11 Oct 24 | Brazil, Israel, Mexico, News and features, Newsletters, Palestine, United States
Hello, readers. This is Sarah Dawood here, the new editor of Index on Censorship. Every week, we bring the most pertinent global free speech stories to your inbox.
This week, headlines have been dominated by the ongoing devastation of the war in the Middle East, where the death toll is now more than 42,000 in Gaza, and more than 2,100 in Lebanon. Monday also marked a painful milestone for Israelis and Jewish people everywhere, as the first anniversary of Hamas’s attacks, which killed 1,200 people. You can read Jerusalem correspondent Ben Lynfield’s forensic analysis on the region’s risks to journalists and press freedom below.
Attention has also been on the destructive Hurricane Milton in Florida, which has killed at least 16 people. The climate event has resulted in human tragedy, physical damage and the distortion of truth, with false information and AI-generated images accumulating millions of views on social media, including a fabricated flooding of Disney World in Orlando. Such imagery has been seized upon by hostile states, far-right groups, and even US politicians to advance their own aims: Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reposted the fake Disney World photos to its Telegram channel, whilst Republican members of Congress have proclaimed conspiracy theories of government-led “storm manufacturing”. This emphasises how crises can be manipulated and monopolised to stir up division.
But while disinformation can undermine democracy, so too can information blockades. This brings us to some important stories coming out of Latin America. In Brazil, the social media platform X is now back online after a shutdown in September. The platform was banned by a top judge during the country’s presidential election campaign, in an attempt to prevent the spread of misinformation. But as Mateus Netzel, the executive director of Brazil-based digital news platform Poder360 told Reuters, social media bans not only restrict public access to information, but can undermine journalists’ ability to gather and report on news. Elon Musk himself was using X to post about the development of the ban, but this was inaccessible to Brazilian journalists. “In theory, there are journalists and outlets who do not have access to that right now and this is a very important restriction because they need to report on this issue and they will have to rely on indirect sources,” said Netzel.
We also heard frightening news from Mexico, where a local politician was murdered and beheaded just days after being sworn in as city mayor of Chilpancingo. Whilst we don’t yet know the reason that Alejandro Arcos Catalán was killed, his murder is yet another example of journalists, politicians, and other public figures being routinely targeted by criminal gangs. Bar active war zones, Mexico has consistently been the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, topping Reporters Without Borders’ list in 2022.
Meanwhile, in El Salvador, climate activists are being silenced through false imprisonment. Five protesters, who fronted a 13-year grassroots campaign to ban metal mining due to its devastating environmental impacts are now facing life in prison for the alleged killing of an army informant in 1989. The charge has been condemned by the UN and international lawyers as baseless and politically motivated, and echoes heavy-handed prison sentences being handed to climate protesters globally, including in democratic countries. As Index’s Mackenzie Argent reported last month, human rights lawyers have called out the UK’s hypocrisy in claiming egalitarianism whilst disproportionately punishing environmental activists, pointing specifically to the sentencing of Just Stop Oil’s Roger Hallam to five years in prison in July. These two stories, although taking place 5,000 miles away from each other, underline how climate defenders are currently on the front line of attempts to be silenced.
04 Oct 24 | Israel, News and features, Newsletters, Palestine, Sudan
If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This well-known philosophical question most likely stems from the work of 18th century philosopher George Berkeley, who questioned the possibility of “unperceived existence”. In other words – did something really happen if no one is around to witness or perceive it?
This might seem a lofty and pretentious way to start this week’s Index newsletter. But the first-hand observance and subsequent documentation of events is the fundamental basis of rigorous journalism, and enables injustices to be accurately reported around the world. It provides us with the ability to understand truth from falsehood. And it is being increasingly undermined.
Journalistic “black holes” are appearing in conflicts globally, stopping the world from being able to witness what is happening on the ground, and therefore causing us to question reality.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, triggered by Hamas’s incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has banned foreign media access in Gaza. Only very limited international news crews are allowed in under strict conditions. This has left the world reliant on press statements, the words of government officials, and individual Palestinian journalists, who have risked their lives to showcase the brutality of the war on social media.
