prime time situation comedy in israel

Prime-time situation comedy in Israel on Palestinians ("Israeli Arabs")

I learned about this show from an informative article in the New York

Times. The title of the show, written by Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian

citizen of Israel, is "Avoda Aravit," which means Arab work or Arab

labor. According to the article, the title is Hebrew slang for

second-rate work. The title also riffs off of the slogan, "Avoda

'Ivrit," or Hebrew labor, which was fundamental for the Zionist

colonizing movement in Palestine. The Zionist ideology proposed that

the Jew of the diaspora would be remade by doing hard physical labor

on the land, and by not hiring others (namely Arabs) to do that work.

The fact that the iconic "worker," especially when it comes to the

most difficult physical labor (in factories, in agriculture, in

construction) is done in Israel today by Arabs represents, therefore,

a kind of subversion of the Zionist dream.

Two things I love about the video clip (courtesy of Al-Jazeera

English): first, the daughter who subverts her parents plan to get

through the checkpoint by speaking Arabic: "Sabah al-khayr ya bulees!"

(good morning, policeman); and second, the Palestinian-Israeli woman

who refers to Edward Said's book Orientalism when she spurns her

Jewish-Israeli date. "Since I'm an Arab, I must adore maqluba [a

traditional Palestinian dish, made with cauliflower]. That's exactly

what Edward Said wrote about in 'Orientalism.'" Interesting because

the expectation is that both Jewish and Arab viewers in Israel would