This decision affected just three journalists in Gaza, one of whom is 25-year-old Abeer Ayyoub. Abeer went from working as a fixer for visiting foreign journalists to writing stories herself, and in the process landing a job with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Starting at the beginning of the last attack on Gaza in November 2012, she quickly made a name for herself by breaking stories that most journalists operating in the Strip had never realised existed.

I spoke to Abeer about what the ban means for her work, and for the state of press freedom in Gaza today

Ruth Michaelson: When we spoke the other day, you described working for Ha’aretz as “your dream”. Why did you want to work with Israeli media?

Abeer Ayyoub: Because I wanted to be the Palestinian voice in Israeli media, to send a message and cover these events from Palestinian eyes — I didn’t want Israeli journalists to be talking about something they’ve never seen [Israeli citizens are banned from entering Gaza]. So I wanted to be the one talking to Israelis, to communicate exactly what is going on here. Most Israelis are misled about what life is like here — they think that we’re all terrorists, which is not the case: Gaza has many civilians who have nothing to do with resistance. Sure, they have their own affiliations, but people have lives here, and they want to live in peace.

RM: Did you feel under threat while you were working for Ha’aretz?

AA: No, never. People showed understanding about my reasons for doing this; my family, my colleagues, even the Gaza authorities were supportive when I asked them before starting at Ha’aretz. They told me that they were in favour of having Palestinians writing for the Israeli media. The criticisms I heard or felt came from people who aren’t involved with the media, so I didn’t take them seriously.

RM: Why did you decide to talk to the Hamas government before going to work for Israeli media?

AA: I hate to do things in secret: I want to do everything under the light. I wasn’t asking for permission, I was just informing them of what was going on. They told me “go ahead, we never banned anyone from working with Israeli media, and it’s the same for you.” It was the head of media relations in Gaza who told me that, the same person who later told me I was banned.

RM: What reason did Hamas give for the ban?

AA: There were several different reasons given — that Israeli media is hostile to us, and that Israel doesn’t allow Palestinians to go inside and cover what’s going on, so we’re not going to allow them to do the same here. But the third and most depressing reason is that they expressed concern that journalists who work with Israeli media will ultimately become spies.

RM: Why do you think they changed their minds like this?

AA: It’s been very difficult to figure this out, as the reasons kept changing — especially as they banned their officials from talking with Israeli media in the same ruling. They certainly have their reasons, but it’s none of the reasons they’ve made public.

RM: So how were you informed about the ban?

AA: Just like everyone around me, I read it in the papers. No one called me or contacted me to let me know. So after I read about it, I went to the media office and asked them if they were serious about this. They told me that they were, and that I had no other choice but to submit to this decision. Initially I thought that I wouldn’t submit to this, but then I reasoned that I have no wish to create extra problems for myself.

RM: What were the risks involved if you hadn’t complied?

AA: The statement said that anyone working for Israeli media will be “punished”: I didn’t want punishment or to be arrested, as I have work that I still want to do here nonetheless. The thing is that a lot of normal people on the ground are against working with Israeli media, so I didn’t think that I would find a lot of support. I decided to stop for a while until things change, and I’m sure that they will change, because Hamas tend to take decisions like this and then repeal them at a later date.

RM: What do you think is the reason behind such a sweeping ruling that only affects three people?

AA: This is the thing — there have been allegations that there are people who work for Israeli media in secret, with no bylines. But again, this was a ruling also designed to affect Hamas officials, and I believe this was aimed primarily at them. Once again, the reason for this will be anything except the reasons they gave.

RM: The timing of the decision seems political, in that it came after the ceasefire with Israel. Do you think that this has anything to do with the ruling?

AA: This was one of Hamas’s claims, that Israel had targeted journalists during the war, and so if Israel doesn’t respect our journalists then we don’t want them to work with Israel. How these two things are related is something that I don’t personally understand.

 RM: How comfortable do you feel working as a journalist in Gaza now, following this ban?

AA: I feel comfortable at the moment, my relationship with the government is good. I work a lot with other forms of international media, and things seem to be okay. Sometimes [the Hamas government] remind me, with provocations or questions about whether I’m still working with Ha’aretz, that they are still focused on this, even if they say it as a joke. But this to me is nothing too serious.

RM: Many elements of both Israeli and Palestinian life are hidden from view given the restrictions on freedom of movement, do you feel like the decision contributes to this?

AA: Exactly. Now there is a real problem — things are disjointed. I can’t express myself within Israeli media: this is permitting any potential media bias, or at the very least reports lacking in sufficient information.

RM: What will be missing from Israeli media discourse as a result of this decision?

