Remembering Uri Avnery - an Israeli giant

Uri Avnery was the last Zionist who genuinely supported equality

 Uri Avnery marching with Gush Shalom peace activists, 2002. Photograph: Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

Uri Avnery, who died on 20^th August aged 94 was a remarkable political activist.  Avnery fought in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 (or the Nakba) and he defended that war as a defensive war. Avnery became a life long campaigner for peace as well as a political maverick. He edited the magazine Haolem Hazeh for close on 40 years and when it became the target of Israeli Labour’s state repression he stood for and was elected to serve in the Knesset. 

Uri Avnery in 1980, working as a journalist and publisher of the magazine HaOlam HaZeh. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Haolem Hazeh was a left-wing muck racking journal that attracted the ire of the Israeli Labour establishment.  It printed the story of how the Iraqi Jewish community, the worlds oldest Jewish community was forced out of the country, not by anti-Semitism but by Zionist agents planting and throwing bombs into Jewish cafes and even synagogues in order to simulate the appearance of anti-Semitism.  It took the side of Israel’s Oriental/ Misrahi Jews against the Ashkenazi Labour Establishment which saw the Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Jewish communities as providing the Jewish working class of Israel, once they had been de Arabised. 

It is arguable whether or not Avnery was a Zionist since he believed in a Jewish or Hebrew State alongside a Palestinian state but one inclusive of its Arab inhabitants.  He was part of the Canaanite group who believed in cutting Israel off from  the Jewish diaspora and becoming an Israeli nation. 

What Uri didn’t or refused to understand was that Zionism was a settler colonial state and that Zionism could not simply be abandoned once the Israeli state had been created. The character of the Jewish state was indelibly fixed by the manner of its birth.  It was condemned to be a bastard state. Zionism inevitably meant the displacement of the Palestinians from their land prior because of the need to secure a Jewish majority in a land where Palestinians were the majority, even in the part allocated by the UN to a Jewish state. This ensured that process of colonisation and discrimination would continue after 1948. A Jewish state also meant that Arabs would be consigned to the margins, an after thought.

Avnery, pictured in 2011, ‘was badly beaten and stabbed by Israeli fascists’ (Getty)

Yet despite this Uri Avnery was one of the very few Zionist supporters who genuinely believed in the 2 State Solution.  Most of those who profess support for 2 states do so because, like the Israeli Labour Party, they want segregation between Jew and Arab whilst seeking to ensure that Israel is not officially an apartheid state, as it is now, ruling over millions of people who haven’t even the most minimal democratic or civil rights.  Avneri sincerely condemned the occupation and the harsh military regime which ruled over the Palestinians whereas the hypocrites of the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, who say they support two states in fact support the military occupation, the checkpoints, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and all the other practices that go along with military rule.

I had my disagreements with Uri in particular his opposition to BDS in for example Uri Avnery – The Muddle Headed Zionist Opposes Boycott. In Veteran Israeli Peacenick Clings to Zionist Delusions I posted an article by Jonathan Cook which criticised Avnery’s argument that the position of Israel’s Arab population was akin to the discrimination against national minorities in Europe. I also reprinted in Uri Avnery - Supporter of 'Peace' and the Palestinian Police Statelet an article by Israeli anti-Zionist Tikva Honig Parnass Support of the Israeli Peace Camp for the Autocratic Palestinian Regime which detailed one of the problems of Avnery’s two state position.  It meant support for the Palestinian Authority, which is a nasty little police statelet, the subcontractor for Israel’s military occupation.

However when Israel killed 9 people on the Marva Marmara, a ship trying to break the blockade of Gaza, I had no hesitation in reprinting Uri’s excellent article Who is Afraid of a real Inquiry?.

Uri Avnery was a maverick, but a sincere maverick and also a brilliant journalist with a flare for writing.  I can remember discussing with Moshe Machover whether or not it would be fair to classify Uri as a Zionist or not. I don’t think we ever decided. One thing is for certain. Uri was one of the very few Zionists, if that is what he was, who genuinely and sincerely believed in equality between Jew and Palestinian and who was sincere in his desire for a fully independent Palestinian state and an end to the Occupation.

That was why Uri supported indeed initiated a Boycott of Settlement Produce but not of Israeli goods.

Uri wrote regularly for some 25 years a regular Friday article. Appropriately enough his last article entitled Who the Hell Are We?, written in the aftermath of the passage of Netanyahu’s Jewish Nation State Law, posed the question that has dogged the Israeli state - what is the identity and nationality of those who inhabit that State. 

Uri’s conclusion was that there is a Hebrew not a Jewish people in Israel which encompasses the Arab inhabitants of the State.  In other words Uri was rejecting the idea that Israel should be a state of only its Jewish inhabitants and the even more absurd idea that the Jews of Israel are part of a wider Jewish nation, encompassing Jews throughout the world.

Uri Avnery, the Israeli optimist who played chess with Yasser Arafat, has died – he was one of my few Middle East heroes

Robert Fisk's appreciation recalls the time he, Fisk, had walked across the bodies of up to 2,000 Palestinians, mainly women and young children, who had been slaughtered in Beirut by Israel’s fascist Phalangist allies under the watchful eyes of Israeli troops.  Not only had Israel’s military kindly lit up the sky with flares in order that the Phalange could see who they were killing but survivors who fled to the perimeter of the camp were turned back into the hell of the camps.  Fisk asked Avnery how the survivors of the Holocaust and their children could commit such an atrocity:

 “I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] was speaking at the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but he spoke only about the Jews. How could he not mention that others – many others – had suffered there? Sick people, when they are in pain, cannot speak about anyone but themselves. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral ‘power of attorney’, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF is more humane than any other army. ‘Purity of arms’ was the slogan of the Haganah army in ’48. But it never was true at all.”

I shall certainly miss his regular Friday article which can be found here! Below are two appreciations of Uri and I also recommend Jonathan Steele’s excellent obituary.

As Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team observed ‘His (Uri’s) death, in a lot of ways, marks the end of the two-state solution – he was the last activist I know of that was really calling for it.”

Tony Greenstein 

The Israeli peace activist who crossed enemy lines and shaped generations

Adam Keller, who spent 50 years working alongside Uri Avnery, remembers the man who hoped for a warm embrace between an Israeli and a Palestinian president.

