Freedom of speech and dissent must stay key to US-Israel relationship

Western governments have taken extreme and unprecedented measures that step outside the normal parameters of statecraft, with little or no thought to the larger ramifications, Oded Forer writes.

US President Joe Biden’s administration’s unprecedented executive order of 1 February has been followed by a slew of similar announcements by Western governments sanctioning individuals and groups in Israel.
The impact of these sanctions goes far beyond the people whose freedoms they curtail. Governments that have long claimed to be democratic allies of the only democracy in the Middle East have, for all intents and purposes, overridden the underpinnings of Israel’s democracy.
By announcing extreme punitive measures against people, public movements and civil society organisations that have never been accused of criminal acts by the Israeli government and against whom no due process of law has ever been conducted in Israel, the US or Europe, the sanctions regime fundamentally dismisses the institutions of Israeli democracy.
In lockstep with the Biden administration, the governments of Canada, Australia, Japan and France — and the EU as a whole — have arrogated to themselves the right to decide, based on wholly untransparent sources and processes, which citizens of Israel are guilty, and what political positions are deemed criminal, seemingly without proper due process.
The sanctions exclusively target individuals and organisations that express or embody a positive view of Israel’s rights in Judea and Samaria, the indigenous and ancestral cradle of Jewish civilisation.
These individuals hold a critical view of the viability and desirability of a Palestinian state, and opposition to political accommodation of Hamas, views held by the majority of Israelis after the 7 October massacre.
This politicisation of the very extreme tool of sanctions, until recently employed as a weapon in the war against international terrorist and criminal organisations, is a tragedy for democracy, not only in Israel but everywhere and anywhere.
They are meant to have a chilling effect on the right to differ and directly impinge on freedom of speech and dissent as values in liberal democracies like ours.
In an attempt to bend political processes in Israel to better comply with their own geopolitical outlook and interests, western governments and international bodies have cast aside these bedrock principles.
The consequences are liable to deal a long-term blow to the conduct of international relations and to democracy itself.
Aside from expressing a colonialist approach to Israel’s democratic institutions, targeted sanctions are potentially toxic for the whole of Israel’s civil society and, by extension, for civil society organisations everywhere.
Israeli governments have for years refrained from interfering with non-government organisations despite the massive foreign involvement in Israel’s internal political landscape exerted by foreign governments through a host of well-funded civil society organisations.
If the US, Canadian and European sanctions now target legal, non-violent Zionist civil society organisations from afar, it can be expected that Israeli decision-makers and opinion-shapers will see themselves freer to abandon their policy of restraint toward anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian civil society organisations.
These organisations are overwhelmingly funded by the European Union and its member states, and enforcement of transparency laws and other restrictions that Israeli parliamentarians have thus far refrained from enforcing may soon become the “new normal”.
The most basic of all democratic freedoms is freedom of speech, the freedom to question, to differ — even with the nexus of power — and, when necessary, to express dissent.
When a citizen believes that his or her government is pursuing a policy that is unjust or unwise, it is a sacred democratic duty to take a stand, present arguments in the marketplace of ideas and air concerns in the public and parliamentary spheres.
When citizens have reason to believe that the government itself is failing to uphold the law of the land, the watchdogs, civil society’s non-government organisations, are entreated to raise the alarm.
If nothing else, all democratic societies share the belief that stifling civilised discourse and debate, legal activism, and peaceful public protest will inevitably drive citizens to the margins. This is in nobody’s interest.
In adopting these radical new sanctions, the US has cast a very dark shadow indeed on its commitment to these basic principles of democracy.
Western governments have taken extreme and unprecedented measures that step outside the normal parameters of statecraft, with little or no thought to the larger ramifications.
These sanctions must be reconsidered for the good of the US-Israel relationship and the vitality of our shared values of democracy, freedom and liberty.
Oded Forer is a Member of Knesset, Chairman of the Knesset Committee for Aliyah, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, and formerly Israel’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development.
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