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Israeli Television Goes International

In December, Netflix began distributing the Israeli television drama Fauda, about an IDF undercover unit in pursuit of a high-ranking Hamas terrorist, and found that it had an eager audience abroad. This, writes Ethan Bronner, is just the latest example of the Jewish state’s newfound success as an exporter of televised entertainment:

In the past few years, networks worldwide have picked up dozens of series that originated in Israel—Homeland and In Treatment among them—placing the country of 8 million among the world’s top producers of shows. . . . In many ways, Israel’s reputation as a high-tech start-up nation is spreading to TV. Like Israeli technology companies, networks such as Yes, Keshet, and Hot must reach beyond their tiny domestic market to make any money. So they’ve adopted many of the same bootstrapping low-budget habits and tapped Israel’s immigrant-rich, melting-pot culture for ideas.

Keshet, Israel’s biggest production house, has opened offices in Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, and Mexico City to sell shows, help create foreign adaptations—and, lately, produce original programming overseas. . . . “Hollywood increasingly sees Israel as a laboratory,” says Hagai Levi, who created In Treatment for Israel’s Hot and The Affair for Showtime. He’s now working on a co-production between Keshet and HBO tentatively titled Flesh of Our Flesh, about the summer of 2014, when Jewish youths were kidnapped and murdered and Israel went to war in Gaza.

HBO’s interest in Levi’s series—about intensely local events, shot on location in Hebrew and Arabic—highlights the growing global hunger for new kinds of entertainment. That has spurred the creation of programs that few believed might find an audience either in Israel or abroad. “TV has suddenly started to deal with Israeli identity partly because of this market overseas,” says Moti Gigi, a communications professor at Sapir College in southern Israel.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Arts & Culture, Israel & Zionism, Israeli culture, Israeli economy, Television

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic