Ayelet Lash; Screenshot of her Facebook page
Sunday, January 31, 2021, 17:45 In mid-January, Ayelet Lash, a right-wing social media personality, was interrogated by the police following a complaint filed by the Reform Movement with the Attorney General’s office against her, over “incitement to racism”. The complaint was filed on the basis of posts by Lash in which she expressed her opinions concerning the powerlessness of the police in handling the rampant crime in the Arab sector and her opinions opposing the policy of the State of Israel on the matter.
From the description of the interrogation it appears that the policeman who interrogated Lash also did not regard it as necessary and said that he did not understand why he had to interrogate her. She was told while under interrogation that the Reform Movement had turned to the Attorney General’s office with a demand that she be interrogated.
Ayelet Lash: “This presumptuous and ugly attempt by the Reform Movement to silence voices is an embarrassment and a disgrace. And the very fact that in a democratic country a mother of four children, who served in the National Service and is the wife of a combat reserve soldier, was taken for interrogation by the police as if she were the worst of the terrorists, over legitimate posts on Facebook, is a badge of shame for the freedom of expression here and for the authorities in the State of Israel which cooperate with this banal absurdity. I am a law-abiding citizen and I have never violated a law or called for others to transgress. These pathetic attempts to silence voices will not defeat us.”
Honenu Attorneys Adi Keidar and Moshe Poleski, who are representing Lash: “This is an injustice unlike any other. Ayelet was interrogated over a tweet on Twitter in which she complained about the powerlessness of the police in handling crime in the Arab sector. Much to our surprise the Israeli Police accepted the directive from the Attorney General’s office to interrogate Ayelet Lash under warning.
“This is a serious silencing of voices reminiscent of dark regimes. The very authorization to open an investigation under these circumstances is a disgrace in and of itself. The Attorney General’s office boasts about the freedom of expression and, due to its importance, does not investigate hundreds of instances of explicit incitement to violence and terror in the Arab sector. But when a Jewish woman merely points out the raging violence in the Arab sector and the powerlessness of the law enforcement authorities to handle it, she is summoned to the police station for interrogation under warning. The Attorney General’s office is simply harassing an innocent citizen who only wanted to point out, in a tweet, failures of the law enforcement authorities. Instead of buckling down and starting to resolutely fight the wide-spread crime in the Arab sector, what does the Attorneys General’s office do? They order the individual who dared to tweet about it to be interrogated. This is simply an embarrassment.”