As a media organization, freedom of speech is a must for us.
It is the foundation of how we operate. It is the ground upon which we stand. It is the essence of the ink on our pages.
Freedom of speech comes with limitations and responsibilities. In Israel, these limitations come in the form of IDF censorship, which issues gag orders and embargoes for “security purposes” – security purposes, of course, including alleged abuses by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who allegedly pressured censor officers to hush stories that aren’t an issue of security.
This is the use of a justifiable system that has seemingly slipped down a rabbit hole of information security to prevent the freedom of information in our country, and it’s a concerning decline.
On the other hand, our responsibilities are massive. We must inform the public as fully as possible, be balanced and clear, not present false information, and do our research. These are basic to our industry.
Fair, we have gotten a bit lazy. We receive a press release and take it at face value: reword, publish, push, c’est tout. We must always strive for better, and that includes fact-checking and thoroughly researching.
That also means defending freedom of speech openly and publicly. It is vital to journalism as a system that we do not hush up those we disagree with. The best way to prove our opponents wrong is through counterarguments, not through forced silence.
Educational Bookshop raid: Condemnable on all fronts
That is why it was so disheartening to see the police raid of the Educational Bookshop in east Jerusalem earlier this month. It was a nuanced situation that, ultimately, is condemnable on all fronts.
On the one hand, there is an issue of information. After all, we do not fully know what books the Israeli police discovered that justified a midnight raid and the arrest of the store owners. The information we have received is quite limited, and we have to take that into account.
Nevertheless, this raid was an infringement of freedom of speech in its most basic form: a bookshop. When publishing begins to be forced to silence itself, one must be concerned about systemic oppression.
The argument being made online is that one of the books being sold at the store glorified the Intifada. However, this is the only book we have seen from this raid that presents such an extreme view.
The bookshop is known internationally among peace-loving communities as a place that promotes knowledge, coexistence, and open conversation. Alongside the one book that was the public reason for the raid, there are books condemning ISIS, Israeli authors such as Yuval Noah Harari and David Grossman, and historical analyses promoting the ideas behind Zionism.
Where would we be, as a society, if we were to accept and even celebrate this kind of attack? What justification would we have as a humanitarian society if we did not preserve the rights of those we disagree with just because we disagree with them?
We must do better. The systems in place must better recognize where the real threats lie because this isn’t it.
Israel Police did not respond to my request for a response at the time of publication.