Word: kenan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps it was. Although Jesus is mentioned only in the title-presumably for shock value-the central character is "the man on a cross." But the real target of Kenan's satire was the quality of life in modern secular Israel and particularly its all-pervading militarism. That, the author claims, is the real reason why his revue was banned from the stage...
...Israeli army has become a substitute for Jewish ideals," says Kenan. "No longer do Jews swear by their intellectuals, by their rebels or their revolutionaries, but by their army and their soldiers. They do not want to be martyrs. They want to be an efficient people." Thus, in one scene of the revue a housewife chortles: "Yesterday I noticed that my maid doesn't dust the table properly. So I called in the army. Now the army keeps things in order at home. It's a real delight to see how they rub, like well-oiled machines...
...Protest. Kenan protested the censor's decision to Israel's highest court and lost. So far, his only support within the government has come from Deputy Premier Yigal Allon, who in his capacity as Minister of Education and Culture had underwritten $1,400 of the revue's production costs. Allon has moved that the censorship laws applying to the theater, which were written during the years of the British Mandate, be repealed. His proposal is on the agenda for Cabinet action, but government watchers predict that if any decision is taken, it will be to keep...
...Kenan incident is the most recent in a series of government crackdowns on critics from within. In 1970 a satire called Queen of the Bathtub was pressured to close after 20 performances because it dealt brutally with Israeli losses during the "war of attrition" with Egypt. "Toilet humor," growled Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Three months ago an English-language lampoon called Lillit, published by Hebrew University students, suddenly lost both circulation and government financial support. The magazine had carried the comic-strip adventures of a muscular "SuperGolda"; her principal adversary was a Tel Aviv intellectual driven berserk by police corruption...
...criticism are the Middle East's no-war no-peace stalemate and the stern treatment of Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories. "We have to decide whether we want to make American Indians out of the Palestinians or live with them on an equal basis," says Kenan. "My attack is basically against the myths that we Zionists brought culture here, we cultivated the land, and therefore it belongs...