AA: Basically I think the gap between civilians on both sides will be widened. We only know about their government, and they only know about ours. The things that I wanted to write about were what normal, everyday people are doing — people like me or my family and friends: we hate the on-going conflict. We believe in resistance, but things are not like the normal depiction of Palestinians in the media, which is likely to portray us as inherently violent.

RM: What would you say is the state of press freedom in Gaza?

AA: I would say it’s changing from time to time, sometimes we have enough space to write, but other times we are denied our simplest rights. It’s the case wherever; governments always try to control journalism when it comes to writing about them.

Ruth Michaelson is a freelance journalist. She tweets at @_Ms_R

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  — A child painted with the national colours of Bahrain during the uprisings second anniversary protests, in which a teenager was killed

Evidence given by Jeremy Paxman and a senior BBC official to the BBC internal inquiry into its handling of the Jimmy Savile affair will be removed from public transcripts detailing the investigations evidence. Lawyers examining the soon to be published transcripts said that evidence from the Newsnight presenter and global news director Peter Horrocks was potentially defamatory, and was particularly critical of how BBC management handled the criticism arising from the Savile scandal in Autumn last year. The findings of the inquiry, overseen by former head of Sky News Nick Pollard, were published by the BBC in December. The report examined the corporation’s handling of Newsnight’s dropped investigation into the case in 2011, and its later response after Savile was allegedly outed as a paedophile in October 2012. At the time the transcript was produced, those giving evidence reportedly didn’t know the report was to be made public. Overall, less than 10 per cent of the Pollard review transcripts will be redacted before publication.

A powerful new firewall used to censor online activity could be established in Pakistan within the next month. The Pakistani government has allegedly been working with the same technology companies that helped Iran, China and Libya curb online dissent, to allow authorities to block pornographic or blasphemous online content. Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik confirmed the reports on Twitter, saying The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) were in their final negotiations for obtaining the software. The PTA originally tried to introduce a similar $10million measure in 2012, which was quashed after being met with fierce public opposition. Whilst Pakistan claims to use the firewall to protect the country’s internet users from blasphemous and pornographic content, it has already blocked a number of unrelated sites, such as the US-based Buzzfeed.

An NHS whistleblower under investigation for high mortality rates has voiced concerns over patient safety despite a legal gag preventing him from speaking out. Gary Walker warned civil servants that he had been given the same choices that had resulted in the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust scandal. He was fired from his job as chief executive of United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust in 2010 for gross professional misconduct, allegedly because he swore during a meeting. Walker claims he was fired for refusing to meet Whitehall targets for non-emergency patients and then gagged as part of a reported £500,000 settlement emerging from an unfair work dismissal tribunal. He said he was instructed by the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority to meet the 18-week non-emergency target “whatever the demand” and was told to resign when he refused to do so. East Midlands Strategic Health Authority refuted the claims. The Francis report published last week recommended that gagging orders on NHS staff be lifted, orders which Walker said were due to a “culture of fear” within the service. His case has been raised in the commons.

The Israeli government has admitted that “Prisoner X”, the mystery detainee who later committed suicide in solitary confinement, was in fact a spy for Israel. Ben Zygier, as he is now known from reports, was part of Israel’s external intelligence forces known as the Mossad and was arrested in 2010 for charges which still remain unspecified, though they were revealed to be serious. The detention of Australian-Israeli Zygier was reportedly enshrouded in such secrecy that even the prison guards didn’t know his true identity or alleged offence. The information was revealed after a gagging order which forbade the media in Israel from reporting on the case was partially lifted by the Israeli government on 13 February.

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A gag order issued by an Israeli court soon after put an end to any reporting on the case, or even reporting of the order itself. “Prisoner X” became a byword in the Israeli media for yet one more of the kind of security-related stories that no-one quite knows the truth of, and probably never will.

Nothing more was heard until this week, when an Australian TV documentary claimed that the man in question was one Ben Zygier, a 34-year-old father-of-two and an Australian citizen who had moved to Israel a decade earlier.

Zygier, who called himself Ben Alon in Israel, was apparently held in the cell — built to hold Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin — for a number of months before he was found hanged, and his body flown to Melbourne a week later. His father Geoffrey, a grandee of the Jewish community there, has refused to speak to the media regarding his son.

Military censorship and wide-reaching gag orders are a fact of life for Israeli journalists. But this gag order was absolute. Articles which appeared on a number of Israeli websites yesterday noting the Australian programme were soon removed.

