israeli flag during speeches and has on occasion taken reporters to pray at the Western Wall before an interview. In 2013, she introduced a bill to annex the Jordan Valley, a move that would all but foreclose the prospect of a two-state solution.
Now she continued on a familiar course, stating that the ministry would stop serving “as an A.T.M.” and calling to divert money away from “powerful institutions.” At one point she paused. “Let’s admit it,” she said. “Your culture demands exclusive funding, while another culture has been silenced for years.”
That other culture is Mizrahi, or “Eastern.” It’s a catchall term that includes Jewish communities from Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the Sephardic Jews, whose origins can be traced to Spain and Portugal, who settled there. These communities immigrated to Israel in mass waves after its founding in 1948 and into the early 1950s, upending its demographic makeup: The Jewish population, almost exclusively Ashkenazi, became more than 40 percent Mizrahi. But it wasn’t just the country’s ethnic composition that changed. The Jewish population that predated the founding of the state was primarily young, secular and idealistic; it was also heavily dominated by males. By contrast, the new Mizrahi arrivals tended to be large families from traditional societies. In their ethnic garb, often with no knowledge of Hebrew, they struck the native-born Israeli sabras and the European Ashkenazim as provincial and uneducated. Zalman Shazar, a future president of Israel, warned that these new immigrants “never knew the taste of high school.” This sense of superiority was heightened by the economic plight of the Mizrahim: Having no real accommodation or employment for them, the government of David Ben-Gurion placed them in overcrowded transit camps, where squalor and hunger became the norm.
The socioeconomic gap between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim has since narrowed, spurred by a rise in interethnic marriage (about a third of Jewish Israeli children born today are ethnically mixed). But it hasn’t disappeared altogether. Mizrahim earn roughly 25 percent less per capita than Ashkenazim, according to Momi Dahan, a professor of public policy at Hebrew University. Social and cultural tensions still percolate. In a 2007 poll, more than half of respondents characterized relations between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in the country as “not good.”er
For Regev, “not good” is an understatement. To her, the public discourse in Israel is rife with ethnically charged condescension. Derogatory terms likears (“thug” in Hebrew slang) and freha(“bimbo”) have come to connote a kind of garish shallowness and are applied almost exclusively to Mizrahim. For too long, she argues, the Israeli establishment — the news media, academia, the Supreme Court — has been closed off to large sectors of society, the same sectors she has cultivated as her base: women, Mizrahim and residents of Israel’s development towns. In other words, people like her.
“It was all planned,” Regev told me this summer of her speech. We were in the back seat of her ministerial car, driving north on the Yitzhak Rabin Highway to attend a ceremony in her honor. It was a scorching day, and she had kicked off her stilettos and wedged her bare feet between passenger seat and window. “I knew that if I went to the Haaretz conference, there was no way I was going to be nice and say, ‘Thank you for inviting me.’ You know those invitations to high society? You tell yourself, I have to look pretty and be nice and wear my high heels? No way. No way. I was there to tell them what I thought of them. To tell them: ‘You talked enough. Now you listen.’ ”
It is a testament to the hopelessness of peace efforts today that the most-talked-about politician in Israel is its culture minister, traditionally a marginalized figure overseeing a relatively minuscule budget. But with the peace process effectively frozen, Israelis have increasingly turned their sights inward. These days, there is much talk of homegrown enemies. Chief among the instigators is an ultranationalist organization called Im Tirtzu, or “If You Will It,” named after the famous first phrase of Herzl’s Zionist maxim, “If you will it, it is no dream.” Im Tirtzu released a video last year labeling leaders of Israeli human rights organizations “foreign agents” and suggesting that they abet terrorists. The group, which had its start on university campuses, then began a campaign to call out prominent left-wing authors — Amos Oz, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua — and other artists and actors as “moles in culture.”
Netanyahu has tried to distance himself from many of the more flagrant displays of such McCarthyism. And yet similar measures are routinely promulgated on the Knesset floor. One recent bill calls for enshrining Israel’s legal status as “the national home of the Jewish people.” A newly passed law requires nongovernmental organizations that receive more than half their funding from foreign governments to disclose this in all their official communications; an earlier version went so far as to demand that representatives of these organizations wear a special badge while in the Knesset. The law is widely seen as targeting the left because it affects most human rights organizations in the country, which typically receive money from foreign governments, but not most pro-settler groups, whose funding comes largely from private donors.
