Censorship by Israel
Updated 2024-03-25
2024-03-19 Meet the Israeli “traitors” standing against the war in Gaza While opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza is voiced around the world, in Israel support for the war is still strong, but we speak to one of only two people imprisoned for refusing to serve in the army. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told his fellow politicians they need to stand united against the United States, as it cautions against an offensive in Rafah. Mr Netanyahu has sent a delegation to the US to discuss Israel’s planned military operation in Gaza’s southern city, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHAE9C0qJB8
2023-11-24 The hostages’ families should have been jailed to shut them up, says former US citizen who was an Israeli spy. Jonathan Pollard, a former US intelligence analyst imprisoned for spying for Israel, has called for hostages’ families to be silenced and arrested. Pollard told Israeli media that the families of Israeli hostages should have been jailed to shut them up. He also said posters of the captives should never have been hung up. “When Israel declared war, the first thing that the government should have done was declare a state of national emergency and told all the hostages: ‘You will keep your mouth shut or we will shut them for you,'” Pollard said. He said the Israeli government should have prevented the hostages’ families from “interfering” with their management of this war. He implied that the hostages’ families were being “used by the international community” or “by our own leftists” as a weapon against the Israeli government. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-hostages-families-should-have-been-jailed-to-shut-them-up-says-former-us-citizen-who-was-an-israeli-spy/ar-AA1ktxTD
2023-11-14 ‘The fear is everywhere’: Israel’s fascist internal crackdown | The Marc Steiner Show Al Aqsa Flood and its consequences are shaking Israeli society from within. While Netanyahu’s government continues a brutal campaign of collective punishment against Gaza, some Israelis are questioning why their government is more committed to massacring Palestinians than effectively securing the swift release of hostages. As dissent spreads, the government is turning to fascist methods to repress those who speak out, effectively eliminating freedom of speech and arresting those who defy them. Israeli photojournalist Oren Ziv joins The Marc Steiner Show for a special discussion co-hosted with Israeli filmmaker Lia Tarachansky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10D7WBdNS0
2023-11-11 From the River to the Sea: There is one Israeli dictatorship A main achievement of Israeli Apartheid over the years was the division of the Palestinian people. While Jews (and other colonialist settlers of all creeds) may roam freely from the river to the sea and enjoy the whole spectrum of privileges, from free speech to the “right” to expropriate Palestinian land, the native Arab Palestinians are confined to enclaves and divided by different systems of discrimination and oppression, different leaderships and different (illusory) political perspectives.
I already reported here in detail about the repression of the first attempts to protest against Israel’s massacres in Gaza and to demand an end to the bloody war. In this second post about Israel’s full-scale dictatorship, I will describe how repression is deepening as the new rules of the game become clear.
On the morning of October 29, the Haifa police did not wait for another demonstration and invaded my house in a big show of force. They confiscated Palestinian flags, posters, and banners from old demonstrations. They arrested me for the night. The next day, they requested to extend my detention on the grounds that by having flags and banners at home, I performed the crime of “behavior that might disturb public order” (this was the article of the law they used). They explained that I might take part in some future demonstrations. Due to my poor health, I was detained mostly in a hospital, where I was handcuffed to a bed and guarded by two armed policemen. The police also sent to the Israeli press some photos of the mess they made in my house and a photo of me in custody, boasting that they detained “a Hamas supporter.” Read full article for more examples of repression of dissent! https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/from-the-river-to-the-sea-there-is-one-israeli-dictatorship/
2023-11-09 Israel Accused of ‘Thought Policing’ as Legislation Criminalizes Viewing Pro-Palestinian Media Arab citizens of Israel “are now criminalized for simply sitting in their homes following the news on Gaza,” lamented one professor. Human rights and free speech advocates on Thursday decried Israeli lawmakers’ passage of legislation criminalizing the viewing of social and other media supportive of the Palestinian resistance struggle.
Knesset lawmakers voted 13-4 to amend Article 24 of Israel’s Counterterrorism Law—which prohibits “demonstrating identification with a terrorist organization and incitement to terrorism”—to include a temporary two-year ban on “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization under circumstances that indicate identification with the terrorist organization.”
The amendment identifies Hamas and Islamic State as terrorist groups and allows the Ministry of Justice to add more organizations to the list. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-counterterrorism-law
2023-11-09 ‘Thought police’: Israel passes law criminalizing ‘consumption of terrorist materials’ Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed what rights groups are calling one of the “most intrusive and draconian legislative measures” ever passed in Israel’s history. On Wednesday, November 8, Israeli lawmakers passed an amendment to the country’s Counter-Terrorism Law by a 13-4 majority, criminalizing the “consumption of terrorist materials,” carrying a maximum of up to one year in prison. Outlined in the new law is an offense described as the “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization under circumstances that indicate identification with the terrorist organization.” https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/thought-police-israel-passes-law-criminalizing-consumption-of-terrorist-materials/
2023-11-05 Israel’s Stranglehold on Media Coverage in Gaza Must End Unlike previous wars it has waged on Gaza, Israel has barred all outside journalists from reporting on the ground. This reduces mainstream coverage of the war’s human cost to a roster of dead and injured, a series of digits reported in the aggregate—and now always with the compulsory footnote, “according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.” While western media organizations insist that this caveat is necessary, their argument—that reporters outside Gaza cannot independently verify the horrifying stories emerging from there—has rarely been followed by an equally public insistence that journalists be allowed into Gaza to report for themselves.
