Israel plans to shut down Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem office, stop transmitting its broadcasts and strip the Qatar-based channel’s journalists of their credentials, the country’s communications minister said Sunday.
Ayoub Kara accused the channel of “incitement” as he announced the plans for shuttering the station’s operations.
“Freedom of expression is not freedom to incite,” he said, according to a ministry statement. “Democracy has limits.”
Al Jazeera said it was unclear when the Israeli government would act on Kara’s request. A legal amendment will be made to adopt the measures, the ministry statement said, with the law updated to reflect the “current geopolitical reality.”
“Changing the law in order to shut down a media organization for political reasons is a slippery slope,” the executive secretary of Israel’s Foreign Press Association, Glenys Sugarman, told the news agency Reuters.
Accusing Al Jazeera of incitement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed last month to shut down its Jerusalem bureau amid clashes between Israeli authorities and Palestinian worshipers over access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque site in Jerusalem’s Old City. However, his office declined to give specific examples of content they deemed to have stoked tensions.
Al Jazeera has accused Israel of siding with Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that are imposing an economic blockade on Qatar and have severed diplomatic relations with the kingdom. These Arab states accuse Qatar of backing terrorism and have demanded the shutdown of Qatari-funded Al Jazeera.
Saudi Arabia and Jordan have closed Al Jazeera offices in recent months, while the channel’s signal has been blocked in the United Arab Emirates.
“The collusion by Netanyahu with his Arab autocratic neighbors leaves little doubt that free independent media and truth are ready to be sacrificed as collateral damage in the power politics of the region,” Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Walid Omary, wrote in an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Since its inception, Al Jazeera has provided Israel with a rare conduit for airing its viewpoints to Arab and Muslim audiences and participating in dialogue with them.”