By Adam Keller

Uri Avnery (Yossi Gurvitz)

How to sum up in a few words 50 years of political partnership, which was also an intimate friendship, with the person who, I believe, had the most influence on me?

The starting point: summer of 1969. A 14-year-old from Tel Aviv, during the summer between elementary school and high school, I notice an ad in HaOlam HaZeh newspaper asking for volunteers at the election headquarters of the “HaOlam Hazeh – Koah Hadash” (“New Power”) party. I went. In a small basement office on Glickson Street, I found three teenagers folding propaganda flyers into envelopes. To this day, the smell of fresh print takes me back to this very moment. Two hours later, we heard a commotion outside. Member of Knesset Uri Avnery, the man whose articles brought us to this office in the first place, walked in. He was returning from an election campaign in Rishon LeZion. He exchanged a few words with the volunteers, thanked us for our help, and went into a meeting room with his aides.

At that point, it was not Uri Avnery’s opinions on the Palestinian issue that motivated me to volunteer for the campaign. My own opinions on the matter were not fully formed yet. Only two years prior, in June of 1967, I had shared with many others in celebrating the fact that Israel expanded into “new territories.” I would not have even imagined that I would eventually dedicate most of my life to trying to get Israel out of those territories. I was attracted to Uri Avnery’s party primarily because it was a young, fresh political party that challenged the old, rotten establishment parties, and because it was opposed to religious coercion, and advocated for separation of religion and state, public transportation on Shabbat, and civil marriage.

A few weeks after I began volunteering, I left a note on Uri’s desk with a few questions: can we really make peace with the Arabs? Should we give back all the territories Israel occupied, or only some? And what will happen with the settlers? (The settler population at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is today.) A week later, I received a letter in the mail – three pages of detailed answers to each one of my 10 questions. I still have that letter. I have no doubt that Uri wrote it himself – his writing style seeps out of every word. He took the time and energy, in the middle of running a political campaign, to provide thorough answers to the questions of a 14-year-old teenager. I think it turned out to be a profitable investment.

The end point: Friday, August 3, 2018. A years-long political partner of Uri Avnery, at 63 years old, I receive his weekly column, as I do every Friday. In this article, he wrote about the Jewish Nation-State Law and Israel’s national identity, and whether it was Jewish or Israeli (he, of course, strongly advocated for an Israeli identity). As I had done many times before, I wrote him an email commenting on the substance of the article, raising some fundamental objections. He suggested we discuss them further next time we meet. I asked for his opinion on the protest against the Nation-State Law, scheduled for the following day by the Druze community. He said he was convinced that the demonstration would not focus on the Druze’s exclusive standing in Israeli society, or the unique bundle of rights they get for serving in the military, but that it will tackle the fundamental principle of equality for all citizens.

Tens of thousands of protesters joined the Druze community in rejecting the Jewish Nation-State Law at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on August 5, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The last which I will ever hear from him was a one-line message on my computer screen: “I am going to the Druze protest tomorrow.” I assume that he did read what I had written him, and that he woke up the next day with the intention of participating in the protest. In the evening, when I was standing amidst the large crowd that amassed in Rabin Square, I assumed he was standing somewhere around. I rang his phone twice but there was no reply, chalking it up to bad reception (which is common during mass rallies when very many people use their mobile phones all at once). In retrospect I know that by then he had already been admitted to an emergency room at Ichilov Hospital, never to regain his consciousness. It was the activists who planned to give him a ride to the demonstration who had found him lying on the floor of his apartment.

What filled the 50 years between the start and end points? The HaOlam Hazeh – Koah Hadash party, which merged into Peace and Equality for Israel, a political party known as Shelli in Hebrew; the Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which managed meetings with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and became a faction of Shelli; the Progressive List for Peace, which we joined after Shelli disintegrated; and then Gush Shalom. So many meetings, marches, protests and conversations. So many memories.

Standing side by side, holding posters at a protest to prevent the closure of Raymonda Tawil’s news agency in East Jerusalem. The photo that Avnery’s wife, Rachel, took of that demonstration is still up on the wall of the room I am writing these very words in. A conversation with Avnery the day that HaOlam Hazeh, which he edited for 40 years, officially shut down. “I know this is a difficult day for you,” I said. He answered: “The paper was a tool, serving a purpose. We shall find other tools.”

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat being interviewed by Uri Avnery in west Beirut. (Photo by Anat Saragusti, courtesy of Uri Avnery)

It is early 1983. Uri Avnery, Matti Peled and Yaakov Arnon, known us the “Three Muskateers,” come back from a meeting with Yasser Arafat in Tunisia. As soon as he lands at the airport, he hands me photos of the meeting, and I bounce from one newsroom to another across Tel Aviv to distribute them in person. I then take a shared taxi to Jerusalem where Ziad Abu Zayyad, editor of the Palestinian Al-Fajr (“The Dawn”) newspaper, waited for me.

A bit later in 1983, the radio announcing the assassination of Issam Sartawi, a PLO member who often met with Avnery and was a close friend to him, and my phone call to Uri informing him of the sad news. The frustrating, endless phone calls in the couple of days that followed proved to us that it was impossible to rent a hall in Tel Aviv to commemorate a PLO man – even one who advocated for peace with Israel and was killed for it.

December 1992. Prime Minister Rabin, who had not yet signed the Oslo Accords and had not yet become a hero of peace, expels more than four hundred Palestinian activists to Lebanon, and we put up a protest tent in front of the Prime Minister’s Office. It is a cold Jerusalem winter, and it is snowing, but inside the tent that was donated by Bedouins from the Negev, it feels warm and cozy. Uri, Rachel, myself and my wife Beate join other activists in a long conversation with Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the northern branch of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, on Judaism and Islam, and how religion and politics converge and clash.

In 1997, in the middle of a protest in front of Har Homa – Netanyahu’s flagship settlement – Uri’s stomach wound, which he had been carrying since the war in 1948, breaks open. A Palestinian ambulance clears him to Al-Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem; we are all anxious. Rachel tells me, “even though I do not believe in God, I am praying.” But Uri recovers and lives on for 21 more years of intensive political activity.

