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Israel Is Using Arrests to Silence Domestic Dissent Over Gaza

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Meir BaruchinCredit: Emil Salman

Haaretz Editorial

Nov 14, 2023 

After he had spent five days in jail, with no indictment filed, a magistrate’s court released Dr. Meir Baruchin, a civics and history teacher, under certain restrictions on Monday. Just a few days ago, police had asked that he be kept in jail for “indicating a decision to commit treason,” a crime carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail. But what started with a bang, involving “treason” and “justifying Hamas’ actions” in Facebook posts, ended with a whisper within a few days.

Make no mistake: Baruchin was used as a political tool to send a political message. The motive for his arrest was deterrence – silencing any criticism or any hint of protest against Israeli policy. Baruchin paid a personal price. He was fired from the high school where he taught and spent five days in jail with no justification.

The police had asked the prosecution for permission to investigate him on suspicion of incitement. But after this request was rejected, they switched to the crime of intent to commit treason – an extreme charge that is very rarely used.

The complaint against Baruchin was submitted by the Petah Tikva municipality, which fired him. Its pretext was posts in which he objected to Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip and discussed the deaths of Gazan civilians. He was questioned about at least 15 posts, some of them from before the war began on October 7. The posts included photographs of dead Palestinians, including young children, frequently accompanied by the statement “this doesn’t interest the Jews.” And with a few exceptions, he’s right. Even during peacetime, Israeli public opinion has almost no interest in innocent Palestinian victims. During wartime, the prevailing view is that there is no such thing.

In another post, on October 8, Baruchin listed the names and ages of six Palestinians killed in the West Bank, aged 14 to 24. “They were born under occupation and lived under it all their lives,” he wrote. “They never knew a single day of true freedom ... They were executed by our wonderful boys.” Last Friday, Judge Oren Silverman justified keeping him in detention for another four days due to such statements. According to Silverman, they sufficed “to establish a reasonable suspicion.”

But Judge Zion Saharay was less impressed by the police’s arguments. His decision to release Baruchin also ignored another police claim – that the veteran teacher had justified the rapes Hamas terrorists committed. This claim was based on messages in a WhatsApp group.

Baruchin isn’t alone. Over the last month, dozens of Arab Israelis have been arrested over alleged incitement. Both the police and the prosecution are party to this move, which significantly curtails freedom of expression in Israel. Even if some of these statements are uncomfortable for Israelis to hear, they should be permitted as long as they don’t constitute genuine incitement.

At a time when the government is seeking to silence people, the police and prosecution shouldn’t agree to do the work of persecution for it. The courts must prevent this and protect Israelis and their freedoms.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

 

The brutality and inhumanity of Israel’s assault on Gaza is no surprise. It’s just what was promised

Owen Jones

As the international court considers claims of genocide, the question of intent seems moot. Just read the words of Netanyahu and his allies

Sat 13 Jan 2024 05.00 EST

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t always starts with words. Genocide is largely remembered for its depraved acts, but it is incubated in language. Words can cast dark spells on a population, stirring hatred in those who otherwise see themselves as moderate, humane, normal.

This is why the genocide convention of 1948 criminalises “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. Like Britain, Israel was a signatory nation and, two years later, it translated the convention into domestic law. There were four acts, it decreed, that leave the offender “treated like a person guilty of genocide”: one is “incitement to commit genocide”.

As the British lawyer Daniel Machover tells me, Israel has a legal obligation to prosecute those who incite genocide. But instead, since the grave war crimes committed against Israeli civilians by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October, government ministers, parliamentarians, army officers and journalists have indulged in the language of extermination. This chilling phenomenon has few historical precedents, because usually instigators of genocide go to great lengths to cover up their crimes. As Raz Segal – an Israeli-American associate professor of genocide and Holocaust studies – tells me, Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is unique “in the sense of discussing it as what I think it is – that is, genocide – because the intent is so clearly articulated. And it’s articulated throughout Israeli media and society and politics.”

In South Africa’s document setting out its genocide case against Israel over the Gaza war, there are nine pages dedicated to genocidal incitement. It notes that Benjamin Netanyahu twice “invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek”, declaring: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” A later passage in the Bible leaves no doubt for interpretation: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” This was no throwaway comment. Consider the unprecedented slaughter of Palestinian children – or “infants and sucklings” – and note that six days after invoking Amalek in a national address, Netanyahu referred to it again in a letter to army soldiers and officers.

