Israel’s government is set to punish the country’s leading left-leaning newspaper, Haaretz, by ordering a boycott of the publication by government officials or anyone working for a government-funded body and halting all government advertising in its pages or website.
In a statement on Sunday, the office of Shlomo Karhi, the communications minister, said that his proposal against Haaretz had been unanimously approved by other ministers.
“We will not allow a reality in which the publisher of an official newspaper in the state of Israel will call for the imposition of sanctions against it and will support the enemies of the state in the midst of a war and will be financed by it,” the statement said.
“We advocate a free press and freedom of expression, but also the freedom of the government to decide not to fund incitement against the state of Israel.”
Haaretz, which is Israel’s oldest newspaper and widely respected internationally for its reporting and analysis, has been a fierce critic of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his current coalition government, the most rightwing in the history of the country.
The newspaper has published a series of investigations of wrongdoing or abuses by senior officials and the armed forces, and has long been in the crosshairs of the current government. It has also been a vocal supporter of the campaign for a ceasefire to free hostages seized by Hamas in October last year and still held in Gaza.
In a statement on Sunday, Haaretz accused Netanyahu of seeking to “dismantle Israeli democracy” and said the resolution to boycott the newspaper was “opportunist” and had been passed by ministers without any legal review.
“Like his friends Putin, Erdoğan, and Orbán, Netanyahu is trying to silence a critical, independent newspaper. Haaretz will not balk and will not morph into a government pamphlet that publishes messages approved by the government and its leader,” the statement said.
To justify the boycott of Haaretz, Karhi’s office has highlighted comments made by Amos Schocken, its publisher, at a recent conference organised by the newspaper in London.
Schocken accused the Israeli government of “imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population” and said it was “fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters, that Israel calls terrorists”. He later clarified his remarks, saying that he had not meant to refer to Hamas.
Haaretz also published an editorial saying that “deliberately harming civilians is illegitimate. Using violence against civilians and sowing terror among them to achieve political or ideological goals is terrorism. Any organisation that advocates the murder of women, children and the elderly is a terrorist organisation, and its members are terrorists. They certainly aren’t “freedom fighters”.
Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the boycott showed that Israel was led by an increasingly authoritarian government dedicated to crushing all kinds of dissent.
“The space for criticism has narrowed significantly, not just by Palestinians but by Jewish Israelis,” she said.
Karhi first proposed a government resolution to halt any state advertisement, subscriptions or other commercial connection with Haaretz last year, citing “defeatist and false propaganda during wartime”.
The move prompted the International Federation of Journalists to express its concern that the Israeli government was set on restricting press freedom and the public’s right to know.
In May, Israeli authorities shut down the local offices of Al Jazeera, hours after a government vote to use new laws to close the satellite news network’s operations in the country.
Officials said the move was justified because Al Jazeera was a threat to national security. “The incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel,” Netanyahu posted on social media. Critics called the move a “dark day for the media”.