May 2003, the Muqata’a (presidential compound) in Ramallah. That afternoon, there was a suicide bombing in Rishon LeZion, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drops a hint that he might send an elite IDF unit to “handle” Yasser Arafat that night. We are among 15 Israeli activists who go to Ramallah to serve as human shields. We call the media and tell them that “for the Prime Minister’s information, there are Israeli citizens sitting outside of Arafat’s door!”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo Accord (photo: Vince Musi / The White House)

Arafat shows Uri his gun and says, “if they come, I have a bullet in here for myself.” We spend an entire night at Arafat’s door, having conversations with young Palestinian guards in a mix of Arabic, Hebrew, and English, paying attention to every sound. Then, it is dawn, and we understand that we made it through the night safely, and that the soldiers will not be coming.

Another long, relaxed conversation when we stopped to eat something on our way back from a Progressive List meeting in Nazareth: “The Crusaders were here before us, they came from Europe and established here a country that lasted 200 years. Not all of them were religious fanatics. Among them were people who spoke Arabic and had Muslim friends. But they were never able to achieve peace with their neighbors or adapt to this region. They had temporary agreements and ceasefires, but were not able to gain real peace. Acre was their ‘Tel Aviv,’ and when it fell, the last Crusaders were thrown into the sea – literally. Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.”

“If I ever get the chance to serve as a minister, I would want to be education minister. That is the most important portfolio in the cabinet. The defense minister may be able to send soldiers to die in war, but the education minister can shape children’s consciousness. The policies of today’s education minister will still bear manifest results in 50 years, when today’s children become grandparents and talk to their own grandchildren. If I were the minister, the first thing I would do is remove the [biblical] Book of Joshua from the curriculum. That book advocates genocide, plain and simple. It is also a historical fiction – the events it describes never happened. Rachel was a teacher for 40 years, and every year she succeeded in avoiding teaching this trash.”

Rachel accompanied him everywhere, an active partner to everything he did, editing his articles and dealing with the all the logistics of organizing protests. We all knew she was a hepatitis B carrier, a time bomb that might explode at any minute. And when it finally did, Uri spent six months with her in the hospital, day and night. He almost had disappeared from political life. One day, I happened to bump into him in the hallway of Ichilov Hospital as he was pushing her in a wheelchair, from one checkup to another.

In her final weeks, someone told Uri of an experimental treatment that could save Rachel’s life. Although he knew the chances were slim, Uri spent large sums of money to purchase the medication in America and have it flown to Ben Gurion Airport, and from there, transported directly to the hospital. When she passed away, Uri asked that nobody contact him for three days, and he completely disengaged from the world. Once those three days were over, he went back to his routine of protests and political commentary ­– or so it seemed.

How to finish off this article? I will go back to 1969, to an article by Uri which I read under the table during a very boring class in eighth grade. I still remember it, almost word for word; it was a futuristic article that attempted to imagine what the country would look like in 1990. The page was split into two parallel columns, representing two parallel futures. In one of the futures, Independence Day in 1990 is marked by a tremendous manifestation of military power, with new tanks on display in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Moshe Dayan congratulates IDF soldiers who are on alert in the Lebanon Valley and the Land of Goshen near the Nile, and declares: “We shall never give up the city of Be’erot (formerly Beirut), this is our ancestral homeland!”

In the second future, on Independence Day in 1990, festive receptions are being held at Israeli embassies across the Arab world, but the most moving photo was captured in Jerusalem, of a warm embrace between Israeli President Moshe Dayan and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Adam Keller is an Israeli peace activist who was among the founders of Gush Shalom. This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Veteran left-wing journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery dies at 94

Avnery, who helped expose some of the darkest chapters in Israeli history and was a fervent opponent of the occupation, inspired generations of Israeli journalists.

By +972 Magazine Staff

Uri Avnery (left) marches alongside his wife Rachel during a rally against the occupation of the West Bank and the siege on Gaza. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Uri Avnery, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and a seminal peace activist who was among the first Israelis to advocate for a sovereign Palestinian state, died in Tel Aviv on Monday morning. He was 94 years old.

Born Helmut Ostermann to a bourgeois family in Beckum, Germany in 1923, Avnery’s family moved to Palestine in 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Tel Aviv. Just a few years after their arrival, Avnery joined the Irgun, the pre-state right-wing Zionist militia. Too young to take part in its militant actions, which included attacks against British soldiers and Arab civilians, Avnery distributed leaflets and edited the Revisionist journal Ba-Ma’avak (“In the Struggle”).

He left the Irgun in 1942, because he was uncomfortable with its harsh anti-Arab position, and joined the Givati Brigade of the Haganah during the 1948 War. During the war he wrote dispatches from the field for Haaretz newspaper, which he later compiled into a book. Avnery was wounded twice — the second time, toward the end of the war, seriously; he spent the last months of his army service convalescing and was discharged in the summer of 1949.

Avnery initially supported the idea of one state, in which a single nation would arise as a union of Arabs and Hebrews — the latter a term he preferred over Jews, since he advocated a state for the Hebrew nation rather than the Jewish people.

During the mid-1960s, Avnery believed that the national Hebrew movement was a natural ally of the Arab nation; he advocated cooperation between the two, under a joint name. By the end of the June 1967 war, however, Avnery changed his views: He advocated the establishment of a Hebrew state alongside an Arab one, as per the 1947 UN Partition Plan.

In 1950 Avnery, together with journalist Shalom Cohen, bought the failing HaOlam HaZeh (“This World”) newspaper in 1950. As editor-in-chief, Avnery turned the paper into a dissident and anti-establishment tabloid that mixed exposés on the corruption of the ruling Mapai government (Ben Gurion’s party, which dominated Israeli politics from 1948 until 1977) with gossip pieces and photographs of nude women.

Commonly derided by Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ben Gurion, the paper’s editorial position was anti-militarist. It published investigative reports that exposed the government’s racist and discriminatory policies against Mizrahi Jews and other ethnic minorities, opposed the military rule that was imposed on Israel’s Arab citizens from 1948-1966, and was the first to publicize the Yemenite Children Affair.

