Never shy of the spotlight, Culture Minister Miri Regev has become the inadvertent star of Israel’s latest drama, sparking a chorus of criticism by threatening to cut funding for a children’s theatre. Regev, a former army general not known to shirk confrontation, has angered many of the country’s leading cultural figures by taking on the theatre in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv. Its director, Norman Issa, an Arab-Israeli, had refused to appear as an actor in another troupe in performances before Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, prompting Regev to intervene. On the same day, Education Minister Naftali Bennett announced that a play by an Arab theatre troupe in the northern city of Haifa would be removed from a list of those receiving subsidies for performances for students. The plot of Al-Midan’s production of ‘Parallel Time’ has close similarities to the life of Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian

Read More: Israeli minister sparks a real-life drama for country’s artists