Screen grab from a video shared on X showing Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken speaking at the Haaretz conference in London.
The call for international sanctions against Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has led at least three Israeli ministries to announce they would end all cooperation with the leftist newspaper.
The angry ministries included the diaspora affairs, interior, and education ministries.
The economy and industry ministries followed suit, reported the Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, Israel's Communications Minister, Shlomo Karhi, launched a renewed call for a government boycott of the newspaper known for not holding back any criticism of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories.
"Israel has a government that opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state... instead, the Netanyahu government wants to continue and intensify illegal settlements in the territories that were meant for a Palestinian state," Schocken said in the widely circulated video of him at a London conference.
Schocken invoked United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which ruled Israeli settlement expansion as a "flagrant violation" of international law that has "no legal validity" and demanded Israel halt all settlement activity in the Palestinian territories.
"Territory cannot be acquired by force," Schocken stressed, noting that Israeli governments have since ignored the resolution, stepping up settlement activity in the past years.
"(Israel) doesn’t care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs of both sides for defending the settlements while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists," he added.
Following the remarks, Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin presented a bill to the Netanyahu government calling for a 20-year prison sentence for Israelis advocating sanctions, Haaretz New York correspondent Etan Nechin posted on X.
The new bill "ironically proves Schocken’s point," Levin said, noting that the move came directly after the Haaretz publisher’s comments, raising fears of government censorship on Israel’s long-lauded free press.
“The only recourse with such disastrous government is to ask other countries to bring pressure, to bear as they did in order to end apartheid in South Africa,” Schocken stressed, as he warned of a “second Nakba.”
The Haaretz publisher has since revised his remarks at the Haaretz conference in London.
"I’ve reconsidered what I said," Schocken said. "There are many freedom fighters in the world and through history, perhaps also on the path to the establishment of the State of Israel, who carried out shocking and dreadful terrorist activities and harmed innocent people in order to achieve their goals," he added.
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