During the years he was editor of HaOlam HaZeh, Avnery was victim of numerous physical attacks. One ended with both his arms broken. In 1975, he was seriously wounded after an assailant stabbed him on his own doorstep.

 Uri Avnery, left, with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, 2002. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

The Shin Bet, Israel’s General Security Service, saw in HaOlam HaZeh a serious threat to the state and listed Avnery as the top enemy of the government. The newspaper’s office was bombed several times, with a 1972 arson attack destroying its entire archives. At one point, the Shin Bet even published its own tabloid, Rimon, in order to discredit HaOlam HaZeh and put it out of business. Rimon would operate for only three years before shutting down.

Avnery decided to enter politics in 1965, after the Knesset passed an anti-defamation law that sought to clamp down on HaOlam HaZeh. He founded the left-wing movement Koah Hadash (New Power). After his election to the Knesset in 1969, Avnery dedicated his parliamentary activities to promoting peace with Israel’s neighbors, fighting against religious coercion by the ultra-Orthodox, and championing civil liberties. He would return to the Knesset in 1979 with the dovish Sheli party, and in 1981 was the first MK to hold up the Palestinian flag alongside the Israeli one in the Knesset plenum.

In 1982, at the height of the Israeli army’s siege on Beirut, Avnery and a group of Israeli journalists, including Anat Saragusti, met with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in the city — one of the first times Israelis met with the Palestinian leader (Charlie Bitton and Tawfik Toubi, both members of Knesset from Israel’s communist party, met with Arafat and the PLO leadership two years prior). The meeting came almost a decade after Avnery made contact with one of Arafat’s envoys. Upon his return from Lebanon, members of the Israeli government called for Avnery to be tried for high treason. Avnery would continue to meet with Arafat in subsequent years, including in 1994, after the Palestinian leader arrived in the occupied territories under the Oslo Accords.

Uri Avnery (center) sits between Arab MK Ahmad Tibi (L), and Likud MK Zeev Elkin (R) in the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, February 16, 2014. (Flash90)

Avnery would eventually split off from Sheli with a group of Arab and left-wing movements to form the Progressive List for Peace, which called for equality for Israel’s Palestinian citizens and an end to the occupation. In 1993, feeling that Israeli peace groups did not take a strong enough stance against the government’s repressive measures — which included the 1992 expulsion of 415 Hamas members from the occupied territories —  Avnery formed the peace group Gush Shalom. He remained the head of the movement, helping organize demonstrations against the occupation and the siege on Gaza and publishing a weekly column until his death.

From the beginning of his journalism career, mainstream Israeli opinion held that Avnery’s writing was subversive and anti-Israel. In his later years he was the subject of controversy after he published articles attacking Russian immigrants and Mizrahi Jews, accusing them of responsibility for Israel’s rightward shift.

Uri Avnery’s wife Rachel died in 2011. They were married for 58 years and chose not to have children, so that they could dedicate their lives to political struggle.

Israel Outlaws the Northern Islamic League – Another Step Along the Road to a Police State

The ‘Only Democracy in the Middle East’ Bans Israeli Palestinian Organisation

Israeli Police Raid Offices of Northern Islamic Leagues Seizing Computers and Files

Sheik Raed Salah - leader of the Northern Islamic Leagues

  

Despite the repression and racism, it can nonetheless be said that Israeli Palestinians still enjoy certain, albeit very limited democratic rights.  Foremost among these are the right to form their own political parties and groups.

The decision to ban the Northern Islamic League, on the grounds that it is no different from Isis is the kind of blatant lie one has come to expect from Netanyahu.  If anyone has something in common with Isis and Al Qaeda it is Zionism and Israel which also uses religious fundamentalism as a means of legitimising its repressive and murderous policies.

Under arrest in court

As the ancient Greek saying goes, those whom the gods seek to destroy they first drive mad.

It is no surprise that, once again, the Israeli Labour Party/Zionist Union has supported Netanyahu's repressive and racist legislation.

The banning of the Northern Islamic League is not only a blatantly political act of discrimination, but it contrasts with the refusal to outlaw even the most racist and violent Israeli organisations like Lehava, to say nothing of the Jewish Home party in the Israeli government.

Tony Greenstein

Sheikh Raed Salah

Israeli ban on Islamic party marks a ‘dangerous turning point’

17 November 2015

Palestinian leaders in Israel warn that Netanyahu is exploiting Paris attacks to ‘shut door’ to minority’s political activity
Middle East Eye – 17 November 2015

The decision by the Israeli government on Tuesday to outlaw the country’s main Islamic Movement marks a dangerous turning point in Israel’s relations with its large Palestinian minority, Palestinian leaders in Israel have warned.

The move effectively drives underground a religious, political and social movement representing the views of a sizeable portion of Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, comprising a fifth of the population.

Sheik Raed Salah and the Northern Islamic League Supporters

Jamal Zahalka was among the Palestinian members of the Israeli parliament who called the decision a “declaration of war” against the country’s Palestinian minority.

“It is an attack not just on the northern Islamic Movement but on our entire community,” he told Middle East Eye.

Sheik Raed Salah

He and other community leaders noted that the Islamic Movement has not used or called for violence. He said the ban was driven solely by the agenda of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right.

“Netanyahu is a leader who needs to create enemies,” Zahalka said. “The recent US deal with Iran deprived him of his main bogeyman. The PA is helping him with security in the West Bank. Gaza is quiet. So he makes an enemy of the country’s Palestinian citizens.

Sheik Raed Salah and the Northern Islamic League Supporters

“In the elections [in March] he began his ugly incitement by saying we were coming out to vote ‘in droves’. Now he has the Islamic Movement in his sights. But he won’t stop with this.”

Netanyahu first mooted plans two years ago to shut down the northern wing of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah.

However, fear of international condemnation, as well as advice from his intelligence services that such a step could not be justified on security grounds, appeared to stay his hand.

Declared ‘illegal organisation’

Asad Ghanem, a politics professor at Haifa University, said Netanyahu had moved now to exploit the attacks in Paris last Friday, which were claimed by Islamic State (IS) and left 129 dead.

“He is making an entirely false comparison between the Islamic Movement and the most violent armed Islamic groups so that he can persuade the Europeans that this is connected to their fight against terror,” he told MEE.

