While Elon Musk battles the UK and EU over social media censorship, Israel is jailing citizens for Instagram posts

The social media crackdown in Israel has somehow escaped the notice of today's free-speech warriors

In case you missed our story yesterday on the IDF shooting an American at a West Bank demonstration, we covered it this morning on Counter Points. We plan to turn many of the print pieces we do here at Drop Site into video reports like this because, like it or not, if you’re reading this email, you’re in the minority in how you consume news. (And we love you for it!) Most people today are listening to or watching news, often while on the go. That doesn’t make print less important, though. Quite the contrary. It’s this kind of print reporting that serves as the raw material on which the podcast and broadcast worlds build their conversations. (By print, I also means outlets like ours that don’t actually have a printed-out version.)

If you’ll be in Chicago next week for the DNC, we’re hosting a watch party on Wednesday evening. RSVP if you can make it.

My story today on the criminalization of speech and social media in Israel doesn’t really break any new ground that hasn’t been covered by human rights organizations inside Israel, but watching the debate in the UK about social media censorship has been maddening knowing that much worse is happening in Israel with nobody objecting or, seemingly, even aware of it. So here’s my piece on that phenomenon:

While Elon Musk battles the UK and EU over social media censorship, Israel is jailing citizens for Instagram posts

By Ryan Grim

Elon Musk and his legion of free-speech defenders on Twitter have recently been locked in a battle with the British government, as well as the European Union, in the wake of race riots that rocked the country this month. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and others in the government have attacked Musk’s social media platform for spreading false claims about immigrants, while Musk has hit back hard and warned that threats of speech censorship lead inevitably to authoritarianism. 

For all his concern about free speech in the UK, however, Musk has had nothing to say about the far more aggressive speech censorship campaign presently being enacted in Israel, a country whose leadership he vocally supports. The crackdown is the result of the crude enforcement of an Israeli law that can criminalize acts as innocuous as posting a Palestinian flag on social media. 

In the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, Israeli State Prosecutor Amit Eisman changed the legal process to allow police to carry out investigations for the crime of incitement or support for terrorism without approval from prosecutors. The Knesset later broadened the law by amending it to make mere consumption of particular media or social media a crime – rather than just publishing it or distributing it. In the months that have followed, a truly draconian crackdown on online speech in Israel has ensued. 

According to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Rights in Israel, more than 400 people, many of them Arab citizens of Israel, have been arrested and detained on charges related to their social media activity. Around 190 of them have been held in custody throughout the legal proceedings, which in many cases can drag on for months, and include confinement in brutal conditions within the Israeli penal system.  

Full data is hard to come by. But according to police data cited by the watchdog organization Shomrim, also known as the Center for Media and Democracy in Israel, by May of this year the state prosecutor had allowed police to open investigations into 524 social media posts. That figure itself is likely an undercount, as it does not include investigations into social media activity opened independently by police, or other prosecutions that have been reported publicly, but don’t appear on Shormin’s list.

One of the first posters to be arrested was a man named Yarmuk Zuabi, a restaurant owner in Nazareth. Last October, Zuabi changed his profile picture on WhatsApp to a Palestinian flag and posted the following cartoon on his account:

The cartoon, which was intended to criticize differences in international response to the Ukrainian and Palestinian conflicts, said nothing about terrorism or justification of violence. Yet it was enough for the police to come down on Zuabi hard.

“Two police cars pulled up with eight officers,” Zuabi later told Shomrim, in a report they published on freedom of speech in Israel this year. “When they took me away I wasn’t handcuffed. I know most of the police officers in Nazareth, so someone called on me to come outside and told me that I was being summoned for questioning at the station. Another officer grabbed my phone, which was on the table, and confiscated it. At the station and during the interrogation, I was handcuffed.”

The officers who took Zuabi into custody told him that he was accused of posting a Hamas flag on social media. Zuabi said he told them it was the Palestinian flag. “Israel signed a peace deal with that flag in 1993 and it has been raised in the Knesset. So, what’s the problem?” he told them, according to an interview that he did with Shomrim.

A court ordered Zuabi to be released, but the detention had its intended effect. “This isn’t a democracy. It’s nothing. We’re being muzzled. There is just one reason that I am careful now: because at home, my wife and my two children ask me why I need this headache,” he told Shomrim. “They don’t want me to go through all that again. So, yes, I am cautious.”

The Shomrim report documented Zuabi’s case and others was itself cited recently by B’Tselem, Israel’s premier human rights organization, in their own report on Israel’s prison system since October 7. The B’Tselem report, published this month, is called “Welcome To Hell,” and paints a portrait of an out-of-control detention system that systematically deploys torture and sexual abuse to humiliate prisoners under its control. 

In a lesser-noticed section of the report, it also includes testimonies of Israeli citizens, as well as Palestinians from the West Bank, who have been detained and abused in custody over their social media posts. 

The B’Tselem report includes the testimony of a young woman identified only as I.A., a student at an Israeli university in her 20s, who, like Zuabi, was detained over an Instagram post. The specific post that constituted her crime is not included. 

Her harrowing story, which begins on page 103 of the B’Tselem report, goes as follows: 

On 12 November 2023, my father called and told me representatives of the authorities had come to our house and handed over a summons for interrogation for me. My father refused to give them my address, and managed to persuade them that they didn’t need to go get me and he’d bring me to the police station.

