Culture Minister Regev on 'collision course' with left

Culture Minister Miri Regev is rapidly becoming the standard-bearer, or main hate-figure, depending on the political perspective, in the escalating culture-war between the new right-wing government and Israel's mainly left-leaning creative community.

On Tuesday, Ms Regev announced she was freezing public funding for the Jewish-Arab theatre in Haifa, Al-Midan, which had produced a play on the life and death of a Palestinian terrorist who killed an Israeli soldier. The official reason was financial irregularities but the theatre has been at the centre of debate since last week when Education Minister Naftali Bennett decided the play would not be included in a list of cultural events offered to schools.

Ms Regev, a former Chief Military Censor and IDF Spokesperson said last month upon her appointment that she "believes in freedom of speech" but that "if I need to censor, I will."

Regev has made it clear that in her opinion, withholding of public funding isn't censorship and admonished a group of artists last week saying "we (Likud) got 30 seats, you only got 20. We know that the left tries to appropriate culture for itself."

Prominent Israeli author David Grossman said: "It seems to me, that from the first moment, Minister Regev entered into a collision course… The danger in the view that Regev represents is in restricting our contact with reality and with our complex situation.