Then there’s Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, who declared: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” No demarcation between militants and civilians exists here. Yoav Gallant, the minister of defence, was a repeat offender. On 9 October, in an unashamed commitment to collective punishment, he declared Israel was imposing a “complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

On witnessing Israeli soldiers gleefully destroying civilian infrastructure on TikTok, some have speculated there has been a breakdown in army discipline. More likely is that soldiers listened when Gallant informed troops he had “released all the restraints” and “lifted all restrictions” on Israeli forces.

Another senior official, Israel Katz, now minister of foreign affairs, declared last year when he was energy minister: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” Meanwhile the heritage minister, Amihai Eliyahu, opposed humanitarian aid on the grounds that we “wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid”. He also suggested nuking Gaza, declaring “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians”. That saw him suspended by Netanyahu.

Some army officers are willing participants. In a video addressed to Gaza’s residents, one major general, Ghassan Alian, castigated “citizens of Gaza” for celebrating Hamas’s extremism, promising: “Human animals are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Another retired major general and adviser to the defence minister, Giora Eiland, demanded other countries be prevented from offering assistance, demanding that Gaza’s people be left with “two choices: to stay and to starve, or to leave”. He advocated Gaza being made “a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in”, declared women were not innocent because “they are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers”, and advocated “humanitarian disaster” and “severe epidemics” to achieve war aims: the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich tweeted he agreed “with every word”.

South Africa’s document is incomplete: there have been countless new examples since it was published. After the Israeli attorney general reportedly issued a warning to colleagues to “watch their words”, clearly concerned that Israel was being incriminated on the eve of the international court of justice investigation, the Knesset deputy speaker, Nissim Vaturi, doubled down on a previous assertion that “Gaza must be burned”.

Netanyahu is said to have warned his ministers to “be sensitive”, yet each day brings more examples of genocidal intent and incitement. This should define media coverage, and yet still the fantasy that this is a war against Hamas – with a side debate about proportionality – is indulged. Without western support, Israel’s mass slaughter would immediately end. This is why we must address complicity: lives depend on it.

That is not simply to critique those who still cheer on this abomination, who if we lived in a society that valued human life, would, by now, be considered morally depraved beyond redemption. As Jean-Paul Sartre once declared: “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.” Here is one of the great crimes of our age, unfolding before our eyes, described to me by the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti as “the world’s first livestreamed genocide”. Rarely has a crime so grave been so honestly spelled out to the world by its architects. Yet many of those who rightly and passionately condemned the atrocities of Hamas have little or nothing to say about Israel’s actions, despite the direct involvement of our own rulers. This is obscene – and occasional handwringing will not scrub away the shame. Tacit acquiescence allows the horror to continue. Words can be dangerous, but so too can their absence.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/13/israel-hamas-gaza-war-crimes

 

Fears are rising of ‘regional escalation’ in the Middle East. But that wider war is already here

Nesrine Malik

The conflict has spilled over into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and the Red Sea – yet the context is barely discussed or understood....

Mon 8 Jan 2024 01.00 EST

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t may be a small detail, but it tells a big, clarifying story: the Biden administration did not appoint an ambassador to Cairo until March of last year. After he came to office, President Biden’s orders to his foreign policy staff were to “keep the Middle East off my desk”. The idea was that the Arab case was largely closed. “The Middle East is quieter today than it has been in decades,” said the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a fate-tempting speech just a week before the Hamas attacks.

The plan was to “ultimately integrate” the region by encouraging further normalisation between Arab states and Israel, thereby isolating and taming Iran. As the scholar Edward Said once put it: “It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.”

It hasn’t worked out. The 7 October attacks put the Middle East back on Biden’s desk. The region isn’t made up of so many peanuts in a jar, and Arab countries have a habit of behaving in ways dictated by domestic calculations and regional ambitions rather than western foreign policy priorities. The result is that all bets are colossally off. And in a matter of weeks the Middle East and wider Arab world have become drawn into the war in a way that has not been met by appropriate action by the US and other Israeli allies that would force a cessation of hostilities and a cooling of the regional temperature.

Underpinning the paralysis is a linchpin of the US’s Middle East foreign policy: that Israel is the US’s key security partner in the region, and that reconsidering its arming and support is therefore out of the question. “Israel is a bright spot in a tough neighborhood,” posted Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley last week. “It has never [been] that Israel needs America. It has always been that America needs Israel.”

