In Israel, life imitates satire [View all]
At the end of his recent interview with Al-Monitor, professor Zeev Sternhell offered an important recommendation. The world-renowned expert on fascism suggested that we use our imagination to identify the threat looming over Israeli society and prepare to deal with it properly.
It would have taken a particularly vivid imagination to predict that an Israeli prime minister would utter a sentence such as "Arab voters are coming out in droves." Who could have foreseen that the public would back a soldier who shot an injured man, and who would have thought that in 2016 a massive majority of Israelis (71.5%) would believe that Israeli control of the territories it captured in 1967 is not occupation?
It takes an imagination such as that of witty playwright Michal Aharoni to come up with a plot — imaginative to the point of being surreal — that turned into reality by the time the play premiered. (Full disclosure: Aharoni is the life partner of Al-Monitor columnist Shlomi Eldar).
The play focuses on a defense minister who is sick and on his efforts to recover. To save his own life, the minister (played by the wonderful Dov Glickman) is willing to violate a law he himself co-authored forbidding Jews from accepting organ transplants from non-Jews. He gets the heart of a Palestinian and, to buy the silence of the settlers, he engages in secret trading with them over funding and the authorization of illegal settlement outposts.
Three years ago, when Aharoni wrote "Angina Pectoris," the practice of separating Arab and Jewish families on maternity wards was just a rumor. It was only in April that Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich openly supported the practice in writing. The possibility that this thug Smotrich, who dreamed up the "beast parade" against the LGBT community, would hold the title of deputy Knesset speaker would have once been considered a bad joke.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/05/angina-factory-michal-aharoni-theatre-play-occupation.html#ixzz48num8Cbr
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