Last week Erdan accused the PA of violating the 1994 Oslo accords, claiming that a clause forbids Palestinian funding of activities on Israeli soil.
Palestine '48 has countered that it is simply buying in programing from Israeli TV companies, while the signal is broadcast not from Israel but from the West Bank city of Ramallah, via an Egyptian satellite. As a result, the station's officials argue, it does not need an Israeli licence.
"There is no legal basis to the order," Jafar Farah, a member of Palestine '48's advisory board, told MEE. "This is a purely political move by the right wing in a competition to show who can be more extreme in silencing the Arab minority."
So far the channel has managed to keep broadcasting, despite the order.
Palestinian leaders in Israel warn that under Regev's stewardship the culture ministry is mounting a much wider assault on Arab arts and culture.
A former Israeli army spokeswoman and military censor, Regev took on her new role in May. She soon announced to Israel's arts establishment: "If it is necessary to censor, I will censor."
Regev's combative stance comes in the wake of an official report showing that Palestinian communities in Israel receive only a tiny fraction of the state's budget for culture.
Under pressure from the courts, the ministry of culture was recently forced to produce data showing that only 3 percent of its budget went to the Palestinian minority in Israel.
According to official figures, four-fifths of Palestinian communities received no ministry funds at all. In 83 percent of the communities, there were no musical activities. Half had no festivals or children's shows, and a third lacked a library. Not one Palestinian community had a theatre or arts centre that met government standards.
Jafar Farah, who also heads the Mossawa advocacy centre for Palestinians in Israel which went to court to demand the spending figures, said Arab culture in Israel was being starved of funds.
"The government is doing its best to prevent its Arab citizens from getting a fair allocation of the budget," he said. "It wants to silence critics of its policies, especially about the occupation and human rights violations."
Cultural landscape reinventedIn recent weeks Regev has threatened the state funding of two prominent havens for Arab culture: Israel's only Arab national theatre, and a Jewish-Arab children's theatre.
The government recently pulled funding from Haifa's Al-Midan theatre, after complaints that it had produced a play in Arabic about the experiences of political prisoners in Israeli jails.
Actors perform in 'A Parallel Time' at the Al-Midan theatre in Haifa
(Image by (Oren Zi)) Details DMCA
Israel's liberal Haaretz daily called Regev's move "ugly," "Stalinist" and designed to "delegitimize" Al-Midan, adding: "The culture ministry is turning into the censorship ministry with dizzying speed."
Al-Midan's manager, Adnan Tarabash, has since resigned but, with the theatre in financial crisis, its officials are reported to be considering appealing to the European Union for help.
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