Can anyone make a sweet and silly comedy out of a subject as grim and intractable as the Israeli-Palestinian situation? For Sameh Zoabi, the director of “Tel Aviv on Fire” (who wrote the script with Dan Kleinman), the answer to the question is another question. What else is there?

For Salam (Kais Nashif), a skinny, sad-eyed underachiever who lives in Jerusalem, there are a few possible answers to that question, none of which seem terribly promising at first. There is Mariam (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a former maybe-girlfriend Salam is still in love with, and there’s also a job in Ramallah, acquired by the most literal kind of nepotism.

Salam’s Uncle Bassam (Nadim Sawalha) is a television producer who has hired his hapless nephew to help out on a bilingual period potboiler also called “Tel Aviv on Fire.” Since Salam is fluent in Hebrew, Bassam thinks he might be able to check the scripts for mistakes. Salam either fails spectacularly at even that simple job or succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Like nearly everything else in this sharp-eyed, good-natured film (Zoabi’s second fiction feature), it’s a matter of perspective.

Neither the show nor the movie is as incendiary as the title makes it sound. The TV version, shot in the emphatic style of an Egyptian Ramadan soap opera, is popular with both Arab and Jewish audiences (and especially with women). It takes place in 1967, and concerns a Palestinian spy who seduces an Israeli general in the service of her people’s cause.