Legislators in the Knesset gave initial approval to a law that would make it a crime to deny the right of Israel to exist — mandating a year in prison for such an exercise of free speech.
The new law introduced by conservative legislators makes it a crime for anyone to “call to negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, where the content of such publication would have a reasonable possibility of causing an act of hatred, disdain or disloyalty” to Israel. The vote was 47-34 to approve the bill.
MK Zevulun Orlev with the right-wing Bayit Hayehudi party introduced the bill.
Citing a controversy over former MK Azmi Bishara’s flight from the country after visiting Syria and Lebanon (where he praised Hezbollah), Orlev insisted that words “very quickly leads to actions.” It is the traditional excuse for cracking down on free speech: free speech can lead to criminal conduct.
The bill is particularly problematic for Arabs who live as law-binding citizens but continue to challenge the right of Israel to exist. Journalists, academics, activists, and politicians would all be subject to the law, which is clearly designed to chill and silence critics. Israel’s right to exist should be defended by logic and history, not preserved through state censures or prosecutions. What is astonishing is that the law will only succeed in forcing the debate underground and confirm the view of some critics that there must be something illegitimate about the status of Israel to justify such draconian measures. Free speech and free press are the inherently the best defense for any free nation.
Yet, the law is part of a disturbing trend in the West in cracking down on free speech, here and here and here. For a prior column, click here
For the full story, click here.
Bron.
If the Palestinians had tried nonviolent process it would have got them exactly nowhere.
India was a special case where passive resistance actually worked.
The reason that it worked was that the Indians outnumbered their conquerors many time over. Even if all able bodied British persons that could be spared were recruited into the army of occupation it would not have been enough to control India.
If the Palestinians tried passive resistance, it would only mean that the carnage would be completely one sided instead of mostly one sided as it is.
CM:
a guy I know says Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Had Palestinians played the martyr and gone Ghandi they would have had their state years ago.
The progeny of Abraham are a fiesty bunch.
Mike.
Most evil is done by good people.
Mike.
“Well compared to every other nation surrounding it and to most of the countries in the world, it damn well is more democratic.”
Israel ensured a Jewish majority by expelling a sufficient number of Palestinians. This made it safe to be a democracy. Israel’s refusal to allow a “right of return” to the Palestinians who fled beyond Israels later established borders and the confiscation of their property is in my view a serious crime.
It is an Israeli myth that the Palestinians were told to flee in radio broadcasts from the surrounding Arab countries, but why this even if true should justify confiscating their property and preventing their return is a mystery to me, Someone please explain. Incidentally the term “present absents” describes Palestinians who fled but remained within the borders of Israel when it was established. These were allowed to remain as second class citizens but they were considered to have abandoned their property and it was confiscated.
Israelis seems to think that their is something culpable about fleeing a war when told to by the enemy radio broadcasts. If there were such radio broadcasts I would assume that they were simply relaying threats from the Israeli ethnic cleansers. Fleeing a war zone seems to me to be sensible behaviour, and Israel’s revisionist historians are turning up evidence of deliberately planned terror campaign to forse Palestinians to flee. The Palestinians who fled were doing so because they had a well founded fear of being killed, just as Kosovo Albanians did more recently. To start a refugee exodus one does not necessarily need to kill a huge number, just enough to start the others leaving.
Mike.
I think that it is a matter of opinion not fact as to whether the US is favouring Israel or Saudi Arabia. You perceive it as being closer to the Saudis, I think it is biased more towards Israel.
I think that America’s affections are mainly with Israel, but its need for gooey black stuff to fuel hummers means that it has to pander to the Saudi kleptarchs and this to some extend puts a limit on its overt favoritism to Israel.
Mike.
“The myth that America or the UN created Israel is just that. The Israeli’s created it to the complete astonishment of everyone.”
The UN may not have created Israel but it concurred, except for the minor point that the area the UN allocated to Israel was smaller than that that which Israel staked out after the 1948 war.
A real myth is that the Arabs started the war. As far as the Arabs were concerned the mass immigration into Palestine and the declaration of the state of Israel were acts of aggression. I believe that ttheir interpretation is correct.
Mike.
