3 Oct 2024 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Last week, Israeli soldiers raided the Al Jazeera office in Ramallah, within the occupied West Bank and ordered the network’s bureau to shut for 45 days.
This is not the first time a media shutdown has happened. In early May, the Israeli army stormed the Al Jazeera bureau in East Jerusalem and closed it after confiscating its equipment, claiming that the network was a threat to Israel’s national security.
An additional two claims were made by Israel this time, which were that the network “incites terror” and “supports terrorist activities”.
Israel has long exercised suppression against the freedom of press and media in the occupied Palestinian territories. Many Palestinian journalists have been killed, attacked, threatened and arrested.
Israel has made Palestinian journalists’ jobs in the occupied territories almost impossible. It’s a constant life threatening situation – on many occasions, Israel has deliberately targeted Al Jazeera journalists and their families.
The sniping of Palestinian-US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022; the targeting of many other colleagues’ families in Gaza, including my own family; the deliberate killing of Al Jazeera journalists in direct attacks; these all resemble Israeli crimes against press freedom and attempts to silence journalists.
Regardless of the feeling that your press gear labels you as a direct target to the Israeli army, the pain and worry of being a danger to your loved ones is indescribable.
Since October 2023, Israel’s suppression of the press has reached foreign journalists too, as it has prevented all international journalists from exercising their right to cover one of the most brutal wars in recent history.
I believe this is an attempt to avoid exposure of crimes committed against the Palestinians, and the crisis they face.
Al Jazeera as a network has long been a prominent voice in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and its presence in the region has always been crucial for a global audience.
The network’s coverage depends on a large number of journalists, bringing together all aspects of the story at once.
Over the years, Al Jazeera has built a reputation for its commitment to telling the story from both sides of the divide. Many people across the world turn their sights to Al Jazeera channels for the latest developments of breaking news stories.
Its coverage isn’t just a reflection of events on the ground – it is an avenue for audiences, globally, to understand the complexities of these events and engage with every story.
The closure of its offices sends a chilling message to the media landscape as a whole.
For years, Al Jazeera has been criticised by Israeli officials for what they allege is biased reporting. Yet, such accusations overlook the network’s fundamental journalistic principle: to show the full spectrum of the story.
I believe that Al Jazeera’s coverage is notably impartial. I say this because it brings to light the narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians, ensuring that no side goes unheard.
Its reporters don’t shy away from broadcasting the pain and suffering endured by civilians on either side of the conflict. Whether it’s an Israeli family mourning after a rocket attack, or Palestinians in Gaza grappling with the aftermath of airstrikes, or settler violence and illegal confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, Al Jazeera’s cameras capture both human realities.
All this is clear in its coverage since the beginning of the Gaza war. On 7 October 2023, my reporting as a Gaza correspondent was on the Palestinian attacks on Israeli towns with complete objectivity. Other stories for my colleagues in Israel highlighted the aftermath of these attacks and the impact on Israeli families.
This objectivity is rare and invaluable in a conflict where misinformation, propaganda, and one-sided narratives often dominate. Where many news outlets have taken up clear ideological stances, Al Jazeera has remained steadfast in its commitment to neutrality. It’s not just about giving airtime to both sides – it’s about letting the facts speak for themselves.
And this, in my opinion, is the true objective of journalism in the first place. Our job as journalists is to inform the public based on facts and evidence, not political agendas.
But to suggest that this impartiality is a threat worthy of office closures is to misconstrue the role of journalism in a so-called “democratic society”. The very essence of free press is to inform the public, to provide transparency, and to hold those in power accountable. Silencing a media outlet like Al Jazeera is a direct assault on these values.
The closure of Al Jazeera’s offices also highlights a troubling double standard. Israeli authorities have allowed other international news agencies to continue their operations, many of which cover the conflict in ways that are far less nuanced or balanced. Yet Al Jazeera, a network that works diligently to present both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, is being targeted and its journalists are constantly under attack. What does this say about the future of press freedom in Israel and the occupied territories?