Declaring the northern Islamic Movement an “illegal organisation”, Netanyahu said it “denies [Israel’s] right to exist and calls for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in its place.”

Early on Tuesday morning, police raided the movement’s head offices in Umm al-Fahm, as well as dozens of Islamic charities and welfare associations in communities such as Nazareth, Jaffa, Kfar Kana, Turan, Beersheva and Rahat.

Some 17 related organisations were also served with orders shutting them down. The group’s leaders were called in for questioning. Computers and documents were seized and the organisations’ bank accounts frozen.

Ghanem said the move would signal to Palestinian citizens that the “door is closed to them when it comes to participating in the democratic process”.

He added: “As well as being politically dangerous, this will also be seen as an assault on Islamic belief. The movement funds and organises student associations that teach the Koran. They will now be treated as illegal.”

Ghanem said nothing about the Islamic Movement had changed in the past decade. “The only thing that changed is the political extremism of Netanyahu and his government.”

Draconian measure

Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, said the order from the defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, was based on emergency regulations from the British Mandate period.

The decision threatens with arrest and imprisonment anyone who continues to be involved with the organisation or offers it services.

Adalah called it “an aggressive, draconian measure” that would “suppress a political movement that represents a large part of the Palestinian public in Israel”.

Salah denounced the ban, saying his movement would continue to defend Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City from what he termed Israeli threats.

For more than a decade Salah has clashed with Israeli officials by leading a campaign under the slogan “Al-Aqsa is in danger”, warning that Israel is seeking to erode Islamic sovereignty over the mosque area.

In September the government banned the Murabitoun, Muslim students organised by the Islamic Movement in the al-Aqsa compound. They had regularly clashed with Jewish extremists allowed into the area in ever-increasing numbers by the Israeli authorities.

Netanyahu and other ministers have accused Salah of incitement and blamed him for the wave of Palestinian protests and so-called “lone-wolf” attacks, many of them stabbings, of the past few weeks.

Salah said: “I will take every possible legitimate step, in Israel and internationally, to remove the measures taken against the movement.”

Welfare services threatened

The Islamic Movement was founded in the 1970s as both a political party and a provider of religious and welfare services. It split into two factions in the mid-1990s, with Salah’s so-called northern group refusing to participate in parliamentary elections.

The organisation runs kindergartens, health clinics, mosques, a newspaper and a sports league.
It is also a key member of the Follow-Up Committee, the Palestinian minority’s only representative national body. Mohammed Barakeh, the committee’s head, said the Islamic Movement would continue to participate in defiance of the ban.

Only a fortnight ago, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported that a year-long investigation by Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, had been unable to find security grounds for closing the organisation.

Two unnamed government ministers told the paper that Yoram Cohen, head of the Shin Bet, had told the security cabinet he objected to any move to criminalise the movement’s more than 10,000 members. It would do “more harm than good”, he reportedly told them.

Ghanem said the Shin Bet’s view was based on an assessment that allowing the Islamic Movement to operate “ensured its political activities were more open and more mainstream, and would avoid it being forced underground.

“The fact that Netanyahu has taken the opposite view tells us this is a political decision, not a security one.”

Both Zahalka and Ghanem said they feared that Netanyahu would next target Zahalka’s democratic nationalist party, Balad. Last month the Israeli prime minister accused the Balad party of conspiring with Hamas and Islamic State.

Terror link claims

The government immediately launched a media campaign implying that Salah’s movement had colluded with “terrorism” against Israel.

A document issued by Netanyahu’s office stated that the group was “a sister-movement of the Hamas terrorist organization. These organizations are secretly and actively cooperating with one another.”

The public security minister, Gilad Erdan, went further, saying: “The Islamic Movement, Hamas, ISIS [Islamic State], and the other terror organizations have a common ideological platform that leads to terror attacks in the world and the wave of terror attacks in Israel.”

Ghanem said it was preposterous to claim that the Islamic Movement shared common ground with Islamic State.

He also observed that, while the Islamic Movement and Hamas shared a political and religious ideology, Salah’s group forswore violence and militant activity in pursuit of its aims.

Zeki Aghbaria, a spokesman for the northern Islamic Movement, called the government’s characterisation of the organisation, as “political incitement”.

“Today I suddenly found I had become a criminal,” he told MEE. “That means they just criminalised any support for the defence of al-Aqsa, or for the Palestinian people under occupation, or for equal rights for Palestinian citizens in Israel, or for welfare provision for students and the handicapped.”

The decision effectively puts the Islamic Movement on an equal footing with the Kach movement, a Jewish extremist group banned in the 1990s after one of its members, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron.

Kach members, who still have strong representation in some West Bank settlements, call for violence against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories and demand their expulsion.

‘Anti-democratic persecution’

Ayman Odeh, leader of Joint List faction of all the Palestinian parties in the parliament, said of the move against the Islamic Movement: “This is indisputably a case of political, anti-democratic persecution that is part of the de-legitimization campaign waged by Netanyahu’s government against the country’s Arab citizens.”

However, the decision won overwhelming support from Israeli Jewish parties, including the main centre-left opposition party, Zionist Union.

The timing of Netanyahu’s announcement takes advantage of the growing climate against Islamic political activism at the local, regional and international levels.

Given the mood in Europe and the United States after the Paris attacks, Netanyahu can probably count on the international community not studying too closely the comparisons between the Islamic Movement, Hamas and Islamic State.

Regionally, meanwhile, the Islamic Movement is at its weakest. Its sister organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been outlawed in neighbouring Egypt, while Cairo has joined Israel in isolating Hamas in Gaza.

And locally, the Israeli Jewish public wants someone to blame after weeks of Palestinian attacks, including stabbings, in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel.

Intelligence services have admitted they have little idea how to deal with the so-called “lone wolves”, individual Palestinians not affiliated with any political faction, behind most of the attacks.

Zahalka said Netanyahu wanted a scapegoat and had found a convenient one in Salah. In statements on Tuesday, Netanyahu blamed the weeks of unrest on what he called “incitement” by the Islamic Movement about the status quo at al-Aqsa.

Haifa University sociologist Sammy Smooha told reporters his polls suggested that 42 per cent of Palestinian citizens identified with the Islamic Movement.