That same day at 6:00 P.M. I went to the police station with my father. He waited for me outside, but as soon as I went in they handed me an arrest warrant. The moment I entered, the police officers started humiliating me, shouting at me that I was a terrorist supporter and mocking my appearance. They took away all my belongings, including my phone and shoelaces. Then my hands were tied in front of me with metal handcuffs.

I gathered from the arrest warrant that I was suspected of identifying with terrorist organizations and supporting terror. I demanded to speak with my lawyer, and they let me. The lawyer calmed me down and explained that I was allowed to maintain my right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Then they put me, handcuffed, in a room where a lot of officers, male and female, were sitting and smoking. One of them put his phone close to my face and took a photo of me. When I told him, "You have no right to photograph me," he answered: "I’ll go outside and tell your father you’re impolite." They all made fun of me, whispering and giggling. 

Then they took me to a vehicle that drove off. They didn’t tell me where we were going, but when we got there I saw a sign saying Hasharon Prison. I asked what time it was and they said it was about 11:00 P.M. I was frightened and anxious. I was received by a male and female prison guard, and the female police officer who escorted me from the police station was also there. They kept mocking me and making fun of me because of a photo of me in a hijab that they had on their computer. I walked slowly, because they’d taken my shoelaces and I was afraid that if my shoes fell off, they wouldn’t let me put them back on. So they pushed me the whole way. The worst was the strip search. I didn’t expect them to do such a thing to me – to search me entirely naked. They made me kneel, naked, so they could see I wasn’t hiding anything. It was so humiliating. I asked the female guard and the female police officer to let me sit half crouching, so I could cover my body a bit. The female guard made fun of my clothes, the shape of my body, and my body hair. She made it clear that I disgusted her. 

I thought of my father. I wondered whether he was still waiting for me outside the police station or already knew I’d been arrested and wasn’t even in Haifa but in prison outside the city. Everything was disturbing, insulting and degrading. They did everything in the most offensive way possible. […] When I got to the cell, the other female inmates were already asleep. There were four beds and another three inmates sleeping on the floor. […] Early in the morning, the other inmates woke up and we introduced ourselves. They were from the West Bank. 

They explained the prison routine – a naked strip search every day, in the shower inside the cell. They said I had to be careful not to upset the female guards, so they wouldn’t beat me. They said, for example, that the guards would beat me if they asked questions and didn’t like my answers, or if I stayed silent and didn’t answer at all, since they considered that a provocation. I couldn’t believe it – how could such a thing happen? Where were we? Something inside me just didn’t want to believe it was possible. […] A bit later, three female guards came into the cell, and a male guard stood at the doorway and watched. Just then, I spoke to one of the inmates and smiled at her. One of the female guards didn’t like that and shouted at me, in Hebrew, "Why are you laughing?" I answered that it was just the shape of my face, and got angry. She led me to the shower and ordered me to undress. She asked where I was from, and why I was there. She told me several times "You're Hamas," and when she didn’t like my answers, she pulled my hair, grabbed me by the jaw, said I had a big mouth and twisted my head and neck, yelled at me and shoved me several times.

On my second night there, one of the inmates had itchy arms and a rash appeared on her body. She was scratching so hard that none of us could sleep. We banged on the door and asked that they let her see the medic, whose room was close to our cell, but no one answered. That night, we also banged the door to ask for pads for another inmate who was menstruating. A female guard came and threw our roll of toilet paper at us. She said, "You’re not in a hotel." In the morning, during roll call and the search, the female guards asked, "Who banged on the door at night?" We all kept quiet. The male guard pointed to the inmate who had demanded pads, and then they took her to the shower and strip searched her naked. We heard her shouting and understood they were hitting her.

While I was there, I attended a legal hearing on Zoom. There were two male guards in the room talking to each other, and I couldn’t hear a thing. I asked them to speak quietly but they didn’t listen to me, and one of them even turned the volume of my speaker down. I gestured to the lawyer that I couldn’t hear anything and he came closer to the camera, spoke slowly and gestured until I understood they had extended my detention by another three days, and that I would be transferred to Damun Prison. […] The conditions were awful there, too. There were a lot of female inmates there. I gathered from them that at the start of the war in Gaza, the prison administration had confiscated all their belongings. They left them nothing. They took away their clothes and electrical appliances, including radios, and the kitchen utensils they used to cook and to prepare coffee and tea. The canteen was also closed. Before that, the inmates prepared their own food, but under the new order they brought us prepared food, which was really terrible and the amounts were too small. […] 

In early 2024, I resumed my studies. I was really scared Jewish students would attack me, especially since there was a group of right-wing students who had campaigned and demanded we be expelled from the university, persecuted and punished. Many students now attend classes armed with rifles and guns, and enter lecture halls like that. I often sit next to someone armed like that during a lecture. It’s a really scary situation, especially in a reality of ongoing incitement against Arab students.

**

Stories like those of Zuabi and I.A., along with countless other Palestinians, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Jewish citizens of Israel detained for posting online, are unlikely to resonate with Musk, who has shown himself to be quite selective in his appreciation of free speech. In 2023, Musk complied with a raft of requests from the Indian government of Narendra Modi to censor his critics online, even removing a BBC documentary from the platform that raised questions about his involvement in crimes against humanity while he was head of the Indian state of Gujarat.

Musk has recently visited Israel, and also reportedly appeared as a guest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent speech at Congress. While the tech billionaire continues to pick fights globally over speech rights, he has remained silent about an aggressive campaign to shut down online criticism by his friends in the Israeli government.