On October 29, the French outlet Le Monde called for open access to Gaza for the press, but no such petition, to my knowledge, has been made public by other mainstream outlets. This acquiescence is especially dangerous because it gives Israel carte blanche to undermine the media’s crucial work in other ways, including by targeting Palestinian camera operators, producers, and reporters, who are the public’s only eyes and ears on the ground.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has already documented at least 36 cases of journalists killed during this war. CPJ also notes that many local journalists, like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians in Gaza, have had to relocate, forcing them to “abandon reporting equipment, documents, and protective gear” as they fled Israeli bombardment. With fewer of these journalists able to report on the aftermath of Israel’s bombing campaign, evidence of the massive civilian death toll will be lost in the rubble, undermining any future inquiries into the conduct of this war.
Resisting Israel’s stranglehold on media coverage took on new urgency on October 27, when Gaza’s access to the Internet and both its telephone networks was severed. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israel-media-blackout-gaza
2023-10-27 Israeli targets journalists, kills their families as Big Tech & Biden admin silence Palestinians With Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killing at least twenty Palestinian journalists—and the Biden administration working to muzzle others—Big Tech is quietly coordinating with Tel Aviv to muzzle Palestinian media outfits.
Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian journalists on October 25 in one of the deadliest days for local reporters since the military’s bombing campaign began nearly three weeks before. As the hours passed, footage appeared showing the moment Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Farra learned that his wife and children were all killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s Khan Younes neighborhood. Similarly heart-rending scenes would play out more than once over the course of the day. Elsewhere in the besieged coastal enclave, an Israeli airstrike killed the wife, son, daughter and infant grandson of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh.
Suspicions that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Dahdouh’s family were quickly bolstered by comments from News 13 journalist Zvi Yehezkeli. “Generally we know the target,” Yehezkeli told audiences within hours of the strike, adding, “for example, today there was a target: the family of an Al Jazeera reporter.”
If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Dahdouh’s outlet found itself in Israeli crosshairs. In 2021, the Israeli military leveled the Gaza tower that housed the officers of both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The following year, Israeli forces assassinated renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, a veteran Jerusalem-based correspondent for Al Jazeera, in a shooting that drew international condemnation but was largely ignored by the US government, which echoes the Israeli government’s position that her killing was “unintentional.” Under Blinken, the State Department has distanced itself from its initial expressions of outrage and no longer calls for either an independent investigation or criminal charges for the perpetrators.
Big Tech censorship has proven indispensable to Israel’s propaganda war. In the aftermath of October 7, multiple social media platforms have suspended or deactivated profiles belonging to numerous prominent journalists, human rights advocates, and Palestinian activists. The crackdown follows years of complaints alleging double standards when it comes to anti-Zionist content on social media.
Despite Meta’s denial, it is worth recalling the company’s record of complying with Israeli government censorship requests. Following the approval of a so-called “Facebook Bill” aimed at clamping down on digital “incitement” in 2016, fanatical former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bragged that Facebook, Twitter and Google were complying with 70 percent of their takedown orders. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israeli-assassinates-journalists-big-tech-biden-palestinians/
2023-10-19 Israeli Attacks on Journalists Stifle Reporting on Gaza Horrors The Israeli communications minister’s attempt to shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Jerusalem—on the grounds that the Qatari news outlet is biased in favor of Hamas and is actively endangering Israeli troops (Reuters, 10/15/23)—should inspire some déjà vu. In the last war in Gaza, an Israeli air strike destroyed a Gaza building housing both Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices (AP, 5/15/21). And just months ago, Al Jazeera (5/18/23) reported that “the family of Shireen Abu Akleh,” a Palestinian-American AJ journalist killed by Israeli fire while on assignment, “has rebuked Israel for saying it is ‘sorry’ for the Al Jazeera reporter’s death without providing accountability or even acknowledging that its forces killed her.”
