Knesset advances bill targeting ‘incitement to terrorism’
Legislation would lower standards of evidence for prosecuting calls for attacks, removing requirement to link them to specific incidents
The Knesset advanced a bill on Monday that seeks to ease the prosecution of Israeli citizens accused of inciting terror attacks.
The government-sponsored legislation, drafted by the Justice Ministry, passed its first of three required plenum votes by a margin of 34 to nine, and now goes to the Knesset House Committee for debate and amendment.
The government has committed to passing the legislation quickly in order to allow prosecutors to expand their efforts to try people who call for stabbings and other terror attacks in recent weeks. Officials have asked lawmakers to bring the bill to committee as early as Tuesday, Haaretz reported.
The bill would lower the bar for prosecuting “incitement to terrorism” by removing the current requirement to prove that a defendant’s incitement was likely to produce “practical results.” Prosecutors will no longer have to produce evidence that a particular attack was instigated by a specific defendant’s call for violence, or that such attacks were very likely to result from the call.
The bill also sets a precedent of distinguishing in law between incitement to terror attacks and incitement to violence unconnected to nationalist or ideological conflict. The lower standard of evidence, if it bill is signed into law, will only relate to terror incitement. Thus, prosecutors will still have to show evidence of direct links between incitement and attacks in order to indict on non-ideological “incitement to violence” offenses.
Current anti-incitement law forbids publicizing explicit support for terror attacks or praising attackers for carrying them out. Those acts will remain proscribed under the new law. The bill also retains the maximum sentence for incitement: five years’ imprisonment.
Knesset members from the Joint (Arab) List voiced opposition to the measure.
“We are presented with a useless and even dangerous new stringency,” MK Dov Khenin said during Monday’s plenum debate.
“Giving up on the principle of preponderance [of evidence that attacks might result from the incitement] is the real trick of the bill. The simple act of speaking, even if it is clear that it won’t lead to violence, becomes a crime. Instead of making the police and legal authorities focus on expression that poses a real threat, we’re turning all expression into criminal expression and raising the severity of punishment to an extreme,” he charged.
But the government bill enjoyed widespread support from opposition lawmakers.
Zionist Union MK Nachman Shai said he would support the bill in order “to stop the wave of stabbings,” but said tackling incitement was not enough.
“The government is shooting in the dark because it doesn’t know how to stop the wave of stabbings and terror attacks. The problem isn’t incitement, but the lack of solutions for the Palestinians,” Shai said.
Fellow Zionist Union MK Yoel Hasson called the bill “important.”