Censorship, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, is the action of preventing part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons.
Censorship is deeply rooted in history, from Ancient Greece and Rome to the last century’s German, Italian and Russian totalitarian regimes, where it has always been used to prevent the disclosure of material considered subversive of the common good by those in power.
Despite the relevance of this political tool, censorship is not directly mentioned in the Constitution of the Italian Republic. Still, its application is limited by the constitutional right to freedom of speech, as Article 21 establishes that “Anyone has the right to freely express their thoughts in speech, writing, or any other form of communication. The press may not be subjected to any authorization or censorship […]. Publications, performances, and other exhibits offensive to public morality shall be prohibited”.
The Italian Constitution firmly emphasizes the importance of freedom, especially as it was promulgated in 1948, five years after the fall of fascism, when everyone’s freedom was put at stake and the need for it became stronger than ever. The only limit imposed on it is the moral standard of common decency in public.
Along the same line, at the European level, Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights reiterate that everyone has the right to freedom of expression, adding that “the exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others […].”[1]
The final lines suggest that the European Union does not allow unconditional freedom to individuals, rather it sets limits to it, in order to preserve countries’ welfare in matters of democratic values, security, integrity and safety.
With the same goal, the Digital Services Act (DSA) law package took effect on 25 August 2023, after being approved by the European Parliament and Council of the European Union in 2022.
The DSA introduces legal changes regarding content moderation, signaling and removing illegal and harmful material, and regular risk assessments to protect users from online dangers: it mainly seeks to create a safer digital space in which the fundamental rights of all users are protected by detecting, flagging and eliminating ill content like hate speech, child pornography, consumer fraud, disinformation, election manipulation, cyber violence.[2]
The DSA is aimed at large platforms or search engines that count more than 45 million users, such as X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and different services run by Google.[3]
With the DSA in force, many EU users are concerned with how it will be possible to keep a fair balance with fundamental rights such as the freedom of expression: when it comes to regulating speech, good intentions do not necessarily result in desirable outcomes, as the LA Times points out.[4]
On top of that, more critical voices argue that the Digital Services Act could be a way for the government to legitimize censorship, masking it beneath the legal system.
“The Digital Services Act is not a tool for censorship” replies a research fellow at the Privacy and Sustainable Computing Lab in Vienna Eliška Pírková – “It’s designed to uphold the rights of millions of people across Europe, and the mere suggestion that it could, should, or may be used for the opposite is misleading and dangerous.”
As stated, the DSA puts protection of freedom of expression at its core, working towards the creation of a secure and more transparent space, where every user is able to exercise their rights without threats.[5]
Moreover, users will be able to report illegal content in an easy and effective way, so that platforms can react promptly; in case they don’t, they will be held accountable through independent auditing reports in public scrutiny.
Nevertheless, the question remains: how risky is it to allow content moderation on such a wide scale, granting at the same time both the ban on censorship and freedom of speech? May the Digital Services Act be a cure worse than the disease?
Nowadays, censorship is a hot topic not only in the media, but also in the art world.
Especially in the wake of the Hamas attack of October 7th, many Palestinian artists or supporters have been muted, blocked or shadowbanned on the main social networks.
Censorship of Palestinians in Israel is nothing new and may be traced back to the era of the British Mandate,[6] a time when the Jewish state as such did not exist yet. British occupation was heavily criticized and opposed by Nuh Ibrahim,[7] “the popular poet of the 1936 revolution”. In his compositions, he sings of freedom and resistance, and urges his people to rebel against British and Zionist settlement. The collection of his patriotic chants, printed outside of Palestine during the 1936 Arab revolt, was banned by the British press censor. Still, a year later, his song Plan it, Mr Dill, which mocked the occupying armies’ commander-in-chief, had become so widespread that Ibrahim was incarcerated in Acre Prison, where he remained for five months. The following year, at 25 years old, he was shot by the British. He is considered a martyr, who died in his fight for freedom and justice.
