JERUSALEM: Israel’s culture minister, who has clashed with the country’s artistic elite over accusations of censorship, has further fueled the dispute by calling some of them “petty bores” and “hypocrites.”

Less than two weeks after she sparked outrage over a threat to cut funding for a children’s theater, cultural figures also protested on Friday as she arrived at a theater awards ceremony in Tel Aviv.

Miri Regev’s threats and blunt dismissal of her political opponents have come to symbolize for some a rightward shift by Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The world of culture is an ungrateful world,” she said in a recorded interview with a women’s magazine which was broadcast Friday on radio.

“I say to myself, who am I working for? For a group of ungrateful people who think they know everything, some of them petty bores, hypocrites.”

In the printed interview with At magazine, published on Thursday, she says she reluctantly took on the job of culture minister after March elections.

“I knew why I didn’t want to take this post,” she said. “I knew I was going to work for vainglorious people.”

Not afraid of an argument, the former general and chief army censor said on June 9 she would “reconsider” state funding to the children’s theater in Tel Aviv’s mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Jaffa.

Her comments came after its Arab-Israeli director, Norman Issa, refused to participate in a play in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Regev has also ordered an examination of another theater’s books after it staged a play whose plot has close similarities to the life of Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian serving time for the kidnapping and murder of an Israeli soldier.