The haredi journalist urging Palestinians to fight back

With the return of far-right politician and convicted terrorism supporter Itamar Ben-Gvir to his post as National Security Minister last month, Israel’s police appeared to expand their range of repression beyond Arab citizens to left-wing Jews.

The night after the return of Ben Gvir was announced, I watched police assault, punch and drag peaceful demonstrators during a sit-in on Ben Yehuda Street in downtown West Jerusalem that did not block or disrupt anything.

The protesters had chanted: “soldier, soldier you must refuse” and “The government of blood is killing us.”  Right-wingers who taunted them were left untouched and praised the police for roughing up the protesters.

In subsequent days, Yair Golan, the former army deputy chief of staff and leader of the Zionist left-wing Democrats party, was manhandled by police at a protest. In a separate incident Naama Lazimi, a member of the same party, was violently pulled by officers during a demonstration outside the Knesset.

This week, Haaretz reported that police were violating a court order by banning an antiwar protest from displaying pictures of Gaza children killed in Israel’s devastating airstrikes. Since the start of the war after Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7, 2023, Arab antiwar protests have been banned or broken up.

Within this escalation, it is risky to be at the forefront of the battle over freedom of expression. But Yisrael Frey, a left-wing haredi journalist, feels compelled to speak out on flashpoint issues even if it means paying a high price. “They won’t succeed in making me lower my head,” he told The Jewish Independent in an interview.

Frey was referring to a police investigation currently underway against him on suspicion of “incitement to terrorism”, a rare speech crackdown against a Jewish individual that could set a precedent (theatres, cinemas and cultural works have been demonised and targeted for funding cuts).

Frey’s most recent controversial social media post describes Palestinians attacking soldiers or settlers in the “apartheid territories” as fighters for “justice, liberation and freedom”, prompting the right-wing B’tsalmo organisation to file a complaint to police. The right-wing Jewish Feed website described the 38-year-old former yeshiva student as a “vicious Jew-hating, Israel-hating betrayer” who is undermining the country during war time.

“Glorifying violence against Israelis isn’t just dissent,” wrote journalist Gila Isaacson in Jewish Feed. “It’s a gut punch to families burying their dead, fuelling visceral hatred from those who see him as siding with the enemy.”

Haaretz’s Carolina Landsmann, however, has cast Frey as an exceptionally courageous individual who highlights Israel’s misuse of the word terrorism. She wondered how many people would stand up for him if he is placed under arrest.

Frey showed little patience when TJI suggested his post could be interpreted as endorsing attacking settler children. “I am a Jew and an Israeli who describes violence. Of course, I will never undertake and have not undertaken violence. I believe in justice and equality. The violence that exists and is present is not because of me.”

He added that the most severe violence comes from Jews oppressing Palestinians. “To create manipulations from the things I have said or to find in them justification or support for violence is aberrant. I scorn this, and I stand by what I said.”

With a sharp mind and a tongue flaying Jewish supremacism, which he defines broadly, Frey could be viewed as a haredi Malcolm X, even though he belongs to the majority group. He has lost work for being seen as too radical but on social media he attracts considerable attention with his refusal to self-censor and his readiness to provoke animosity to make a point.

Soon after the start of the Gaza war, he released a clip of himself reciting Kaddish for the dead in Israel and Gaza. He said that hundreds of Palestinian women and children had been “slaughtered” Right-wingers shot flares around his apartment block and threatened his life. He had to go into hiding.

In our interview Frey did not hold back either. The problem, he insists, is not just the coercion and racism of the Right, but the misconception by the Jewish liberal Left that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic. For Frey, defining Israel as “Jewish and democratic” still advantages Jews and puts them at the top of a hierarchy with Arabs in an inferior position. At best, it amounts to “Jewish supremacism in a nice bubble,” he says.

Frey says that everyone who joins an anti-government demonstration is performing a welcome act. But he clearly sees a lot of hypocrisy among protesters, too. “You can’t go into the cockpit of a plane at night, bomb tents in Gaza, slaughter hundreds of women and children and expect that because you stood in the street with a flag and demonstrated against the dismissal of the Shin Bet chief, that you were on the right side. You were on the filthy side. And if you continue this way, neither you nor your children will get what you are trying to attain with your imaginary democracy.”

Although Israel has traditionally depicted itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, which holds regular elections and until recently could point to broad freedom of expression and judicial and other checks on government power, Frey’s critique that it actually is not democratic is neither far-fetched nor original. Arab intellectuals and political parties have been saying so for years.

Leaving aside the power structure in the occupied West Bank that has been likened to apartheid, sovereign Israel itself lacks any binding legal provision for equality of its citizens. In 2018 the Knesset passed the Nation State Law, seen by both supporters and opponents as enshrining anyone who is not Jewish as a second-class citizen.

Frey argues that what he sees as the liberal self-deception of a “Jewish and democratic” state has been shattered with the ascendence of far-right extremists such as the disciples of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane. Now that the Right has chosen all-out Jewish supremacy and completely thrown away any semblance of democracy, the only way to defeat it is for liberals to hit back by dropping “Jewish” and becoming completely democratic, he argues.

“This means giving up Jewish supremacy, having equal rights for all human beings living here, Jewish-Palestinian partnership, and negation of the thinking that Moshe is worth more than Mohammed,” he says.

Police called Frey in for interrogation on March 14 after he had posted that “a Palestinian who harms an IDF soldier or settler in the apartheid territories is not a terrorist and it is not a terror attack. He is a hero fighting an oppressor for justice, liberation and freedom.”

Frey invoked his right to silence during police questioning, rejecting the idea that “forces of Jewish supremacy” and oppression have any authority to decide what is legitimate for him to say.

He is not at all surprised that repression used against Arabs is now being experienced by himself and by liberal Jews, some of whom fear the country is turning into a police state. With a discriminatory apparatus of rule in place towards Palestinians, it is easy for the Netanyahu government to deprive liberal Jews of their rights and abuse them as well, Frey argues.

“What’s the impediment to transferring administrative detention from Palestinians in the territories or from Palestinians within the 1948 borders to a [Jewish] leftist?” Frey asks.

“If I’m a young Israeli and they educated me that the other is marked as dirt and dust and that you can go into his house in the middle of the night and take it apart and that you can force his wife and children to stand at checkpoints… and that you can break his hands and feet, it is not surprising that with the passage of time the authorities will succeed in transferring ‘the other’ to the Jew who is secular, who doesn’t like Bibi,” Frey explains.

He declines to answer what made him take the road less travelled from haredi yeshiva student to what is, by Israeli standards, radical egalitarianism. Nor does he want to discuss whether he favours a one-state or two-state solution. “People who say ‘yes, but what’s your solution?’ don’t really want to hear about the problem,” he says.