Even more extraordinary was the meeting called that afternoon by the Prime Minister’s office convening the so-called “Editors’ Committee”, a grouping set up in the early years of the state through which senior media figures could be briefed on secret information if they agreed to not publish it.

Historically this was a sort of gentleman’s agreement between the hacks and the establishment, who in the nascent days of Israel were understood to be more or less on the same side. Now, the annual meeting between the PM and the Editors’ Committee has become largely a matter of show, open to the scrutiny of other journalists. Self-censorship is managed more obliquely.

The Prisoner X situation was so extraordinary that a number of MKs used parliamentary privilege yesterday to ask the outgoing Justice Minister, Yaakov Ne’eman about the Australian reports.  Zahava Gal-On, head of the left-wing Meretz faction pouring scorn on the implied complicity of the Israeli media.

“I want to hear your stance on the fact that journalists volunteer to censor information at the government’s request,” she said. “Is it proper that the Prime Minister’s Office invited the Editors’ Committee to prevent news from being publicised? Today, we hear that in a country that claims to be a civilized democracy, journalists cooperate with the government, and that anonymous prisoners, who no one knew existed, commit suicide.”

The gag order has now been softened, perhaps due to the MKs’ questions,  and Israeli media are now reporting on the Australian story. But it’s the press rather than politicians who should be charged with exposing this kind of event.

There is an argument to be made that there is a need for some level of censorship to protect national security. But the censors need to choose their battles.

It’s stupid and self-destructive to try and suppress a story after it appears on a foreign media outlet. The suppression will inevitably serves to draw additional attention to the story.

The danger is that security becomes its own justification for censorship with a creeping reach.

Daniella Peled is editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and writes widely on the Middle East

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A recent demonstration by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel in which children were dressed up as concentration camp prisoners has sparked a new potential addition to Israel’s laws on freedom of speech.

The bill, which has already passed its preliminary hearing, would mean anyone using Holocaust imagery or Nazi labels in public may soon face a NIS 100,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

But this bill is far more about controlling the parameters of debate than about showing respect to the victims of the Nazis.

It’s instructive to look at who is sponsoring the bill. Uri Ariel of the National Union party is a settler leader who only this week admitted giving right-wing activists information on Israel Defence Force movements.

“Unfortunately we have been witness in recent years to the cynical exploitation of Nazi symbols and phraseology,” he said this week, “which is offensive to Holocaust survivors, their families, and many others among the Jewish people.”

Indeed we have, and not least from members of his own constituency.

One of my enduring memories of covering the disengagement was of seeing two little girls in the West Bank settlement of Homesh, due to be evacuated later that day, skipping along wearing matching stars-of-David cut from orange cloth, the colour of the anti-disengagement movement. They were also wearing matching home-made hula skirts made of ribbons of the same material.

That was a theme that ran through the disengagement to the point it lost its ability to shock — the orange stars, the settlers calling IDF soldiers Nazis and even kapos, concentration camp overseers often recruited from the Jews themselves.

Ariel himself previously backed a bill to erase convictions from the 2005 disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. One wonders whether he would be keen to apply his new bill retroactively.

But then again, there is a long and arguably tasteless history of using the Holocaust in Israeli political discourse.

In just a handful of examples, rallies against the Oslo movement in 1995 featured pictures of then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin dressed in SS uniform, and last year, Yaakov Katz of the National Union compared the Eretz Nehederet (“Wonderful Country”) satirical TV programme to Nazi propaganda because of its depiction of religious settlers.

To this day right-wing politicians are fond of referring to the 1967 lines as indefensible “Auschwitz borders”.

To be fair, this phrase was originally coined by the Labour party’s Abba Eban, and this tendency to namecheck the Shoah isn’t restricted to the nationalist right, by any means.

The late great Jewish thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz caused outrage 30 years ago when he described some Israeli soldiers as akin to “Judeo-Nazis”, and during a joint Israeli/Arab demonstration in Bilin last year, I saw many protestors wearing yellow stars (eight rather than six pointed, but the message was clear) with the word “Palestinian” inscribed in Arabic in the centre.

This exploitation of symbols of the Shoah may be nauseating and an example of deeply cynical manipulation, but it’s a sure way of catching public attention.

Maybe the coalition government sees this bill as a handy way of deflecting the debate away from the real issues at hand – whether that of haredi integration, freedom of speech or faltering social cohesion.  It’s certainly likely to win widespread public support.

It’s partly because the Holocaust is such an intimate part of public life in Israel that politicians so freely call those they disagree with Nazis, and civilians judge soldiers drawn from their own ranks to be kapos.

