Early last week, Israeli authorities arrested one of the most senior journalists in Palestine: Nasser Laham, editor-in-chief of the Ma’an News Agency. He was held for nine days on suspicion of “assisting a terror organization through media,” then quietly released without charge.

I’ve known Nasser for over 20 years. We first met in the early days of the Second Intifada, a time when many still clung to the belief that if Israeli and Palestinian journalists simply sat down and got to know each other, they could begin to bridge the divide and foster a discourse of peace. If memory serves, what bonded us was the shared conviction that dialogue alone isn’t enough, and that real change demands calling things by their name: occupation, dispossession, apartheid.

We met many times after that, usually in Nasser’s office in Bethlehem. We typically spoke in Hebrew, which Nasser had learned fluently during his time in Israeli prison, and occasionally in Arabic, which I had just begun to study. After I was fired from the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth for political reasons, Nasser invited me to write for Ma’an, and I ended up publishing a piece or two. Later, when a young Palestinian man set fire to my car in Ramallah, Nasser wrote an article in my defense, stating that I was “a friend of the Palestinian people.”

I don’t recall us ever talking about “peace.” Nasser was careful not to endorse any particular political solution — whether one state, two states, or something in between. Instead, our conversations focused on principles: equality, freedom, justice, and the right of everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to a life of safety and dignity. 

When I began formulating ideas for a new political movement, it was Nasser who introduced me to Awni Al-Mashni, a political activist he knew from the Dheisheh refugee camp and from Israeli prison. Awni would go on to co-found with me the organization known today as A Land for All. Our first meeting took place in Nasser’s office.

Over the years, I saw Nasser drift away from the many Israeli friends he once had. And they, too, began to keep their distance. The bridges between them, already fragile when we first met in the early 2000s, had by then fully collapsed. The separation and suppression had worked. 

Israeli media gradually lost interest in hearing Palestinian voices, becoming increasingly preoccupied with concealing the occupation and preserving the status quo. On the other side, many Palestinians no longer saw the point in speaking to an audience that refused to listen. They were done playing the role of eternal defendants, forever expected to apologize for their very existence.

In 2018, I visited Nasser in Dheisheh to offer condolences after his father passed away. I suggested we do an interview for +972 and Local Call. It was a bitter conversation. Although he repeatedly stressed that Palestinians should not resort to violence (“We have no armies, no weapons, no means, and no possibilities”), his message was far from one of reconciliation. 

“The Zionist movement is the worst in history when it comes to sowing hatred between nations,” he said. “There is no hope for peace with it. No possibility for peace.”

When I pressed him to describe what kind of solution he envisioned, he said: “How do we find a solution? We wait a thousand years. The Israelis will be defeated and flee. What’s the hurry? Why are the Arabs hurrying?”

Even if those were words of defiance, they were hard to hear — especially for someone like me who has searched, and still searches, for a path to reconciliation. But in hindsight, he saw where things were heading: an age dominated by hatred, violence, and despair.

Sending a clear message

When my car was burned, Nasser wrote that I had paid a price for standing with the Palestinians. It felt like an overstatement then, and feels even more so now, after Nasser himself spent over a week in prison for his journalism. 

Nasser’s attorney, former MK Osama Saadi, pointed to the stark gap between the serious charges leveled against his client — providing services to a terror organization, distributing inciting content, and identifying with a terrorist group — and the quiet, almost anticlimactic way his detention ended. According to Saadi, the allegations rested primarily on Nasser’s affiliation with the Lebanese channel Al Mayadeen and on classified evidence never shared with the defense. In the end, he was released without conditions, and Saadi predicts that no charges will be filed.

Whether Nasser actively directed the operations of Al Mayadeen in Palestine, as the prosecution claimed, or was simply interviewed as an expert, the action taken by Israel against the channel was clearly an act of suppression. The discourse on Al Mayadeen — or Al Jazeera, for that matter, whose operations Israel has also banned — may be impassioned, and may even contain errors from time to time. But if that qualifies as “incitement,” all Israeli news channels would have been shut down long ago, and dozens of their journalists put behind bars.

Indeed, Nasser’s arrest seems to have served another purpose. A journalist known in nearly every Palestinian household and across much of the Arab world, his detention aimed to send a clear message to all Palestinians: no one is immune. Not those living in caves or tin shacks in Masafer Yatta or the Jordan Valley, and not those who travel the world interviewing prime ministers. Even after his release, the message lingers.

Nasser wasn’t the only journalist arrested by the Israeli authorities last week; Israel Frey, a Jewish-Israeli independent journalist and left-wing activist, was also detained by police for a tweet. After five Israeli soldiers were killed in combat in northern Gaza, Frey wrote on X that “the world is a better place this morning without five young men who participated in one of the most horrific crimes against humanity.” He was held for four days as a “security prisoner” — a category almost exclusively reserved for Palestinians — before being placed under house arrest.

It’s hard not to see the connection between Nasser’s arrest and that of Israel Frey, both of which fall on the same spectrum of silencing and intimidation. Yet the reactions could not have been more different. In Israel, even many who don’t particularly like Frey were outraged by his arrest, by the sight of him in detention garb, and by the decision to treat him as a “security” (i.e. Palestinian) prisoner. Nasser’s arrest, by contrast, passed in near silence.

But the proximity of these two cases should teach us something: there is no real line between one freedom and another, between press freedom “here” and press freedom “there.” As Martin Luther King wrote from Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.