The politicians peddling those bills represent a new vanguard of far-right activism. Younger and more unabashedly anti-democratic than Netanyahu’s cohort of Likudniks, they do not feel the need to pay lip service to the idea of the occupation as a temporary necessity. Some — like Naftali Bennett, the education minister, and Ayelet Shaked, the justice minister — belong to a smaller party in Likud’s coalition that ensures its continued drift rightward. Their platform includes “fighting anyone who acts to turn Israel into ‘a state of its citizens.’ ” Others are the Likud’s own. Earnest, dour politicians like Yariv Levin and Ze’ev Elkin make up the maximalist camp of the party, its rough equivalents of Ted Cruz and Darrell Issa. Likud today “holds the worldview that historic rights are superior to natural, human rights,” says the political scientist Zeev Sternhell. “What they’re saying in effect is, ‘We are the majority, and we can do whatever we want.’ ”
Regev is often placed in the maximalist camp. Like them, she doesn’t believe in the “illusion of peace” and has spoken out vehemently against a Palestinian state. She argues that Jews should be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, which goes against Israel’s security arrangements with the Islamic council that has administered the site since the 12th century. And she is unapologetic about seeking to cement her party’s power. She told me: “There’s a new group on the right that says: We’re unwilling to bow our heads any longer. We’re unwilling to let the left decide for us if we’re in charge.”
But unlike other politicians in the maximalist camp, for whom the territorial question remains central, Regev has decided to set her sights elsewhere. Regev’s goal is to dislodge the “elites” in order to elevate previously marginalized groups. To do so, she has issued new criteria for the allocation of state funds for cultural institutions. These include a clause that gives the government the power to punish acts of “delegitimization of the state” — burning the Israeli flag during a play, for example — and provides financial incentives to troupes that perform in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
For the country’s diminishing liberal base, Regev represents not a culture war so much as a war on culture. As Daniel Ben Simon, a former Labor politician, put it, “She’s a commissar of culture.” But 59 percent of Israeli Jews support her agenda, according to an Israel Democracy Institute poll. She is often called “colorful,” a charitable description of her internal contradictions. She has amassed considerable political clout but views herself as a perpetual underdog. She rails against Ashkenazi and leftist elites yet is married to an Ashkenazi man who used to vote left. She uses a well-worn phrase to characterize Israel as “a villa in the jungle,” assailing the Palestinians, but speaks in glowing terms about Arab Israelis who “respect the laws of the country.” She identifies as conservative but sees herself as a champion of gay rights. She grew up in a traditional family — “ ‘feminist’ is a word I can’t relate to,” she has said — but spent 25 years in the Israeli military, rising through the ranks to become chief censor and then spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces. It’s time, she says, for Israel to have a female defense minister. (Preferably her.)
In her first primary contest, in 2008, Regev rounded off the party’s list for the Knesset — “No one gave a damn about her,” as a colleague of hers put it. But by the latest Likud primary, at the end of 2014, she had clinched a top-five position, the highest for a woman in the party. Forbes Israel named her the most influential woman in the country. Given her impressive finish, it was clear that she would get a ministerial position. She wanted the welfare ministry and says she prayed for it at the Western Wall before meeting with Netanyahu to learn of her assignment. When she went by his office before the swearing-in of the new government, she says, he promised her the job. But a few hours later he called her at home and rescinded the offer, having given the welfare portfolio to another Likud politician. He suggested a few alternatives, including the culture and sports ministry, “and as he’s saying this, tears start streaming down my face,” she told me. It took her a few days to realize that this was her chance to break out. “I wanted to bring the Mizrahi issue to center stage and not run away from it. And the peripheria. To not be afraid. To not accept the statement that we’re beasts, that we’re nothing but mezuza kissers.”
Her timing was fortuitous. A Mizrahi group called the Black Panthers, founded in the early 1970s to protest what it saw as the state’s systemic discrimination against Eastern Jews, has had a renaissance of sorts, thanks to social media and growing cultural movements that seek to recast the negative image of Mizrahim. “I’m the Mizrahi/You don’t know/I’m the Mizrahi/You don’t mention,” begins a poem by Adi Keissar, who founded Ars Poetica, a reading series featuring young Mizrahi poets; the name, taken from Horace, reclaims the pejorative ars. As Maor Zaguri, a television writer and director, told me, “We’re practically a majority, and yet the feeling is that nothing in culture is for us.”
