High Court Justices President Esther Hayut, Vice President Hanan Meltzer and Judge Yael Vilner, rejected today the petition of the Al Midan Theater against the negation of its budget in 2016 and 2017.
The petition was rejected after the judges ruled that the theater did not meet the criteria for eligibility for support, and that the compromise agreement signed between the theater and the Culture Ministry did not give the theater the right to receive budgetary support.
The theater was at the center of a public storm due to a play that was based on the life story of the terrorist Walid Daka, who murdered the soldier Moshe Tamam.
However, the denial of the budget was based on the theater's failure to meet the criterion of the amount of activity at the theater, and as Justice Meltzer noted in the judgment, "the petitioner's performance data for 2016 were very low, even in relation to the threshold conditions for "small theaters" listed in the support texts. The conclusion that emerged from the data was that the petitioner did not meet the threshold conditions for receiving support in 2016.
The judges also determined that the theater did not prove that the amount of activity in it in 2016 and 2017 was low due to the delay in transferring theater funding to 2015, as the theater's management claimed in the petition.
President Hayut added that the theater refrained from presenting the full picture to the support committee in order to prove the violation by the Ministry of Culture, as it had claimed, and therefore, despite accepting some of his claims, the petition should be rejected.