Salah is due to start an 11-month prison term next week after an Israeli court found him guilty of incitement over a sermon he delivered in Jerusalem in 2007. It is the latest of several jail terms he has served.

Israel Outlaws Nation’s Leading Muslim Group

by Richard Silverstein on November 17, 2015

in Mideast Peace

Contemplate this: the Department of Homeland Security announces that henceforth the Nation of Islam, the Westboro Baptist Church, and Zionist Organization of America are outlawed organizations.  They are considered supporters of a terrorist ideology and must completely dissolve their organizations and their programs.  Anyone found to be a member of any of the groups is liable to criminal prosecution.

In response, the groups refuse to accept the decree.  They announce that in order to continue representing the legitimate interests of their followers and co-religionists, they are going underground.  They denounce the decision as a serious violation of the Constitution and call upon the nation to protest it.  The result: dead silence.  Everyone who hasn’t been banned is too cowed to put up much of a fight, though scores of the remaining legal groups know the new policy is unjust and a grave violation of civil liberties.

That scenario sounds pretty far-fetched here in the U.S. (though China currently does precisely this to Tibetan Buddhists and the Falun Gong, and Iran does the same to the Bahai).  But it isn’t far-fetched at all in Israel.  Defense Minister Yaalon, a political ally of Kahanist Moshe Feiglin, took advantage of the terror hysteria sweeping the globe to outlaw the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, Israel’s leading Islamic organization.  Keep in mind that this is the same guy whom the NY Times’ Tom Friedman called “Israel’s very decent defense minister,” in a recent column.  Can you imagine what Friedman’s definition of ‘decent’ is?  Or better yet, what his definition of ‘decency’ is?

Israel’s Islamic Movement leader, Sheikh Raed Saleh

Its leader Sheikh Raed Saleh, has just been jailed for the umpteenth time for some offense or another.  Saleh, who successfully fought banning by the UK Tory government, is the equivalent of Malcolm X in the Israeli Palestinian community.

He is a fiery, uncompromising advocate for Muslim unity.  An implacable opponent of Israeli oppression of his co-religionists.  The Movement spearheaded resistance to Israeli encroachment on the Haram al Sharif.  Though it has never advocated violence or been charged with engaging in it, nevertheless the Israeli government blames the group for fomenting all of the Palestinian attacks against Jews over the past two months.

According to the Israeli Jewish narrative, everyone is to blame for anti-Israel terror: ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Islam–and now the Northern Movement.  Everyone, that is, except Israel.  It is never to blame for the bloodshed and massacres it inflicts.  It is merely a victim, defending itself against terrorist monsters like those who struck in Paris.

Is Saleh and the Northern Movement angry and defiant? Yes.  Is it an implacable foe of injustice against Israeli Muslims?  Yes.  Is its rhetoric intemperate at times? Yes.  But is it a terror group?  Does it commit or advocate violence? Does it advocate overthrowing the State?  No, to all of the above.

I warn the pro-Israel crowd here that you can dredge up misquotes and mistranslation from the Jerusalem Post and MEMRI all you want.  It won’t change the fact that this banning is inherently racist and Islamophobic (no Jewish terror group has been similar banned though there was talk of banning the Jewish fascist group, Lehava).  I have no interest in parsing propaganda tracts alleging Saleh said this or that, which you will all undoubtedly be marshalling to defend this outrageous decision.  So I put you on notice and a short leash.

מה שעשה היום יעלון, בחכמתו האינסופית, זה לקחת ארגון גדול וזהיר שהיה תחת זכוכית מגדלת, שכל צעד שלו דווח בגלוי, והפך אותו למחתרת. הכרזת מלחמה

— Noam R (@noamr) November 17, 2015

As I wrote above, this banning is a cynical ploy by the defense minister seeking to kiss-up to his Kahanist settler constituency.  It seeks also to criminalize a large cross-section of Israeli Muslims who are loyal to the NOrthern Movement, which plays a huge role in providing a social safety net among this community.   As NoamR tweeted (“What Yaalon did today in his infinite wisdom, was to take a large, cautious organization which was under a magnifying glass, whose every step was openly reported, and send it underground: a declaration of war”), this decree is not just anti-democratic, it will drive the Movement underground just as the Egyptian junta has driven the Muslim Brotherhood underground.  In Egypt, the result has been a series of bloody bombings and terror attacks by Egyptian Islamists angry at the massacres of the military regime directed against their followers.

This move by Yaalon will drive an even greater wedge between Jews and Muslims within Israel.  It will provoke more violence on both sides, more hatred.  As Noam wrote, it is nothing less than a declaration of war.  Until this time, the most savage violence was between Israeli Jews and Occupied Palestinians.  Henceforth, the action will gradually shift to within Israel itself.  The Palestinians of Israel are a loyal, long-suffering and generally quiescent regarding their second or third-class citizenship.  That may all be changing.  When it does, you will not have just a war between Israel and Palestine.  You will have a civil war within Israel: Israeli Jewish citizens murdering Israeli Palestinian citizens.  In the name of nationalist supremacy.

Israel is a State going to Hell in a handbasket.  It’s worst enemy is itself.  I have never witnessed a train wreck.  But watching this insanity slowly unfold is the closest thing to it.

I have been exploring what sort of organized protest or movement may spring up around this issue.  It is the sort of grave injustice which demands mass protest and the cooperation of disparate groups.  Speaking of which, watch what the Israeli “left” does and says around this issue.  Remember what I wrote above about “silence?”

Press Release  November 17, 2015
 

Gush Shalom: Netanyhau's outlawing of Israels the Islamic Movement is a demagogic and anti-democratic move, harmful in every respect

"Also those who disagree with the positions of the Islamic Movement in Israel should say clearly and unequivocally that outlawing this movement is a demagogic and anti-democratic move, harmful in every respect," says Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc. 

"Up to now, the Islamic Movement had acted openly, undertaking various political and religious activities which were public and visible for all to see – however disagreeable the message conveyed sometimes was. It is no coincidence that the heads of the Shabak Security Service had strong reservations about such a move. For many months they strongly advised the government not to drive underground a mass movement which has tens of thousands of supporters among the Arab citizens of Israel. In last night pushing through the banning of the Islamic Movement, Prime Minister Netanyahu has taken advantage of the atmosphere of hysteria following the atrocity in Paris, in order to take an ill-considered  step and gain cheap immediate popularity at the expense of incurring serious long-term damage. Historical experience in many times and places has shown that when a government gets away with outlawing a hated political movement, there would follow acts of oppression also towards other movements and parties".