Miri Regev at a film-awards ceremony, where she was booed. Earlier, she walked out of the event in protest over the rapping of a poem written by the pre-eminent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times
Whether out of a genuine sense of purpose or as a way to score political points, Regev has managed to tap into these age-old antagonisms. She has threatened to divert state funding away from places like the Israeli Opera and the canonical theaters of Tel Aviv and prioritize smaller operations working out of underprivileged areas, including the peripheria, which is overwhelmingly Mizrahi. She has tried to overhaul the Israeli arts council, the government’s advisory body on culture, by nominating only people of Mizrahi origin who openly share her agenda. At times, she seems to exert more influence than Netanyahu, who has recently been dogged by scandals, including charges that he received illegal contributions from foreign donors and that his wife pocketed thousands of shekels from recycling fees. (Netanyahu has dismissed the accusations as “a lot of hot air.”)
Opinions on Regev’s motives — as with every subject in Israel — are split. In the media, Regev is often portrayed as an unwitting crusader for a cause more sophisticated than she is. She is a recurring character in a popular satirical Israeli show, in which a male actor plays her as a primitive loudmouth. “The way they see it, Miri Regev is the ultimatefreha,” says Ron Cahlili, a documentary filmmaker and self-described Mizrahi leftist who supports Regev’s agenda. “In the fact that she’s a woman, first of all; in the fact that she’s Mizrahi; that she comes from Kiryat Gat. In the fact that every Friday she posts pictures of herself making pots of spicy fish. That she lights candles with a head scarf on, and kisses mezuzas, and talks about the Temple Mount and about tradition. And is right wing! Really right wing. This combination releases all the possible stereotypes. The white Zionist left can’t take it.”
For Mizrahi activists like Cahlili, Regev is an unequivocal good. “For once in 67 years, a culture minister is speaking the truth,” Cahlili says. “Even if she does one-tenth of what she has set out to do, we’ll have a historic correction of injustice.” But others see her as hurting the Mizrahi cause. “The danger of the Mizrahi struggle is that it will fall to a place of unjustified hatred, where there’s no grace and no compassion, and where there’s an inability to accept a multiplicity of voices,” says Mati Shemoelof, a Mizrahi writer and editor. And many on the left see an inherent hypocrisy in the gap between Regev’s words and her actions. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of Arab political parties, told me: “You can’t reconcile this seemingly liberal and egalitarian approach with an attack on Arabs, which is what she’s doing.”
“All of this is new,” Regev said late one morning. We were in Kiryat Gat, less than 20 miles from the Gaza border. She pointed to where the housing project she grew up in once stood; it was demolished last year. “We slept four in a room, in bunk beds. My grandmother had the bottom bed.” Her eyes brightened; her smile widened. Despite her talk of hardship, she was in her hometown, and it felt as though she were taking a victory lap of sorts — while making sure it wouldn’t be lost on me just how far she had come.
From her old neighborhood, we drove to the wealthier part of town, where her husband, Dror, was raised and where his parents still live. Dror is an engineer in the aerospace industry. They met when Miri was 16 and he was in his early 20s — he spotted her at the city’s central bus station — and they now have three grown children. Dror’s grandparents immigrated from Russia and Poland, and at first Miri felt intimidated by them and their European ways. “They were all teachers and spoke high Hebrew, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t fit in. But everything was O.K. It was all in my head. Because I came from a culture that hugs and touches andkapara and ‘What do you want to eat?’ and huge pots of food. And at his house things were different. There was less touching and less — it’s not that there isn’t love, there is — but it’s different. The combination between the cultures isn’t an easy one.” Nevertheless, she added, she and Dror are proud that their children are now “really Israeli” and “have both the Eastern and Western in them.”
Regev’s driver stopped, and we stepped into the thick heat of the day. She was dressed for an event that evening: high heels and a short black dress that flattered her recently slimmed-down figure. Her neck was burdened with heavy necklaces, one a blend between a Star of David and a sheriff’s star.
“Shalom!” a neighbor stopped her. “What did we do to deserve this?”
“Shh, don’t tell Dror’s parents I’m here,” Regev laughed before enveloping the woman in a hug.
