Abstract
As fears of a regional escalation in the Middle East rise,
“We are not speaking only of al-Jazeera. We will weigh steps against any channel that constitutes an immediate threat to state security,” a Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) official who identified himself only as Eitay told the Knesset’s National Security Commitee last month during a hearing I attended extending the Al Jazeera ban.
It was first banned in May on the grounds the station, which Israel claims backs Hamas but also subverts Israeli domination of the flow of war information, was substantively harming state security and inciting violence against Israelis. The station denies this.
Eitay’s declaration was just one example of how the Israeli security apparatus - including the Shin Bet and the police under the control of far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir - is flexing its muscles and expanding its clout while the public and media are preoccupied with the seemingly unwinnable war against Hamas in Gaza.
At the Knesset, the committee room was eventually partially cleared so that Eitay could present classified material, a practice typical of the secretive process by which the ban on Al Jazeera, with its significant ramifications, has coasted through the power structure.
Spy agency Mossad, for its part, was hardly a restraining actor. “Mossad also supports the necessity of limiting foreign channels, of course with each case being examined on its merits,” its official said during the open part of the hearing. A military censor chimed in with his approval, too.
Zvika Fogel, a retired brigadier general from Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, who last year praised the torching by extremist settlers of a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank, chaired the meeting with enthusiasm.
“From what [information] I am exposed to, foreign journalists are harming the security of the state,” he said, suggesting that Israel’s enemies were getting information from foreign journalists enabling them to hit targets in northern Israel from Lebanon. He offered no proof, nor was he asked to do so.
Al Jazeera was an easy first target among the media because it is widely viewed in Israel as an enemy mouthpiece. But the precedent has been set and, as the hearings demonstrate, it will now be more straightforward to close other outlets. The security agency recommendations enabling the government to close foreign outlets are supposed to be subject to judicial review - but only after they have already been shuttered.
Given a tradition in which judges seldom challenge the Shin Bet, and the fact that the recommendations are based at least partly on secret evidence which the appellant cannot even access, Israel lacks adequate safeguards to protect foreign media outlets.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel is mounting a last-ditch effort to strike down the original foreign outlets closure law at the supreme court. But it is a long shot after earlier judicial rounds failed to dent the ever-expanding ideology of state security.
Protesters hold a banner in support of press freedom in Israel outside the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern in London. UK billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Entertainment company owns more than 50% of Channel 13
CREDIT: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy
“This is a slippery slope. Now it’s Al Jazeera, then it could be another foreign station, maybe Sky News in Arabic or CNN, and then Channel 12,” Oren Persico, a staffer at the Seventh Eye media watchdog, said. Channel 12 is Israel’s most popular outlet, featuring both critics and supporters of the coalition.
Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem surrounded by Israelis, many of them ultra-nationalists, who are taking part in the Jerusalem Day flag march through the Muslim Quarter in what is considered an act of provocation to Palestinians
CREDIT: Eyal Warshavsky/Alamy
The pressure in Israel, a country which was once considered a relatively bright spot in the repressive Middle Eastern media environment, is not just being exercised by security figures. Liberal Israeli journalists shifted into survival mode last month after a major television outlet, Channel 13, appointed as their new news editor Yulia Shamalov-Berkovich, a former legislator, perceived as a supporter of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While many journalists from the channel and their supporters have poor credentials as champions of free expression because of their glaring failure to report the massive suffering and death among civilians in Gaza during the war, the station nevertheless still broadcasts investigations into government misconduct and is generally considered independent.
After Shamalov-Berkovich’s appointment changes came quickly. War Zone, a show fronted by investigative journalist Raviv Drucker with a history of challenging Netanyahu, was canned.
This decision intensified journalists’ fears of Channel 13, owned by UK billionaire Len Blavatnik, becoming simply a pro-Netanyahu outlet, especially as Drucker had recently carried out a damning probe into alleged corruption in the transport ministry.
It was all in line with what Israel Journalist Association media freedom officer Anat Saragusti terms a “master plan” for destroying independent media.
Channel 13 employees reacted by calling an emergency protest in July, which was also attended by journalists from other outlets and they mounted a legal challenge to Shamalov-Berkovich’s appointment. The following month the management agreed to an out-of-court agreement to reverse it.
But Saragusti warned that journalists must remain vigilant. Other components of the government’s media plans,
Saragusti says, include following up on communications minister Shlomo Karhi’s threats to cripple the Kan public broadcasting corporation, an Israeli version of the BBC with diverse voices, and to strengthen Channel 14, an unabashedly pro-Netanyahu channel that targets coalition critics.
She said the coalition government’s approach to the media was motivated by the same anti-democratic goals as its efforts to weaken the judiciary, a measure that kicked off mass protests last year.
“They want to eliminate gatekeepers, whether in the judiciary or in a free media, whose job is to criticise the government and shed light in dark places,” she said. “The less the public knows, the more disciplined it will be, and the less it will demonstrate and rise up when it is harmed.”
The security rationale, which resonates in a country where the security establishment has always played a huge role - including by imposing what amounts to a military dictatorship on Palestinians - is being invoked in other areas too.
After the 7 October Hamas incursion into Israel, the massacre of more than 1000 Israelis, the taking of hostages, and the war in which Israeli soldiers have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, freedom of expression is being limited on social media, demonstrations are being suppressed and academic freedom curtailed. The coalition is projecting the message that survival is at stake and there needs to be heightened vigilance against threats.
“7 October just strengthened our belief that all our enemies are coming to destroy us,” Likud legislator Eliyahu Revivo told me in May.
He was explaining why he was advancing an amendment to a 2016 anti-terrorism law that would broaden the definition of punishable incitement. The old version of the law has already been widely used against Palestinian citizens of Israel who write social media posts with messages ranging from support for the Hamas attacks to expressions of sympathy for Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
“This amendment will give more flexibility to the police to arrest and indict,” says Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, a legal advocacy group for Israel’s Arab minority.
He said a chilling effect has spread, and police were violating the rights of Arabs and a small number of far-left Jews to protest.
“This war is totally different from the other wars because the police themselves are really working against the law,” he said. “They arrest people for no reason and prohibit protests by force even when the protest doesn’t require a licence.”
The chill is also pronounced in academia, according to Jabareen. He said: “I get phone calls from professors wondering whether their syllabus will be a problem or not.” On 11 July the Knesset approved on preliminary reading a bill that would require university heads to fire, without severance pay, instructors who are deemed to support terrorism. In the event of non-compliance, the institution’s budget could be cut.
Ksenia Svetlova, a political analyst who was a journalist and a left-wing opposition member of the Knesset, is deeply troubled. She believes the war is accelerating a process by which the coalition is transforming Israel not into an illiberal democracy, as feared last year, but into an authoritarian state like Russia.