For Palestinians and my fellow Jewish dissidents in Israel, it’s a tough time to make comedy. Amid the growing repression and fascism that pervades Israeli society, I’ve jokingly asked my Palestinian comedian friends to send me their edgy jokes so I can try them out, since, unlike them, I wouldn’t risk arrest for doing so. At least not yet.
That’s how it is in Israel these days. One day the police decide to go after a Palestinian singer, the next day it’s an actress, then a beauty salon owner, and then booksellers. And before you know it, they’re banging on the door of a stand-up comedian. No, seriously.
Nidal Badarneh, a well-known Palestinian comic, was at his home in Haifa on Feb. 24 when police arrived to take him in for questioning. According to the police, he was arrested under the pretext of “disturbing public order,” which, for Nidal, meant telling jokes about Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
On Jan. 20, he had posted a video to Instagram after the first three female Israeli hostages were released wearing tracksuits, joking in Arabic that the “certificates” Hamas gave them upon their release were for completing a pilates course. In another video posted later that month, featuring a clip from one of his shows, he joked that Thai workers were not actually kidnapped from Israel on October 7, but rather saw pickup trucks and hopped in, assuming they were taking them to work.
Nidal’s arrest was the culmination of weeks of persecution — what Hadeel Abu Salih, his attorney at the Haifa-based human rights group Adalah, called an “extensive campaign of incitement by extremist right-wing groups.” It started when Hazinor, a popular television program on Israel’s Channel 13, translated and shared his jokes to its hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Right-wing groups then threatened to disrupt his stand-up show in Haifa on Feb. 14, leading police to cancel it.
The same groups then pressured the police to intervene in every subsequent attempt to reschedule the show or change its location. When the police eventually decided to arrest him, they received vigorous praise from Culture Minister Miki Zohar: “Anyone who jokes about the hostages … belongs in jail or Gaza, not on stage.”
Nidal expressed his willingness to fully cooperate when police arrived to detain him, and yet they still chose to raid his home, handcuff him, and humiliate him. And despite the claim that he posed a threat to public order, he was released after a few hours without any restrictive conditions: no obligation to report to the police, no house arrest, no travel ban, nothing.
Such shows of force aim to intimidate and suppress Palestinian voices inside Israel, and have become disturbingly common: Adalah has catalogued almost 200 “incitement” charges filed against Palestinian citizens since October 7, including several prominent cultural figures subjected to blatant political persecution. Which naturally begs the question: who is actually “disturbing public order” here?
When genocidal rhetoric passes for comedy
As a stand-up comedian myself, I’ve known Nidal for many years. He jokes about many things, from the personal to the political. And unlike many artists who feared the consequences of speaking out after October 7, he has had no qualms about satirizing the current social climate inside Israel.
In “Iron Kibbeh” (a play on “Iron Dome,” Israel’s missile defense system, and “kibbeh,” a popular Palestinian food), his current stand-up show that was subjected to the cancelations, he explores some of the absurdities Palestinian citizens have faced during the war — from the lack of shelters and Iron Dome protection, to being stuck at home with your children due to regular rocket sirens, praying for Israel to go ahead and occupy the entire Middle East if it means the kids can go back to school.
We can argue whether or not his jokes about Israeli hostages are tasteful, appropriate, or even funny. From my own experience, I know that comedians often need to tell many jokes and test out half-baked punch lines for even some of the material to land with your audience.
But it’s clear that it wasn’t the content of the jokes that landed Nidal in trouble. I frequently criticize the State of Israel in my shows, and no police officers have come to arrest me for a joke. When you’re an Arab stand-up comedian in Israel, though, you’re simply not allowed to make fun of the same things Jewish comedians joke about. And believe me, they’re telling a lot of jokes.
