December 2, 2025
Orly Noy
But the same cannot be said of our parliamentarians. As a disturbing new report by the Haifa-based legal center Adalah shows, they have used the chaos of the past two years to advance more than 30 new laws entrenching apartheid and Jewish supremacy — joining Adalah’s existing list of now more than 100 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens.
One of the report’s central findings is a sweeping assault on freedom of expression, thought, and protest across a wide array of arenas. It includes laws prohibiting the publication of content that includes “denial of the events of October 7,” as determined by the Knesset, and restricting broadcasts of critical media outlets that “harm state security.”
Another authorizes the Education Ministry to fire teaching staff and withdraw funding from educational institutions based on views it considers expression of support for, or incitement to, a terrorist act or organization. And alongside a state-led campaign to deport international solidarity activists, a third law bars foreign nationals from entering the country if they have made statements critical of Israel, or have appealed to international courts to take action against the state and its officials.
But perhaps the most dangerous bill is one that targets citizens who merely seek to consume information from sources the state doesn’t like. Just a month after October 7, the Knesset passed a two-year temporary order — renewed last week for another two years — that outlaws the “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization,” carrying a one-year prison sentence. In other words, the legislature now criminalizes conduct that takes place entirely within a person’s private space.
According to the bill’s explanatory notes, the legislation rests on the assertion that “intensive exposure to terror publications of certain organizations may create a process of indoctrination — a form of self-inflicted ‘brainwashing’ — which can raise the desire and motivation to commit an act of terror to a very high level of readiness.” But the law does not specify what qualifies as “intensive exposure” or “continuous consumption,” leaving the duration and threshold entirely undefined.
Nor does it clarify what tools authorities may use to establish that an individual has consumed prohibited content. How, in practice, will officials know what someone views in private? As the Adalah report notes, locating potential suspects would itself require espionage operations, population-wide surveillance, and monitoring of internet activity.
While the banned “terror publications” currently only include Hamas and ISIS materials — a list the justice minister has already expressed his intention to expand — lawmakers have also sought to cut off access to additional sources of information that might, God forbid, expose Israeli citizens to the full extent of the crimes against humanity their army has committed and continues to commit in Gaza. Hence the passage of the so-called “Al Jazeera Law,” which has severed the Israeli public from one of the world’s most widely trusted sources of reporting on events in Gaza.
Similarly, the law against “denial of the events of October 7” not only elevates the attacks to a crime comparable to the Holocaust, but reaches far beyond the realm of actions into the domain of thought and expression. It makes no distinction between direct calls for violence or terrorism on one hand, which are already outlawed, and the mere articulation of a political position, a critical narrative, or skepticism of the state’s official account on the other.
“The law is designed to cultivate fear, stifle public debate, and suppress discussion on a matter of public concern,” Adalah notes. “It remains unclear what actions constitute the act of ‘denial’ that the law prohibits, especially since to this day, the state has not appointed an official commission of inquiry into the 7 October attacks, nor has it published … an ‘official narrative’ of the events of that day.”
Adalah’s report offers a good indication of where Israel is heading. While it may seem that we are already at the bottom of a void, there is always the abyss beyond the abyss — one that invites new atrocities, and toward which we are hurtling at full speed.
These despicable laws did not bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, even among those who once claimed to fear for the fate of “Israeli democracy.” In fact, some of these laws were passed with the support of Jewish opposition parties in the Knesset. The illusion of democracy for Jews alone has never looked more grotesque, or more dangerous.
The abyss beyond the abyss
From the very first days of the war, the Israeli regime was severely violating basic rights of freedom of opinion and protest. On Oct. 17, 2023, then-Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai announced a “zero-tolerance” policy toward “incitement” and protests, and for months every attempt to demonstrate against the Israeli army’s destruction of Gaza was met with an iron fist.
But the wave of new draconian legislation goes even further. In addition to establishing the legal infrastructure for the systematic persecution of dissidents, both Jewish and Palestinian, it includes measures that target Palestinian citizens explicitly, like the so-called “Deportation of Families of Terrorists Law.”
Under this law, the definition of “terrorist” — a label applied almost exclusively to Palestinians in Israel — has been broadened to include not only those convicted of terrorism in a criminal proceeding, but also individuals detained on suspicion of such offenses, including those held under administrative detention. In other words, people who have not been indicted, let alone convicted, of anything.
At the same time, the Knesset tightened the already draconian prohibition on “family reunification” to try to prevent Palestinian citizens from marrying Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and has expanded penalties against Palestinians who “illegally stay” in Israel. In effect, lawmakers exploited the Gaza genocide to escalate their long-standing demographic war against Palestinians, including those living within the 1948 borders.
