RAMALLAH // Did the writing touch a raw nerve, sending TV executives scrambling to prevent broadcast at the last moment? Or did its programming simply stir competition within a corporation rife with internal rivalries? Perhaps it was all a big misunderstanding.
Whatever the reason the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) at the last moment decided to pull the plug on a Palestinian soap opera, to have been shown over Ramadan. It certainly set tongues wagging and provided a storyline well worth its own episode, if not a whole series. The makers of Matabb ("speed bump", in English) were not impressed, nor were their European backers - the German cultural centre, the Goethe Institute and the European Commission.
"The Goethe Institute regrets the cancellation of the PBC broadcast," read a statement released on Sept 8, so terse that the sound of gnashing teeth could almost be detected. "The abrupt cancellation by the PBC of the serial has given the Palestinian public and the international media reason to suspect a lack of transparency. We hope that the PBC will review its decision and broadcast the serial at a later date."
Yahia Barakat, director of programming at the PBC and the person who had originally agreed to show Matabb, said it was all a misunderstanding. "The problem was in the programming. In Ramadan, most programmes are 30 parts. This programme is only 10. From the beginning, I told the Goethe Institute that we would do our best, no more." Mr Barakat said there was still a chance PBC would broadcast Matabb over the last 10 days of Ramadan. No decision has yet been made and Farid Majari, the executive producer of the series and director of the Goethe Institute, said he was not hopeful.
"We keep hearing different things from [the PBC], but we never received an official explanation." Mr Majari said he would not speculate about the reasons why Matabb was pulled from the schedule, but others suspect the programme's focus on contemporary social and political issues could have made broadcasters uneasy. "It seems multiple elements conspired to stop the broadcast," said George Khleifi, Matabb's director. Prominent among these, he said, was the soap's content.
"There were some elements who did not like certain scenes and plot lines in the soap [at a premiere screening at a Ramallah cinema], because they felt it did not show Palestinians in a good light," Mr Khleifi said. This, he said, had caused someone to write a letter of complaint that ended up with the PBC and "someone higher" than the director of programming. Some of the scenes that had caused consternation, said Mr Khleifi, included one in which three young men threw Molotov cocktails at an internationally sponsored theatre project, causing protests that the series portrays Palestinians as always using violence to resolve their problems.
Another scene, a dream sequence that has a mother serving tea to Israeli soldiers who had abused her son, was misunderstood to mean that she (and the series' creators) were promoting a humiliating normalisation with the Israeli occupation. Furthermore, the focus on the love life of one of the series' central characters, the single female head of a Ramallah-based NGO, could have been provocative to more traditional elements in society, said Mr Khleifi, while a plot strand about corruption was deemed unflattering to the Palestinian Authority.
Mr Khleifi accepted that this was speculation, but said he could draw no other conclusion since no official explanation had been offered. "Once the series was stopped, these are the rumours we heard. You start with one word and end with 10," he said. However, he added, the series did attempt to tackle contemporary life in a way that perhaps gave executives at PBC "cold feet". "There are three taboos in the Arab world: politics, sex and religion. We dealt with the first two in a way people are maybe not used to ? They [PBC] got cold feet because some people criticised the series."
Mr Barakat denied that content had anything to do with the cancellation and said the series had been viewed in full by the PBC and approved by committee. Some media analysts, however, suggested the cancellation reflected rival interests within the PBC, an institution that has been roundly criticised in the past for a dearth of professionalism, a lack of relevance and, in some cases, endemic corruption. In 2001, Hisham Mekki, a former director general of the PBC, was killed in Gaza City amid a cloud of corruption allegations. Those allegations - a suspected US$20 million (Dh74m) embezzlement case - are one of 50 open cases of corruption the PA's prosecutor general's office is investigating.
"The PBC is the embodiment of all the problems in Palestinian society: over-militarisation, over-politicisation, over-factionalisation," said Daoud Kuttab, a former head of Al Quds University's Educational TV, and now director of the Community Media Network NGO, which operates in both the West Bank and Jordan. "It operates within the traditional Arab mentality of how to run a state except worse: Arab state television has become better. The PBC took everything bad from those stations, with the direct government control, the protocol news and the corruption. If you want to do an anthropological study of Palestinian society since Oslo, you could not find a better case study than PBC."
Mr Kuttab suspects that internal rivalries within the PBC saw Matabb used as a tool by one faction against another within the corporation, with the political and social issues raised by the soap used more as excuses than causes for the series' cancelled broadcast. "In this particular problem it is incompetence and office politics. As with almost all internal problems, if you don't have a powerful backer, you can get used. This soap opera was produced by artists. Who cares about artists? If it had been produced by someone close to Fatah, no one would have dared to raise their voice."
The cancellation of Matabb has caused a slew of bad publicity in European media, and Mr Kuttab said it was "embarrassing how bad it made the PBC look". Perhaps that is why the corporation is still considering airing the soap towards the end of Ramadan. In this case, the controversy should serve the soap well, as both Mr Kuttab and Mr Khleifi agreed. "If you want to ensure the popularity of something," said Mr Khleifi, "all you have to do is ban it."
okarmi@thenational.ae