5 Sep 2024 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
Last week, Israel’s authorities took significant steps on the internal front to narrow political freedom, censor cultural expression and increase the power of police in Israeli society, critics of the most right-wing cabinet in Israel’s history say.
Perhaps the gravest step was the unprecedented closure of the communist party office in Haifa to prevent screening of a new film by controversial Palestinian-Israeli director Mohammed Bakri. Although it was only for 10 hours, human rights lawyers stressed the office closure and film banning were done without a court order, setting a precedent for bigger blows to political groups that displease the coalition or police,
“Police closure of a branch of a party is an action characteristic of dictatorial regimes,” Gilad Kariv, a liberal Jewish legislator wrote on X. “I have reservations about the movie and views of Mohammed Bakri but the attempt to claim that showing the movie represents an immediate danger to public security is a low point and part of a dangerous process.”
A previous Bakri film, Jenin, Jenin, which set in the same locale, the West Bank’s Jenin Refugee Camp in the aftermath of a 2002 Israeli West Bank military operation ordered after suicide bombings, was released later in 2002. After a protracted legal battle, Israel’s high court rejected an appeal by Bakri against a lower court ruling that he had defamed an army officer and upheld a ban on the film, as well as payment of damages of $55,000.
Now, without additional legal ruling or basis, police are also banning the second film, Janin Jenin (Incubations of Jenin), which gives testimonies, some by the same eyewitnesses as in the earlier film, of another Israeli operation against the camp, this time in 2023.
Advocates of censorship say either that the two films are similar or that it doesn’t matter because Bakri is an “antisemite” bent on besmirching Israel. The filmmaker says his goal is to convey an often suppressed Palestinian narrative of life under occupation and the devastation caused to the camp, known as a hotbed of militancy which, as fate would have it, was targeted for another major operation last week.
Shamai Glick, a right-wing activist, took credit for the bans, stressing that police had acted on his complaints. “There is no reason people in Israel and the world should see an antisemitic film just like there is no reason they should see a film that harms the gay community,” he said.
On Tuesday, police ordered the director of a theatre in Jaffa to drop plans to screen Janin Jenin that evening and he complied. Still, Israeli education and culture minister Yoav Kisch called for closure of the theatre through a cutoff of state funding merely because it had planned to show the new movie.
There is more at stake here than the fate of a single film. The absence of court orders required in the past for bannings and the grabbing of more power by the police are seen by left-wing activists as markers on Israel’s trajectory of deterioration into a nascent police state. Their last hope is the moves can be overturned by Israeli attorney general Gali Baharav-Miara, herself a frequent target of the coalition and the right-wing minister in charge of the police, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“It’s one thing if there’s a court order to prohibit a certain artistic event. Then of course police have to enforce it. But if there’s none and they do that out of their own initiative, that’s incredible,” said leading human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, who has represented Bakri in the past.
The closure order for the offices of the communist party in Haifa, which was reviewed by Index on Censorship, raises questions about transparency. The document said preventing screening of the film was necessary “to safeguard the security of the public” but did not delineate the alleged threat. It added that showing the film could lead to “disturbances of the public order” but specified that the intelligence information on which the decision was based needed to be kept classified.
The coalition says tougher steps are needed to thwart incitement during the Gaza war that was ignited by Hamas’s brutal attacks on southern Israeli communities on 7 October. This triggered Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Police, for their part, deny any ulterior motive in the recent steps. “The Israel Police operates as an apolitical entity, with our role being to enforce the law rather than create it,” the police spokesman’s office said in response to queries. “Our primary goal is to maintain order and public safety.”
But the more democratic tendencies in Israel view Ben-Gvir as an especially dangerous actor in the government’s ongoing bid to remove checks on its power. This started last year with proposals to undermine the judiciary and is now gaining renewed traction while the public is distracted by war.
The communist party, represented in the Knesset as part of the Hadash grouping, said the closure was ordered just before the film’s screening and limited to 10 hours to preclude the party from going to court to challenge it.
