TV| Arab Labor]
Arab Labor
Lots of Laughs Between Israelis & Palestinians
Every once in a great while, American television has one of those rare and special moments when the medium serves a greater purpose than just entertainment. We can look back at TV programming like All in the Family and see how the people behind that groundbreaking series used comedy as a means of exploring important, sensitive, and often taboo social issues.
Israeli television is achieving that same lofty goal through its own groundbreaking series, Arab Labor, a sitcom that depicts Israeli society through the eyes of a very funny and entertaining Muslim Arab family as they struggle to conform and fit in. Currently, two episodes of Arab Labor are broadcast every Saturday night, at 10:00PM and 10:30PM, on KCET (Channel 28).
The series was created by Sayed Kashua, an Israeli-born Palestinian who attended Jerusalem's Hebrew University and who writes in Hebrew for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. Arab Labor (from the Hebrew Avoda Aravit, which colloquially implies "shoddy or
second-rate work")
focuses on Amjad Alian, a Palestinian journalist and Israeli citizen, as he seeks greater status in the society into which he was born, but where his car is still searched everyday when he drives to his job in Jerusalem.
“I wanted the Israeli mainstream audience to meet different kinds of Arabs - not just terrorists or politicians - and to listen to their language and their stories," Kashua has explained. "I'm not dealing with (Palestinian) lives under direct occupation, like in the West Bank - it's about the Palestinian minority inside Israel."