“Eretz Nehederet,” for instance, Israel’s version of “Saturday Night Live,” recently aired a sketch about the released hostages. In an interview with an overly-friendly BBC journalist, a Hamas official explains that the hostages’ noticeable weight loss is the result of their time at “the Hamas Wellness Center — or as we call it, Slimtifada.” Right-wing Israelis often criticize the show’s sketches, but the idea of arresting its comedians and writers is never even a consideration.
If joking about Israeli hostages could plausibly be taboo, there is no similar prohibition for making fun of — and even celebrating — Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Since October 2023, I have seen clips of Israeli comedians making sickening and inflammatory jokes, and none of them have been arrested.
In December 2023, Guy Hochman, an Israeli soldier and comedian with a large following, posted a video of himself stripping down to his underwear on a beach in Gaza, screaming, “Everything is ours!” In the same month, he mocked Palestinian deaths as part of a stand-up routine: “We don’t need [to publish] their names — what do I care what the terrorist’s name is? As far as I’m concerned, it should be Mohammed 1, Mohammed 2, Mohammed 3, until you get to 100,000 and we’re done.”
There’s also Avi Nussbaum, a popular Israeli comedian whose recent stand-up routine included the line, “Today, five died in Gaza — wait a moment, that’s not the joke yet.” Or, take Roy Iddan, an Israeli TV writer who appeared in November 2024 on a well-known satire show on Kan 11, Israel public broadcaster, and joked, “Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza — unfortunately.”
And the list goes on and on. It’s not just bad comedy; it’s genocidal rhetoric that reaches hundreds of thousands of Israeli viewers. It’s evidence for the international courts to get a glimpse of what the public is entertained with.
No one is showing up at the homes of these comedians to arrest them. Quite the opposite; they embody the spirit of the times here. I thought about writing, “I wonder if the police have seen these clips.” But then I told myself, of course they have — and the officers are probably laughing their heads off.
A drop in the ocean of injustice
Early on in the war, I had naively hoped that Israeli comedians would use their voices and platforms to call for an end to the killing, and to push against the growing militarism and fascism spreading through Israeli society. Instead, they’ve become part of the Israeli war machine. They are performing on army bases, on tanks, and from the ruins of Gaza, and their fan base will only grow.
Nidal’s arrest is just a drop in an ocean of injustice and inequality. After Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and as it escalates its war on Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, it might seem like a minor incident. But I’m not sure Israelis fully grasp its implications: that this machine, the one that hunts down Palestinian creators and silences their voices, will eventually come for all of us who dare to dissent.
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Natalie Marcus, an Israeli screenwriter, director, and a dear friend, spoke with remarkable clarity and sensitivity about Nidal’s case. “There is no incitement in telling a bad joke,” she told me. “I didn’t think [Badarneh’s joke about the hostages] was good, funny, or appropriate, but it doesn’t endanger anyone. It’s very clear that, from the police’s perspective, the issue is not the joke itself but who told it. If a Jew had told the same joke, he wouldn’t have gone to jail — at most, he’d have trouble selling tickets to shows.”
Marcus was one of the creators of “The Jews Are Coming,” a satirical Israeli television series that parodied subjects ranging from Bible stories to Zionist history — including taboo religious issues. In February 2021, Israel’s attorney general approached the team behind the show and threatened to indict them over jokes they’d made about Abraham. Those threats never came to fruition, but Marcus certainly felt that the space for freedom of expression is shrinking, including for Jewish Israelis. “If we — the creators, comedians, satirists — don’t speak out against [Badarneh’s] arrest, we will reach a point where we are next in line.”
We Jewish citizens, who have some degree of power and privilege, bear an immense responsibility in these times. Those of us who have not been engulfed by the wave of hatred, blindness, and vengeance have a historical duty not to accept this crackdown and simply move on. We must write, protest, expose, and stand against these injustices however we can so they do not become the new normal.
And we comedians have a special obligation: to challenge Israeli hasbara, even though they are pretty challenged already. I mean, defending a system that arrests comedians? Good luck explaining that.