Palestinian Soap in Hot Water Over Plo Plot

As television dramas go, it was a modest affair. There was just one camera, a cast of 14 and all scenes were shot on the streets of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. The budget for the 10-episode series was about £120,000 - less than the cost of a single episode of a western soap opera.

But for the Palestinians, the television show Matabb marked a rare effort to produce a homegrown soap that would entertain as much as challenge its audience, tackling difficult issues of corruption and romance as well as the Israeli occupation.

Even that was too much for some. Before the first episode was screened, the state television channel, the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation (PBC), took the show off the air without explanation and has not broadcast it since.

Matabb's opening night should have been at the start of September to coincide with the beginning of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, which is also a time for much-discussed TV dramas across the Arab world.

Since the ban, it has been broadcast on a private television channel available only in parts of the West Bank and on the internet in Arabic with English subtitles, yet the show has won a modest but loyal audience.

"We're trying to introduce our society as a society, and not only as a people under struggle," said George Khleifi, who wrote and directed the show. "We always show the struggle, but this is also a society trying to build itself."

Matabb means speed bump and refers not only to the many annoying humps that fill the streets of Ramallah but also marks the ups and downs of the characters' lives. The drama is set in one of the many small non-government organizations in Ramallah. There is one European in the office, named Shprocket, who speaks Arabic but grasps little of what goes on around him - a gentle dig at western aid workers.

One of the young women in the office has begun a relationship with a local bad boy who drives a stolen Israeli BMW and whose aggressive flirting almost gets his girlfriend killed by her father and brother when they feel their honour has been slighted. The son of the office cleaner is arrested by the Israeli military during an incursion into the city, triggering a debate about whether to hire a Jewish Israeli lawyer to free him.

In the end, the apparently inept Israeli lawyer surprises her critics when she succeeds in bringing the teenager home unpunished, though he seems radicalized by the experience.

And the office director, a divorced Palestinian woman, slowly falls for a journalist who interviews her and agrees to cover up the fact that the center was secretly set up with money she took from her former husband, an arms dealer in Beirut.

Arabic television dramas often skirt the difficult issues, Khleifi said. "You think they're going into a problem and then they bypass it. One of the problems of this series is that it didn't take a bypass."

One official at the PBC told the producers he objected to a scene that he thought described the Palestine Liberation Organization as corrupt.

In fact, the scene shows the opposite: that the PLO investigated the corrupt arms dealer. Mohammad Dahoudi, another PBC director, said the show was under review and might yet be broadcast later in Ramadan. "It is being checked. If this is suitable to our traditions and society then very well, we will present it," he said.

Farid Majari, the show's executive producer, said it was still not clear precisely which scene had given offense. "They give a different explanation every time they are called," he said.

Majari said the show was foremost about entertainment. "It's a typical soap opera, it deals with burning social issues," he said. "It's an opportunity to start a discourse without us saying what is right and what is wrong."