After the October 7 attack by Hamas, and Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, there has been a crackdown on freedom of speech and political dissent that can only be described as McCarthyite. This is happening in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere, but it’s particularly pronounced in Israel, where I’ve lived since 2019.
Most recently, in early November, police were filmed attacking an Orthodox protester who put up a Palestinian flag in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, which has a large anti-Zionist community.
Earlier, on October 12, a silent vigil was held in Jerusalem calling for a hostage exchange. The crowd was brutalized by the police, with participants being attacked by officers even as they attempted to leave the area.
Just two days later, a rightwing mob stormed the house of Yisrael Frey, a leftwing Israeli journalist. The attack was in response to tweets by Frey in which he condemned Israel for killing Gazan civilians. Frey, who has been arrested for his social media posts in the past, has now gone into hiding and expressed fear for his life.
On October 18, activists from the joint Israeli-Palestinian NGO Standing Together were detained for hanging posters that featured Arabic writing. Police confiscated both their posters—which displayed the slogan “we will get through this together” in both Hebrew and Arabic—and T-shirts printed with peace slogans. In another case involving an Israeli-Palestinian cooperation group, an Arab-Jewish conference in Haifa was canceled after the Israeli police told the venue owner there would be “consequences.”
One of the most legally concerning cases occurred when Shlomo Karhi, Israel’s communication minister, expressed an interest in shutting down the Israeli operations of the Qatar-based news organization Al Jazeera. Even in light of Israel’s disregard for freedom of expression, shutting down a major newspaper would be an escalation.
On October 25, an activist was arrested for hanging a banner from the balcony of their Jerusalem apartment that read: “There is no holiness in an occupied city.”
Even members of Knesset (Israel’s house of representatives) have not been spared. Ofer Cassif—the lone Jewish Knesset member from the predominantly Palestinian Hadash party—was banned from the body for forty-five days. This suspension comes after he criticized the bombardment of Gaza, and was accused of “anti-Israel statements after the war in Gaza broke out.” Cassif called his suspension “another nail in the coffin of freedom of political expression.”
There are dozens of other similar incidents, and attempting to list them all would be nearly impossible. Israel, of course, has never fully afforded its citizens or Palestinian subjects the right to speak freely. The recent attacks are not a new phenomena, but an escalation of a longstanding pattern. Prior to October 7, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel reported on police harassing protesters for waving Palestinian flags, passengers being hassled at train stations for political clothing, and the suppression of free speech at Israeli universities.
Other Israeli NGOs have also criticized the government’s poor track record in protecting freedom of expression. As Yesh Din, an Israeli legal group that focuses on human rights abuses in the West Bank, points out on their website: “While Article 19 [of the Israeli Declaration of Independence] states that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. . .,’ Israel has employed brutal censorship for years towards the occupied people. The IDF responds harshly to protests across the West Bank, resulting in many of Yesh Din’s complaints of unwarranted injuries, and it still detains people from time to time for ‘holding inciting material.’ ”
Similarly, B’tselem, a prominent organization that documents Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, has condemned Israeli policy in the West Bank with regard to freedom of speech. The group, for example, has highlighted the problems with Military Order Number 101—a provision that requires gatherings of over ten people in the Occupied Territories to request a permit from the “commander of military forces in the region” if the event is “construed as political.” Such a sweeping definition greatly limits freedom of speech, in all its aspects. The penalty for breaching the Order is harsh—ten years imprisonment and/or a heavy fine.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has documented a long list of incidents of the Israeli government or other public bodies suppressing Palestinian free speech. These range from universities suppressing student groups to police raiding political party branch offices. Perhaps most importantly, in June 2022, Adalah reported on the first legal ruling that relied upon Israel’s Nation-State Law.
Israel’s suppression of liberty goes back to the earliest days of the state. Though granted citizenship, Palestinians living within Israel were subjected to military law until 1966. During that time, Palestinian citizens of Israel suffered many of the abuses that are now considered unique to the West Bank. In 1983, Human Rights Watch published a report detailing Israeli suppression of publications expressing Palestinian nationalism.
If freedom of speech or any other civil liberties are to be obtained in Israel, the struggle must start from the realization that these liberties never existed there in the first place. Escalations of injustice must be vocally condemned, but they must also acknowledge the full historical reality. Despite the West’s tendency to portray Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the country’s track record with freedom of expression proves otherwise.