1 Nov 2023 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Following the brutal attacks on Israel by Hamas on 7 October, violations of free speech have occurred at such pace and scale that it has made keeping track a challenge. The situation was already difficult before that date: Israel was in the grip of a huge crisis, the country stalled by endless protests in response to the government’s attempts to neuter the Supreme Court, while Amnesty International identified “a general climate of repression” in Gaza Strip under Hamas. Since the war started, the right to freedom of expression has gone from bad to worse in both Israel and Palestine, and indeed around the world. Whilst a degree of deterioration was predictable – conflict is never the arena in which rights improve – the current state could hardly be foreseen.
Starting with media freedom, on 7 October itself, of the 1,400 people who were murdered by Hamas several were Israeli reporters on duty. Following the massacre, Israel’s response has resulted in the death of at least 5,000 (according to the latest UN figures from 23 October), again including a number of journalists. Although none of the journalists from either side of the divide were killed for what they had written, they lost their lives though their line of work, making the media landscape all the poorer.
Others have, however, been punished for their work. Journalists from outlets including the BBC, Al-Jazeera, RT Arabic and Al-Araby TV have all reported obstructions to their reporting by the Israeli military, police and others since the conflict began. On 12 October, a team of BBC Arabic reporters were dragged from their vehicle, searched and held at gunpoint by police in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, despite their vehicle being marked “TV” and the presentation of press cards, the BBC reported. On 26 October, Lama Khater, a freelance writer with Middle East Monitor and a political activist, was arrested by the IDF in the city of Hebron, West Bank, her husband Hazem Fakhoury told CPJ. Confrontational attacks have been coupled with subtle ones: On 9 October, for example, The Jerusalem Post reported that its website was down following a series of cyberattacks. The group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the attacks, reported Axios and Time magazine.
Media freedom could deteriorate further. On 16 October, Israel proposed new emergency regulations that would allow it to block broadcasts that harm “national morale”. Officials threatened to close Al-Jazeera’s local offices under the proposed rule and to stop the global news organisation from freely reporting on the war.
With the situation on the ground increasingly difficult and with limited media from Gaza itself, the internet more broadly, and social media specifically, is a lifeline. And yet getting information within and out of Gaza has become increasingly difficult. Internet services have been disrupted by the attacks, while Palestinians and their supporters allege that social media platforms, in particular Instagram, are “shadow-banning” their content. Instagram’s owner, Meta, has denied this, but they have admitted that they inserted the word “terrorist” automatically into translated bios of Palestinian users, something they apologised for on 19 October.
Social media giant X, which has had a tumultuous ride under owner Elon Musk over the last year to say the least, has also been flooded with misinformation, as we reported on 18 October. Images have been adopted from other conflicts, fake accounts created in a smorgasbord of lies intended to sow confusion, division and hate. At a time when it could be providing an essential role in the spread of crucial information, trust is low.
As those within Israel and Palestine struggle to access reliable news, international media outlets find themselves in the middle of claims of irresponsible reporting, such as jumping too fast to conclusions over who was behind the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital, and accusations of bias. The latter can sometimes be unhelpful noise. To instantly shout “censorship” can be erroneous. There are a host of reasons why newspapers and broadcasters might run a story or interview a person (some being mundane, merely down to the availability of one person over another). Impartiality is not a prerequisite for outlets that are not funded by taxpayers. Nor does objectivity equate to equal weight for views. Still, with a conflict as complicated as that between Israel and Palestine, as longstanding, as heated and as volatile, a plurality of views and careful attention to how information is both interrogated and reported is crucial. It’s not clear that every outlet has adhered to these fundamental principles.
As for the actual red pen, one example of direct censorship came from Yale University’s campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News, which censored a pro-Israel opinion piece by removing references to Hamas atrocities. We suspect there are others. Alas the nature of censorship and self-censorship means we don’t always know about them.
Has criticising Israel become a punishable offence for the average person? A “McCarthyite backlash” against criticism of the country’s bombardment of Gaza has been claimed by civil rights groups in the USA, as people are fired, threatened with dismissal or blacklisted from future jobs, according to the Guardian. Take one example: Michael Eisen, editor of the scientific journal eLife, was forced out of his job after reposting an article from satirical magazine the Onion with the headline: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”. In Germany, the journalist Michael Scott Moore noted that “the tendency in Berlin right now is to squelch as much criticism of Israel as possible”, citing the arrest of a Jewish Israeli protesting the war amongst others. In the UK, home secretary Suella Braverman suggested that waving Palestinian flags and using popular pro-Palestine slogans could be illegal and a ministerial aide was sacked from his government role following his letter to the prime minister calling for a ceasefire. In Switzerland, all demonstrations related to the conflict were banned in Zurich. In Australia, New South Wales authorities vowed to stop marches from proceeding. And in Israel, in one of the more unpleasant twists, the parents of hostages, who were protesting in Tel Aviv, were spat at and abused by supporters of current leader Benjamin Netanyahu. This in addition to police saying they’ve investigated and detained more than 100 people for their social media activity and, as we reported last week, activists being arrested in Jerusalem for putting up posters with the message: “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together.”
