TEL AVIV, Israel — It's very hard to tell when Sayed Kashua is being serious.
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For a hard-drinking comedian, Kashua is still baby-faced at 37, but the bags under his eyes and the nervous flicks of his cigarette show signs of wear. He fidgets a lot and sometimes ends his sentences by mumbling. His strait-laced demeanor is a bit surprising -- after all, Kashua has made a career skewering every element of Israeli society, from the secular to the Orthodox Jews to his fellow Arab Israeli brethren, who must bear the tensions inherent in their Palestinian identity and Israeli passport.
A journalist and novelist, Kashua is also the visionary behind Avoda Aravit (Arab Labor), a sitcom on Israel's Channel 2 that has enjoyed three strong seasons and is in post-production on its fourth. The show, one of the five most successful comedies in Israeli television history, follows the stumbles of a hapless Arab Israeli journalist named Amjad as he contends with married life, fatherhood, and his intense need for the acceptance of Israeli society.
Amjad embodies an exaggerated version of Kashua's own troubled identity. In Israel, a nation plagued by xenophobia and casual racism, Kashua is the quintessential good Arab, the Arab who passes, who dares not to offend.
"I like to deal with the characters that I know best," says Kashua. Without even pausing for a beat, he adds, "I'm totally in love with myself."
We are sitting in his smoky studio office in the small Jewish village of Neve Ilan, just outside Jerusalem and a stone's throw from Abu Ghosh, the Arab Israeli town famous for its hummus. Kashua has missed the deadline on his weekly column for the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and he is agitated. He has only recently returned from a whirlwind three-week book tour in the United States and Canada for his latest novel, Second Person Singular, about two very different Arab Israelis who are both desperate to escape their outsider status.
Now he is knee-deep in editing work for Avoda Aravit's fourth season, and the expectations have never been higher.
"Sayed wouldn't accept my saying it, but I think that the series made a great change in Israel society," says Shai Capon, director of Avoda Aravit and one of Kashua's closest confidants and drinking buddies. "It's the first time that you see an Arab as a vulnerable human on Israeli television. Not as a terrorist and not as a victim. It took the first fear out of the title 'Arab,' and the audience, the Jews, could see … someone who just wants to be loved."
Aside from reality fare, Avoda Aravit is the only show on Israeli TV featuring Arab characters, and it's certainly the only one with a majority of its dialogue in Arabic. The Israeli media group Keshet admitted that it was taking a major gamble when it decided to run with the show in 2007, and in the show's early days, Keshet braced for backlash.
When the show first aired, there were grumblings in Israel's Arab media -- Kashua was accused of indecency, stereotyping, or even treason toward his people. But Israeli Jews, whom Keshet feared would be in an uproar, for the most part just laughed and tuned in.
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