You are Not Allowed to Criticise Israel. The Case of Artyom Kirpichenok

On 2 August, the Russian-Israeli historian Artyom Kirpichenok landed in Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. He disembarked from a flight from Yerevan (Armenia) and expected to be in Israel for a conference. Kirpichenok’s friends lost contact with him from that moment on. A few days later, Russia’s Ambassador to Israel Anatoly Viktorov said that Kirpichenok had been picked up by Israel’s Shin Bet (or Shabak, the security service); this was confirmed by former State Duma representative and journalist Daria Mitina. Friends and colleagues speculated as to why Kirpichenok had been detained. Many felt it was because he had travelled to Iran previously and others felt it was because of his criticisms of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. Shabak made no public comment. Kirpichenok was not permitted to meet a lawyer.

Three weeks into his arrest, on 23 August, Kirpichenok’s lawyer, Inna Lebedinskaya-Katz, met with him at Petah Tikva, a Shabak detention centre. Shabak has placed a publication ban or a gag order (איסור פרסום) on information about the case. There has been no public confirmation of a charge against Kirpichenok. During the hour-long meeting, Kirpichenok told his lawyer about what he has experienced over the past three weeks. Three to four Shabak agents are taking turns to interrogate him violently for eighteen-to-twenty-four-hour blocs. He is not permitted to sleep (the lights are on all the time) and is kept handcuffed on an iron stool that is welded to the floor. Kirpichenok has been told that he has been abandoned and forgotten by his friends and that he faces life imprisonment.

Lebedinskaya-Katz was not permitted to bring a notebook or a piece of paper into the cell and had to memorise her conversation which she has now reported. She said that Kirpichenok is in tolerable physical condition, ‘although he is exhausted, tormented, and deeply depressed’. When told that his friends have not abandoned him, Kirpichenok sent his greetings and said that no one should come to Israel.

It has become clear that Kirpichenok’s trip to Iran is not the issue here. The problem is, it appears, that Kirpichenok is deeply critical of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. Shabak has been through his social media and is seeking to get a ‘confession’ from him during the violent interrogations. It’s the typical nonsense. If he comes to trial, the indictment will contain the usual garbage and will include statements elicited under torture. Since October 2023, Shabak has summoned at least twenty Israeli protestors for interrogation over their protests and social media criticism of the Israeli government. But this is just a drop in the bucket.

Kirpichenok would be the first to accept that despite the harshness of his experience it is nothing like what has been experienced by the Palestinians – the carnage in Gaza, certainly, but also the violence visited upon the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

If we just stay with interrogations over social media posts, Shabak and allied agencies of the Israelis state have arrested over 1400 Palestinians mostly those who are citizens of Israel or residents in occupied East Jerusalem. Around 96% of all Israeli ‘incitement’ investigations under the Ben-Gvir authority targeted Palestinian citizens or East Jerusalem Palestinians. In just the first five weeks after October 2023, Adalah documented 251 Palestinian citizens of Israel subjected to arrest, interrogation, or ‘warning talks’. Of these, 121 cases concerned social media activity and 31 their presence at demonstrations. At least 84 were interrogated by the police or Shabak and released, while another 132 were held through court proceedings. Adalah stresses that its count is incomplete and excludes those arrested in occupied East Jerusalem. Here are four cases of different intensities:

1) In June 2025, Haifa police summoned a Palestinian citizen with an Israeli passport to their station. There, two men identified themselves as Shabak officers, searched the student, and then began to interrogate him. They asked him about his legitimate work as a member of Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, affiliated to the Communist Party of Israel). They did not say that he had done anything illegal but questioned him about his relatives and whether he had communicated with anyone from Iran or Lebanon. When he said he had not, they warned him that a real interrogation would take place ‘underground and without light’ and threatened that Shabak would come to his family home and ‘destroy it’.

2) In May 2025, Shabak questioned a Palestinian minor from a Bedouin family about an online computer game which he played. The case forms part of a documented pattern in which Bedouin citizens are routinely brought in and questioned about their internet browsing, their musical tastes, their social media likes, and the Quranic verses that they posted on their WhatsApp. These interrogations by Shabak are crowned by threats that their homes will be destroyed or that they will be deported to Gaza.

3) On 7 December 2023, Israeli forces detained Diaa al-Kahlout, the Gaza bureau chief of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, even though he had a press card and identified himself to them as a journalist. The interrogators stripped him, bound him, photographed him in that state, beat him, questioned him, and then sealed his mouth with tape. The interrogators identified themselves as Shabak and tried to establish that al-Kahlout’s newspaper is connected to Hamas. He was held for thirty-three days without charge in Sde Teiman.

4) On 18 March 2024, Israeli forces arrested Imad al-Ifranji, the Gaza editor of al-Qudsnewspaper, took him to Sde Teiman, where he remained for 572 days (including with visits to other interrogation centres and then to Ofer prison). Al-Ifranji was violently interrogated by Shabak and military intelligence. They mostly focused their interrogation on an interview that al-Ifranji had done thirteen years earlier of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Al-Ifranji was blindfolded and beaten. Journalist Wesam Afifa documents the hellhole of Sde Teiman in his book, Survivors of the Darkness (2026).

Even within the realm of Israeli law, Shabak has increasingly exceeded its security mandate by treating lawful Palestinian speech, journalism, and political activity as potential terrorism. It summons citizens, including minors, for ostensibly voluntary ‘warning conversations’ without explaining that attendance is not compulsory. Interrogators have questioned people about social-media posts, Quranic verses, music, political affiliations and journalism, while threatening home raids, violence, or deportation to Gaza. In detention centres, Palestinian journalists report brutal interrogation, stress positions, beatings, sleep deprivation, and threats against their families. These practices violate due process, freedom of expression, and protections against torture. Israeli civil-rights organisations argue that Shabak is operating unlawfully as an instrument of political intimidation. But this has become utterly normal in Israeli society.

It is into this net that Kirpichenok has landed, and his case is perhaps the most puzzling since he is an Israeli citizen and not Palestinian, and he does carry a Russian passport and lives in Russia. One would have imagined that Shabak might have detained Kirpichenok, spoken sternly to him, and then released him or prevented him entry into Israel (deporting him on his Russian passport). But instead, they have given him the full Shabak treatment. There is no evidence that he will be released at any point soon. This is evidence, along with the treatment of the Gaza Flotilla activists, that Israel has gone beyond punishment of the entire Palestinian population. The Israeli state is now prepared to treat anyone, even a person marginally critical of its genocidal war, as a threat to the state. This is the Israel of today.

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).