by joe eskenazi
staff writer
When Jerusalem landlord after Jerusalem landlord reads the Arabic name “Sayed Kashua” on the lease application and reflexively says no, the flesh-and-blood Sayed Kashua is hurt. And when he’s flagged down by Israeli police on his ride home, that’s the coup de grâce.
But the Israeli Arab journalist and writer can’t be blamed if his lips curl into a wan smile, even momentarily, during life’s painful episodes. After all, it will make for great television.
Kashua, 32, has made international headlines with the successful debut of his Israeli TV series, “Avoda Aravit” or “Arab Labor.” For nine episodes this season (and, inshallah, 13 more next year), primetime viewers of Israel’s Channel 2 have tuned in to watch a show with more than 70 percent of its dialogue in Arabic, and in which Arabs are portrayed as something other than terrorists, cab drivers or vendors at the open-air market.
Getting Kashua’s unconventional show on the air took four years of negotiating.
“Arab Labor” revolves around the life of Amjad, a young Israeli Arab journalist who writes for a big Israeli newspaper — like Kashua, who writes a satirical column for Ha’aretz. Also like Kashua, Amjad lives with his wife and young family in an Arab section of Jerusalem.
But Kashua shies away from calling Amjad his alter ego.
“My life is not so funny, to be honest. It’s a lot more boring than the TV show,” he deadpanned in a phone interview from his flat in Beit Safafa.
It certainly wasn’t funny when Kashua’s daughter was rejected from a Jewish kindergarten program. But it made for a painfully awkward, “Fawlty Towers” - style comic moment when the same happened to Amjad. And when Amjad interviews the leader of the We Are Here and They Are There political party (which advocates the transfer of Arabs out of Israel) and ends up in therapy rehashing his nightmares of being a refugee — that too makes for extremely black comedy.
Assuming “the embassy doesn’t make problems giving me a tourist visa,” Kashua will be in the Bay Area for multiple appearances next week, discussing his TV show, column and novels “Let it Be Morning” and “Dancing Arabs.”
While many Israeli TV comedies go heavy on the laugh track, Kashua wants the laughs to sting a bit. Even the show’s title, “Arab Labor,” is a racist Israeli expression meaning “shoddy work.”
And while Israel’s Jewish audiences can’t get enough “Arab Labor,” the Arabs whose lives it dramatizes haven’t reacted similarly. Just as some American blacks objected to “Good Times,” Arab journalists have excoriated Kashua for supposedly playing into Israeli stereotypes of Arabs.
Kashua saw this coming, predicting every complaint in a Ha’aretz column. And, he admits, they’ve got a point. To a degree, he is stereotyping Arabs. But he’s stereotyping Jews, too.
Arabs’ complaints started in the show’s first episode. When Amjad fumes to his Jewish best friend and coworker Meir that he’s endlessly being pulled over by cops, Meir tells him that his beat up old Subaru is “considered an Arab’s car.”
So, Amjad picks up a stolen Rover — “a Jewish car” — from an Arab car thief (“Most Israeli Jews think Arabs always buy stolen things and steal cars”) and blissfully sails through Israeli checkpoints — until his engine blows. Kashua, incidentally, notes with a laugh that he drives “a very old Arab car — a Mitsubishi Galant made in 1990.”
The complaints continued when Amjad’s father was given the honor of ceremonially purchasing his neighborhood’s chametz for one shekel — and promptly sold the lot on the Internet.
In the upcoming second season of “Arab Labor,” Kashua hopes Amjad moves into a Jerusalem flat in a predominately Jewish neighborhood. The near-certain instances of being shunned by neighbors and harassed by cops — gold, comedy gold! And, if Kashua lands a flat in a Jewish neighborhood himself, writing will be all too easy.
And Kashua sees positive things in the show’s future. Most Israelis have been rooting for Meir and Amal, a beautiful Israeli Arab lawyer, to move ahead in their nascent romance.
This is a good sign — though the writer is unsure he wants them “to marry each other or kill each other.”
“I have no idea yet.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California