On 10 October 2023, a film called Lyd was due to be screened in Jaffa, an old port city attached to Tel Aviv, inhabited by both Jews and Palestinians. Lyd is the Arabic name for the city of Lod, where the main Israeli airport is located. Part documentary, part fiction, this alternative history film describes the 1947-1949 Nakba and imagines what life would have been like in Lyd if that massive deportation had not taken place. In July 1948 a massacre was perpetrated in Lod’s Dahamshe mosque where, according to different sources, between 95 and 250 Palestinians who had found refuge there were shot to death by Israeli tanks. Released in July 2023, Lyd, co-directed by Rami Younis, a Palestinian journalist with Israeli citizenship, and a US documentarist, Sarah Ema Friedland, was shown in several festivals across the United States.
Banned films
But come 10 October, the film was not screened. On that very morning, the police informed the exhibitor, Mahmoud Abou Arisha, manager of the Al Saraya cinema, that the film was banned. The Minister of Culture, Miki Zohar, had demanded that the police step in, arguing that there was “a serious and immediate risk to public order”.
The minister had been briefed by a well-known far right activist. Needless to say, neither he, nor the minister, nor the police officer had seen the film. A petition to lift the ban was signed by fourteen Israeli artistic associations, arguing that “the role of the police is to protect freedom of speech, not those who wish to abolish it.” The police minister, Itamar Ben Gvir answered: “The lefties screaming their heads off after the cancellation of the screening of Lyd should understand that the law is the law and an order is an order.”
Lyd is not the only film to be banned in Israel recently. In August 2024, Jenin, Jenin 2, by actor and film-maker Mohammad Bakti, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, met the same fate. And in October of this year, it was the turn of the film 1948 - Remember, Remember Not by Israeli director Neta Shoshani. The accumulation of such decisions over a brief period of time is symptomatic of an obvious trend: the extension of censorship in a general atmosphere where the desire for a “Strong State”, an authoritarian one, is growing by the day.
Long since used to this, the Palestinians of Israel are of course its first victims. On 7 November, parliament passed a law making it possible for the “deportation of a terrorist” to be accompanied by the expulsion of all his relatives, parents, children, brothers or sisters. This decision necessarily concerns Palestinian Israeli citizens, because there has never been a need for a law to deport Palestinians from their homes in the occupied territories. This new provision merely adds to a long list of supremacist laws dividing juridically the treatment of Israeli citizens according to whether they are Jews or Palestinians.
At the same time - and this is new - an atmosphere of “tracking Jewish traitors” has developed. For over ten years, the parliament has known surges of authoritarianism, embodying the right wing’s determination to do away with the prerogatives of the Supreme Court and subject it to the sole discretion of the executive. There has already been been a flood of draft laws, decrees and decisions, all relating to restrictions on freedom of speech and action which no longer concern the Palestinian population alone1. They are now also targeting any utterance considered “offensive” to the State of Israel and its policies.
Thus a law was passed in October 2024 making it possible to fire any teacher or professor who has shown “sympathy for a terrorist organisation”. Knowing that any support of whatever kind for the Palestinian cause is considered “terrorist” we can imagine the pressure exerted on any history teacher, for example, who would dare to depart from the “official” version of the 1948 deportation of Palestinians, which holds that “Israel never deported any Arabs. They all left of their own free will.” Another draft law, still being debated, among several others of the same ilk, would inflict a fine equivalent to a little over $3,000 and a year in jail on anyone waving a Palestinian flag in a public institution. This law is clearly targeting students.
The threats to Haaretz, which is both a “newspaper of record” and society’s main pole of resistance to Benyamin Netanyahu’s colonial policies, are representative of this campaign against freedom of speech.
Haaretz, “sponsor of terrorism”
Thus, on 24 November 2024, the government approved a proposal from the Communications Minister, Shlomo Karhi, which requires every public administration and any organism benefitting from the financial support of the State to stop purchasing advertising space in this newspaper and taking subscriptions to it for its personnel.
Netanyahu declared his approval of this proposal. The government justified it on the grounds that “many editorials (...) compromised the legitimacy of the State of Israel.” The owner of Haaretz, Amos Schoken, is accused of “sponsoring terrorism”. Indeed, at a conference organised in London a few days earlier, on 27 October, before an audience largely made up of Jews, the latter - a self-proclaimed Zionist - had inveighed against “the cruel apartheid regime imposed on the Palestinian population” and spoke of “Palestinian freedom fighters whom Israel calls terrorists”. He referred to this statement a bit later, assuring that he considers “the use of terror illegitimate”, but without withdrawing the term “freedom fighters.”
The government latched onto this affair to start mounting what looks like an indictment for treason targeting Israelis denouncing the colonialism of their state. Without waiting for the passage of this draft law, the Minister of Interior Affairs, Moshe Arbel immediately suspended all of his ministry employees’ subscriptions to Haaretz. Yariv Levin, Minister of Justice, proposed the passage of a law aimed at any Israeli without exception calling for a boycott of the State of Israel to be punished by a ten year jail sentence - twenty years in wartime. Aluf Benn, the paper’s editor in chief immediately reacted:
Netanyahu has never liked our reporting and our strong stance against his policy of occupation and annexation in the occupied territories and his overall denial of Palestinian rights. In 2012, he called “Haaretz” and “The New York Times” the “main enemies of Israel” (and later denied it). We were little surprised when, several weeks into the current war, Netanyahu’s henchman Shlomo Karhi, the communications minister, drafted a cabinet resolution to boycott Haaretz and stop government-paid advertising and subscriptions to the paper.Karhi sought to outlaw and shut down any media “helping the enemy by undermining public morale in wartime.”
His effort to punish Haaretz was blocked initially by the Justice Ministry, citing the danger to press freedom.
