In Israeli parlance, Breaking the Silence is one of a group of so-called “leftist NGOs” ( amutot hasmol) that are the object of a new bill now making its way through the Knesset, an initiative of the fanatical minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked, possibly the least just person in the country. There have been calls to outlaw the organization entirely. The witch-hunt began this time with a targeting of the ex-soldiers’ organization Breaking the Silence by a strident chorus on the right, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and other members of the cabinet, but also including prominent politicians and journalists from the wishy-washy center, including the highly popular Haaretz correspondent Ari Shavit. Israelis with a memory going back to the 1960s sometimes liken the current campaign to the violent actions of the extreme right in Greece before the colonels took power, as famously depicted in the still-canonical film Z. Palestinians have lived with the reality of state terror for decades-it is the very stuff of the occupation-but it has now seeped into the texture of life inside the Green Line, as many on the left have warned that it would. There is now a palpable sense of danger, and also an accelerating decline into a situation of incipient everyday state terror.
Politically driven harassment, including violent and illegal arrest, interrogation, denial of legal support, virulent incitement, smear campaigns, even death threats issued by proxy-all this has become part of the repertoire of the far right, which dominates the present government and sets the tone for its policies. Clearly, there is an ongoing coordinated campaign involving the government, members of the Knesset, the police, various semiautonomous right-wing groups, and the public media. 1 But open attacks on the Israeli left have now assumed a far more sinister and ruthless character some of them are being played out in the interrogation rooms of Israeli prisons. In a sense, this is nothing very new organizations such as B’Tselem, the most prominent and effective in the area of human rights, and Breaking the Silence, which specializes in soldiers’ firsthand testimony about what they have seen and done in the occupied territories and in Gaza, have always been anathema to the Israeli right, which regards them as treasonous. Israeli human rights activists and what is left of the Israeli peace groups, including joint Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations, are under attack.
A poster of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (left), Aida refugee camp, near Bethlehem, West Bank, 2009 photograph by Josef Koudelka from ‘This Place,’ an exhibition of pictures by twelve photographers of Israel and the West Bank, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art until June 5, 2016
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