Israel’s Arrest of Andrey X Shows Its Broader Suppression of Free Speech
On November 30, an activist and journalist who goes by the name of Andrey X—who has garnered a large social media following for his local reporting in Israel and Palestine—uploaded a video to Instagram which shows him placing a “Free Palestine” sticker on a wooden beam in the Israeli city of Sderot, less than a mile from Gaza. In the video, Andrey, who grew up in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg and moved to Tel Aviv after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, explains that he is standing at a lookout point from which Israeli tourists and students can watch Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip using binoculars. The lookout point was established more than a decade ago as a memorial for fallen soldiers, but it has regained prominence since the attack on October 7, 2023.
On December 12, almost two weeks after Andrey posted the video, plainclothes police officers in Tel Aviv, who refused to identify themselves, grabbed Andrey and forced him into an unmarked vehicle. One police officer threatened to kill another activist who was filming Andrey’s arrest. Andrey was then brought to a police station in Sderot where he spent the night in jail, during which time he says he suffered constant abuse and beatings, particularly before his interrogation, when one officer would repeatedly approach him, punch him, and then walk away. Andrey says he was also denied food and water, and strip searched multiple times throughout his time in jail.
Andrey was then brought before a judge and put on trial for vandalism and disturbing the public order. The police claimed that the sticker was placed on a monument commemorating the Israeli soldiers killed by Hamas militants on October 7. Following Andrey’s trial, the judge initially ordered that he be released, but the police appealed the ruling. Andrey then spent three more days in jail before facing trial again, this time with additional charges of assaulting an acting police officer and “desecrating a memorial.” Andrey denies all of these charges. He was subsequently released on bail of 5,000 Israeli shekels, and sentenced to a thirty-day ban from all Israeli military memorial sites, along with the possibility of being called in for future questioning at any time. Andrey speaks fluent Russian and English, but only conversational Hebrew, yet he states that no translator was provided during the trial, and that he had to rely on friends for translation from Hebrew to English during his trial and imprisonment.
Andrey’s arrest is just one example of a broader effort by the Israeli government to suppress free speech in Israel, particularly since October 7. A few weeks after October 7, members of the grassroots joint Israeli-Palestinian organizing group Standing Together were detained for putting up posters, and had their T-shirts confiscated. In December 2023, a Palestinian nurse working in Israel was arrested by Israeli police for allegedly blocking colleagues on social media, and had her work permit revoked. In another case, this past August, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) appealed to the Israeli court system to sanction a group of police officers for stealing the signs of anti-war protesters. The courts dismissed the petition.
In Andrey’s case, Israeli authorities made no secret of the political nature of his arrest. After Andrey uploaded the video of himself placing the sticker, Israel’s Minister of Housing and Construction Yitzchak Goldknopf called Andrey an “extreme leftist activist” and made a public statement appealing to the police to “put an end to [Andrey’s] depraved activities.” Andrey tells The Progressive that the wooden beam on which he placed the sticker was in no way marked as part of the monument, and that there were other stickers that had been previously placed there. Andrey’s testimony, along with court documents provided to The Progressive by the Human Rights Defenders’ Fund (HRDF), make it clear that the location of this sticker was only deemed illegal because of its content.
In these documents, the police directly referenced Goldknopf’s appeal, adding that Andrey “systematically carries out similar transgressions throughout Judea and Samaria,” referring to the West Bank by its Biblical name.The police also cited the pro-Palestinian sentiment of Andrey’s sticker as justification for his arrest. Shahadeh Ibn Beri, Andrey’s attorney and a representative of HRDF, tells The Progressive that Andrey’s arrest was “born of purely political motives . . . . [Andrey’s] activism has become a thorn in the eyes of extremist rightwing fascists, including various settlers that engage in systematic slander and incitement against him.”
While this type of systemic failure of justice has arguably existed since the founding of Israel, legal suppression of free speech has escalated since Itamar Ben-Gvir became the National Security Minister in 2022. Shortly after assuming office, Ben-Gvir instructed police to remove Palestinian flags from all public spaces, a move that ACRI has condemned as illegal.
For his part, Andrey has expressed uncertainty regarding how long he can continue his activism. “This is crystal clear political persecution, and the pressure on me is ramping up and it’s unclear how long I will be able to continue my work unabated,” he said in an Instagram post last month.“If these are the conditions Israeli Jews are subjected to, you can imagine the conditions for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.”
“It’s difficult to explain why jail is a bad place,” Andrey tells The Progressive. “It’s a bad place not because they strip search you. Not because they beat you. Not because they deprive you of [food and water] . . . The thing that actually pushes on you is hard to explain and it doesn’t sound as bad . . . the sense of your humanity being stripped from you, and the complete loss of agency and autonomy . . . feeling like you’re just an object to be moved within the system and the system hates you. All of that sounds like whining and sounds less serious than being beaten up, but it’s so much worse.”