Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev probably has not found the time to see “Mephisto,” adapted by Hillel Mittelpunkt and directed by Omri Nitzan, currently on stage at the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv. The energetic minister is most likely too busy imposing economic sanctions on theaters and mounting attacks against the “leftist media.” In any case, anyone who boasts of never having read a Chekhov play is unlikely to have heard of Klaus Mann or seen the play based on his 1936 novel. “Mephisto” tells the story of Hendrik Hofgen, an actor who sells his soul to the Nazi regime to get ahead and is appointed the manager of the National Theater. The character is based on the real-life Gustaf Grundgen. “I’m just a normal actor,” Hofgen says, offering up one of the most charged lines of self-defense in theater history.

Regev and her boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, want Israeli playwrights along with producers of movie and TV documentaries to be just like Hofgen — submissive. The same goes for news editors and reporters. After all, public funding is effectively being used in the service of Israel’s creeping annexation of the occupied West Bank. Why should it not serve the annexation of the cultural sphere, too?

“It’s unacceptable that the communications minister doesn’t have any control,” Regev railed during a Cabinet debate last July on the future Public Broadcasting Corporation. “If we have no control, why should we give it money?” she asked. Indeed, why should it be any different from any other sphere controlled by government ministers?

Regev has long been threatening Israeli artists with an initiative that would transfer to her the Finance Ministry’s current authority to deny state funding to institutions that produce works that question Israel as a Jewish and democratic state or present Israel’s independence day as a day of mourning, or the Nakba, Arabic for “disaster,” as many Palestinians call it.