New Israeli law targets Arab cultural institutions

The Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports Miri Regev is preparing a draft law which allows for the granting of budgets only to cultural institutions that declare allegiance to the State of Israel.

According to Regev’s proposal, the Israeli Ministry of Culture will not grant budgets to institutions that insult or offend the Israeli flag and symbols of Israel, incite violence, racism and terrorism, mark Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, and those who do not recognise Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

The proposal comes after a crisis emerged between Regev’s ministry and Masrah El-Maydan, a theatre company which performed a play inspired by messages written by the prisoner Walid Duka, who was convicted of planning the murder of an IDF soldier.

Regev is expected to present the bill on Wednesday morning to the Knesset’s Education Committee, in the context of what she has called “cultural justice”.

The bill will transfer decision making powers regarding funding to the Ministry of Culture. The current law states that a cultural institution can be fined retroactively if it infringed on the laws of the State of Israel, but this is a long process at the discretion of the Finance Minister. This means that in practice the Ministry of Culture is obliged to fund those organisations even if it objects to the content of their work.

Regev claimed that the decision should be up to the Ministry of Culture because unlike the Ministry of Finance, her ministry can communicate directly with cultural institutions and monitor their works.