Once again, Minister of Culture Miri Regev is making threats to defund an Israeli cultural institute due to political considerations. In May, for instance, she withheld the ministry’s funding of the Haifa-based Arab-Israeli Al-Midan Theater for putting up the play “A Parallel Time,” which is based on a story by terrorist Walid Daka. The Haifa municipality followed in her footsteps.

In September, the ministry sent a letter to all the cultural institutes in Israel, citing various laws and regulations affecting the eligibility for budgetary support in 2016. There are various reasons for which the state can withhold financial support, such as negation of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state; incitement to racism, violence and terror; expressing support for an armed struggle or an act of terror by an enemy state or a terrorist organization against the State of Israel; marking the state’s Independence Day as a day of mourning; and showing contempt for or defacing the national flag or the state’s emblem.

Now, Regev is threatening to defund the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, which is holding the International Film Festival on Nakba and Return ("48 mm film festival") on Dec 4-6. Featuring 10 films, the festival is being organized for the third consecutive year by the nonprofit organization Zochrot (which means "remembering" in Hebrew for the female plural), which touts itself (on its Hebrew-language site) as “promoting the responsibility of the Jewish public in Israel for the Palestinian Nakba and for exercising the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.”

Despite the fact that the founders of the organization are men and women, Jews and Arabs, they used the feminine gender for the organization's name. In their opinion, “The memory in Israeli society in connection with 1948 is predominantly militaristic and chauvinistic, dealing mainly with battles, operations, conquests and idolization of heroism. We chose a verb that is less commonly used in Hebrew as an attempt to provide a feminist alternative that will address other issues, such as the lives of the Palestinian communities that lived in the country before the war as well as the fate of the women, men and children who made up those communities.”