Ariel’s bill aims to control ownership of the Holocaust and its legacy, rather than honour its victims. But using the law to control public discourse in Israeli society, however offensive, is just another shameful exploitation.

Daniella Peled is an editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. A former foreign editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on Israel and Palestine and is a regular contributor to Ha’aretz

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The “Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott – 2011″ was approved on Monday 11 July by a majority of 47 to 38 Members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

The law prohibits the public promotion of boycott by Israeli citizens and organisations, and, in some cases, agreement to participate in a boycott. It forbids not only a boycott of Israeli institutions but also of the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).

The wording of the law is designed specifically to prohibit and penalise political boycott of Israel or of the settlements in the West Bank, rather than other types of boycotts, such as consumer boycotts related to pricing of products.

In private law, the law defines boycott as a new type of “civil wrong” or tort. It will enable settlers or other parties targeted by boycotts to sue anyone who calls for boycott, and the court may award compensation including punitive damages, even if no actual damage is caused to the boycotted parties. For example, if an Israeli actor publicly calls on others not to perform in a theatre in the Israeli settlement of Ariel, the theatre can sue that actor for a minimum sum of £5,000 in damages, which can be awarded even if no such damage was caused.

In public law, the law will revoke tax exemptions and other legal rights and benefits from Israeli organisations and charities, as well as academic, cultural and scientific institutions which receive any state support, if they engage in boycott. For example, if a theatre calls for boycott of settlement theatres, its right to state funding or grants can be revoked. As a result of this threat, theatres may limit the ability of their employees to speak out, for fear of losing funding and benefits. In addition, if a human rights organisation publishes information regarding settlements, and that information is used by others as a basis for boycott, that organisation or charity is liable to have its tax exemptions revoked, as well as being exposed to private compensation suits.

Israeli businesses and industries will also be penalised, if they work with the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian companies and accept their conditions that exclude trade with businesses that also trade with settlements. A recent example of this is the plan to build the new Palestinian city of Rawabi. Israeli contractors wishing to participate have been asked by Palestinians to refrain from also doing business with settlements. The law seeks to penalise such contractors and may in effect deter Israeli businesses from trading with Palestinian businesses more generally.

Israeli human rights organisations see the law as a double attack:

1. On democratic values and the rule of law — because it restricts freedom of expression and association and threatens Human Rights Defenders. Boycotts, even if unpopular as a tactic, are a non-violent and legitimate form of public protest.

2. On respect for international law and the chances for peace — because for the first time it provides official legal protection for the illegal settlement project in the West Bank, and conflates the status of the state of Israel with that of the settlements.

Prior to the vote, Israel’s Advocate General declared the bill to be ‘borderline unconstitutional’. The legal advisor to the Knesset also issued a harsh critique of the bill, defining it as illegal.

Following the passing of the law, an intense public debate broke out in Israeli media and in the Knesset. A poll held on behalf of Israel’s Knesset TV Channel immediately after the vote showed that 52 per cent of Israelis support the law, while 31 per cent oppose it , but following this there have been numerous calls of opposition from civil society. Israeli human rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel called for civil disobedience in the face of the law, while a Facebook page opened by activist group Peace Now, initiating a consumer boycott of settlement products in defiance of the law gathered 6000 supporters within two days. Most Israeli newspapers have come down clearly against the law, and a Member of Knesset from the Israeli opposition party Kadima (which initially participated in the drafting of the bill, but later withdrew its support) has tabled a proposal to revoke the law.

Immediately after the vote a petition was submitted to Israel’s High Court of Justice by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, challenging the compatibility of the bill with constitutional principles. A second petition is currently being prepared by two leading Israeli human rights organisations, on behalf of other human rights groups as well as organisations most liable to be affected directly by the law.

Two days after the law was passed, the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton responded to it, telling press that she was ‘concerned about the effect that this legislation may have on the freedom of Israeli citizens and organizations to express non-violent political opinions’.

Despite abstaining from the vote Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has voiced support for the law. In a debate in the Knesset he said the bill reflects Israeli democracy. “What stains (Israel’s) image are those savage and irresponsible attacks on a democracy’s attempt to draw a line between what is acceptable and what is not,” he said.

The anti-boycott law is the latest in a string of aggressive legislation by Israel’s Knesset, whose essence is the attempt to restrict political dissent and human rights-based criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestinians. On Wednesday 25 July, the Knesset is set to vote on a different initiative, put forward by FM Avigdor Liebermann’s party Israel Beitenu (Israel Our Home), to establish a parliamentary commission of inquiry that will investigate the activities and funding of left-wing groups and human rights organisations.

Full English translation of the law and other documents available here

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