Israel’s free speech crackdown: ‘War inside of a war’

The 21-year-old computer science student was beamed into the small wood-paneled courtroom from jail via video link.

By Loveday Morris

NAZARETH, Israel — The 21-year-old computer science student was beamed into the small wood-paneled courtroom from jail via video link. She had dark circles under her eyes after 11 nights in detention.

To save on personnel during Israel’s war against Hamas, defendants are no longer transported from their cells. Only urgent court cases are being heard. The prosecution of Rita Murad, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is deemed to be one of them.

Her alleged crimes of “identifying with a terrorist organization” and “incitement to terrorism” center on three Instagram posts that she shared on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants rampaged through communities in southern Israel.

One of the images used in the prosecution of Murad showed Palestinians using an earthmover to pull down parts of the barbed wire-topped barrier between Israel and the Gaza Strip. “While the ‘invincible army’ was sleeping,” read the message in Arabic across the image.

A second showed a montage of Palestinian children: “Where were the people calling for humanity when we were killed?” it read. A third post to her 1,100 Instagram followers showed a group of jubilant Palestinians on a captured Israeli military vehicle. “Gaza today,” read the caption with an emoji of the Palestinian flag.

In “normal times” such posts wouldn’t even warrant a trip to the police station, said Murad’s defense lawyer, Ahmad Massalha, as he waited for her hearing on Thursday.

But these aren’t normal times. Murad faces up to five years in jail if convicted, while a new draft law seeks to strip citizenship for those convicted in cases like hers. In court in the northern Israeli city of Nazareth, she has made accusations of being beaten in prison.

As war expands, Israel's endgame is no clearer

Murad is one of at least 56 people indicted on similar charges. Israeli authorities say they are fighting a second front in the war against Hamas, one set on rooting out anything that could be perceived as sympathy or “incitement” among the population. Rights groups say as many as 100 others have been arrested or detained in the “zero tolerance” crackdown, including one of Murad’s acquaintances who posted an Instagram video about cooking “victory” shakshuka.

According to the Mossawa Center, a rights group in Haifa, Israel, at least 350 Palestinian Israelis have been called to hearings at their workplace and 120 university students are in disciplinary hearings. Meanwhile, ad hoc groups of civilians trawl through social media posts and flag them to the police.

Defense lawyers and human rights advocates describe the moves as a McCarthy-style clampdown focused on the 20 percent of the Israeli population that has Palestinian heritage. In the current climate, posting anything that does not sit staunchly with the Israeli state’s framing of the war can lead to arrest.

The groups foresee profound implications for freedom of expression, but also for the fabric of Israeli society as even expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment appears enough to be criminalized in some cases.

“It’s McCarthyism on amphetamines,” said Ari Remez, a spokesman for Adalah, an Israeli legal rights organization tracking 215 cases of arrests and investigations, drawing a comparison to the “Red Scare” in the United States in the 1950s when public figures and others were screened for loyalty and sometimes blackballed for any hints of Communist sympathies.

“The criminalization is on a totally different level,” he said.

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