Your right in saying that fundamentalist Christians have no love for the Jews. Their support is because of their loopy religius beliefs in the end times and its requirement for the Jews to return to the Holy land before God can send all unbelievers including the Jews who do not convert to hell.
As someone has pointed out in a previous thread, it is hypocrisy for a citizen of any of the colonial settler countries like Australia, Brazil or the US to criticize Israel for behaving now in the same way as their countries did in the forgotten past.
Diane Oliver.
When does a state built on stolen land achieve legitimacy so that any struggle against its existence becomes illegal.
Everyone seems to accept that the USA, Australia and Brazil (as examples) have achieved this legitimacy but why is that so if Israel is not. The only difference between Israel and these other examples is that in Israel the necessary ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population has not been completed.
Diane Oliver.
It is not true that World war II was the cause of the establishment of Israel. It may have hastened its formation but the intention to establish a Jewish state in lands confiscated from Palestinians was there since the nineteenth century.
By that time Jews had truly got the message that Christians hated them and they knew that living among Christians posed a risk that their Christian neighbours might turn on them, murder them and divide their property. If there is a Christian nation that did not discriminate to some extent against Jews, please tell me its name.
The German Jewish holocaust served as a string of exclamation marks reinforcing the message.
Of course well deserved Christian guilt about failure to do anything effective to hinder the holocaust may have made UN agreement on the establishment of Israel easier to obtain.
Diane Oliver.
“Is Israel a democracy”.
Just before the declaration of the state of Israel, the majority of the population in the area that later became Israel was Palestinian. Obviously the Israelis were unwilling to create a democratic state in which they were a minority so in the inevitable war they ethnically cleansed enough Palestinians to create a Jewish majority.
Apartheid South Africa was technically a democratic state, since black residents were not citizens entitled to vote.
I note that my country, Australia, allows descendants of the unlawful occupants who were here before the arrival of the rightful owners to vote, but even in those places where they form a substantial proportion of the population such as The Northern Territory, the franchise does them no good since they are still outnumbered by the minority of whites who react in a racist manner to the presence of Aborigines and Territory governments of either party are extremely hostile to Blacks.
Alex.
If Israel allowed the Palestinian standard of living to rise to Israeli levels their birth rate would probably drop. Of course this is out of the question so other methods will have to be used. But then they are, every young Palestinian rock thrower killed by Israeli troops with assault rifles is one little victory in the demographic struggle.
Is this model we are adopting here in the US? It seems like it. We seem to be in lockstep with a nation that is willing to go to any end in the name of security. To what end? The Patriot Act has kept us safe from Eliot Spitzer’s philandering; however, it is not known how effective it was in keeping the public safe. Have we crossed over to the point of no return?
“Why did the Bush administration want to go into Iraq so badly…even before 9ll. Because Israeli influence in this country wanted that war to protect Israel. How many Israeli soldiers were sent to help us in Iraq? How many have been sent to help us in Afghanistan?”
The Bush Administration wanted to go into Iraq because they wanted the oil and because the Saudi’s, who really ran Bush’s ME policy didn’t like Saddam as competition. The Bush family has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Saudi’s for many decades and despite the crap handed to the Fundamentalist Christians, never liked the Jews or Israel. Bush’s grandfather Sen. Prescott Bush was a principal in a bank that helped finance Hitler. His partners were the Dulles Brothers, who became Secretary of State and CIA Director under Eisenhower. An administration deeply unfriendly to Israel.
The myth that America or the UN created Israel is just that. The Israeli’s created it to the complete astonishment of everyone. This is true about the myth of the US being Israel’s number one ally. The US has been keeping Israel in check for the Saudi’s since Israel began. Why. Because the Saudi’s want Israel to exist so that their own people will have something external to hate and not look at their own oppression. Yet they need Israel in turmoil, or its’ technological capabilities might demonstrate new possibilities for the ME’s indigenous peoples that would destabilize their despotic governments. This tactic has also worked well for some of the other Arab oligarchies.
Your point about how many Israeli soldiers helped us in Iraq or in Afghanistan shows unbelievable ignorance of history since the first Iraq war. George H.W. Bush was specifically told, publicly by the Saudi’s that no Arab States would take part in the first Iraq War if the Israeli’s played a role. This was why George H.W. Bush pleaded with Israel not to retaliate when Saddam’s SCUD missiles rained down on Israel.