For a fateful coincidence, Ghassan Kanafani[8] – an author, journalist, and politician, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – was born precisely in Acre in 1936. Concurrently with the 1948 outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war, his family was forced into exile and fled to Lebanon, later settling in Damascus. With his works – ‘The land of Sad Oranges’ (1962), ‘Men in the Sun’ (1963), ‘Return to Haifa’ (1970) – he preserved collective memories of the Nakba and the associated generational trauma, pioneering Palestinian Resistance Literature. Because of his literary and political activity, he was killed in Beirut by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence, on 8 July 1972.
While working for Al-Hurriya, a magazine edited by the Arab Nationalists Movement, Kanafani was the first to discover and publish Naji al-Ali’s comics.[9]
Al-Ali was eventually to become the most famous drawer in the Arab world and, according to The Guardian, “the nearest thing there is to an Arab public opinion”. In his strips, he depicts the hardships of living under Israeli occupation and advocates for the respect of Palestinian rights. On 22 July 1987, while outside the London offices of the newspaper he worked for, al-Ali was shot in the neck and mortally wounded; the responsibilities of his assassination are still to be ascertained, but Mossad is once again alleged to be involved. Handala, his most famous character, is a personification of Palestinian people: a ten-year-old boy – the age at which al-Ali was forced to leave his homeland - barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, turning his back to the reader. Handala is, to this day, one of the most iconic symbols of Palestinian identity and resistance, a constant presence in any form of Palestinian art.
The Freedom Theatre,[10] an institution founded in 2011, at the end of the second intifada, by actor and director Juliano Mer-Khamis in the Jenin refugee camp, made it a mission to collect testimonies of artistic censorship in The Revolution’s Promise (a play). The theater believes in culture as a form of resistance and holds that “the third intifada will be a cultural one”. Since then, the theater has been the subject of numerous Israeli raids, it has lost 80% of its funding by refusing to depoliticize its work, and its staff has been repeatedly imprisoned. Mer-Khamis, son of an Israeli mother and a Palestinian father, was shot dead on the doorstep of the theater on 4 April 2011.
There is Souhail Khoury, musician, composer and general director of the National Conservatory of Music, arrested for possessing revolutionary music tapes. He was violently tortured and convicted by a law from the British Mandate epoch – the same Nuh Ibrahim was convicted for, and the same Dareen Tatour, guilty of having posted a poem of resistance on Facebook,[11] would be sentenced for in 2018. There is Mohammed Bakri, whose award-winning documentary Jenin Jenin about the Jenin refugee camp massacre of 2002 has been banned[12] (available on YouTube here); there is Mohammed Saba’aneh, a cartoonist inspired by Naji al-Ali imprisoned in 2013, who smuggled his artwork out of prison; and there is Mohammad Al Azzah, a photographer who survived being shot in the head as he was taking photographs of Israeli soldiers, later searched, beaten up, imprisoned without charges, who nonetheless keeps taking photographs.
Beyond Israeli borders, even showing the slightest support to the Palestinian cause, as much as liking or sharing a post on Instagram, let alone exhibiting a Palestinian project, has recently become risky business.
Ask Ai Weiwei, the Chinese arti-star whose exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London, has been put on hold because of a since-deleted tweet.[13] Or ask David Velasco, the director of Artforum, who was fired[14] after the magazine published an open letter[15] signed by prominent figures of the art world, calling for an immediate ceasefire and the passage of humanitarian aid in Gaza. Repercussions have been such that many artists have demanded to cancel their names ever since, and Artforum editors, in a following note, have pointed out how “the open letter was widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly sensitive and complex geopolitical circumstances”.[16]
Germany, in particular, following a symbolic resolution passed in 2019 that, for the first time in the EU, deemed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement[17] “anti-semitic”, is particularly sensitive to showcasing work by Palestinian artists. Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s award ceremony for her Minor detail, to be held during the Frankfurt book fair, was annulled;[18] and again, curator Anaïs Duplan has seen his exhibition at Museum Folkwang in Essen shut down due to his pro-Palestine engagement on social media.[19] In a dramatic domino effect, the entire commission of documenta, the notable contemporary art festival held in Kassel, resigned claiming that “in the current circumstances, we do not believe that there is a space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas […]”.[20]
And if the documenta mass resignation hit the art world as an earthquake, imagine the impact when the most important contemporary art institution excludes Palestinian projects from its program: ArtNews reports that, while the Israeli pavilion will be set up as planned, the Palestinian Museum’s project, Foreigners in their Homeland, has been rejected and will not appear among the 2024 Venice Biennale’s collateral events.[21]
The conflict we are witnessing – and have been witnessing for years now – is extremely tangled and thorny. It calls for each one of us to question issues of legitimacy, power, violence, and justice. Even though different conclusions might be found in each reasoning, we do believe that if we, as both individual and Western countries, consider human rights and freedom cornerstones of democracy, we should also face – and condemn – the multiple cases of censorship carried out towards Palestinian artists, who cannot and should not be ignored.
