On the night of November 3, a plainclothes officer walked into Abed Abu Shhadeh’s bedroom in Jaffa while his wife, Haneen Eghbariya, lay there with their two sons. She said the man “came in like a thief.” Shin Bet agents and police took Abed, questioned him through the night and refused him a lawyer. They called it “contact with a foreign agent.” The contact was an interview. Before Israel’s October 27 election, Abed sat down with Azmi Bishara, the exiled former Knesset member, for Al-Midan, his podcast on Arab48. Abed has covered Israeli politics for more than a decade, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, for Arab48, Local Call and +972 Magazine.
In court the police called him a journalist, took a recess, and came back calling him a “political adviser.” His lawyers asked for any evidence of something beyond a recorded conversation, and the police pointed to a secret file. The judge extended his detention anyway. He spent five days alone in a cell two meters by two. Then the police skipped their own remand hearing and let him go without charge, and the Shin Bet, asked whether the case is closed, said nothing. Six months earlier, Haneen says, fifteen officers came to the same house for no stated reason, stood around for ten minutes and left.
Ran Shimoni describes himself as a good, law-abiding citizen who tends to trust the state’s institutions. On Sunday he wrote in Hebrew to the Israelis who had kept quiet about Abed and admitted that if it had been anyone else, he might have kept quiet too and waited for things to “become clearer.” It was Abed, “whom I know inside and out,” a man Ran would have suspected himself before suspecting. “And suddenly I understood, suddenly I saw it.”
Ran wrote that this “happens every week, and has for years. To Jews, to Arabs, to Palestinians, to asylum seekers.” Palestinians have known it for seventy-eight years. The state that took Abed governs us by sorting us: citizens inside the Green Line, permanent residents in Jerusalem, West Bank Palestinians under military courts, Gaza under siege and bombardment, refugees barred from going home. Each category gets its own laws, its own permits and its own prisons, and the categories exist to keep us apart. Abed’s offense was a conversation across those lines. A Palestinian citizen of Israel sat with a Palestinian leader in exile and played the recording for Palestinians everywhere. The state calls that contact with a foreign agent.
Ran saw all of this clearly, and then he wrote: “Until then, I don’t suggest losing trust in the state’s institutions.” He had just watched those institutions take a man he would vouch for over himself, hold him alone, deny him a lawyer and justify it with a file no one could read. He said the head of the Shin Bet should have resigned four times in a single week, and he kept his faith in the Shin Bet.
Yousef Munayyer called the arrest “a clearly political motivated abuse of government power.” The motive was political. The power was used as designed. The Shin Bet, the remand courts and the sealed evidence are how Israeli democracy has always worked for Palestinians, going back to the military government that ruled Palestinian citizens until 1966. Israeli liberals keep calling each new case a crisis of governance. Their conscience is real, and it stops at the state, and the state knows it can count on that.
Americans watched the same demand on 60 Minutes a week earlier. Ross Douthat asked Abdul El-Sayed whether Palestine has a right to exist. El-Sayed said yes. Douthat asked about Israel. “Yes, if there is a shared understanding,” El-Sayed began, and Douthat cut in over the condition. El-Sayed asked to finish. He said he would back two states if both peoples chose that, or one state shared in a different way if they chose that.
Days later he told ABC that the state of Israel cannot stay as it is and still give everyone equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination. The right-wing press treated his condition as a scandal. Because his condition was equality. Douthat wanted from El-Sayed the pledge Ran made without being asked: faith in the state first, and questions about its conduct later, if ever.
But the state’s conduct is on the record. In Gaza, Israel has killed Palestinians by the tens of thousands, starved them and flattened their cities. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and its former defense minister. Soldiers and settlers raid West Bank villages every day. No Israeli official has paid for any of it, and a state that pays nothing for mass killing will not think twice about one journalist in Jaffa.
On November 8, hours after Abed walked out, President Herzog handed Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form Israel’s next government. The Western press will introduce him as the opposition, the sober general who will repair Israeli democracy. In 2008 Eisenkot laid out the Dahiya doctrine, promising disproportionate force against any village Israel is fired on from, because “these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.” Gaza has lived under that doctrine ever since. As army chief he oversaw the 2018 Great March of Return, when Israeli forces killed 189 Palestinians and wounded more than 6,000 with live fire, according to the UN commission of inquiry. He rejects a Palestinian state. Eisenkot is what the institutions Ran trusts produce at their most respectable, and the election that raised him gave Israelis a choice of managers for the occupation. I wrote about that vote in The Occupation Won Israel’s Election.
Abed walked out of the cell and talked about the future. “Between the river and the sea there are Jews and Arabs, and we need to learn to live together,” he told the crowd in Jaffa. He thanked the Arabs, Jews and foreigners who stood with him, the lawyers and the Adalah team, and said their support “is not to be taken for granted.” He said the cell taught him to value what people take for granted, family and each other. “We will continue our struggle for justice and equality for everyone,” he said.
Ran came to Abed’s side because he knew him. Most Palestinians in Israeli cells have no friend like that, no welcome party, and no one outside their family who knows their name. The Shin Bet still has not said whether Abed’s case is closed, which leaves the file open over his head.
Since his arrest, several friends have told me, as a compliment, that Abed and I look like brothers. I have caught myself tracing our families back, looking for the place where the lines might cross. My grandfather was from Jaffa, so I am from Jaffa too, the way exiles are from somewhere. On Sunday the city welcomed Abed home.
Abed was held for five days. I was wrongfully arrested and held for interrogation for fifty-two. I know what those days are built to produce, and it outlasts the cell. The raid at night, the isolation, the sealed file and the release with no charge and no closure all aim at the same result: a man who comes home and keeps his voice down, and a community that watches him and learns to do the same. Detention like this is meant to teach silence, and the people who order it never say so. That is the quiet part. Abed said it out loud within hours of walking free, into a microphone in Jaffa: “They want us to be afraid.”
He called the arrest political and told Arab48 what comes next: “I will continue to fulfill my role, practice my profession and serve the people and the community. There is no place for fear. We are walking the path of truth, for equality and justice for all.”
Thank you for covering Abed Abu Shhadeh‘s arrest. Unless I have missed the news, your Substack and Al Jazeera are the only two media outlets that have covered the Political analyst arrest . I had only just seen Abed Abu Shhadeh on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. Adam Scott Bellos, another panelist member of the show and a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, was notably combative. Days later, Al Jazeera reported Abed Abu Shhadeh had been arrested. I just saw that he’s now been released. When will this end? Now we have this new chapter of the Israeli elections. I don’t think can bear to listen to our UK government and political commentators tell us “everything is ok now Netanyahu has gone”. Thank you for this piece. It’s good to have you back.
Oh, and who controls Holly-Dirt, Media, Education, the narrative?
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/dang-never-a-dull-moment-with-talmud
This is not a document-film (Naza), nor a work that provides new evidence, but an ensemble account of the very same events we have learnt about from the courageous Palestinian reporters – many of whom are no longer alive – facts and truths that the Palestinians themselves have always sought to convey to us, in vain, now narrated in the first person and dispassionately by their tormentors, who are protected by anonymity. Protected out of fear of being prosecuted by the Israeli state for their revelations – certainly not for war crimes.
https://parolesenzapadrone.wordpress.com/2026/11/06/israel-naza-open-society/