A separate chapter of Adalah’s report documents the severe violations of the rights of Palestinian prisoners and detainees since October 7, who, according to testimonies and other reports, have been held in torture camps. The same legislative wave has also gravely infringed on the rights of children, eliminating “the longstanding legal distinction between adults and minors” for terrorism-related offenses. In addition, the report details legislation deliberately harming Palestinian citizens through the expanded use of military service as a criterion for social benefits and public resources, and Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories through the banning of aid organizations like UNRWA.
As someone long familiar with the argument that there is something useful about “removing the masks” and exposing the Israeli regime as it truly is — anti-democratic, racist, and rooted in apartheid — I find no grounds for optimism here. In the Israeli leadership’s open rush toward fascism, not only will the heaviest price be paid by those most exposed and vulnerable, but also the gap between a society’s self-image and reality is precisely the space in which political change becomes possible. When that gap closes, and society begins to accept the image staring back at it in the mirror, the political space for meaningful transformation contracts dramatically.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to protest the Netanyahu government’s “judicial overhaul,” insisting that its true purpose was to “crush Israeli democracy.” Yet the protest movement has focused largely on democracy’s procedural mechanics — checks and balances, judicial independence, and the prime minister’s own legal entanglements and fitness for office. Far too little attention, if any, has been paid to the erosion of democracy’s substantive foundations: freedom of expression and protest, equality before the law, and safeguards against institutionalized discrimination.
These trends did not begin in the past two years, but it is no accident that they have accelerated at a terrifying pace alongside the Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The devastation in the Strip and the fascist legislation advancing through the Knesset function as two coordinated forces working to dismantle the last remaining constraints on Israeli power.
And just as the Israeli protest movement cannot ignore the genocide in Gaza and the question of Jewish supremacy if it hopes to effectively resist the judicial overhaul, so too the global movement opposing the genocide cannot overlook the legislation being promoted by the most extreme Knesset in Israel’s history. This is no longer merely an internal Israeli affair, but part of a broader assault on the very existence of the Palestinian people.
Orly Noy
In a two-year blitz, Israeli
lawmakers passed over 30 laws curtailing Palestinians' rights and punishing
dissent, a new report shows.
For over two years, Israeli
public life has been shrouded in a heavy, disorienting fog. There has been an
unending churn of crises, conflicts, and anxieties at home and abroad: the
shock of the Hamas attack of October 7 and Israel’s genocidal campaign of
revenge on Gaza, the fight to bring back the hostages and against the state’s
vilification of their families, the reckless confrontations with Iran.
Together, these have left Israeli society suspended in a collective stupor,
obscuring the depth of the abyss into which we are rapidly descending.
But the same cannot be said of our parliamentarians. As a disturbing new report by the Haifa-based legal center Adalah shows, they have used the chaos of the past two years to advance more than 30 new laws entrenching apartheid and Jewish supremacy — joining Adalah’s existing list of now more than 100 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens.
One of the report’s central findings is a sweeping assault on freedom of expression, thought, and protest across a wide array of arenas. It includes laws prohibiting the publication of content that includes “denial of the events of October 7,” as determined by the Knesset, and restricting broadcasts of critical media outlets that “harm state security.”
Another authorizes the Education Ministry to fire teaching staff and withdraw funding from educational institutions based on views it considers expression of support for, or incitement to, a terrorist act or organization. And alongside a state-led campaign to deport international solidarity activists, a third law bars foreign nationals from entering the country if they have made statements critical of Israel, or have appealed to international courts to take action against the state and its officials.
But perhaps the most dangerous bill is one that targets citizens who merely seek to consume information from sources the state doesn’t like. Just a month after October 7, the Knesset passed a two-year temporary order — renewed last week for another two years — that outlaws the “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization,” carrying a one-year prison sentence. In other words, the legislature now criminalizes conduct that takes place entirely within a person’s private space.
According to the bill’s explanatory notes, the legislation rests on the assertion that “intensive exposure to terror publications of certain organizations may create a process of indoctrination — a form of self-inflicted ‘brainwashing’ — which can raise the desire and motivation to commit an act of terror to a very high level of readiness.” But the law does not specify what qualifies as “intensive exposure” or “continuous consumption,” leaving the duration and threshold entirely undefined.
Nor does it clarify what tools authorities may use to establish that an individual has consumed prohibited content. How, in practice, will officials know what someone views in private? As the Adalah report notes, locating potential suspects would itself require espionage operations, population-wide surveillance, and monitoring of internet activity.
