The term “loyalty in culture bill” sounds like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, last month, Israel’s minister for culture and sport introduced just that to a parliamentary committee, which responded with a mixture of rightwing approval and leftwing condemnation. Many of Israel’s newspapers are now happy to mention Miri Regev in the same breath as Joe McCarthy.

In her short time as minister, the former army brigadier-general responsible for the military’s media relations has been criticised for her attacks on artists’ freedom of speech, the latest being her proposal to give government funding only to art loyal to Israel.

“What is happening in Israel now is fascism,” says David Tartakover, a graphic artist famous for designing politically inspired work, including the logo for the Peace Now campaign in 1978. He believes this is the culmination of a slow creep of limitations that began after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Over the last year, he says, things have visibly worsened.



Comparisons with Joe McCarthy … Miri Regev, the minister for culture and sport. Photograph: Reuters

A snapshot of what Tartakover is referring to would include Naftali Bennett, the minister of education, banning Dorit Rabinyan’s novel Borderlife, about a relationship between a Jewish woman and Palestinian man, from school reading lists because it promoted “assimilation”; and the rightwing extra-parliamentary political group Im Tirtzu denouncing two of Israel’s most internationally recognised writers, Amos Oz and David Grossman, as being “infiltrators inside [Israeli] culture”.

While the attorney general scaled back Regev’s powers last Wednesday, only allowing her to retrospectively “defund” artists who had received grants, the bill is still symbolic of her willingness to insert her politics into the art world. In her short tenure, Regev has threatened to fine theatre groups who refuse to perform in the West Bank, and attempted to vet the army radio station’s playlist to ensure it included more songs by Israeli and Mizrahi artists.

Tartakover, who has been at the forefront of politically inspired art in Israel for over 40 years, sees this as “a culture war” rather than a series of unrelated events, one that has its origins in the “48 years of occupation of the territories, where there’s no democracy. Being the ruling power of two million Palestinians without any rights affects the whole country.”

The bill defines disloyal art as follows: “Denying the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; incitement to racism, violence and terror; support for an armed struggle or terror act by a hostile country or terror organisation against the state of Israel; marking Independence Day as a day of mourning; an act of vandalism or physical degradation that dishonours the country’s flag or state emblem.”



‘This is a culture war’ … graphic artist David Tartakover

Craig Dershowitz, executive director of New York-based organisation Artists4Israel, is more defensive. He believes that an awareness of the “various anti-Israel forces at play in the cultural dialogue” is crucial to understanding why the bill has been introduced.



Dershowitz, a street artist who leads educational tours of Israel for other graffiti artists, says: “I applaud a country that wrestles with so much adversity to have any – much more such a robust – cultural concern in government.” He says the international community “sometimes forgets that Israel is a country at war – and, at other times, forgets it is a country that exists outside of that war”.

He adds: “All art exists within society and, as such, is part of a social contract. Art has obligations to society even if that obligation is to be radical, rebellious and fighting against social norms. In Israel, those social contracts have always been quite different to how we imagine them in our privileged western liberal communities.”

In this politically charged country, frequently the focus of the world’s attention, it can be difficult for Israeli artists to be anything but political. As the director of an arts-based organisation, Dershowitz regularly sees Israeli artists almost forced to take a political stance, either by action or inaction, to which he poses the question: “Do the artists feel the need to respond – or are they just being asked the question? When they do answer, it’s amplified 1,000 times more than any other artist.”

Sculptor and installation artist Sigalit Landau, who has been keenly aware of this politicisation since her first exhibitions in the early 90s, says: “You are always going to be judged [in the light of the] conflict and your background.”

Landau, whose arts deals primarily with identity and occasionally dips into politically uncomfortable territory, believes the bill shows how Regev likes to take advantage of Israel’s politicised atmosphere in order to grab headlines: “There are always new things. Every week there’s a new idea.”



‘We’re talking about so little money’ … sculptor and installation artist Sigalit Landau at the Venice Biennale’s Israeli pavilion, 2011. Photograph: Barbara Zanon/Getty Images

While Landau is uncomfortable with the symbolism of Regev’s bill, she believes the influence of government grants can be overstated: “We’re talking about so little money. Some people say, ‘Keep your money. It’s not affecting anything anyway. You’re talking like you’re an ATM machine.’”

However, she regrets the fact that Regev isn’t treating art “as a way to bridge opinions, backgrounds and differences”. She adds: “It didn’t used to be about agreeing on everything – culture comes out of disagreement. I think most people who bother living here do love this place in a way. They prove it by not leaving, by making art or literature, by teaching or a taking part in a debate.”

While Israel’s artists seem split on the question of whether Regev’s bill represents a war on free expression, or is simply to be expected in such a country, Landau says there is one thing she couldn’t work without: “Hope in Israeli culture.”