Israel is the oasis of democracy in the region, yet Israeli daily Haaretz is relentless in its criticism of the government, the occupation and the discrimination against the Palestinian people. And so it was necessary for Israel to shut the paper up to make sure there would be no dissonant voices amid the Israeli press, especially since Haaretz is the biggest, most liberal and influential newspaper in the country. Investigative reports by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass were for many years the main source of information on which human rights organizations all over the world depended to monitor the daily violations committed by the Israeli government in the Occupied Territories. Hass had indeed chosen to live amid the Palestinians in Ramallah in order to monitor directly the diverse forms of humiliation they suffered, the details of which she would publish immediately. And when the Israeli government imposed a blockade on Gaza, which former US President Jimmy Carter recently described as the worst violation of human rights in the world today, Amira Hass moved to Gaza in order to experience the horrors of the blockade herself. In his articles, Benny Ziffer, literary editor of Haaretz, had also called on Israeli writers to boycott the Paris Book Fair last month. He had succeeded in uncovering a secret document that the government made writers sign before they were given their airline tickets to attend the fair in which they pledged not to attack Israel during any of the seminars, or the media. Haaretz is awash with journalists who criticize Israel's policies such as Gideon Levi, Meron Rapaport, Akiva Eldar and others. But since we all know that the existence of democratic systems which boast a free press does not necessarily mean that journalists have the right to attack the government and expose its policies to the scrutiny of public opinion, Gideon Levi's weekly Friday column was cancelled altogether, Rapaport was fired and Amira Hass' salary was halved, after she was relegated to a freelancer; and Akiva Eldar's weekly page was shrunk down by half. Of course all this happened without the slightest breach of press freedom, since Israel is the oasis of democracy in the region. The paper was bought by a new publisher who apparently decided that news of the occupation doesn't sell, according to him, and that the paper needed to follow a new editorial policy that is more preoccupied with running trade and business news! This reminds me of a similar incident when the Israeli right-wing newspaper the Jerusalem Post was sold to Conrad Black who changed its editorial policy completely, making it the main conduit for Israel's conservative right. He even hired a former censor as publisher - a fact that clearly neither contradicts press freedom or the principles of democracy - which led to the resignation of many of the editors who objected to the appointment. Still Israel is an oasis of democracy and what happened recently in Haaretz is no different from what's happening in Israel in general. Renowned US researcher Norman Finkelstein was recently prohibited from entering Israel - despite the fact that he is a Jew whose parents are Holocaust survivors - because he wrote that Israel had transformed the Holocaust into a lucrative trade in his famous book "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Eighty-year-old Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of South Africa and anti-Apartheid activist who received the Nobel Peace prize in 1984 was also recently refused entry into Israel for calling on the Jewish State to respect the rights of Palestinians under occupation. The reason for that is that Israel doesn't want the world to know what it's doing to the Palestinians; and because it is the oasis of democracy in the region, it shuts up all the voices which expose its policies. Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writers' Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
