Miri Regev, Gal Gadot and Benny Gantz
Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sport Miri Regev (*1965) has been described as a cultural warrior, Trump in high heels, Sarah Palin of Israel and attack dog.
The daughter of Sephardi immigrants, a father from Marocco and a mother from Spain, suffers from a severe form of deformation professionnelle. She served in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), first as the military’s chief censor, then as the IDF Spokesperson during the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Although she became Minister of Culture and Sport in May 2015, she still seems to be at war all the time.
Her infamous Culture Loyalty Bill looks like a — very mild — version of the cultural politics of the Soviet and Nazi era and seems to be in sink with what Orban has been prescribing for present-day Hungary. She cites the Freedom of Funding argument. The government funds cultural projects according to artists’ loyalty to the State of Israel, which for someone like Miri Regev can be resumed as loyalty to the Netanyahu government.
Culture is about diversity and freedom of expression. In short, Miri Regev is unfit for the job of Minister of Culture. She behaves like the chief censor. She is trying to defund cultural events, artistic activities that she does not like. She tried to defund a show including nudity. The controversy over the McJesus sculpture by the Finnish artist Jani Leinonen at the Haifa Museum of Art was just one of many occasions. In 2018, Miri Regev said that the actress Natalie Portman had “fallen like a ripe fruit into the hands of the BDS movement supporters”; the Jerusalem-born Hollywood actress Natalie Portman had refused to come to Israel to receive an award, but she had never said that she was in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to change Israel’s stance towards Palestinians, to comply with international law.
Her current fight with Rotem Sela and Gal Gadot is no accident. Miri Regev had warned the Israeli public that the former IDF general Benny Gantz—whose Blue and White party is leading in the polls—was secretly planning an alliance with Arab parties. Rotem Sela reminded her Instagram readers of the fact that Arabs were citizens of Israel too: “What’s the problem with the Arabs??? Dear god, there are also Arab citzens in this country. When the hell will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people were created equal, and that even the Arabs and the Druze and the LGBTs and — shock — the leftists are human.”
When Prime Minister Netanyahu attacked Rotem Sela, Wonder Woman Gal Gadot, who had previously been used as a poster child for Israel by the Netanyahu government, came at her defense: “Rotem, my sister, you are an inspiration to us all.”
The world is small: Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Culture, the actress Gal Gadot as well as the former IDF Chief of General Staff and potential next prime minister (or at least minister) are all living in Rosh Haayin. Maybe they will all meet on April 9, 2019 at the ballot box voting in the 2019 Israeli legislative election.
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Article added on March 12, 2019 at 01:57 Ukrainian time.
