No More Hiding Behind Planters

Photo: © Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime.com

At the end of a major hearing at the Supreme Court this past July, the court's security guards feared violence from right-wing activists who had come to court. To avoid this, they helped representatives from ACRI quickly escape from the courtroom the moment the proceedings ended and tried to hide us in one of the corners of the building. And so there we found ourselves, after a principled and important legal hearing about the starvation of security prisoners, crouching with the security guards behind a planter so that the thugs wouldn't find us. 

This almost comical situation is just another symptom of the mechanisms of intimidation and violence being wielded against civil society and against the court. 

At that hearing, I counted 16 security guards inside the courtroom, who stood and tried to prevent harm to the judges or the building. But for a long time now, extremists and right-wing activists have been lying in wait for us at the entrance to and exit from the court. Together with shouting and hurling abuse at the lawyers, they film videos and take photos of our young female staff members and try to dox them online, where they publish their phone numbers and instigate a campaign of telephone harassment against them. 

Protecting human rights has always been a struggle against the centers of power, and the restoration of civil and human rights following a war is a long process that is nowhere near automatic. This is a critical moment. It requires understanding that the cruelty and the injustice will not stop without determined resistance. 

With the outbreak of the war, we saw a collapse of all human and civil rights in Israel and in the occupied territories. Alongside the war crimes that Israel committed in Gaza, we witnessed the suppression of freedom of expression of Arab society in Israel, as well as the undermining of freedom of protest, the disregard of the most basic human rights in prisons, and harm to freedom of the press. 

Now the illusion that it is possible to dismantle the human and civil rights of Palestinians in the territories and in Israel and continue to maintain a democratic society, is shattering. And indeed, while the discrimination against Palestinians and other disadvantaged groups is becoming entrenched, it is also expanding and seeping into other spheres. 

The examples are numerous. Since the beginning of the war, hundreds of Arab citizens have been arrested under a temporary order for their expressions on social media. Now, in addition to legislative moves attempting to render this temporary order permanent, in recent weeks we have been seeing Jewish anti-government protesters being arrested. Similarly, after the attempts to silence and the subsequent closure of Al Jazeera under emergency regulations, we are now witnessing new legislation designed to make the closure of Al Jazeera permanent, alongside an unprecedented attack on the prominent Jewish Israeli journalist Guy Peleg, whose "crime" is reporting on Netanyahu's corruption trial. And if in the past institutionalized police violence against protesters was expressed towards Arab, Bedouin, Ethiopian, and ultra-Orthodox protesters, today the police force exercises violence against all groups opposing the government, including Knesset members, and permits political thuggery by rogue groups and militias. 

Every official, journalist, cultural institution director, or protester is a target. To stop the snowballing, we must stand on the principles of protecting human rights without concessions or cutting corners. Not to be deterred and not to hide behind planters, but to face the violence and resist it. 

We stand before enormous forces that seek to harm the most basic values. That aim to undermine the gatekeepers and opponents of the government through attacks that appear separate and isolated, but are in fact part of a comprehensive attack. The institutional attempt to harm Al Jazeera creates the conditions to try to legally shut down public broadcasting, and gives legitimacy to the violence against Guy Peleg. State-sponsored violence trickles from hurting Arabs and Palestinians to hurting Jews, from the attack on human rights organizations outside the courthouse walls into the halls themselves and to the judges. 

Human rights, based on the concept that every person has rights that no government can strip from them, are the legal and practical expression of the values of human dignity, the sanctity of life, equality, and morality. They are the foundation for a just society, upon which we can build a different future here. Success depends on our ability to understand the broader picture, and to respond every time with determination, with strength, and without compromise. 

This is a translation of an article that appeared on the Haaretz website in Hebrew on December 7, 2025