Duty in Occupied Albania

A satirical revue entitled The Patriot, by the well-known Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin, opened in Tel Aviv last week and quickly became the center of a national controversy. The play is about a cynical young Israeli hero who buys land in the West Bank as a real estate investment, kicks an Arab shoeshine boy to show that he lives up to the standards of anti-Arab Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and later tries to figure out how to leave wartorn, inflation-ridden Israel by obtaining an immigrant visa to the U.S. In the end, alas, he dies while on military service in faraway "Israeli-occupied Albania."

Israeli audiences loved it, but the revue was banned by the government's censorship board as offensive to "the basic values of the nation, the state and Judaism." In the past, Israeli censors have occasionally outlawed Arabic-language plays, but they have never taken such action against a Hebrew-language production.

In defending the decision, Censorship Board Chairman Yehoshua Justman charged that the Levin play portrayed the Israeli people as "corrupt, degenerate, ruthlessly killing Arab children and degrading the Arabs."

Defying the ban and thereby risking legal action, the revue's producers decided to keep the show open, and many Israelis obviously approved. As the independent newspaper Ha'aretz observed, "You don't have to love Levin's play or agree with his opinions to defend his right to say whatever he likes." At midweek in a preliminary vote, the Israeli Knesset expressed its support of a bill that would abolish all censorship of films and plays.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.