Reem Hazzan, the Hadash leader in Haifa who was interrogated by police before the closure, said the film was to be screened in a closed room in front of about 60 people and followed by the collection of donations for the relief of Gaza civilians. Hazzan says there has never before been such a closure, even when Israeli Palestinians lived under military rule until 1966. She alleged the move follows a pattern of interrogations and threats against Hadash activists for organising demonstrations
Bakri recently told the joint Israeli-Palestinian outlet Local Call that the new film “is the continuation of the first movie Jenin, Jenin but with different timing and circumstances.” He said some of his interviewees who spoke in the first film compared the two incursions. He does not show any soldiers in the new film.
According to Haaretz, it has segments from the first film, a section on Bakri’s legal and personal troubles as a result of the first movie, explanation of the plight of Palestinian refugees since their displacement in 1948 and it gives the most emphasis to Israel’s incursion into Jenin camp last year.
Glick admitted he had not seen the new movie, nor did he think this was necessary. “If Hitler today published a book then I would also come out against it without reading it,” he said.
12 Jul 2024 | Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Russia, United Kingdom
A Russian art collective which was due to open a show in London highlighting the plight of opponents of the Putin regime claim their exhibition was cancelled at the last minute because one of them was Israeli.
The Pomidor group was founded in Moscow in 2018 by the artists Polina Egorushkina and Maria Sarkisyants, but the duo was forced to relocate two years ago after the Kremlin crackdown on opposition activity. Egorushkina now lives in London and Sarkisyants in Ashkelon in southern Israel.
Their latest show, Even Elephants Hold Elections, was part of an ongoing project about free expression designed to challenge people in democratic countries to understand life in an authoritarian regime and reflect on their own experience. Pomidor’s work includes embroidered banners celebrating political prisoners which the artists display in friends’ windows and phone booths on the street.
Among these are tributes to Viktoria Petrova, imprisoned in a psychiatric unit for anti-war social media posts, Mikhail Simonov, a 63-year-old pensioner arrested for comments on other people’s social media and 13-year-old Masha Moskaleva, who was taken away from her father after drawing anti-war pictures at school.
The show was due to open on 3 July at the Metamorphika Gallery in east London. But on the evening before, the two artists were told the gallery had received messages raising concerns about “inappropriate behaviour” on social media.
This referred to two posts pinned on Maria’s Instagram account. One post from 7 October expressed her horror at the “terrible evil” and included the words, in Russian, “Israel my beloved, we are here, we are here to support each other, all my thoughts are with the kidnapped, let only them return home alive. Eternal memory to the fallen.” A second post marked the one-month anniversary and expressed solidarity with the Israeli hostages and their families.
Sarkisyants told Index they were called to an urgent meeting the next day: “They showed me the two posts and said you should clarify your position. I said, I am from Israel and there was nothing in the post but facts: 1200 people were killed and 300 became hostages.”
The gallery asked Pomidor to sign a joint statement with Metamorphika condemning “the Zionist regime”, which they refused to do. “I’m Israeli. I was there,” said Sarkisyants. “What they proposed was impossible for me to do”
After several hours of discussion, Pomidor suggested a compromise of putting the exhibition solely in the name of Polina, but the gallery demanded the collective remove all work connected with Maria. At this point the exhibition was cancelled.
Pomidor posted on Instagram: “The problem came up because Maria is from Israel.”
This is something the gallery strongly denies. Metamorphika founder Simon Ballester told Index: “We were really compassionate with her story. But we asked her to say she had empathy for Palestinians and was against the war crimes.”
Ballester said the problem came when Sarkisyants expressed her support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.
“It’s outrageous” the artist told Index. “I told them I do not support Netanyahu or his government. I feel they betrayed us. We expected them to protect us, but they didn’t. But I support my country Israel and its people.”
Since the cancellation of the show, Metamorphika claims it has received over a thousand “hate mails, insults and threats”. According to Ballester, he and his colleagues have been accused of being “Nazis, rapists, antisemites and misogynistic scumbags”.
