Freedom of Expression in Israel
Adam Shinar · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Abstract This chapter provides an overview and critique of the protection of free expression in Israel. It argues that protection of speech in Israel has been almost exclusively reserved to the judiciary in the face of suspicion and sometimes hostility to free expression in the legislature and the executive. This duality can be traced to a security-driven colonialist paradigm dominant during Israel’s first years, which still maintains its hold on legal consciousness. According to this paradigm, security considerations are paramount and legitimate speech restrictions. Whereas this is the case in many jurisdictions, in Israel security considerations have been understood in an expansive and expanding way, thus serving to increase speech restrictions. The Supreme Court has increasingly resisted the security-based paradigm, yet developments in Israel, underscored by a permanent state of emergency, have all but guaranteed that security-based considerations receive a great deal of deference, even when security is merely a cover for preserving Israel’s constitutional identity and ideological hegemony. The conflicting approaches to free speech thus generate, on the one hand, a right that commands broad consensus in the abstract, but on the other hand, a right whose standing is still precarious. This chapter thus tells the story of both the protection and the vulnerability of speech protection in Israel, amidst these competing poles.