Gush Shalom goes on to say: "The Northern Islamic Movement and its leader Sheikh Raed Salah were charged with fanning the flames at the Mosque Compound in East Jerusalem. But the very last body entitled to make such charges is a cabinet whose ministers include Uri Ariel, the foremost of all Temple Mount  provocateurs and firebrands. When the government in which Ariel is Minister of Agriculture outlaws Sheikh Salah’s movement, there is no escaping a feeling of outright discrimination and double standards in the actions and policies of the current government of Israel.”

Contact:
Adam Keller, Gush Shalom Spokesperson +972-(0)54-2340749

Attacking NGOs Who Tell the Truth

One of the myths of Israel's right is that the Supreme Court is a liberal Arabist institution - whereas it has presided over waves of confiscations and expulsions

 Israel – the transition from ‘democracy’ to dictatorship

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Noone should be surprised that ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ is fast jetissoning even the pretensions of being a democratic state.  The dictatorship that is the Occupation is rapidly coming home as dissident NGO’s, even the pro-Zionist  Btselem find their funding under attack.

NGO’s will only be able to receive funding from outside Israel with the permission of the government.  Meanwhile Sheldon Adelson’s free paper Israel Hayom, which is subsidised to the tune of $5 million by an   American/Zionist billionaire will be protected, even though it is destroying the rest of Israel’s independent media.

Right-wing Israeli NGO

Israeli hasbara has been going into overtime this week against the group Breaking the Silence, which recorded and publicised the stories of soldiers detailing what really happened in Gaza, the free-fire zones where civilians could be shot without hesitation and the collapse of any semblance of moral values.  The reaction has been to accuse Breaking the Silence of lying, being anti-Semitic (of course!), self-hating Jews etc. etc.  Shoot the messenger rather than deal with the message is the order of the day.

Ayelet Shaked - the 'angel of death' genocidalist and spearheading attack on human rights NGO's as 'justice' minister

Ayelet Shaked, who is on record as advocating the genocide of Palestinian people (or ‘little snakes’ as she terms Palestinian infants) has been appointed ‘Justice’ Minister.  It’s on a par with the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger at the time of the Vietnam War. 

Protest against Israeli apartheid outside new housing block within Arab East Jerusalem

She has Israel’s Supreme Court in her sights.  This is a favourite target of the far-Right.  The Supreme Court has an appalling enough record when it comes to Palestinian rights as it is.  It has ruled that Israeli law trumps International law.  It has given the go ahead for land confiscations, the demolition of villages and much else.  It has a grisly record of deferring to ‘security’ concerns and it is always cognisant of the need to uphold Zionist values (such as ruling that there can be no such thing as a common Israeli Nationality).  Nonetheless, the few liberal decisions it has made have proved irksome for the ‘democratic’ tyrants now ruling Israel.

Tony Greenstein

B'tselem visiting Arab farmer whose crops have been destroyed by settlers - Btselem, although a Zionist group, has been under consistent attack

Is Netanyahu waging ‘war’ on critics at home?

6 June 2015

The Israeli government has indicated it is preparing to take a hard line against human rights groups, the media and Supreme Court

Middle East Eye – 6 June 2015

The Israeli Right objects to foreign funding of NGOs - but not foreign aid for weaponry!

A month into resuming his premiership, Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of an increasingly autocratic rule, as critics warn that his new government is preparing to take a draconian line against Israeli institutions opposing its policies.

Despite its appalling record Israel's Supreme Court under Justice Miriam Naor is under attack from Shaked for not being even more right-wing

Israel’s new rightwing coalition has already indicated it will make a priority of tackling three fronts – human rights organisations, the media and the Supreme Court. All repeatedly clashed with Netanyahu during his previous terms in office.

The leader of the parliamentary opposition, Isaac Herzog, sounded the alarm last month, cautioning Netanyahu not to “raise a hand” against the judiciary, media or the country’s minorities, including its 1.5 million Palestinian citizens. Netanyahu, he added, appeared to have learnt “tricks” from the region’s dictators.

Long-time observers of Israeli politics also fear that the current narrow right-wing coalition will give the prime minister a much freer hand. In his two earlier governments, Netanyahu depended on the support of centrist parties, such as Labor and Yesh Atid. Now he faces no such constraints.

After Netanyahu awarded himself new powers to veto legislation this week, Dov Khenin, the only Jewish member of the Arab-led Joint List party in the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, wondered: “Are we for autocracy?”

Similarly, Uri Avnery, leader of the Gush Shalom peace movement and a former Knesset member, concluded in a recent column entitled “Who will save Israel?” that: “The extreme right has found its self-assurance, and is determined to use its power.”

Concerns mount

Causes for concern have quickly mounted.

They have included the announcement of a government bill to penalise human rights groups working to help Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as to protect the rights of the large Palestinian minority inside Israel and of African asylum seekers.

In addition, a diplomatic source told Middle East Eye that behind the scenes Israeli officials are trying to browbeat European governments into ending funding for the Israeli human rights community.

Eyebrows have also been raised by Netanyahu’s decision to reserve the communications ministry, which regulates the media, for himself. This is despite his having a shortage of ministerial posts with which to reward coalition partners.

Analysts have warned that Netanyahu is preparing to intimidate parts of the media critical of him and shore up the position of Israel Hayom, a free daily that has become the biggest-circulation national newspaper. Owned by US casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the paper staunchly supports Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, there are fears that the Israeli Supreme Court, which repeatedly came to blows with Netanyahu’s last government over efforts to jail and deport asylum seekers, is in his sights as well.

The prime minister agreed to appoint Ayelet Shaked, of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, as justice minister. Shaked has been a fierce critic of the court, and has previously tried to introduce legislation to neuter it.

“Netanyahu has good as declared war on dissent, whether it’s from human rights organisations or the media,” said Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa, an advocacy group for Israel’s Palestinian minority.