The cost of this logic is high, and escalating. The talk is of “fears of a wider war in the Middle East”, but the truth is that war is already here. It has now spilled into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. Strikes and counterstrikes have been traded between Israel and Hezbollah along the south Lebanon border for weeks now. In November, Israeli strikes targeted Damascus airport, taking it out of service. Last week, a drone strike in the heart of Beirut assassinated a Hamas leader and six others, widening the theatre of war away from Hezbollah strongholds in the south of the country. From Yemen, Houthi militia have struck and seized vessels that the group says have ties to Israel, in protest against the bombardment of Gaza.

All of this is happening in a wider context of crises and divisions in individual countries. Each escalation results in a rippling series of repercussions. Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have diverted commercial traffic headed to North America and Europe away from the waterway, affecting Egypt’s much-needed revenues from the Suez canal and potentially the country’s stability in the middle of a prolonged financial crisis.

Globally, if the Red Sea cannot be made safe, we will see rising trade costs and insurance premiums, and supply chain congestion in a world commodity market already unsettled by the war in Ukraine. This is already resulting in increased military activity in the area – last week, US navy helicopters sank Houthi boats that fired on them. Anything more coordinated on the part of the US and its allies, which have already sent a strong cease-and-desist message by targeting Houthi bases in Yemen, risks destabilising a precious truce in the country and raises the possibility of open clashes with Iran, which has announced the deployment of warships to the Red Sea.

Aftermath of the purported attack that killed senior Hamas figure in Lebanon – video

There is little risk that any of these countries would openly declare war on Israel – that would be suicide. But therein lies both the false comfort and hidden threat. Mischievous non-state actors, proxies and political instability can unravel peace almost as effectively. Islamic State claimed responsibility last week for the deadliest attack in Iran since the 1979 revolution. The timing of the attack suggests a vanquished group making hay of the political volatility in order to make itself relevant. IS is “kind of like the Joker”, Aaron Y Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told NPR. “They want to see the world burn. They don’t care how it happens as long as it benefits them.”

They may get their wish. Groups such as IS thrive on instability, and in countries with weak sovereignty. Across the Red Sea in east Africa, Sudan, the site of a large port city, is in the throes of a messy war where currently two regimes jostle for control, while much of the country lies ungoverned, its borders pregnable. Lebanon’s foreign minister is open about the inability to rein in Hezbollah, telling the BBC that his government can only “impress on them that they should not respond themselves. We don’t tell them, we dialogue with them in this regard.” In Yemen, there are effectively two governments that control different territories in the north and the south.

Throughout the region, there is one constant: Iran’s ability to effectively fund and deploy proxies, a facility made possible by the US’s historical role in empowering it through the Iraq war, and then failing to contain it.

Israel is pushing Hezbollah to its limits. How it responds will define the future of this war

Amal Saad

Read more

But the risks are even bigger than that. It is hard to overestimate, in these power vacuums and proxy groupings, the effect of the scenes from Gaza and the West Bank. Arabic satellite channels run a rolling, forensic account of the devastation. Al Jazeera Arabic broadcast the funeral and last rites of the assassinated Hamas political leader, just as domestic Arab channels traditionally would the weekly Friday prayers from Mecca. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees reside in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, and public discourse across the region, from dinner tables to panel shows and newspaper coverage, is dominated by the war in Gaza, events in the West Bank and developments in the wider region. The threat is looming, as already seen in Iran, of terrorism that preys on febrile climates of high feeling.

If and when such events unfold, they will no doubt be framed, without context or history, as the result of extreme religious ideology, the chronic bloodlust of Arabs or Muslims, and further proof of a “tough neighbourhood” that needs policing. The reality is that the status quo that the US and Israel hoped would happily turn into wider Arab “integration” and normalisation with Israel, containment of Iran and the slow, quiet death of the Palestinian cause was always secured on the basis that no one would make any sudden moves that would trigger prides and paranoias about who really holds power.

Then Hamas struck, and what followed were the actions of an Israeli government that is not behaving like a stabilising force in the region, but an aggravating one. As long as the US and other western allies fail to confront that fact, out of inertia or fear of domestic blowback, everyone, including Israel, will pay a high price for a war that has long gone past justifiable self-defence, and could soon become a global threat.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/08/israel-gaza-middle-east-escalation