Staying with Israel, human rights activists worry the detentions are due to the police adopting a wider interpretation than normal of what constitutes incitement to violence. A well-known singer and influencer, Dalal Abu Amneh, was held in police custody for two days. According to Abeer Baker, her lawyer, she was accused of “disruptive behaviour” by police officers, who said her posts could incite violence, in particular one featuring an image of the Palestinian flag with the Arabic motto: “There is no victor but God.” Baker said Abu Amneh was expressing a religious sentiment, while Israeli authorities interpreted the singer’s post as a call to arms for Palestinians. This example highlights a tension right now, the question of what defines hate speech and how we balance the rights for people to protest (be it online, in the streets or through petitions) versus the rights for people to live free from fear and persecution. Some of the banners and comments made at protests have been vile. They are clearly, irrefutably hate speech and given recent events – an Orthodox Jewish man assaulted in London, a mob storming Dagestan’s airport looking for people arriving from Israel, cemeteries and synagogues set alight in Tunisia and Austria, to name just a few – one could argue incitement. Still, it is clear that there has been huge overreach. Many who have been punished for what they’ve said have been peaceful, with views that – even if you disagree with them or find them uncomfortable – should be protected.
The above is far from an exhaustive list. It could go on and on. Consider Adania Shabli, the Palestinian writer whose event at Frankfurt Book Fair was called off. Consider the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose appearance at 92NY, one of New York City’s leading cultural organisations, was pulled on the back of his criticism of Israel. Yet even this incomplete tally paints a grim picture. Free speech can be difficult and no more so than with Israel-Palestine, a conflict which is and always has been so deeply emotive and tribal. The knee-jerk response at present seems to be to silence. This is no solution. As George Orwell famously said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” This applies as much to those in Israel as it does to those in Gaza and to all of us outside. There have already been enough victims and casualties – let’s ensure free speech is not another.
18 Oct 2023 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
The tragedies unfolding in Israel and Gaza are putting the social media platform X to the test – a test that X keeps failing. X, formerly known as Twitter, has elevated disinformation alongside fact-based reports on the conflict that range from graphic images created through AI, video game footage, and a plethora of recycled clips from Syria’s decade-long conflict.
Yet X’s disinformation overload should have been expected. Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform, it has undergone a series of algorithmic and “aesthetic” changes that upended the credibility of the content. Instead of boosting posts from experts and on-the-ground reporting, X’s algorithm promotes Twitter Blue subscriptions, accounts which pay for a verification checkmark. This “pay to play” method has served to boost accounts of bots and propagandists, and has enabled disinformation to go viral in a short amount of time.
Musk’s favourite sycophants are being rewarded for their click-baiting methods amid the violence in Israel and on the Gaza Strip. Mario Nawfal – an obscure businessman who gained a following on X from his endorsements by Musk – posted a 2020 YouTube video showing Turkish missiles fired in northern Syria. Nawfal misstated: “Salvo of rockets fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip towards Israel” alongside the video.
His message was tagged with a “community note” – an X fact-check system implemented through crowd-sourcing. But the post remained up, highly visible because of X’s algorithm. As of this writing, the post had more than two million views.
Musk’s own attention-seeking posts amid the violence demonstrate that. “All Tesla superchargers in Israel are free,” Musk posted. But his gesture was not all about altruism. There was a caveat. The post was restricted to replies from paid subscribers only.
Of greater concern is the platform’s role and influence in spreading distortion and disinformation. Musk bought Twitter for his own ideological reasons, and has viewed himself at war with “woke” values, which he argues erodes the foundations of democracy. Through his own personal crusades he has aligned himself with far-right ideologues and authoritarian leaders. And in turn he has garnered their loyalty.
Musk has made other changes on X that also have had a profound impact on how facts are represented. Earlier this month, X removed media-composed headlines from news articles. Musk argued the change was to “greatly improve the aesthetics” of the platform. But now users are shown images without context, allowing for bots, propagandists and even meme accounts to fill in the blanks with unsubstantiated claims. The result has created an alternative reality where conspiracies reign over fact.