And many have lost their lives in the process. According to investigations by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of 4 October 2024, at least 127 journalists and media workers are among the more than 42,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation started gathering data in 1992. The CPJ has determined that at least five of these journalists were directly targeted.
Major broadcasters have also been targeted. Last month, Al Jazeera’s office in the West Bank was raided and shut down for 45 days by Israeli soldiers, following the closure of the channel’s East Jerusalem office in May, on claims that they are a threat to Israel’s national security. But as Al Jazeera English’s Gaza correspondent Youmna El Sayed writes for Index this week, such shutdowns of legitimate news providers prevent global audiences from being able to see the pain and suffering that is being endured by both Palestinians and Israelis, encouraging misinformation to propagate.
As hostilities escalate across the Middle East, news channels continue to be curtailed. This week, an air strike destroyed the headquarters of the religious al-Sirat TV station in Beirut, Lebanon, on grounds that it was being used to store Hezbollah weapons, a claim which Hezbollah denies. Foreign correspondents are, however, still allowed in Lebanon – but in Iran all broadcasting is controlled by the state, with foreign journalists barred, meaning access to objective reporting is essentially impossible.
Outside of the region, other countries’ severe reporting restrictions and intimidation of journalists have made it difficult for global audiences to comprehend what is happening in conflicts. This includes Kashmir, the disputed mountainous region between India and Pakistan, and Sudan, where it is estimated that 90% of the country’s media infrastructure has been wiped out by the civil war.
What is the impact of this? The worrying rise in press suppression not only creates huge risks for journalists, but severely curtails people’s ability to understand geopolitics, conflict, and in future, historical events. It stops us from being able to weigh things up and form opinions based on what we have perceived.
Ultimately, it is impossible for any news producer, whether they be an individual correspondent or a major broadcaster, to be truly “objective”. People are driven by motives, both emotional and financial, and their own lived experiences. A news organisation, backed by a particular country or group, will appear truthful to some and severely biased to others.
But the only way to ensure some level of objectivity is to retain access to a broad range of sources, from the BBC to Al Jazeera, helping us form a more rounded world view. To go back to Berkeley’s philosophical analysis, the only way to verify the truth is to have the privilege of witnessing the evidence. Without this, it becomes virtually impossible to be able to tell fact from fiction.
05 Sep 24 | 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.
02 Aug 24 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
They emerge very slowly from a black hole in the background. Men and women, their faces tired, all take heavy steps. Some are dragging a bag, others have mattresses and household objects. The stage is lit in green and red, illuminating the young actors and dancers one by one, emphasising their individual suffering. The music – rapper Hijazi’s remix of the traditional Palestinian choral song Tarweeda Shamaly – repeats in a hypnotic loop to tell us that, for 70 years, the story of Palestinians has always been the same: moving forward in an exhausting and constantly uprooting process. The Palestinians call it Nakba and this dance-theatre show named The Story is Sick by the Ayyam al Masrah company, the only one active in the strip, was performed just over a year ago live in Gaza. It was a performance like no other which I saw on a reporting mission to the strip. Today it seems to rise again in tragic reality, after 7 October 2023.
The theatre has been destroyed now and no longer exists. The cast and crew have paid a horrific price for living in Gaza. Of the company’s 20 or so actors, aged between 20 and 35, many are displaced in Deir al-Balah. Only one, the stage technician, Ahmad Gheidar, decided to stay in Gaza, risking his life; a couple of actors, Mohannad and Lina, got engaged, left Gaza and did everything they could to escape to Egypt; three have died with all their families. None of the members of the company have a home to return to; their houses are all destroyed. The only thing left to the actors of Ayyam al Masrah is theatre, as the artistic director of the company, Mohammed al-Hessi recalls, constantly disturbed in the background by the buzz of Israeli drones.
For al-Hessi himself it was unimaginable that one of the play’s characters – a Palestinian, forced to abandon his home in 1967 and wander through refugee camps in the region – would be his reality a year later. Displaced from Gaza City after the Israeli bombings of November 2023, he and his wife and three daughters are searching for a fourth refuge, after Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and Rafah.
