• The IDF has closed the al Jazeera office in the West Bank for 45 days.
• Israel is drifting towards taking full control of Palestine.
The Israel Defence Force has closed the al Jazeera offices in the West Bank for 45 days.
Israel has always claimed to be the most democratic state in the Middle East. Accelerating censorship gives the lie to this claim. No foreign journalists are allowed into Gaza, which has been pulverised by the IDF. Only al Jazeera has been able to report continuously from Gaza – that is why al Jazeera has been banned from reporting inside Israel and why its West Bank office has now been closed.
And it is not only al Jazeera that is suffering. Over 600 articles have been censored in the last year by the military censor inside Israel, which itself is slipping into autocracy.
Twenty years ago Tony Judt wrote that Israel has to choose between being an apartheid state that swallows Palestine and a democratic country which accepts a two-state solution.
Israel has no legal authority to close a media house in the West Bank. Nor does it have legal authority to order Palestinians out of northern Gaza. Israel is drifting towards apartheid.
The closure of the al Jazeera office in the West Bank is a dangerous warning sign.
Quote of the day: "The past is never dead. It's not even past. "
William Faulkner
The American novelist was born on September 25, 1897