But Netanyahu and Karhi simply awaited another opportunity, eventually citing controversial remarks by our publisher Amos Schocken to declare the Haaretz boycott at last Sunday’s cabinet meeting. We are not alone in the government’s cross-hairs. With a cease-fire in Lebanon and dwindling fighting in Gaza, facing a weak parliamentary and street opposition, Netanyahu has relaunched his coup at full speed. “We were elected and can enact regime change,” explained Karhi, who also seeks to close Israel’s public broadcaster, which the government sees as too independent. His coalition colleagues are promoting anti-democratic bills that threaten to undermine free elections and other means of political expression, as they prepare for building Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza.
But we are not terrorized or terrified by Netanyahu’s threats and his efforts to delegitimize our journalism and strangle “Haaretz” financially. We will stick to our critical mission to stand for human and civil rights and to expose government wrongdoing and war crimes. This is our duty – even more so when Israel is at war2.
Benn is used to this kind of pressure. Just over a year ago, Minister Karhi had already suggested that the government boycott the newspaper throughout the State apparatus - “army, police, prisons, ministries and public companies”3. But since 7 October 2023, the patriotic fervour that has engulfed Israeli society has enabled the colonialist far right to assert its program publicly with far greater confidence.
“The new head of Defence has said so: apartheid is official”
According to many accounts, the re-election of Donald Trump has made Netanyahu and his far right cronies “euphoric”4. The idea of changing the balance of power in the region in Israel’s favour goes hand in had with the feeling that it will be possible to establish within the country a regime able to impose its domination ad infinitum. A stunning example: one of the first decisions taken by the new Defence Minister, Israel Katz, consisted of putting an end to the possibility of jailing a Jewish settler under the statute known as “administrative detention” which makes it possible to jail anyone as “a threat to security” without their being informed of the alleged offence and with no time limit.
At present there are an estimated 3,000 Palestinian detainees held without charge (not counting the unknown number of captured Gazans). The Minister of Defence has decided that henceforth, all Jewish citizens will be exempted from administrative detention. At the time he took this decision there were sixteen - all of them extremist settlers of the kind that are currently running rampant in the West Bank against the Palestinian population : they are now effectively set free. One rule for some, another for the others. “The new head of defence has said so: apartheid is now official”, was the Haaretz headline on 25 November. As for the settlers, they broke out the champagne.
Having succeeded in getting rid of his main political rival, former Miniser of Defence Yoav Gallant - notorious for his infamous declaration, following the 7 October, that Palestinans were “human animals” - Netanyahu is now flanked only by opportunistic accomplices or unconditional cronies. Ben Gvir has already transformed the police into an armed militia at his beck and call. In the far right’s cross-hairs now are the Attorney General of the State, Gali Baharav-Miara, and the head of Shin Beit (the internal security service), Ronen Bar, both felt to be insufficiently reliable.
A “Strong State” accountable to none
As for chief of staff Herzi Halevi, it seems his days are numbered: not for having carried out this monstrous war on Gaza but for having favoured a negotiation which led to the liberation of Israeli hostages, and above all for having strongly objected to the military re-occupation of Gaza. Besides which, Netanyahu wants to make sure he emerges unscathed from the eventual commissions of enquiry into responsibility for the security fiasco on 7 October 2023. For him it is vital to put all the blame for the Hamas attack on the General Staff. For Israeli jurist Yael Berda, law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “This is it. The authoritarian putsch has happened. (...) If you don’t support the State, then it turns against you. This authoritarian turning leaves no room for dissent or for debate5.”
This “Strong State” which is being established is of course in love with Trump: an avalanche of fake news must fuel the absolute control of “alternative information”. This is why one of the priorities of Netanyahu and his messianic cronies is to prevent the circulation of serious news about what has happened and is still happening in Gaza and Lebanon. Such news is usually produced by local media and Israeli NGOs. In spite of the pressure exerted by a massive propaganda machine (the notorious Hasbara) and the many obstacles raised by those in power, including banning journalists from going into Gaza, the latter continue to provide as much verifiable news as possible on the on-going wars.
If more and more Israelis are leaving their country now - the exact numbers are unknown - it is not so much because of the massive crimes perpetrated in the occupied Palestinian territories as because of the feeling, in certain sectors of public opinion, that there is a galloping erosion of the “democracy” which Israeli Jews have known since the creation of their country.
In this respect, the passage of the law entitled “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish people” in 2018 constituted a major turning-point by officialising Jewish supremacy as the central pillar of the State. It was then that the most racist, colonialist and messianic fringe of the population began the radical imposition of an agenda which it had been promoting for years. Its weight has grown considerably, at first in the climate of panic which developed following the 7 October security fiasco, then increasingly encouraged by the “successes” achieved in the campaign of destruction in Gaza, perceived as legitimate revenge. The paradoxical feeling, combining fear, all-powerfulness and immunity which then set in could only fuel the rejection of “internal traitors”, those rare Jews who oppose the supremacist trend that has gripped the majority of the population. The open road to a “Strong State” is no more than a natural consequence of this evolution.
Translated by Noël Burch.
1For example, the word “Nakba” had already been removed from history text books given Palestinian children citizens of Israel in 2009.
2Aluf Benn, « Netanyahu’s governement wants to shut us down », Haaretz, 26 November 2024 .
3Jonathan Lis, « Israeli Government imposes sanctions on Haaretz, cuts all ties and pulls advertising », Haaretz, 24 November 2024.
4Neri Zilber, « Benjamin Netanyahu’s allies call for purge as Israeli PM’s power grows », Financial Times, London, 24 November 2024.
5Alona Ferber, « We are there : two stories of Israeli authoritarianism », Prospect Magazine, London, 4 November 2024.