While the banned “terror publications” currently only include Hamas and ISIS materials — a list the justice minister has already expressed his intention to expand — lawmakers have also sought to cut off access to additional sources of information that might, God forbid, expose Israeli citizens to the full extent of the crimes against humanity their army has committed and continues to commit in Gaza. Hence the passage of the so-called “Al Jazeera Law,” which has severed the Israeli public from one of the world’s most widely trusted sources of reporting on events in Gaza.
Similarly, the law against “denial of the events of October 7” not only elevates the attacks to a crime comparable to the Holocaust, but reaches far beyond the realm of actions into the domain of thought and expression. It makes no distinction between direct calls for violence or terrorism on one hand, which are already outlawed, and the mere articulation of a political position, a critical narrative, or skepticism of the state’s official account on the other.
“The law is designed to cultivate fear, stifle public debate, and suppress discussion on a matter of public concern,” Adalah notes. “It remains unclear what actions constitute the act of ‘denial’ that the law prohibits, especially since to this day, the state has not appointed an official commission of inquiry into the 7 October attacks, nor has it published … an ‘official narrative’ of the events of that day.”
Adalah’s report offers a good indication of where Israel is heading. While it may seem that we are already at the bottom of a void, there is always the abyss beyond the abyss — one that invites new atrocities, and toward which we are hurtling at full speed.
These despicable laws did not bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, even among those who once claimed to fear for the fate of “Israeli democracy.” In fact, some of these laws were passed with the support of Jewish opposition parties in the Knesset. The illusion of democracy for Jews alone has never looked more grotesque, or more dangerous.
The abyss beyond the abyss
From the very first days of the war, the Israeli regime was severely violating basic rights of freedom of opinion and protest. On Oct. 17, 2023, then-Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai announced a “zero-tolerance” policy toward “incitement” and protests, and for months every attempt to demonstrate against the Israeli army’s destruction of Gaza was met with an iron fist.
But the wave of new draconian legislation goes even further. In addition to establishing the legal infrastructure for the systematic persecution of dissidents, both Jewish and Palestinian, it includes measures that target Palestinian citizens explicitly, like the so-called “Deportation of Families of Terrorists Law.”
Under this law, the definition of “terrorist” — a label applied almost exclusively to Palestinians in Israel — has been broadened to include not only those convicted of terrorism in a criminal proceeding, but also individuals detained on suspicion of such offenses, including those held under administrative detention. In other words, people who have not been indicted, let alone convicted, of anything.
At the same time, the Knesset tightened the already draconian prohibition on “family reunification” to try to prevent Palestinian citizens from marrying Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and has expanded penalties against Palestinians who “illegally stay” in Israel. In effect, lawmakers exploited the Gaza genocide to escalate their long-standing demographic war against Palestinians, including those living within the 1948 borders.
A separate chapter of Adalah’s report documents the severe violations of the rights of Palestinian prisoners and detainees since October 7, who, according to testimonies and other reports, have been held in torture camps. The same legislative wave has also gravely infringed on the rights of children, eliminating “the longstanding legal distinction between adults and minors” for terrorism-related offenses. In addition, the report details legislation deliberately harming Palestinian citizens through the expanded use of military service as a criterion for social benefits and public resources, and Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories through the banning of aid organizations like UNRWA.
As someone long familiar with the argument that there is something useful about “removing the masks” and exposing the Israeli regime as it truly is — anti-democratic, racist, and rooted in apartheid — I find no grounds for optimism here. In the Israeli leadership’s open rush toward fascism, not only will the heaviest price be paid by those most exposed and vulnerable, but also the gap between a society’s self-image and reality is precisely the space in which political change becomes possible. When that gap closes, and society begins to accept the image staring back at it in the mirror, the political space for meaningful transformation contracts dramatically.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to protest the Netanyahu government’s “judicial overhaul,” insisting that its true purpose was to “crush Israeli democracy.” Yet the protest movement has focused largely on democracy’s procedural mechanics — checks and balances, judicial independence, and the prime minister’s own legal entanglements and fitness for office. Far too little attention, if any, has been paid to the erosion of democracy’s substantive foundations: freedom of expression and protest, equality before the law, and safeguards against institutionalized discrimination.
These trends did not begin in the past two years, but it is no accident that they have accelerated at a terrifying pace alongside the Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The devastation in the Strip and the fascist legislation advancing through the Knesset function as two coordinated forces working to dismantle the last remaining constraints on Israeli power.
And just as the Israeli protest movement cannot ignore the genocide in Gaza and the question of Jewish supremacy if it hopes to effectively resist the judicial overhaul, so too the global movement opposing the genocide cannot overlook the legislation being promoted by the most extreme Knesset in Israel’s history. This is no longer merely an internal Israeli affair, but part of a broader assault on the very existence of the Palestinian people.
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