We are in the age of blood and gold of Israeli television. On the one hand, commercial channels fill the screen with gladiators clashing in well-conceived circus and amusement arenas. In any case, it was just entertainment, but the quarrels are programmed to attract the viewers, by constantly drumming on the wounds of Israeliness. Instead of healing, invented reality TV deepens internal strife and rifts for our big brother – ratings. But as soon as reality penetrates into reality, and the producers of discord and malice come to complain, they immediately wash their cameras cleanly, shrug their shoulders, and call it "reality" and what do you want, we are not in the business of education but in the business of selling advertisements, and "Masuda Meshderot."
But the vacuum of existence has also created the opposite movement, and on the other side of the commercial channels stands the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation - "Kan", which not only stands out in relation to the shuffling of the zero waters of the commercial channels, but manages to radically change Israeli television.
If you want to learn something about the Israeli reality, you can find it very easily in the "here" closest to the summary. "Main Box Office", "Corrupting Angel", "Six zeros", "Stockholm", "East Side", "Aviram Katz", "The Commander", a small collection from a wealth of great series. All these series constitute excellent television viewing, with complexity, richness and a good understanding of the Israeli reality.
But one thing keeps coming up from watching them – they all still have the problem of forms (stereotypes) and misguided biases when it comes to one topic. In other words, they disrupt the periphery. Take, for example, the series "Six zeros". Among the winners of the millions is a couple who come from the periphery, the man from the settlement of Omer, which already arouses a particularly large peripheral ridiculousness, but let's say, let's say. But the woman comes from Yeruham, you know—full, teneful, Mizrahi family and all the. Here, however, we gave the Torah peripheral a layer of personality complexity that manages to present it as a complete character. And what's the problem? Anyone who has ever traveled between Yeruham and Be'er Sheva immediately understands that some of the scenes in the "periphery" were not really filmed in Yeruham or in the hospital in Beer Sheva.
Why the peripheral disruption? I don't know, but it's safe to assume that this is just another case of "far away" to be precise. And between us, what difference does it make where exactly the couple comes from from the periphery? What is the difference between housing and housing? The main thing is that it is a periphery.
And it doesn't end there. In the series "Aviram Katz" the heroine descends to Mitzpe Ramon. This time, the people of the series made the effort and did not settle for "Mini Israel" and went up to Mitzpe Ramon to film the series. But what, when the heroine drives her car from Jerusalem to the observatory, the car is filmed driving along a deserted, broken and bumpy road that even camels would refuse to climb on the grounds that it is too cliché. The southerner in me knew immediately what road it was, it wasn't invented, it did exist. It's called the Hikers' Road, to Har Harif. But no sane person would travel to Mitzpe Ramon via this road, when there is the main road (and still not a two-lane road, Minister Regev). But what do the creators of Peripheral Duke care, the main thing is that we have a road, potholes and twists of the 50s, to show how remote and stuck it is in the past.
Now you're complaining that the tenements and roads are not ideally represented? Again "Conquer me, drink to me"? Imagine if the series "East Side," about East Jerusalem, was filmed in Acre. It's similar, isn't it? Or imagine that the series "Rothman in Kaplan" (which I just invented, but you know will come), which describes the infatuation of a couple in protest, will be filmed at the entrance to Be'er Sheva, with the Azrieli Towers replaced by the clock tower and two palm trees. Satisfactory? Not. But that's exactly what peripheral disruption does. Makes Tel Aviv a concrete place and disrupts the rest of the country to the point of turning it into a television screen setting, robbing the place of its uniqueness.
And when you disrupt a periphery, you rob all its people of the right to be what they are. Anyone who photographs the place as a flat carpet of clichés flattens the complexity of the place into a one-dimensional dimension, and continues the distortion of the reality of the commercial channels. Please of you, the drama and comedy people of "Kan", stop disrupting the periphery, you are better than this.
And unfortunately, this is exactly what cannot be said about Kan's news department, which repeatedly falls into the trap of forms on the periphery. Anyway, when it's deliberative, the center and the periphery are discussed, but when it comes to possible civil wars - don't be "blessed is the match", fools. This week, Kan News people came to cover "The First Shot in the Civil War" and filmed a recycling article in Beersheba in the classic formula - "Us and Them" - this time in the boxing ring: Be'er Sheva opposite Hatzerim.
There are many historical, social and economic distortions in the relations between kibbutzim and cities in the periphery, there is no need to ignore or deny it. Anyway, when you come to discuss such an explosive subject as the shooting in the air at the Kibbutz Hatzerim gate, accompanying it with dramatic narration that seeks to intensify the drama, it is dangerous but understandable. But Moav Vardi's article did the original sin in relation to the periphery – to fish for the familiar and the obvious, and to put him in the role of his life at the center of the picture. All so that it says what the camera thinks the audience thinks the camera wants to see and hear.
Such casting has no problem finding a substitute. Certainly when you do poor preparatory work at the level I will arrive at the shopping center and find me an occasional peripheral, who will tell me what he thinks about us and them, and if possible with an accent, a kippah and a variety of clichés.
Since I know the place and the working people, I wonder how the people of Kan did not find the Ashkenazi optometrist from Be'er Sheva, or the Arab pharmacist from Be'er Sheva, or the elite baker from Be'er Sheva, all neighbors in the same shopping center where the camera chose to position itself and establish the stereotype of "Mapai, Likud, kibbutzim, towns, us, them, war, Gaba Gaba, hey hey.
True, this opinion exists in space, but it is only one of many different ones. If Kan News people weren't lazy in thought, they could find a collection of other, more complex opinions, right in the same shopping center where news cameras stoked the muffled old embers of civil war to roast everyone's meat.
Cosmic timing, in the same shopping center, a few days after the "civil war" that never happened, "Things in the Desert," the graduation event of the Mandel Program for Leadership in the Negev, Cohort 5, took place. Alongside the fountains, and opposite the Israeli routine of falafel and a cellphone store, graduates of the program presented their work in the public space. Puppet theater, singing on branches, vocal performances, colors and words, everything is good, beautiful and interesting. But there was one job that challenged the beautiful sunset. "A local desert adaptation of the Vogging consciousness technique, a practice of movement appropriation of symbols of power and power by the queer community that is excluded from them," as stated by performing artist Raz Gluzman. Or to put it simply - a man dancing in a wedding dress.
If Verdi's cameras had bothered to come to this event, they would have discovered the wonders of routine there. Occasional ultra-Orthodox, passing Bedouins and a variety of clichés from the Negev, who asked in front of the performance, conducted themselves in a manner that was not clearly tenuous. Look, chuckle, and sip a free smoothie. "From the flood," one of them smirked, "may he be healthy," he said, and continued on his way. And maybe lucky the cameras didn't come. For by nightfall, no civil war had broken out.
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