As Twitter, the platform was a digital democratiser that gave voice to ordinary citizens beyond the confines of traditional media. In times of political upheaval or natural disaster, Twitter had a reputation for delivering on-the-ground reporting and firsthand accounts in real time.
Now it is Musk’s personal megaphone promoting his political views and business interests.
X’s representation of the events in Israel and Gaza reveal that the platform’s strengths for truth-telling are eroded and all but gone. Will we heed the warnings by Twitter’s demise or even realise the impact X now has on how we see the world?
13 Oct 2023 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
The events of the last week have been horrific. We won’t rehash them here — the videos, photos and details coming out of the Middle East are everywhere you look. For an organisation that campaigns for free speech, we have struggled to find words to respond to the mounting loss of life and the horrendous accounts that emerge every day. But at Index our job is not to report on all of this. Instead our job is to uphold free expression, and to alert the world to the instances where this has been curtailed. So that’s what we’ll do. Here are the free speech issues we are most concerned about:
Killed and missing journalists
Amid the deaths of civilians, journalists are losing their lives. While there’s nothing to suggest that the journalists are being specifically targeted, their lack of protection is of huge concern, both for them and for the knock-on effect for media freedom more broadly. The Committee to Protect Journalists has reported that at least 10 journalists have been killed so far. The first was Yaniv Zohar, an Israeli photographer working for the Israeli Hebrew-language daily newspaper Israel Hayom, who was killed alongside his wife and two daughters during the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz in southern Israel on 7 October. Israel Hayom’s editor-in-chief has said that Yaniv was working that day. Nine Palestinian journalists have also been confirmed dead as of yesterday and one Israeli journalist is reported missing.
Protest bans
Across the world, buildings are being lit up with blue and white, while green, white, black and red flags are being held aloft in protest. While these vigils and protests are being enacted, so too are calls to shut them down. In the UK, home secretary Suella Braverman suggested waving Palestinian flags might be a criminal act (depending on the context) and told police chiefs to be on “alert and ready to respond to any potential offences”. In France, the interior minister yesterday announced a systematic ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Police have also warned against pro-Palestine rallies in Sydney, after some people chanted antisemitic slogans at a previous demonstration. The Sydney event organisers have distanced themselves from those people and said: “This behaviour has no place at these rallies.” Meanwhile, police in Sydney placed restrictions on Jewish people by warning them to stay at home while that first rally went ahead, and even arrested a man who was carrying an Israeli flag for “breach of the peace”.
There are certain areas that fall into “grey free speech” areas. Protest is usually not one of them. Only sometimes it is. The office was divided, for example, on whether there should be restrictions on protest outside abortion clinics. Today we are similarly divided. The Times argues here that some protests are making the leap from a peaceful right to expression to hate crimes. The Daily Beast argues the opposite and that these bans would erode our free speech rights.
Internet interruptions
This week we’ve heard reports of social media accounts being suspended or blocked. NetBlocks, a former Index award-winner which maps media freedom, has also reported on declining internet connectivity in areas of both Israel and Palestine, after attacks and counter-attacks. In Gaza, a total blackout is anticipated if further internet infrastructure is damaged, making access to social media all but impossible before the apps are even opened. As we reported when Erdogan cut off access to social media following the Turkey earthquakes, access to the internet and these platforms is crucial during times of disaster and war. It can be a lifeline, connecting people to aid as well as to their loved ones.
Misinformation multiplied
On Wednesday, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins called out a video seemingly from the BBC being circulated by Russian social media users, which claimed Ukraine was smuggling weapons to Hamas. The video was entirely fake. Others have highlighted video after video claiming to be footage of Israel bombing Gaza or Hamas airstrikes on Israel, which are in fact a combination of Assad airstrikes in Syria, fireworks in Algeria and even video game footage. Both faked and reappropriated content are running rampant on X (formerly Twitter), which is not necessarily anything new. But a Wired report suggests that the scale of the problem is new. Boosted posts from premium subscribers take precedence over once-verified news providers and hordes of fired misinformation researchers now spend their time updating their CVs rather than fighting fake news on the platform. And in an added twist fake news to smear both Muslims and Jews is also running rampant behind China’s Great Firewall on Sina Weibo.
