Israel’s culture minister, who has clashed with the country’s artistic elite over accusations of censorship, has further fuelled the dispute by calling some of them ‘petty bores’ and ‘hypocrites’. Less than two weeks after she sparked outrage over a threat to cut funding for a children’s theatre, cultural figures also protested on Friday as she arrived at a theatre awards ceremony in Tel Aviv. Miri Regev’s threats and blunt dismissal of her political opponents have come to symbolise for some a rightward shift by Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘The world of culture is an ungrateful world,’ she said in a recorded interview with a women’s magazine which was broadcast Friday on radio. ‘I say to myself, who am I working for? For a group of ungrateful people who think they know everything, some of them petty bores, hypocrites.’ In the printed

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