An Israeli Journalist Is Behind Bars for Challenging the Consensus
"How can the death of young combat soldiers who were killed doing their job of protecting the homeland be a good thing?" Judge Ravit Peleg Bar Dayan asked during the hearing at which she denied bail to journalist Israel Frey.
Frey had been arrested on suspicion of incitement and supporting terror due to a post on X in response to the news that five soldiers had been killed in the Gaza Strip.
"The world is better this morning without five young people who participated in one of the cruelest crimes against humanity," he wrote.
But the judge's question ignores what Frey said. She's absolutely right that the deaths of young men who fell protecting the homeland could never be a good thing. Frey would also presumably agree with that.
But he was challenging that very assumption – that these soldiers indeed fell in defense of the homeland. In his view, and contrary to the views of the vast majority of Israelis, they were killed while participating in vicious crimes against humanity.
Frey is a provocateur.
It's very hard to read what he wrote, because the world isn't a better place when five young Israeli men are killed. The deaths of soldiers during a war that has long since lost any justification is part of the tragedy that everyone calling to end the war seeks to stop.
But his provocation works because it forces us to think anew about words that have frequently been flung at Israel but have slid smoothly down our throats – crimes against humanity.
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Israelis aren't able to conceive of the possibility that we are the ones committing the crimes, especially after Hamas' massacre on October 7, 2023.
Smoke rises to the sky following an Israeli bombardment in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday.Credit: Leo Correa/AP
The reason that Frey's schadenfreude is so difficult to swallow, even for me, is that he takes his words with the utmost seriousness.
Yet through this violent tactic of taking things to extremes, Frey forces us to think – to leave those words in our minds, not let them go in one ear and out the other, as usually happens when "the world" levels such accusations. This painful tactic admittedly makes our blood boil, but it requires us to truly think about whether we – all of us – aren't collaborating in crimes against humanity.
Had the judge seen reality the way Frey does, she might not have been upset by his post. Had she also thought the Israel Defense Forces was killing innocent civilians, including women and children, indiscriminately in Gaza; that Israel was starving the population as a tactic of war (the so-called "generals' plan"); and that it was planning a population transfer of Gaza's residents (the "humanitarian city" in Rafah), then maybe she would have shared Frey's anger, even if not his joy over the soldiers' deaths.
Frey neither incited nor supported terrorism. He was arrested because he thinks the soldiers operating in Gaza are committing brutal crimes against humanity.
Palestinian mother Samah Al-Nouri, whose daughter Sama was killed in an Israeli strike on Thursday, comforts her son as casualties from the strike are brought into a hospital in the Gaza Strip.Credit: Ramadan Abed/Reuters
Consequently, it's also not surprising that the prison commissioner ordered him to be classified as a "security detainee" – a status normally reserved for Palestinians convicted or suspected of terrorism.
The state thereby outlawed an entire point of view: that Israel is committing crimes against humanity in Gaza is "terrorism."
And the one fundamental question that is never asked, because it has been silenced with the cooperation of most Israelis, is the following: Is Israel in fact perpetuating cruel crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip?
Such silencing isn't unusual in countries that commit such crimes. But it's not inconceivable that in the future, this discussion will be held.
Perhaps then, when people talk about the consensus that dominated Israel at the time and how the media and the legal system collaborated with it, they'll also remember the people who refused to fall in line.
And because we have learned from history that societies do get caught up in collective crimes and wake up too late, we have a duty to maintain a place in our society for people who challenge the consensus in the very places where that has become taboo.