Satire in the Holy Wonderland: The Comic Framing of Arab Leaders in Israel

Abstract

This article traces the depiction of Arab leaders in televised Israeli satire during the last two decades. First, I discuss the construction of Yasser Arafat's image in the popular show Hartzufim (1996–2000), claiming that his polysemic framing as an Arab-Jew served both the emotional needs of Jewish-Israelis in a bewildering era of transformations and the commercial interests of the show's producers. I then examine the depiction of other Arab leaders in Eretz Nehederet (2003–present), highlighting the continuous dominance of the “Israelification” framing strategy as a mode of hegemonic cooptation. Yet, in contemporary entertainment-driven media environment, this framing of Arab leaders tends to be de-politicized and fantasy-anchored, rather than news-anchored.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Zohar Kampf, Ifat Maoz, and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt for their useful comments on this article. I am also grateful to the editors of this special issue for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

¹This simplified shortlist consists of very popular shows that focused mainly on political satire: many other comic shows that incorporated some satirical elements have been broadcast in Israel over the years, as well as some purely satirical shows that were not as successful as the ones listed here.

²The practice of using humor to cope with a perceived ethnic or racial threat is not unique to Israel, of course. In the American context, for instance, the Sambo comic stereotype has been extensively analyzed as helping whites cope with repressed feelings of fear and intimidation while maintaining their sense of control (Ely, 1991).

³ Hartzufim was based on a format that was utterly new to Israel but quite popular across the globe: puppet-based satire. The trademark of this genre is the use of grotesque “latex puppets of well-known figures and characters, both fictional and real” (Meinhof & Smith, 2000, p. 43). The visual representation of these famous figures varied across shows. For instance, the successful French program, The Bebette Show (1984–1995), used Muppet Show puppets to capture a “zoo full of political beasts,” starring Kermit the Frog as President Mitterand (Collovald & Neveu, 1999 p. 341). A different visual representation system was adapted in the British Spitting Image (1984–1996), which, as its name ironically hints, focused on caricaturized versions of politicians and other celebrities.

⁴The complete set of polls can be found at the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research: http://www.tau.ac.il/peace/.

⁵This falls in line with the findings of Balmas, Sheafer, and Wolfsfeld (2011), according to which Hamas representatives appeared much more frequently than Fatah representatives in Israeli news in the aftermath of the 2006 Gaza elections which brought Hamas to power. It also echoes the process described by Wolfsfeld (2004), according to which Israeli media tends to focus on the concrete, specific and immediate threats of terror associated with the Hamas rather than on the more abstract, general and distant discourse related to peace.

⁶It should be noted that the news, in Israel and elsewhere, has itself undergone processes of de-politization and personalization (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007; Thussu, 2007; Wolfsfeld, 2004), yet Eretz Nehederet's satire on Arab leaders seems to have taken this trend one step deeper into fantasyland.

⁷It is important to note that since the size of the Israeli market is so small, a commercial television show will not survive if it addresses only a small portion of the population. In other words, mainstreaming seems to be vital for the sustainability of Israeli commercial satire.