History was made Sept. 14 at the Al-Midan Theater in Haifa. It was the first time that the theater, founded in 1995, performed a play in Hebrew. "Oved Shabbat" (“Quieter Days”) was directed by Sinai Peter and written by playwrights Hanna Eady, a native of the Druze town of Peki’in, who now lives in the United States, and Edward Mast. The play was originally written in English and then translated into Hebrew. It will one day be performed in Arabic as well.

“This isn’t an act of coexistence,” says the theater’s artistic director, Salwa Nakara. “We liked the writing and the play’s approach,” she clarifies, “and we thought that presenting it to a Hebrew-speaking audience was the right thing to do. Our voice won’t be heard without Hebrew. Much to our chagrin, Israel today has yet to realize the importance of understanding the Arabic language.”

Eady, who is married to an American Jew, was recently interviewed by Israeli daily Haaretz. The paper described him as someone “who believes in theater as a means of bringing about social change, and therefore insisted on his play being performed in Hebrew 'to connect with the Israeli audience.'” The article claimed that the decision “required courage from the theater’s manager, Adnan Tarabash, who is now being criticized by the Arab public for making this decision.”

Underlying this criticism is the Arab public in Israel's increasing disappointed over the results of its efforts to integrate into the Israeli mainstream. Arab-Israelis now want to make the theater exclusively their own. There are very few cultural islands in Israel with a distinctively Arab identity, and the theater usually avoids collaborative efforts solely for the sake of “coexistence.” In this sense, Haifa serves as a safe harbor for Arab artists. It has become a cultural “city of refuge,” much like Tel Aviv is for Jewish artists and performers.