In her hometown, Miri Regev is better known as Miriam Siboni, her maiden name. Her mother, Mercedes, immigrated from Spain as a teenager in 1957 and still watches Spanish entertainment news every afternoon. Her father, Felix, who is from Morocco, worked for years as a welder; he lost two fingers in a work accident. Among themselves, the Sibonis usually converse in Spanish and like to listen to Julio Iglesias and Mercedes Sosa. They brought up Miri and her three younger brothers in a household that was neither secular nor religious but masorti — traditional. This is commonplace for Mizrahim in Israel: an adherence to certain Jewish commandments but not to all. It may mean keeping kosher and saying the Kiddush, but turning on the television after the Shabbat meal. Or walking to synagogue on Friday and refraining from lighting the gas, but still driving to meet friends on a Friday night. It’s a form of observance that is heavy on ritual and sits somewhere between the two poles of Ashkenazi life: staunch secularism (the kibbutzniks; the sushi eaters of Herzliya) and strict religiosity (the kipa-wearers and the ultra-Orthodox).
That afternoon we sat in the snug, well-lit living room of the Sibonis. Regev had swapped her heels for a pair of worn flip-flops and piled up her hair with a clip. The news was on in the background. I asked her parents about politics. “I grew up among the progressives, the Labor Party,” Felix said. “When my daughter joined Likud, as a father I had to support her, so I switched.” This came as something of a shock. As far as I knew, Regev had never before spoken about growing up in a Laborite home.
Later I would learn that despite her hard-line positions, Likud might not have been Regev’s first choice. In 2008, after retiring from the military, she considered her options. She wanted to enter politics but wasn’t sure which party to join. “She was debating,” recalls Daniel Ben Simon, who ran in the Labor primaries that year. “She told me, ‘If there’s an opportunity at Labor, I’ll go with Labor.’ ” She met with Ehud Barak, then the chairman of the Labor Party, but he refused to guarantee her a top spot on the party roster. Realizing she stood a better chance of being elected under Likud, which was riding high in the polls, Regev scheduled a meeting with Netanyahu. Nitza Friedman, a close friend of Regev’s for nearly 20 years, remembers being “surprised” when Regev joined Likud. (Regev acknowledges meeting with Barak. But she says that they didn’t talk of her joining the party and that her preference was always to be a member of Likud.)
‘I was there to tell them what I thought of them. To tell them: “You talked enough. Now you listen.” ’
When Regev joined the Knesset, she wasn’t given any significant assignments. Despite her military bona fides, she barely managed to get on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. She struggled to find a voice in the party. Then, in 2009, she objected to a tax on fruits and vegetables proposed by Netanyahu and made a name for herself as a populist hero of sorts when she appeared on the cover of a newspaper chopping salad. “Unacceptable,” Netanyahu fumed at the time. Gradually, she also began to align herself with the coalition’s more hard-line elements, making headlines for her outrageous statements in the Knesset. In 2010, an Arab lawmaker participated in a flotilla protesting the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Regev publicly yelled at her, calling her a traitor in Arabic and a Trojan horse. “She gave the show of her life,” Ben Simon said, morosely. “That day, Miri Regev was born.”
One evening, I joined Regev for a Ramadan visit to her Arab supporters at a private home in the northern town of Ma’alot-Tarshiha. It was an airless night. An enlarged print of the Dome of the Rock, the holy site in Jerusalem, hung in the entryway. Every table inside the carpeted house was laden with watermelon wedges, puff pastries and silver carafes of black coffee, even though the fast wouldn’t be broken for another couple of hours. Regev was the guest of honor, and a line of men with their young sons formed to greet her and her aides.
She shook each of their hands, hugging the men she recognized and pinching the boys’ cheeks. “They killed you with this heat, huh?” she said. She turned to one of the men, who wore a white button-down shirt. “You look like a groom today! Come, neshama. Join us.” She glanced at the tables, feigning disbelief. “What’s all this food for if you can’t eat?”
“It’s for you,” the host replied warmly.
The atmosphere was festive, but the gathering itself seemed unlikely, surreal even, considering Regev’s past rebukes of Arab lawmakers — “Betrayers! Terrorists!” she fulminated in 2014 — and the fact that Arab Israelis rarely vote for Likud (the party garnered about 1 percent of the Arab vote in the last election). I was told that the evening’s host was a veteran Likudnik — he referred to Regev as being “like family” — but I wondered how many of the other men present actually voted for her.
