Ratuv, Hebrew for "wet," specializes in producing skinflicks with topical
political themes, typically featuring scenes involving female soldiers, Mossad
agents and members of the military.
After installing software that could detect where users are logging on,
managers of the site found they were receiving thousands of hits a week from
folks in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though the Israeli net domain
.il is blocked from some of these countries.
"We were amazed to find a huge amount of our users from these countries," says
Nir Shahar, who manages the site. "We cannot accept money from many of these
countries, so they can't download the films. They can only look at the
pictures."
To make up for the lack of local download access in those countries, Shahar
decided to translate the entire site into Arabic, with detailed descriptions of
each scene and plenty more pics. Traffic went up tenfold, with the site
receiving up to 100,000 hits a week from Arab auds.
The most popular movie on the site is "Code Name: Deep Investigation," an
X-rated parody of the arrest of dissident Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai
Vanunu, who spilled the beans on Israel's secret nuclear weapons program in the
1980s. He was eventually caught by Mossad agents, who sent a beautiful female
agent to trap him.
"Arab people usually see female Israeli soldiers in a bad situation, so there's
a lot of curiosity to see what Israeli girls look like without any uniforms,"
says Shahar. "We don't make regular porn films. Our films parody the situation
in Israel, so we look at issues like the elections here and Mossad. There is a
lot of relevance to the Arab-Israeli situation."
Given that Israeli law precludes Shahar from accepting credit card payment from
some Arab countries, he plans to set up a site registered in either Europe or
the U.S.
"We are also interested in making films with Arabs and Israelis in them,"
Shahar says. "It's something we can do to speak about the connection between
the two people, but its not going to be easy."