But the ability of Al Jazeera and other Arab reporters to cover the assault on Gaza is jeopardized by the alarming number of newspeople Israel has killed since the crisis began. The Committee to Protect Journalists (10/18/23) has counted 13 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since the crisis began, with two more missing or detained. Three Israeli journalists were also killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack, with another taken prisoner. https://fair.org/home/israeli-attacks-on-journalists-stifle-reporting-on-gaza-horrors/
2023-10-19 Knesset Suspends Lawmaker Ofer Cassif for Criticizing Israel’s War on Gaza An Israeli parliament ethics committee has suspended Knesset member Ofer Cassif for 45 days after Cassif criticized Israel’s assault on Gaza. His suspension comes as Israeli authorities have arrested more than 100 Israeli citizens over social media posts supporting Palestinians in Gaza. At least 70 Israeli university students face suspension or other disciplinary action for posting pro-Palestinian sentiments online. Click here to see our interview with Ofer Cassif. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/19/headlines/gaza_death_toll_nears_3_800_as_israels_siege_and_bombardment_enters_13th_day
2023-10-18 Reports: Israel to Ban Al Jazeera for Reporting on Gaza War Israel is reportedly set to ban Al Jazeera’s operations in the country over its coverage of the war. Al Jazeera is one of the few global media networks that has reporters on the ground in Gaza. In related news, the Committee to Protect Journalists said at least 17 media workers have been killed since the start of the war. Thirteen of them were Palestinian, three Israeli and one Lebanese https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18/headlines/biden_sides_with_israel_after_airstrikes_level_gazan_hospital_killing_hundreds_of_palestinians
2023-10-16 At Least 12 Reporters Killed Covering Israel-Gaza War Amid Reports of Harassment and Attacks The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 12 media workers have been killed since the war started. Elsewhere, journalists from BBC Arabic say they were pulled from their vehicle by Israeli police in Tel Aviv and held at gunpoint. And on Sunday night, a right-wing mob attacked the home of Israeli left-wing and ultra-Orthodox journalist Israel Frey. The mob accused him of being a “traitor” for speaking out against the killing of Palestinian civilians. Meanwhile, Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is pushing emergency measures that would allow police to arrest citizens and journalists whose content “harms national morale.” https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/16/headlines/protests_across_the_us_call_for_israel_to_end_its_siege_and_genocide_in_gaza
2023-10-11 Journalists Hold Funeral Procession for Their Colleagues Killed in Attacks on Gaza Among the dead in Gaza are at least seven journalists. On Tuesday, media workers held a funeral procession for two of the slain reporters. Blue “press” helmets were placed on their bodies. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/11/headlines/death_toll_in_israel_and_gaza_tops_2_200_as_gazans_face_total_energy_blackout_and_no_safe_refuge
2023-01-25 EU Says It’s Anti-Semitic to Call Israel an Apartheid State It is anti-Semitic to say Israel perpetrates the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people, according to the European Union. That would mean that major rights groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israel’s B’Tselem – which is funded by the EU – are guilty of anti-Jewish bigotry, according to Brussels.
The lawmakers stated that Amnesty’s report last February “alleges that apartheid was inherent in the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and has been built on and maintained by successive Israeli governments.” The lawmakers asked if EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also views Israel as an “apartheid state.”
The pro-Israel lawmakers should be fully satisfied with Borrell’s written response issued on 20 January. “The Commission considers that it is not appropriate to use the term apartheid in connection with the State of Israel,” Borrell wrote. Borrell affirmed the EU’s reliance on the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and emphasized: “Claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor is amongst the illustrative examples included under the IHRA definition.” The highly politicized IHRA definition, heavily promoted by Israel and its lobby, has faced broad opposition due to concerns that it will be used in precisely the manner Borrell is now deploying it: to falsely label legitimate criticism of Israel and its crimes as anti-Jewish bigotry.
Borrell provided no factual basis for dismissing the meticulous research from multiple human rights groups showing how Israel perpetrates apartheid, a serious crime against humanity covered by the Rome Statute , the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. https://www.blackagendareport.com/eu-says-its-anti-semitic-call-israel-apartheid-state
2022-05-15 The Israeli Execution of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera reporter with more than two decades of experience covering armed conflicts, knew the protocol. She and other reporters remained last Wednesday in the open, clearly visible to Israeli snipers about 650 feet away in a building. Her flak jacket and helmet were emblazoned with the word “PRESS.”
There were three shots fired in her direction. The second bullet hit the Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samoudi in the back. The third shot, al-Samoudi remembered, hit Abu Akleh in the face below the rim of her helmet. https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-israeli-execution-of-al-jazeera
2022-05-12 Shireen Abu Akleh was executed to send a message to Palestinians The execution of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli soldier in the Palestinian city of Jenin, along with Israel‘s immediate efforts to muddy the waters about who was responsible and the feeble expressions of concern from western capitals, brought memories flooding back from 20 years of reporting from the region. Abu Akleh reported on far too many killings of Palestinians not to have known the risks she faced as a journalist every time she donned a flak jacket. It was a kind of nerve I did not share. According to a recent report by Reporters Without Borders, at least 144 Palestinian journalists have been wounded by Israeli forces in the occupied territories since 2018. Three, including Abu Akleh, have been killed in the same period. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/shireen-abu-akleh-was-executed-to
.
Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
.
progressiveissuesblog 