Then one of the town’s deputy mayors, a genial lawyer named Ayman Shanati, spoke. “I’m not a man of Likud,” he said. But with Regev, “we are seeing real change and a lot of new projects in the Arab sector.” He praised Regev’s reallocation of funds, which has benefited Arab towns much as it has the peripheria and ultra-Orthodox communities, but complained that his town still didn’t meet certain budget criteria.
Regev nodded. “Write it down,” she told an aide.
The evening began to take on the distinct feel of electioneering, of a quid pro quo exchange. Regev has perfected the craft. A staggering amount of her time is spent shuttling to events of potential voters, where she schmoozes and canvasses in equal measure: “We can’t be complacent,” she was seen telling guests at a bar before the last primary. It isn’t only supporters whom she showers with attention. She kisses everyone: the strangers who ask to take selfies with her, the traffic cop who lets her entourage pass through, the bleary-eyed cook catering a work lunch that she attends. She doesn’t see a disconnect between her radical statements against the Palestinians and her attempt to promote Arab culture or woo Arab Israeli voters, many of whom identify as Palestinian. Arab Israelis want to “raise their children in peace,” she says, while members of the Palestinian leadership “sanctify death.” (Arab municipalities are used to such double speak from government ministers but often decide to swallow the insult in order to maintain working relations.)
She stood up and thanked Shanati. “The cultural revolution that I am leading is to give voice to the Arab sector,” she said at a volume more suitable for a conference hall. “My office is your home. Every problem, every issue.” Yet earlier she ventured a qualifier by way of hyperbole: “Whoever is loyal to the state, we’ll bring him the moon.”
One morning in June, the heads of theaters, dance companies and orchestras across Israel received an official letter from the culture ministry. It required them to state, among other things, whether they had “refrained from performing” for Israelis in Judea and Samaria — the West Bank. Though the letter was cloaked in bureaucratic language, the issue is explosive in Israel. For the Israeli left and for the country’s Arab population, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the engine of Israel’s entrenchment in the Palestinian territories. Some artists, particularly Arab Israelis, refuse to perform for settlers in the occupied territories on moral grounds. And yet the money that cultural institutions receive from the state each year is based partly on the number of production runs they mount. Because Israel is geographically small and has limited audiences, these institutions can’t afford to perform only in their home base. And so they go on the road, touring the country and appearing wherever they can, including in West Bank settlements.
A few years ago a quiet agreement was reached: Artists who objected to performing in the West Bank were to be substituted during those productions. But Regev imperiled this delicate compromise. When the Arab-Israeli actor Norman Issa refused to perform in the Jordan Valley last year, Regev threatened to pull funding from a Jewish-Arab children’s theater he helped found. The statement letter, which has become known in the Israeli news media as the “loyalty form,” drew fire not just from a handful of personal objectors; some 1,500 artists signed a petition objecting to Regev’s moves. Stage directors worried that in order to mount shows that would appeal to the tastes of settlement councils, theaters would have to adopt, as the journalist Israel Harel, who himself lives in a settlement, wrote earlier this year, “a repertoire that is homophobic, nationalistic, even religious, resembling Iran under Khomeini.”
Many who oppose Regev’s stipulations say her approach to culture is colored by her stint as chief military censor. In a recent government meeting to discuss the establishment of a new public broadcaster, Regev excoriated the prospect of an independent broadcasting authority. “It’s inconceivable that we’ll establish a corporation that we can’t control,” she said. “What’s the point?” Regev doesn’t deny that the role of censor has shaped her thinking, but she seems to have learned that to advocate censorship outright is bad form. Instead, when liberals complain of her curbs on freedom of speech, she counters with what she calls the state’s “freedom of funding.” As Regev told me, her voice rising with each sentence: “If, as a cultural institution, you decide not to perform in Judea and Samaria, to boycott an entire population that lives there, that’s fine. But you won’t get all of your funding. … If you put on a play about a terrorist who says he supports killing soldiers, then you won’t get funding. Not from me.”
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Regev at a ceremony for a new Torah scroll at the house of a political activist from the Likud Party.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times
When I asked heads of cultural institutions what they made of this notion, they all noted that the funding in question isn’t Regev’s to distribute but comes from taxpayer money. “There’s no such thing as ‘freedom of funding,’ ” one added. “Citizens have freedoms; states have duties. In a fascist state, the state has freedoms and the citizens have duties. Without funding, cultural production can’t take place.”