Article by Sofia Brogi and Alice Campana
Bibliography
[1] Official Journal of the European Union C 303/17 - 14.12.2007.
[2] European Commission, Digital Strategy Policies, 25 September 2023: The Digital Services Act package
[3] Brussel Signal, 24 August 2023: Digital Services Act: EU censorship rules to come into force.
[4] LA Times, 23 December 2022: Op-Ed: Don’t be too tempted by Europe’s plan to fix social media.
[5] Access Now, 2 August 2023: DSA is not a censorship tool: Commissioner Breton must clarify blocking statement.
[6] Following WWI, the British Empire was granted “tutelage” - i.e., domination - of the Palestinian land, previously under Ottoman control, in order to provide “administrative advice and assistance”.
[7] Matthew Carey Salyer, “Revisiting Nuh Ibrahim, Rebel Poet of mandatory Palestine, in 2021”, Forbes, 25 May 2021.
[8] From the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine question, a joint project of the Institute for Palestinian Studies and the Palestinian Museum.
[9] Haifaa Khalafallah, 'Third World Review: This pen is mightier... Profile of Naji al-Ali, Arab cartoonist', The Guardian, 21 September 1984.
[10] Zoe Lafferty, “Dreams of liberation: Israel’s censorship of Palestinian art”, The New Arab, 3 October 2022.
[11] “Resist, my people, resist them”, available here.
[12] “Israel bans screening of “Jenin, Jenin” after soldier’s lawsuit”, Al Jazeera, 12 January 2021.
[13] Alex Greenberger, “Ai Weiwei Says Lisson Gallery ‘Effectively Canceled’ Show After Israel-Hamas War Tweet”, ARTnews, 14 November 2023.
[14] “Artforum fires top editor after its open letter on Israel-Hamas war”, The New York Times, 26 October 2023.
[15] “An open letter from the art community to cultural organisations”, Artforum, 19 October 2023.
[16] “A statement from Artforum’s publishers”, Artforum, 26 October 2023.
[17] The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement that calls for economic sanctions to pressure Israel into “meeting its obligations under international law”, i.e. withdrawal from occupied territories, removal of separation barriers and full equality of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. Modeled after on the South-African anti-apartheid movement, it is often deemed antisemitic, while BDS leaders define themselves as anti-Zionist.
D. M. Halbfinger, “Is B.D.S. anti-semitic? A closer look at the Boycott Israel campaign”, The New York Times, 27 July 2019.
[18] “Polemiche alla Fiera del libro di Francoforte: il mondo della cultura si schiera dalla parte di Adania Shibli”, Exibart, 19 October 2023.
[19] Tessa Solomon, “German Museum Shutters Curator’s Contribution Over Pro-Palestine Instagram Activity, Igniting Censorship Outcry”, ARTnews, 14 November 2023.
[20] Alex Greenberger, “Documenta Selection Committee’s Remaining Members Resign En Masse as Controversy Mounts”, ARTnews, 16 November 2023.
[21] Alex Greenberger, “Israel Moves Forward with Venice Biennale Pavilion as Palestine Museum US Says Its Proposal Was Rejected”, ARTnews, 24 October 2023.
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