“I am very worried,” he told Index in a series of daily voice messages that continue a dialogue that has already lasted more than six months. “There are thousands of people who continue to move by cars and donkeys like us. After being shot in the back and miraculously unharmed, I spent two months on Rafah beach in al-Mawasi. Here, at times I hoped to end it all. The cold in February was excessive and we tried to survive by somehow diluting the salty sea water for drinking. I was morally destroyed by the impossibility of giving a dignified life to my wife and my daughters, but I didn’t believe I would be forced to move again and again to get away from the bombings that reached us as far as the south of the strip”.
Al-Hessi’s fate is also that of a man unafraid to speak truth to power: inconvenient for Israel, to the point of not being able to leave Gaza for seven years now, because he raises political issues in his plays and is not afraid to highlight the impact of the Israeli occupation on Gazans’ daily life; inconvenient for Hamas because the theatre company has been the only one on the strip since 1995 that does not bow to the local powers that be. He has challenged Hamas’s moral police by putting men and women on stage as couples and has had the courage to question the Islamic values on which daily life is based, stimulating debate among spectators. In the audience, men and women sit together, next to each other, condemned by Hamas authorities as a dangerous potential for “promiscuity”.
In Gaza City, the success of The Story is Sick was so overwhelming when it was first staged in February 2023 that the number of performances was doubled to 40. “People loved our show because it manages to generate a great debate between the public and the actors,” al-Hessi told Index proudly. “After the performance everyone asks questions, as if looking for a solution. And the theatre has always been full: those who saw the show brought other people, students, associates. At the debut there were 350 people in the room and there were people waiting outside, sitting on the stairs.”
For those who attended the play last spring, the atmosphere was alive with debate, pulsating even. From the stands, many were wondering about the weight of tradition on family relationships and how the Israeli occupation and segregated life on the Gaza strip made the patriarchal system and male-female dynamics more burdensome and complicated.
Hana Abd al-Nabi, a lively and dynamic actor in the company, wrote the script of The Story is Sick together with the artistic director. She explained: “In this show we faced a new challenge: it was the first year in which we added male figures to the narrators on stage because we had always entrusted the role of the narrator to a female voice and body. The audience so far had not been mixed but was mostly female only.
“We then inserted male characters into the show and encouraged the presence of young men in both to change their point of view on the topics treated in our comedies. The female character tells the story from her point of view, and the male character tells the same story from his point of view. As an author I had to split between genders: if I were a man, would my wife say a certain thing, and would she complain in a certain way? And what would I do if I were a woman? And who would be right between the two? On stage, with respect to individual stories, both genders – man and woman – are right, each from their point of view. Actually, we still find ourselves trapped in the same cultural and social pattern, from the era of the Arabian Nights to the era of social media, where our entire lives, even private, are discovered, exhibited.”
The project started with a workshop between 23 actors to understand how to tell a story. The cast of Ayyam al Masrah had gathered the voices of three generations of Palestinians from Jaffa, Haifa and all of historic Palestine. Stories of the first Intifada, the second, and life today. Stories of couples who got married or who lived together or who had a love story. Each actor brought six stories. “In this journey,” said al-Hessi, “we saw something happen in front of us: in this story of the Palestinian people there was something sick. From 1948 to today, love and life have progressively disappeared. And we saw that the future in the eyes of the young was already broken, and that each of us was torn to pieces. We saw how each event – an intifada, an offensive, a siege – had an increasingly worse effect on social life. In the difficulties of everyday life, in looking for a job, in family life: even love stories have disappeared.”
The only moment al-Hessi smiles is when he talks about his workshops in refugee camps: “Our first show in 1995 was called Mothers. 200 women came to see it, and a long discussion started there too. Instead of an hour we stayed there for three hours because all the women wanted to talk. From there we started our storytelling programme for women. Now I have built a 20-minute show that stages our displacement in which women are once again the main characters and we will have three female actors on the stage. And I wrote another script, and I have three male actors on stage: it is a show tailored to the needs of children up to 12 years of age.”
Al-Hessi’s recipe is simple. At the end of the day, his bread is life: tragic, absurd, unexpected, constantly balanced between the grimace of pain and the laughter of survival.