To stroll through the complex that houses the Tel Aviv Museum, the Israeli Opera and the Cameri Theater is to get a glimpse of the institutions that Regev is beleaguering. The Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv was founded in 1944, four years before the founding of Israel itself. It was the first theater to feature a young generation of sabra actors who spoke conversational Hebrew, unlike the more established actors of the city’s Habima Theater who immigrated from Russia and were classically trained. The Cameri was known as secular, political and often defiant.
Noam Semel has been the Cameri general director for the last 24 years. He is 70, slight of build, with a smooth face and the booming voice of someone who likes to hear himself speak.
“There is huge unrest,” he said as soon as I sat down in his office, a modest room whose walls were crowded with framed posters, including one of him shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin. Like most of the heads of the cultural institutions I spoke to, who have dozens of employees on their payroll, Semel was quick to point out that he was on good personal terms with Regev, though, he added, “professionally, or intellectually, we have a disagreement.” Semel believes that Regev’s war on the cultural elites, and especially on Tel Aviv, is misplaced. He named as his inspiration the longtime French minister of culture, Jack Lang, who concentrated France’s artistic talent in Paris, creating a hub of cultural vibrancy. This could be Tel Aviv, Semel argued.
What about Regev’s oft-voiced complaint that a focus on Tel Aviv would neglect the peripheria, I asked. Semel turned his computer screen to face me. “Where are we today?” he parried. He pointed to the Cameri production runs for the day. “We’re in Jerusalem, Afula, Kiryat Haim and Beersheba.” In other words: the peripheria.
“And that’s regardless of Miri,” a colleague of his interjected.
“That’s a typical day,” he said. “That’s ‘Tel Aviv elite’ for you.”
There is a parable that Regev likes to trot out to demonstrate her tenacity. It’s one that appears in many articles about her, to her evident delight. It concerns a colony of frogs trapped at the bottom of a well. One day one of the frogs tries to escape. The other frogs all call out to her that it’s impossible: She won’t make it. But she manages to scale the wall anyway. Dumbfounded, the other frogs ask her how she did it. “What?” She calls down to them. “I can’t hear you!” Turns out she was deaf all along.
Regev isn’t deaf, but her ability to mute her critics and forge ahead is indeed remarkable. There are many who believe that Netanyahu has watched her rise not only with awe but also with trepidation. She has more than hinted at coveting Israel’s highest office. “I don’t know if he feels intimidated, but there’s no doubt that today I’m a force,” Regev told me.
She spends a good part of every morning standing on the front porch of her home, in a small city near Tel Aviv, taping video messages for supporters who request them on Facebook. “Ready?” an aide asked on a recent day, holding her phone to the minister’s face. Regev was framed by greenery; an Israeli flag fluttered from a nearby fence. “Now we have Oren, who’s turning 51,” the aide said. Something inside Regev switched on. She smiled her famous smile. “Oren, kapara! Fifty-one! You’re so handsome! You’re so young! What does the age matter?” She signed off: “Love you, mazel tov, Miri,” cupping her hands into a heart shape.
As Regev’s professed cultural revolution continues, she seems increasingly to revert to her old role as censor, demanding that culture march in lock step with the state. In July, she caused controversy when she called to withdraw public funds from Army Radio for airing a segment about the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. She blamed the station for “sanctifying the anti-Israeli narrative” and threatened to remove it from the army altogether. In September, she stormed out of a film-awards ceremony during the performance of a duo rapping a Darwish poem. “If you’re not loyal to the country, then you should be punished,” she told me in no uncertain terms.
“What is this loyalty?” Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, said when asked about Regev’s ultimatum. “A person who is against the settlements: Is he loyal to the state of Israel or not? A person who is against the occupation: Is he loyal to the state of Israel or not? A person who is against Arab discrimination, who is against antidemocratic laws: Is he loyal or not? When you demand loyalty from an entire Arab population, is that not collective condescension? Who is this higher being who demands loyalty from us?”
Regev’s answer to that question would most likely be: the new right, the military, the ruling majority. Back on her front porch, she began taping a video for a coming race to honor an Israeli soldier who was killed in 2014. “Dear residents of the Golan Heights,” she said, finding her stride as she squinted against the rising morning sun. “I want to salute you!”
Ruth Margalit is an Israeli writer living in New York. This is her first article for the magazine.
