The Science and Technology Committee of the Knesset, chaired by MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash-Ta’al), convened on last week for a debate on the displays of hatred and incitement recorded on social media against Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel. In the debate, a special report by the Knesset Research and Information Center was presented, which revealed enforcement statistics pertaining to offenses of incitement to terrorism during the war in Gaza, in the years 2023–2024. The report raised troubling questions about gaps in enforcement, racism and lack of transparency in handling these offenses.
In Octobers 2023, some of the procedures for opening investigations on these offenses were made more flexible. The police were given the power to launch an investigation even without the authorization of the State Attorney’s Office in cases of “clear shows of support for Hamas.” The change led to the launching of an additional 105 investigations, but these statistics were not analyzed by police according to population group. The report emphasizes the gaps between the data provided by the police and the State Attorney’s Office. While the police provided partial information on the number of complaints and investigation cases, the State Attorney’s Office did not provide a full breakdown of the statistics by nationality or gender, due to the limitations of its records.
MK Ayman Odeh during the debate at the Science and Technology Committee in the Knesset (Photo: Knesset)
Among the trends that stand out are a significant gap between the number of suspects and the number of indictments ultimately served, and a disproportionate focus on specific population groups. A breakdown of the statistics by population groups shows that 92% of the suspects in incitement cases were from the Arab-Palestinian national minority in Israel, whereas the number of racist Jewish suspects stood at just 8%. Additionally, from the 42 indictments filed against Arab defendants in 2024, none ended in acquittal. Conversely, no indictments were filed in cases that involved far-right Jewish suspects, which numbered 20 cases.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said that the far-right government ignores Arab complaints of harassment while over policing Arab citizens for legitimate political expression, During the first five weeks of the war, Adalah handled 251 cases involving arrests, interrogations, or warnings for Arab citizens—121 for alleged incitement on social media and 31 for participating in protests.
Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler of the Israel Democracy Institute presented the new digital reality that poses challenges to states and technology companies in coping with incitement offenses. She said that the primary failing was the problem of lack of transparency and added that the social media platforms were required to provide a quick response to complaints about offensive content, but in practice the handling time of the complaints is quite slow, particularly on weekends and Sundays. She said that the social media platforms had failed to implement effective content monitoring mechanisms in unique languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, leading to selective and unequal enforcement.
Khaled Kutt, the husband of Safaa Awad, an educator from Shfar’am who was murdered in a Hizballah rocket attack from Lebanon that struck the Lower Galilee last month, said, “In addition to the great pain and our severe loss to the family, the friends, the entire school and the town, beyond all the sorrow in the world, we experienced a severe racist attack. We will take all possible measures to restore the honor of our dear wife and mother.”
Committee Chair MK Odeh said during the session “We have before us shocking responses that were sent to families that experienced bereavement in the Arab society, and received comments such as ‘May there be many more in your village’ and so forth. The coping of the authorities and the technology companies with offensive discourse and incitement online reveals a very worrying picture; the incitement is clearly directed towards the Arab population.”
“The data presented to us speaks for itself: 92% of the investigations launched in the past year were against Arabs; 70% of the arrests were based on publications on social media and only 20% of the cases led to an indictment. There is a clear lack of satisfactory mechanisms for handling this phenomenon—there is no coordinating agency in charge, no methodology, no legislation, no exact data and no ability to break down the data by nationality or language. This situation attests to the authorities’ lack of readiness to cope with the scope and severity of the problem. Here in the committee, we will continue to monitor the issue closely and work to advance solutions that will ensure proper handling of online incitement,” added MK Odeh.
