Two officials from the National Security Council, Rani Peled and Amit Aviram, on Monday told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (FADC) the cabinet was not holding any hearings regarding problems of incitement, and that if it did, it was not clear which cabinet would do so, the outgoing one or the incoming one.
The unprecedented answer from the NSC officials reflected the unique political moment currently facing the country, when there is an expectation that a new government is about to take over, but it is not final, and the professional level of the government is unclear about who is giving them orders.
The response came after a question from FADC chairwoman MK Orna Barbivai (Yesh Atid) about whether the cabinet was holding hearings on the issue and giving directives to government agencies about handling it.
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Director Nadav Argaman was not in attendance despite being the one who brought the dangers of political incitement to the front pages of the country’s newspapers.
Barbivai said she had insisted on holding the hearing publicly because the incitement was public, but Argaman had only been willing to participate in a closed-door hearing.
Argaman’s warnings were interpreted as mainly directed to a mix of statements made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters against members of the new expected government.
Earlier, Barbivai framed the complexity of the challenge of tackling political incitement in light of the need to maintain free speech for leading officials.
Some incitement “is connected to the political sector,” she said, [but] how do we deal with incitement when it is connected to politics?”
Nevertheless, when the Shin Bet director is worried about trends on social media “both in quantity and in severity,” the political class and the FADC must take notice, Barbivai said.
No probe had yet been opened for any of the recent political incitement, Deputy State Attorney for Special Matters Shlomi Abramson reported. The prosecution generally waits for the police to bring cases to them, he said.
Five incitement indictments were filed in connection with social-media posts regarding Jewish-Arab ethnic strife tied to the May 10-21 Gaza conflict, three indictments against Arabs and two against Jews, Abramson reported.
Moreover, 35 posts were monitored and 12 were criminally investigated, with some probes still ongoing, he said.
Social-media trends are being followed and analyzed from a legal perspective to see if they fit the category for opening a criminal probe, senior police investigations commander Dudu Boani said.
He spoke about the challenges of tracing and handling such issues, as opposed to how much easier it is to locate, arrest and prosecute persons who commit crimes in the physical world.
Knesset Security Officer Yosef Garif said: “In the recent period there has been a rise in the reaction received by MKs; now there are four MKs with special security details.”
Religious Zionist Party MKs Orit Struck and Itamar Ben-Gvir criticized Argaman and the police for allegedly focusing more on incitement by right-wing activists against the Left as opposed to also probing incitement from left-wing activists against the Right.
In response, Barbivai said: “Attempts to attribute political calculations to the Shin Bet and the police is grave and violates the rules of the game of a democratic state. Harming security institutions causes damage to the ability of the State of Israel to defend itself from both internal and external threats.”
She called on the cabinet to hold an emergency meeting to combat the current wave of incitement.
The current atmosphere was leading down a slippery slope that, in the past, had led to the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Barbivai said.