A couple of nights ago, the brilliant actor/comedian Tal Friedman appeared for an interview on London and Kirschenbaum, a nightly television current affairs show, to promote his latest film - The Schwartz Dynasty (Shoshelet Schwartz). Friedman plays a religious West Bank settler in the film, and during the interview he described how he prepared for the role, by dressing in the common "uniform" of a settler - a knitted skullcap, sandals, ritual fringes hanging out of an untucked shirt, and a pistol in his belt. Thus attired, he wandered the streets of largely secular, middle-of-the-road towns in central Israel.

He said that he was amazed at the negative responses. On one occasion, in Rishon LeZion, a middle class town about 20 minutes' drive from Tel Aviv, he was cursed by a shopkeeper and told he was destroying the country. Friedman said that he had several similar experiences, and that he started to feel like a despised minority in his own country - simply because of the way he was dressed.

So now, he said in his impish and inimitable style, whenever I see someone dressed in orange,* I smile at him. Who knows? He might be a nice person.



*The colour adopted by the anti-disengagement movement