Asked if he now regretted cancelling the show he said: “I think it was the right thing. I’m sorry it was the day of the show. That was really unfortunate.” He said the gallery operated on humanist principles and was striving for peace and equality.
The Pomidor exhibition will next travel to Montreal in Canada and the artists are in discussion with a gallery in London to host the show later in the year.
3 Jun 2024 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
Israel’s decision to seize video equipment from AP journalists last week may have been swiftly reversed but the overall direction of travel for media freedom in Israel is negative.
Journalists inside Gaza are of course paying the highest price (yesterday preliminary investigations by CPJ showed at least 107 journalists and media workers were among the more than 37,000 killed since the Israel-Gaza war began) and it feels odd to speak of equipment seizures when so many of those covering the war in the Strip have paid with their lives. But this is not to compare, merely to illuminate.
The past few days have provided ample evidence of what many within Israel have long feared – that the offensive in Gaza is not being reported on fully in Israel itself. On Tuesday a video went viral of an Israeli woman responding with outrage at the wide gulf between news on Sunday’s bombing of a refugee camp in Rafah within Israeli media compared to major international news outlets. Yesterday, in an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC, press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel, Anat Saragusti, spoke more broadly of the reporting discrepancies since 7 October:
“The world sees a completely different war from the Israeli audience. This is very disturbing.”
Saragusti added that part of this is because the population is still processing the horrors of 7 October and with that comes a degree of self-censorship from those within the media. The other reason, she said, is that the IDF provides much of the material that appears in Israeli media and this is subject to review by military censors. While the military has always exerted control (Israeli law requires journalists to submit any article dealing with “security issues” to the military censor for review prior to publication), this pressure has intensified since the war, as the magazine +972 showed. Since 2011 +972 have released an annual report looking at the scale of bans by the military censor. In their latest report, released last week and published on our site with permission, they highlighted how in 2023 more than 600 articles by Israeli media outlets were barred, which was the most since their tracking began.
In a visually arresting move, Israeli paper Haaretz published an article on Wednesday with blacked out words and sentences. Highlighting such redactions is incidentally against the law and will no doubt add to the government’s wrath at Haaretz (late last year they threatened the left-leaning outlet with sanctions over their Gaza war coverage).
The government’s attempts to control the media landscape was already a problem prior to 7 October. Benjamin Netanyahu is known for his fractious relationship with the press and has made some very personal attacks throughout his career, such as this one from 2016, while Shlomo Kahri, the current communications minister, last year expressed a desire to shut down the country’s public broadcaster Kan. This week it was also revealed by Haaretz that two years ago investigative reporter Gur Megiddo was blocked from reporting on how then chief of Mossad had allegedly threatened then ICC prosecutor (the story finally saw daylight on Tuesday). Megiddo said he’d been summoned to meet two officials and threatened. It was “explained that if I published the story I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside,” said Megiddo.
Switching to the present, it feels unconscionable that Israelis, for whom the war is a lived reality not just a news story, are being served a light version of its conduct.
In the case of AP, their equipment was confiscated on the premise that it violated a new media law, passed by Israeli parliament in April, which allows the state to shut down foreign media outlets it deems a security threat. It was under this law that Israel also raided and closed Al Jazeera’s offices earlier this month and banned the company’s websites and broadcasts in the country.
Countries have a habit of passing censorious legislation in wartime, the justification being that some media control is important to protect the military. The issue is that such legislation is typically vague, open to abuse by those in power, and doesn’t always come with an expiry date to protect peacetime rights.
“A country like Israel, used to living through intense periods of crisis, is particularly vulnerable to calls for legislation that claims to protect national security by limiting free expression. Populist politicians are often happy to exploit the “rally around the flag” effect,” Daniella Peled, managing editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, told Index.
We voiced our concerns here in terms of Ukraine, which passed a media law within the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion with very broad implications, and we have concerns with Israel too. But as these examples show, our concerns are far wider than just one law and one incidence of confiscated equipment.
