The Shin Bet’s recent decisions to delay some anti-Occupation activists at the airport for “cautionary conversations” on their way into the country; are these interviews a frightful slide down a slippery slope, or just security-folks being security-folks?
This is a segment from The “Cautionary Conversations” Edition.
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Israeli law allows exclusion of travelers advocating BDS. Peter Beinart, a professed liberal Zionist, has said in New York Times op ed that he cannot in conscience purchase products made by settlers in occupied territory–minimally, a personal boycott. This not the quietism of Quakers past who, in personal decision announced only to intimate family and Friends in Meeting, would refrain from deed or interaction, rather inscrutable to the outside world. At best his public stance is “here I stand, where are you?” a step removed from “here I stand, how can you not join me?,” this last full advocacy of boycott. Is admission of personal refusal advocacy of boycott? On that question hangs Beinart’s intimidating detention. For if Beinart could be turned away he can be “cautioned” and admitted, a weaker reprimand, this certainly the thinking of security. They questioned him to decide whether their discretionary power should be evoked, or so they can say.
If I can be sanctioned for saying I will not perform an act, can I not be sanctioned for not performing the act? Must I then purchase a settler product to avoid denial of entry? Is that not the only way to insure I have not boycotted in thought and non-deed? Should Ben Gurion not have a settler store where all entrants dutifully buy if but a trifle to show purity of mind? And does not my otherwise admission incriminate me in my non-act, a thought crime made material by the absence of material outcome? Have some money in your pocket to avoid expulsion!
Free speech, in the United States, operates rather the reverse. I can announce I will burn my draft card, but until I do nothing can be done to me. But does not my announcement provide emotional support for others thinking of doing same; does it not plant the idea into others’ minds making them an engine of future crime, making me a material cause to that future crime; does not my announcement encourage assembly for communal criminal card burning? Speech affects the brain, of self and recipients. The 1st Amendment interdicts these causal chains as material causes in law, minimally when the speech is made through a public media organ with no direct exposure between speaker and recipient. This does not mean the speech is not causal, just that it cannot be used by the State to define criminality. Security services often hate speech precisely because they understand its causal impact. But while speech might have such a causal impact, it is mostly quite difficult to show such impact per case; free speech becomes a corollary to reasonable doubt. And the latter principle lets some guilty go free. Security services everywhere want to control speech for good reason. They have to be stopped for even better reason. Unpleasant outcomes exist, though, for both sides.
Beinart has not only admitted to personal boycott of settler products; he has also lamented the devastating consequences of the siege of Gaza. He was detained, I believe, not as a bureaucratic fluke, “how DID you get on that list?”, but precisely for his words. He was detained as well as signal to others thinking of speaking similarly, and to those who might latter associate with him. He was detained not just to caution against meeting certain individuals or engage in otherwise lawful assembly, but to instill uneasiness to fear in those who might meet him. He was released in relatively short order because he had access to an Israeli attorney, and because someone realized he is too well known among liberal American Jews; others have waited longer, with more verbal abuse. But once you make spoken thought illegal it is hard to avoid such further steps, for they are all related to preventing more dangerous speech.
And this is another reason to interdict the admittedly frustrated security services, for chasing thought is a ticket that never expires.