The decision by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos last week that his paper would not endorse a candidate in the US election offered a sneak peek into a potentially Trumpian future. It was also a reminder of the poignancy of the broadsheet’s motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, adopted in 2017 following Trump’s 2016 election victory. Here was a billionaire media tycoon—the second-richest man in the world, no less—opting to stay quiet for fear of retribution from a presidential candidate whose penchant for revenge has been well advertised. The noose around the neck of liberal democracy tightened.
Closer to home that same week was an example of what happens when unwelcome truths are uttered under an intolerant regime. On Sunday 27th October at JW3, the Jewish community centre in north London, the Israeli daily Haaretz held a conference, entitled “Israel: Allied or Alone?” The newspaper (where, full disclosure, I got my start in journalism) is a liberal, left-leaning broadsheet, the Israeli equivalent of the New York Times or Guardian. In Israel, it is a relatively critical organ of the establishment press. “If it looks like ethnic cleansing, it probably is” was the headline of the paper’s 29th October editorial about Israeli actions in north Gaza, for instance.
The consensus at the event was further to the left than much of the Israeli mainstream. It was organised with Yachad, a British-Jewish peace advocacy group; Standing Together, a grassroots Israeli Jewish and Palestinian protest movement; and the New Israel Fund, an Israeli human rights NGO. Speakers, including Israeli Jewish and Palestinian politicians and activists, called for more international pressure on Israel over the Gaza war and the occupation of Palestinian territories. But it was an address by the paper’s publisher, Amos Schocken, which got the most attention. Schocken called for sanctions against Israel; used the word “apartheid” to describe Israeli policy towards the Palestinians; called the Israeli army’s onslaught on the Strip “a second Nakba”; and used the term “freedom fighters” to describe some Palestinians resisting Israeli oppression (he later clarified that he had not been referring to Hamas, and Haaretz published an editorial clarifying that Schocken did not mean that terrorists are freedom fighters, and that he may also even have “erred in his clarification”).
On 31st October, Israel’s Interior Ministry suspended any cooperation with Haaretz, including freezing its advertising spend with the paper. In a letter, interior minister Moshe Arbel described Schocken’s remarks as “disgusting” and indicative of a “serious disconnect from fundamental values, especially at a time when Israel is waging a just war, which began after the murderous terrorist attack by Hamas on 7th October”. Other ministries have also suspended ties or cancelled their Haaretz subscriptions. Israel’s justice minister Yariv Lavin, meanwhile, is pushing for legislation to criminalise Israeli citizens who call for sanctions against the state or its leaders, with penalties of 10 years in prison, rising to 20 years in times of war.
Israel has long styled itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East”, but as these steps show, that is a generous and long-inaccurate description. Having made perfectly legal remarks, Schocken and Haaretz have received the kind of government response that Bezos seems to fear in the US.
The Israeli government’s action is unprecedented, as is the justice minister’s attempt to criminalise any Israelis calling for sanctions against the government from abroad. In 2011, Israel passed an “anti-boycott law” against anyone advocating an economic, cultural, or academic boycott of Israel, but this mandated civil rather than criminal liabilities. It was also mostly “narrowly interpreted” by the courts, Yael Berda, an associate professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, tells me in a phone call. “There was a game here,” she says, with the judiciary keeping in check potential abuses from legislation she describes as “fascist”. The judicial reform pushed by the current Israeli government, which sparked months of mass protests, was intended precisely to remove these checks and balances. The whole point of “the coup”, Berda explains, was to say to the institutions and people acting to prevent rights abuses: “Stop sterilising [our] fascist legislation.”
Berda is one of the co-conveners of an open letter, signed by some 3,500 Israelis to date (full disclosure: including your correspondent), which calls for external pressure on Israel to end the Gaza war and agree to a ceasefire and hostage release deal. Until anti-sanction legislation goes through, Israelis signing the letter are still risking social censure, and some are jeopardising their livelihoods, too, she explains, as shown by broader reactions to the Haaretz debacle. The newspaper has reportedly suffered a flurry of subscriber and advertiser cancellations. Some people associated with Haaretz distanced themselves from Schocken's remarks. For instance, a Haaretz co-owner, Leonid Nevzlin, reportedly stated that, “Amos's words clash with the newspaper's values, my values, and the values of most journalists and newspaper employees. I regret that Amos used Haaretz’s platform and spread his personal and extreme views without emphasising that these are his private opinions, which do not represent those of the newspaper.”
As another developing major scandal also makes clear, none of this has happened in a vacuum, and certainly not in what could be described as a functioning democracy. Following investigations by Israel’s security services, a spokesperson in the office of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Eli Feldstein, is suspected of obtaining and leaking intelligence material to amenable media, something Netanyahu’s office denies. It is thought this may have been done to undermine hostage negotiation efforts. A false story about Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planning to take hostages to Iran via the Philadelphi corridor—the security buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt—was covered extensively by the German tabloid Bild and British paper the Jewish Chronicle. This supposed plan, and the need to secure the Philadelphi corridor, was used by Netanyahu as a reason not to accept a hostage release deal or agree a ceasefire. Another three suspects were arrested, all of them from the defence establishment. A source close to Feldstein, the main suspect, alleged he was “driven solely by ideological and Zionist motives”, Haaretz has reported.
Taken together, the Haaretz and Feldstein stories offer classic examples of authoritarian government, says Berda: anyone working for the state is doing good, and anyone working against it is doing bad. Under this logic, the hostage families, fighting for the lives of their loved ones, are doing harm.
And while the space in Israel for free debate has shut down, it is not as if the space was totally open in London, either. At the conference, two counter-protests greeted attendees: one against the Gaza war, the other for the Israeli government, and both against the Haaretz event. Anti-war protesters shouted words like “genocide” at attendees through megaphones, some at close quarters. Speaking on a panel that afternoon, an Israeli-Palestinian former lawmaker, Sondos Saleh, was visibly emotional as she explained how painful it had been, as a Palestinian, as a woman, to be targeted in this way by protesters in London.
There is a sad irony to this, that those who wish to see an end to Gaza’s war would seek to shut down a conference whose conveners want the same thing. David Davidi-Brown, the chief executive of the New Israel Fund UK, told me in an email that “whether hateful protestors outside the building on the day, or the extreme reaction from Israeli ministers, rejectionist and violent voices are trying to intimidate Israelis and Palestinians seeking a better future”. Hannah Weisfeld, executive director of Yachad, said that spaces where Israelis and Palestinians can gather to talk about safety, security, and even peace, are “ever diminishing”.
In Israel, it is no longer a matter of democracy being “under threat”, or of authoritarianism being on the way, says Berda: “We are there... the authoritarian coup has happened.” As the hostage families have learned in the painful months since 7th October, if you are not with the state, it is against you. That is frightening. What is more frightening perhaps, Berda adds, is the use of the hostages as a pretext to commit war crimes in Gaza. This authoritarian turn has left no room for disagreement or debate. Over the weekend, leaders of Standing Together, the peaceful protest movement that also partnered on the Haaretz conference, were detained in Tel Aviv while demonstrating against the war and calling for a hostage release deal.
The fighting in the Strip continues, as does the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. A response by Tehran to Israel’s latest strike is imminent. Meanwhile, media outlets that support the government and its strongman leader are declared patriots, and therefore good. But anyone, including Haaretz, who advocates for citizens, who says they might matter more than the government’s quest for unlimited power is bad, defeatist—a traitor.
