Paris- The Israeli forces’ storming of Tel Aviv Tribune’s office in Ramallah yesterday, Sunday, and its closure for 45 days by military order, presented by armed and masked soldiers on a faded piece of paper to journalists in the office, and carried out in a hurry in an area that is “theoretically” outside the authority of the occupation, raised several questions and concerns about its motives.
As international organizations defending press freedom and legal experts continue to denounce Israel’s violations, this decision coincides with an unprecedented wave of political incitement against Tel Aviv Tribune within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, violent attacks by the occupation on the occupied West Bank, and a campaign of extermination against the people of Gaza that is approaching its first year.
audio and video execution
In a scene that resembles a military parade and the situation in Palestine on a miniature scale, the journalists leave their office while the occupiers remain inside, roaming around like ghosts, vandalizing and confiscating the network’s property. Even the image of the late journalist Shireen Abu Akleh bothered them, so they found no way to deter her looks that followed them around the place except by tearing it up.
For her part, the President of the International Federation of Journalists, Dominique Pradali, believes that “the occupier is trying by all possible means to eliminate all witnesses and journalists who could testify to the crimes of soldiers and settlers.” She added to Tel Aviv Tribune Net that Israel does not respect the freedom of journalistic work in the Palestinian territories it occupies and in the Gaza Strip as well, and that fortunately, Palestinian journalists in Gaza have continued to provide the world with serious and honest information and images to reveal the truth about the situation there.
Regarding the seriousness of the seizure of the office’s archives and equipment, Bradley described it as “an act of war,” noting that expelling journalists and stealing all their data on computers and other devices is extremely dangerous to all their communications because they are no longer able to protect their sources.
In the same context, the Deputy Secretary General of the International Federation of Journalists, Tim Dawson, stressed that the files that journalists work on must remain completely confidential because they are obligated to protect the identities of their sources. Therefore, the search of computers by a hostile government is completely unacceptable, and is only one part of a long series of horrific crimes committed by the Israeli government against free media, he said.
Speaking to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, Dawson expects Israeli journalists to suffer the same fate, because “tyrants don’t tend to practice tyranny once they get away with it, they just keep practicing it more.” He continued, “We’ve seen attacks on Israeli newspapers like Haaretz, which have been described as enemies of the state, which means that the government does not tolerate views that deviate from its own views and gives itself the right to silence people when they criticize it.”
He believes that Israel will use its technology or artificial intelligence techniques to copy, download and analyze all the files it took from Tel Aviv Tribune’s office to examine them more quickly, “a terrifying prospect that undermines the basic principles of a free press,” according to the spokesman.
Lawless intimidation
For its part, the Israeli army claims that the closure order came because “the offices were used to incite terrorism and the channel’s broadcasts endangered security and public order in the region and all of Israel.”
Commenting on this, French lawyer Gilles Duvier asserts that the occupying military force has no right to close the office even for 15 minutes, nor to manage the affairs of Ramallah, according to the 2014 International Court of Justice opinion, which clearly states that “any occupation is illegal and must be ended immediately.”
In an interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net, Duvere considers that the concept of terrorism in international law has very weak content and does not exist in the statute of the International Criminal Court or the writings of international justice. Therefore, their accusations are limited to “the crazy political success of this term because its value – legally – is marginal and fragile.”
It is not unlikely that the 45-day period imposed by the occupation will be renewed. He explained, “The military force has no limits or respect for laws, and after they have exceeded all legal grounds that do not allow them to close the Tel Aviv Tribune office, they can go further and accuse the office director of incitement to crime and so on.”
Dawson sees what the occupation soldiers did as a “despicable attempt to intimidate Tel Aviv Tribune journalists,” and that tearing up the pictures of the late Shireen Abu Akleh is a “despicable act” that is part of the Israeli government’s attacks on media freedom, including preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza, targeting Palestinian journalists for murder, and harassing local media when they dare to criticize its government.
For her part, Bradley pointed out the difficulty faced by the International Federation of Journalists in protecting journalists, because “when the occupier does not apply any international law and the international authorities fail to make their voice heard and respected, it is difficult for us to do more than these authorities can do.”
Assassination of democracy and Oslo
Despite Israel’s desperate efforts to portray itself as the only democratic state in the Middle East and the most efficient legal system, its actions prove otherwise, that its system is far from democratic and that its government policy has relegated the rule of law to the shadows and become a dying memory.
This is consistent with the statements of the international criminal law specialist, Toby Kidman, to Tel Aviv Tribune Net when he said that “Israel practices a policy of apartheid and has a clear goal of dehumanizing the Palestinian people, and its military forces storming the Tel Aviv Tribune office and closing it down constitutes clear evidence of its blatant tyranny.”
“Tel Aviv Tribune is clearly an important independent voice documenting crimes in real time, a voice that the Israeli government is desperate to hide from the outside world,” Kidman said. “The harsh reality is that we are witnessing the collapse of the international rule of law system – as if it were normal – and our collective silence should make us feel ashamed.”
According to attorney Gil Dovere, the Oslo Accords disappear completely, because they were based on the idea of distancing oneself from international law and creating a binational treaty, a method that was primarily aimed at distancing the Palestinian people from international law, and thus depriving them of all possible means of recourse to it.
He continued, “At a time when the Palestinian issue is making progress, Israel is violating the sovereignty of the Palestinian territories and international law, because the Palestinians have left the Oslo Accords aside and returned to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.”
In turn, Tim Dawson described the storming of the office and the entry of the occupation forces into Area A as a “flagrant violation of Oslo,” noting that “the soldiers moving in their military uniforms and carrying assault rifles as if they were going to battle, breaking down doors, confiscating equipment, and expelling journalists from their offices, proves the death of media freedom, as democracy is assassinated in its absence.”
While Oslo was killed and freedom of the press remained ink on paper, current events have proven that the region has an Israeli military governor armed with what he calls “authorities” by which he decides whatever he wants, leaving many question marks hanging over the occupation’s true intentions in the West Bank, perhaps the most important of which is: What does it want to do there away from Tel Aviv Tribune’s cameras?