"Defamation is something whose publication is liable to -
(1) to humiliate a person in the eyes of others or to make him a target of hatred, contempt, or ridicule on their part;
(2) degrading a person for actions, behavior, or attributes attributed to him;
(3) harm a person in his office, whether a public office or any other position, in his business, occupation or profession;
(4) to degrade a person because of his race, origin, religion, place of residence, sex, sexual orientation or disability;"
Is it necessary for the matter to be explicit or is the harm implied? To this the provisions of section 3 of the Prohibition of Defamation Law answer:
"It does not matter whether the defamation was expressed directly and in its entirety, or whether it and its reference to the person who claims to have been harmed by it are implied by the publication or by external circumstances, or some of them and some of them."
Section 2 of the Prohibition of Defamation Law defines the term "publication" as follows:
“)a) Publication, for the purpose of defamation - whether oral, written or in print, including drawing, figure, movement, sound and any other means.
(b) It is considered to be defamatory publication, with the exception of other forms of publication:
(1) If it was intended for a person other than the victim and reached that person or another person other than the victim;
(2) If it was in writing and the writing might have reached a person other than the injured party, according to the circumstances."
- The examination of publication will be carried out according to a number of stages outlined in the case law. In the first stage, The expression must be interpreted in an objective context, and the meaning that arises from it must be derived, according to standards accepted by a reasonable person. The examination of the question of whether publication amounts to defamation is done through an objective test. In other words, it is necessary to understand the meaning and meaning of the words according to their natural meaning in the context in which they were brought, and to examine whether these are expressions that cause humiliation in the eyes of a reasonable person to whom he has been exposed. In the second stage, it is necessary to examine whether, according to this meaning, the words constitute "defamation", according to the provisions of the Section 1 of the Prohibition of Defamation Law, and whether the manner in which they are said constitutes "publication" within the meaning of the Section 2 to the aforementioned law. In the third stage, the application of the various permanent protections must be examined Sections 13-15 to the Prohibition of Defamation Law, on Publication. In the fourth stage The latter, and to the extent that it is found that this is a publication of defamation, which is not covered by one of the defenses, the question of remedies, including the question of proper compensation for the plaintiff, must be examined (Civil Appeal 89/04, Nudelman v. Sharansky, given on August 4, 2008, paragraph 17 of the judgment of the Honorable Justice Procaccia). View More Civil Appeal 723/74, Haaretz Newspaper Publication in Tax Appeal v. Electric Company Ltd., PD 31(2)281, 300; Civil Appeal 740/86, Yigal Tumarkin v. Elyakim Haetzni, PD 33(2)333, 337; Civil Appeal 1104/00, David Appel v. Ayala Hasson, PD 56(2)607, 617.
The distinction between the various alternatives listed in section 1 of the Prohibition of Defamation Law was discussed by the Supreme Court in Other Municipality Applications 1104/00, supra, at p. 616 ff. It was determined that the first alternative in section 1 of the aforementioned law, which speaks of humiliation of a person in the eyes of people, is "a kind of wide-ranging basket alternative," while the other three alternatives are concrete. In all four alternatives, it is not necessary to prove the existence of damage, but it is sufficient that the publication could have caused harm.
- Other Municipality Requests 723/74 The above is said, it is said (p. 300):
"The natural and ordinary meaning of the words will sometimes be found in the literal sense, and sometimes in the conclusions between the lines. The natural and ordinary meaning of words should not be reached by shoveling them and detaching them from their context, but on the contrary, they must be seen against the general background in which they were brought and in the context of the things in which they were published. Hence, for example, when the court examines things published in the newspaper and wishes to apply the test of a reasonable and ordinary person, it must assess the meaning and meaning of the words in the eyes of the ordinary newspaper reader and consider how he would have understood what is written. The aforesaid rule, which directs us to the ordinary meaning of the words, has an additional expression: the words must be interpreted in the context in which they were published, without requiring additional external data that may change or expand their meaning, unless it can be proven that these additional data are also within the ordinary knowledge of those who heard or read them."
- Relevant for our purposes are the words of the Honorable Justice Sohlberg (as he was then called), which were made in the Civil Appeals Authority. 817/23, New Contract Association v. Zohar, given on May 30, 2023, in section 24 of the judgment:
"With regard to the variety of insults that hawkish spokesmen may direct towards each other, such as the (lost) use of the term 'mentally ill,' and the like. It is clear that despite the factual cover of the aforementioned linguistic expression, in view of its literal-dictionary meaning, which relates to a defined medical diagnosis of clinical significance, in many cases, this will not be the way in which a person from the community will understand the matter, but rather as an insult that expresses, in an improper way, a negative opinion about the object of the statement..."