Israel ‘not perfect’

Netanyahu has defended his record against such charges.

Following criticism from US President Barack Obama that his security worldview assumed only the “worst possibilities”, he said on Thursday: “Israel isn’t perfect, but it is on a level with the world’s great democracies and it faces challenges that are much more difficult.”

He added that his government had invested heavily in helping Israel’s Palestinian minority, and he promised to preserve the independence of the Supreme Court, while stressing that his intention was only to open up the media to greater competition, not to control it.

“I believe in competition in products, in goods and also in ideas,” he told a press conference.

But critics are not reassured.

A European diplomat in Jerusalem told MEE that Israel had been waging an aggressive campaign in capitals across Europe to persuade them to stop funding human rights groups in Israel.

“The pressure being exerted on us behind the scenes is intense,” said the source, who wished not to be named, given the issue’s sensitivity.

The diplomat added that Israel wanted in particular to silence Israeli groups whose work might encourage a growing international boycott campaign or assist investigations by the International Criminal Court, which the Palestinians officially joined in April.

The diplomat indicated that B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence – both of which highlight human rights abuses and are funded by European governments – were top of Israel’s hit-list.

Row over soldiers’ testimony

The tensions exploded into public view this week when Israel’s foreign ministry opened a rift with Switzerland over its support for an exhibition by Breaking the Silence.

Yigal Caspi, Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland, denounced the exhibition in Zurich as “slander” for featuring photographs and testimonies from Israeli soldiers alleging violations of Palestinian human rights.

Caspi demanded that the Swiss government immediately stop funding the exhibition. Israel has previously demanded that Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Denmark also end their support for the group.

The row was immediately followed by a decision from the culture ministry to pull funding from a dance show due to open in Tel Aviv that incorporates video clips from the occupied territories taken by B’Tselem.

Tzipi Hotovely, Netanyahu’s deputy in the foreign ministry, warned on Tuesday that the government would “act against groups that operate against Israel from within the country and abroad”.

Breaking the Silence responded by criticising the government’s “anti-democratic campaign”.

NGO bill in pipeline

The clash with Switzerland looked like the opening round in a more comprehensive move to muzzle human rights groups, said Rina Rosenberg, the head of advocacy at Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

“The direction this government appears to be heading in is a cause for great concern,” she told MEE. “It looks like we are in for a big fight.”

The coalition parties specified in their agreement last month that they would advance what is being dubbed an “NGO bill”, targeting groups seen as left-wing and pro-Palestinian. Shaked, the new justice minister, is the driving force behind the measure.

According to Israeli media, the bill is likely to require NGOs to seek the approval of the defence and foreign ministries over funding they receive from foreign governments – a move that is expected to apply to human rights and pro-Palestinian groups exclusively.

If such legislation passes, most of these groups would struggle to survive financially, said Rosenberg.

In the previous Knesset, Netanyahu’s government tried to pass legislation against human rights organisations but froze it following protests from western governments. One proposal was to classify leftist groups receiving overseas funding as “foreign agents”.

At the same time groups like Rabbis for Human Rights and Physicians for Human Rights were rejected for tax-exempt status, limiting their ability to fundraise, while right-wing groups were given the status.

Rosenberg said Netanyahu’s new government appeared to have learnt its lesson and was avoiding overtly politicised legislation.

“This time it looks like they are going to be much smarter – and that makes the situation more dangerous,” she said. “By conditioning funding on permission from the defence ministry or a Knesset committee, they can say they are following practices adopted in countries like Egypt, Jordan and India.”

She feared that Israel would be able to rebuff criticism by claiming it was being singled out.

Communications ‘czar’

Farah, of Mossawa, said Netanyahu was also seeking to “consolidate his power over the media”, as a further way to silence critics.

As well as becoming communications minister, he has placed himself in charge of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, and increased his control of the ministerial committee overseeing legislation.

As part of the coalition agreement, Netanyahu insisted that his partners commit to supporting any communications initiatives he introduces.

Amir Teig, a media analyst, warned that Netanyahu was determined to turn himself into a “communications czar”.

Yossi Verter, a political analyst for Haaretz, argued that this was “payback time” for Netanyahu. Netanyahu was reported to have been incensed by news coverage during the campaign that painted him in an unflattering light.

Threat to TV channels

Netanyahu’s main goal, according to analysts, is to end any threat of restrictions on the national daily newspaper Israel Hayom.

Netanyahu’s coalition partners in the last Knesset denounced the paper as Israel’s “Pravda”, after the official mouthpiece of the former Soviet regime.

Netanyahu called early elections last November shortly after the Knesset passed the first reading of legislation to bar national distribution of a free newspaper to limit Israel Hayom’s influence.

The paper, which loses Adelson an estimated $5m a year, has left the largest paid-for newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, which is critical of Netanyahu, struggling.

Netanyahu has also used his communications role to make life difficult for the country’s two loss-making commercial TV stations, Channels 2 and 10. He has offered no relief on their heavy debts, with Channel 10 in particular in danger of closure.

Farah said Netanyahu’s financial threats were an effective way to intimidate the broadcasters who rely on state advertising.

Judges ready for fight

Concerns for the Supreme Court, the final court of appeal for Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as for minorities inside Israel, are also mounting.

Netanyahu shocked many in the legal community last month by appointing Jewish Home’s Shaked as justice minister. She has been a fierce critic of the court for being too liberal.

A retired Supreme Court justice was quoted saying of her appointment: “They [the government] are inviting a fight.”

Shaked is known to want to deny the Supreme Court the right to overturn laws and to change the judicial appointments system so that right-wing judges dominate.

“The idea of the court as a liberal institution is a myth,” said Daphna Golan, a law professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem specialising in human rights. “It is actually very conservative and rarely protects the rights of Palestinians, whether in the occupied territories or in Israel.”

“But as far as Shaked and the right are concerned, it is too activist and they want to weaken it.”

This week Shaked introduced her first bill as justice minister, setting a 10-year jail tariff for those found guilty of throwing stones. Observers expect the law to be applied only to Palestinians.

Golan said the danger was that, faced with threats from the government, the Supreme Court was becoming ever more loath to uphold human rights, removing yet more democratic protections.

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