Fair journalism
Getting news from on the ground is a huge challenge in this conflict, and it’s in that vacuum that the kind of misinformation we just outlined takes hold. So it’s all the more concerning that Israel’s public broadcaster Kan News reported that the Israeli cabinet is planning emergency legislation to ban Al Jazeera, which does have a presence on the ground in Gaza. This is not the first time Israel has announced a ban on the network. Back in 2017 Israel looked set to join a boycott by Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which all accused the network of sponsoring terrorism. Relationships between Al Jazeera and Israel have also been very strained since the May 2022 killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. But if Al Jazeera is banned, one of the few media outlets reporting from within Gaza will go silent.
We know that conflicts can deal a blow to free expression. At Index we are here to ensure that doesn’t happen, or at least if it does happen that it doesn’t go unnoticed. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.
10 Mar 2023 | Hungary, Israel, News and features, Poland, United Kingdom, United States
When the most distinguished former chair of Israel’s Supreme Court, the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Aharon Barak, said that he would go before a “firing squad” if it would help prevent what he sees as an existential threat to his country’s democracy, it’s a safe bet he was talking about something momentous.
Barak’s January denunciation of the attempt by Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government to neuter the Court was just part of what has brought many tens of thousands of Israeli citizens out in unprecedented protests across the country. An impressive array of judicial, political, ex-military and intelligence leaders have warned that Netanyahu’s programme is leading Israel on a path akin to that of authoritarian governments like Hungary and Poland at best, and dictatorship and “fascism” at worst.
The coalition formed on 29 December is easily the most right wing in Israel’s history and includes in key Cabinet posts two religious and avowedly extreme and anti-Arab supremacists, Bezalal Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, both determined that Israel should annex the occupied West Bank. Their appointment adds a volatile new element to a conflict in which 14 Israelis and 70 Palestinians have been killed this year alone.
But it is the “reforms” to the Supreme Court drawn up by Netanyahu’s justice minister Yariv Levin which, opposed by an Israeli majority in opinion polls, have unleashed a wave of outrage on the streets. These include clauses heavily curbing judicial review, removing the criterion of “reasonableness” by which it can judge government decisions, for appointments of the Court to fall under the direct control of the government, and for judgements ruling that a government decision in unlawful or conflicts with semi-constitutional Basic Laws to be overruled by a simple majority in the Knesset (parliament).
The Court is hardly the “overmighty” bastion of liberalism depicted by its critics. Last year, for example, it approved the planned eviction of 1000 southern West Bank Palestinians from their homes purportedly to make way for an Israeli military firing zone. But it remains the last hope for individuals, Jewish or Arab, fighting against unjust decisions, whether legal or administrative. What’s more in Israel’s single parliamentary chamber system the Court is the only check and balance on the executive and the Knesset majority it invariably commands.
The changes to the Court should not be seen in isolation from other measures planned or already in various stages of enactment or proposal. These include allowing the death penalty – unused since the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s execution in 1962 – for Palestinian terrorists, and the power to deprive Arab—though not Jewish—terrorists of residency as well as citizenship. Fears of secular Israelis have been fuelled by calls from ultra-orthodox parties for an end to the ban on segregation of men and women at publicly funded events, while Smotrich has even called for the banning of Arab political parties, representing nearly 20% of the Israeli population. Already under way is a bill to curb the law officers’ power to declare the prime minister unfit to rule. Many Israelis also see the wider judicial reforms partly as an attempt by Netanyahu to escape the possible consequences of his ongoing trial on three corruption charges.
The Netanyahu coalition agreement provides for prohibitively high taxation of Israeli civil-society organisations, several defending Palestinian human rights, which draw funding from mainly European governments, including Britain’s. The measure will not mostly apply to the many right-wing, pro-government advocacy groups because they are mainly funded by rich individuals, especially in the USA.
There has not yet been any legislative attack on Israel’s still fairly vibrant press, albeit in a market dominated by the pro-Netanyahu freesheet Israel Hayom. But writing after the election last October Aluf Benn, editor of the liberal newspaper Haaretz, pointed out that existing legislation for ordering a state of emergency lays down powers for a press clampdown, and suggested that Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir wanted a state “in which criticising the government or replacing it will only be a pipe dream.”
In a sense, however, the changes to the Supreme Court are the programme’s hinge, by severely weakening its right to strike down any of these or other measures because, say, they do not conform with the 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty. Indeed if so far vain attempts by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog fail to secure a compromise on the changes, and the government passes the Court legislation by the end of March as it intends, a major stand-off between it and the Court is in prospect, leaving much of Israel—perhaps even including senior Army figures—having to choose between its recognition of an elected government and its respect for the law as it has prevailed since the state’s foundation 75 years ago.