The Israeli’s reluctantly agreed, a position which is unheard of in world history when a nation is attacked and has the wherewithal on its’ own to destroy its attacker. The same issue kept the Israeli’s from Iraq II and Afghanistan.
You ask: “Is Israel a democracy?” Well compared to every other nation surrounding it and to most of the countries in the world, it damn well is more democratic. Now the real issue here is whether this is a good law and I would personally say it isn’t and it was stupidly conceived. However, recently we’ve discussed similar laws on this site that have been passed in Britain, France, elsewhere in Europe and in all the Islamic States. That doesn’t justify Israel’s passage, but it does contextualize it as a disturbing governmental trend around the world and even in our own country. I’m not a fan of recent Israeli governments, but I also don’t make them out to be quite as evil, stupid yes, as their detractors would have it. The current PM is an incompetent and corrupt fool and won’t be in power for that long.
Now I’m not going to engage in debate with you, because frankly by your comments you’ve shown you lack more than superficial knowledge of the issue. I’ve no doubt that you’re probably a good person, who feels for the oppressed of the world. So am I. What differentiates us is that I don’t follow the leads of anyone’s propaganda and try to really investigate the subjects I write and talk about. If you really do see yourself as a champion of the oppressed than I suggest you do further research on the subject. All might not be as you seem to think it is.
However, research alone is not the true judge of a critical mind. What is far harder than research is the facility to examine your most deeply held beliefs and subject them to honest criticism. Many highly intelligent people find themselves unable to do that and so can be extremely intelligent, yet hold ignorant views. Reading you out of context I really can’t say where you are in this continuum,
but I give you an A for empathy.
What does J. Turley have to say about the State of Israel? In a court of law how “firm a ground” does Israel stand on? Can Prof. Turley defend Israel?
Is Israel a democracy? The crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinean people are becoming well known. The public isn’t fooled any more. They take land illegally…it is not their property….should they exist on that property? Israel was given land in Palestine after WWII but the Palestinean people had nothing to say about it. They were chased from their homes, had their homes taken from them and to be sure that they could not claim their property the Israeli government burned down the building that held all the deeds. On film it has been shown how an Israeli got into a Palestinean home, locked the doors so the Palestinean couldn’t even get his personal effects, and just took the home. The Palestinean people have not had a leg to stand on. The Israeli lobby in the USA keeps info away from the American people. They do not want a Palestinean State. They do not want live Palestineans in Israel. Their aim is to kill them all or chase them out.Like it says in the bible about the Canannites: God commands they kill “every living thing”. Why did the Bush administration want to go into Iraq so badly…even before 9ll. Because Israeli influence in this country wanted that war to protect Israel. How many Israeli soldiers were sent to help us in Iraq? How many have been sent to help us in Afghanistan? How much do we give Isarel in Aide….BILLIONS….and for nothing in return except to instigate wars that they don’t have to fight. Now Israel wants it to be a crime to be against the ‘existance of Israel’…..You better start building a lot of jails. After you remove freedom of speech what will be next….? As an American citizen I will say that Israel does not have the right to exist…on stolen land.
FFELO,
An even more prolific killer of the academics was Pol Pot. Hitler liked scientists as long as they weren’t those pesky Jew scientists like Einstein. Pol Pot thought everyone with an education needed to die.
Alex wrote:
“Has any country ever benefited when it tried to suppress academic debate?”
________
Hitler’s Germany was one failed example.
Over the last 40 years or so there has been great debate about what the long term demographics will be in Israel. Some think that the Jewish birthrate is going to be higher, and thus the Arab minority will decrease by percentage. However others think that the Jewish birthrate will be smaller, and that the Arab minority will become a majority in critical areas such as East Jerusalem, and possibly eventually a majority in the whole country.
This means that the eventual existence of Israel as a Jewish state is not just a political issue, but also a matter of genuine academic debate.
Has any country ever benefited when it tried to suppress academic debate?
Well does a country have the right to exist outside of its inhabitants rights to exist? If you abominate the people what will soon be left?