Israel Frey’s persecution exposes Israel’s intolerance for dissent

Israeli journalist Israel Frey in 2022

Carolina Landsmann writes in Haaretz on 14 March 2025:

Journalist Israel Frey is being politically persecuted. He’s hounded for his political position, which preserves all the distinctions that the Israeli stance has systematically shattered over years of indoctrination: distinctions between sovereign Israel and the occupied territories, and between legitimate violent resistance to the occupation and terrorism.

This week, the police interrogated Frey under caution – as a possible suspect – on suspicion of incitement to terror about a few posts he made this year. He wrote in one post that “a Palestinian who hurts an IDF soldier or a settler in the apartheid territories is not a terrorist. And it’s not a terror attack. He’s a hero fighting against an occupier for justice, liberation and freedom.”

This isn’t the first time. In December 2022 he was questioned on suspicion of identifying with a terror organization and incitement to terror, following posts in which he said that “targeting security forces is not terrorism” and called a Palestinian who was planning an attack a “hero.”

Frey does not support terror and isn’t inciting to terrorism. He claims that an occupied person’s violent resistance in the occupied territory, against Israel Defense Forces soldiers, is not terrorism. This isn’t even expressing an opinion (later he will support the struggle and call the fighters heroes). It’s a trivial description, on the level of definitions. One can oppose a violent struggle against the occupation, but one can’t say that every violent struggle against the occupation is terrorism.

Had Frey supported attacks on civilians in Israel’s sovereign territory, like what Hamas did on October 7, or terrorist attacks against civilians inside Israel like the suicide bombings in buses and cafes, then one could say he supports terrorism. It’s very clear where Frey draws the line between legitimate and illegitimate.

After the interrogation, he wrote: “The police placed before me a file with a collection of my best tweets, under the suspicion of supporting terror. The one thing they had in common was reports and opinions that distinguish between an obscene attack on innocent parties and resistance to the security forces.”

The thing is that after years of rightist indoctrination, of occupation, of erasing the Green Line, today the Israeli mainstream isn’t prepared to accept any kind of violent resistance to the occupation, and even less so after October 7. In fact, it’s not ready to accept any kind of resistance to the occupation – violent or nonviolent.

In fairness, we must note that Frey’s choice to treat settlers as legitimate targets in the violent struggle for liberation is not trivial. It’s a question of whether to view adult settlers as civilians, with attacks on them being illegitimate as part of a violent struggle against the occupation, or whether they are part of the security apparatus and control of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, which makes them legitimate targets in a violent struggle against the occupation.

But in present-day Israel, there’s no place to hold any discussion on the occupation, to ask questions or create these or other distinctions. None of what the Palestinians are doing is legitimate. Even a documentary about the goings-on in the territories (“No Other Land”) is seen as illegitimate in Israel today.

We can’t object to the Palestinian struggle without offering a legitimate alternative. We can’t say no to terror and at the same time treat the diplomatic moves by Mahmoud Abbas as terror (“diplomatic terrorism”). We can’t occupy another nation for almost 60 years and tell it that its struggle for liberation is not legitimate by definition. What the hell do we expect from the Palestinians?

Distressingly, both Israeli and Palestinian societies have undergone a frightening radicalization. How many people like Frey are there left in Israel? How many people will launch a campaign to release him if his persecution leads to an indictment, or worse – imprisonment?

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