Murad scrolled, landing on a few viral images that were circulating that morning and quickly turned into Instagram memes. Metras, a news account with 250,000 followers that focused on Palestinian issues, had a picture of the bulldozer breaking through the border fence in Gaza, along with a caption in Arabic: “While the ‘undefeated army’ was asleep.” There was a group of Palestinian teenagers sitting on what looked like a captured Israeli jeep — someone had captioned it “Gaza today.” There was a grid of the faces of dead children, with the quote, “Where were your tears when we were murdered?” posted by a young Palestinian influencer, whose account mixed activism with hot selfies. The algorithm also served a post from an account Murad didn’t follow, an “Italian American socialist.” He had posted a quote: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?” The posts had thousands of likes and shares. Murad shared all four of them to her stories.

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Between 2020 and 2023, prosecutors filed incitement-to-terrorism charges about once or twice a month, on average. In the past 12 months, 189 defendants have been indicted, with hundreds more arrested, investigated and released for lack of evidence. The suspects aren’t high-profile Arab activists. They’re emergency-room nurses, kindergarten teachers and college students. This policy has led to scenes that cause widespread intimidation: In broad daylight, police officers blindfolded and zip-tied a female Arab hairdresser in Majd al-Krum, on suspicion of making social media posts that criticized the I.D.F. By the time she was released, the video of her arrest had gone viral.