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At 6:29am on October 7, 2023, when air raid sirens began blasting across Israel, a broadcast journalist named Chen Liberman was asleep next to her partner, Adam Shinar, a professor of constitutional law, in their apartment in Tel Aviv. They rose quickly, shuffling into their children’s bedroom, which doubles as the family’s shelter. Sitting in the dark—reinforced concrete walls dampened the sound; the children, aged three and five, continued to sleep—they learned from their newsfeeds that rockets had been fired from Gaza, part of a barrage falling across the country.
Liberman thought immediately of a segment she had filmed the day before, for a panel show scheduled to air that evening on Channel 12, Israel’s most watched Hebrew-language news network. Liberman features mainly as a reporter on the country’s version of 60 Minutes, called Uvda (“fact”), but she is also frequently tapped for studio debates, a fixture of Israeli broadcast television. In recent months, the media had been consumed with the government’s attempts to weaken its judicial branch. Now the realization dawned on her: “I’m not proud of this,” she said. “But the first thing I told my partner was, ‘There’s no chance they’re going to air the show.’”
There was a series of resonant booms—the sound of Israel’s aerial defense system destroying rockets midair. (The country’s military later said that about 90 percent of some three thousand rockets fired from Gaza in the first two days of the war were intercepted.) Liberman and Shinar slipped out of their children’s bedroom and turned on the TV, just as thousands of other families were doing the same. News has always been a national obsession in Israel, which perhaps makes sense for a tiny country where war is frequent and proximate and everyone knows someone in the army. Broadcast journalists and commentators, including Liberman, are household names. Politicians and generals regularly appear on air, and their arguments spill out into public debate on social media. Liberman, who is thirty-nine, with striking, intelligent hazel-green eyes and blond hair that falls well past her shoulders, often serves as a left-leaning foil in a news environment increasingly dominated by loyalists to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.
By the time the sun was up, the whole country’s attention was on the south. “It was difficult as a journalist to watch from home and not be there in the field,” Liberman said. But her frustration was quickly subsumed by horror. “I started to understand how many people were dead, how helpless they were. At that point I was just glad to be with my kids.” Heavily armed Hamas militants had streamed into the country. Horrifying videos circulated online: of bodies lying in the streets, of hostages being dragged into Gaza, of executions at close range. In TV studios, presenters took calls live on air from families barricaded in their bomb shelters, pleading for help. In one, a woman reported in a frantic whisper that she could hear terrorists breaking into her home. For many, help would never arrive. By the end of the massacre, 815 civilians and 380 security personnel had been murdered. Another 251 were taken hostage. The country was stricken.
The next day, Liberman and Shinar drove the kids to his parents’ house, near the city of Be‘er Sheva, where they would have more space to be outside between rocket attacks. Then Liberman turned around and returned to Tel Aviv. The next season of Uvda was not scheduled to air for another few weeks, “but it was obvious we needed to get in the picture and see what we could contribute,” she said. She took a camera to a nearby hospital to meet a cancer patient named Liora Argamani, whose daughter Noa had been taken hostage by Hamas.
“I was drawn to the whole hostage issue from the beginning,” Liberman said. “Everybody was so hurt and so traumatized that the immediate and most understandable response was ‘Let’s get revenge.’” She had seen this before, in places upended by an attack. “I have to admit that on some level I was feeling the same way,” she told me. But she feared for the hostages and despaired of where the country’s blind fury might lead. “I thought, ‘We’re not going to bomb Gaza now because we have hostages there,’” she said. “‘That’s a given.’ And then we started bombing Gaza.”
In addition to reporting on the struggles of hostage families, Liberman made her case on panel discussions that Netanyahu should agree to exchange Palestinian prisoners for hostages right away—that the full force of a military campaign should wait. She quickly understood that the public had no appetite for restraint. “I got the worst comments, like ‘Because of people like you, we’re going to lose the war,’” she said. Privately, some of her colleagues expressed their agreement that the government should prioritize the hostages above retaliation. But especially in the early days, few were willing to suggest on air that diplomacy was an option. “Some people identified with the families but said, ‘We don’t know what’s going on in back rooms, we don’t want to hurt the negotiations, we don’t want to express our opinions,’” Liberman told me.
The war began. Israel refused to allow journalists into Gaza without a military escort, but Palestinians on the ground documented a massive campaign of destruction as it unfolded. Coverage in international outlets showed scenes of immense human suffering: screaming children, bodies being pulled from mountains of rubble, doctors weeping for their inability to save one broken body after another. Israeli television showed almost none of the devastation, and Israeli journalists who questioned the use of force were maligned as extremists. Instead, coverage focused on stories of hostage families, profiles of injured soldiers, and statements from Daniel Hagari, the military spokesperson—reports that did little to challenge the public’s overwhelming belief that the war was necessary and justified. “The Israeli public does not want to see victims who are not Israelis, especially not victims that we created—where we are the victimizers,” Oren Persico, a staff writer at the Seventh Eye, which covers press freedom in Israel, told me. “They would turn off the television.”
Compounding that dynamic was the fact that the October 7 attack “was personal for a lot of Israeli society,” Persico said. “And journalists are part of Israeli society.” In a tight-knit country, everyone is connected to someone who was injured or killed, he said. Everyone knows what it’s like to feel under assault. In the first decades of Israel’s existence, Gideon Levy, a journalist for the left-leaning paper Haaretz, told me, pressure on journalists to align with the state’s narrative had a name: the tikshoret miguyeset, or the enlisted press. “Now it’s mitgayeset,” Levy said, using the reflexive form of the word. “Nobody recruits it. Now it’s recruiting itself.”
Liberman was soon straddling a line. She fit neatly into the mainstream media: She started her career, as many Israeli journalists have, as a member of the military unit that produces news. In her view, the war was and remains (the ceasefire, she noted, is provisional) an act of self-defense. But she is also one of only a handful of prominent reporters in the country who have even occasionally challenged incendiary anti-Palestinian speech. As a journalist, Liberman said, her personal politics are irrelevant: “I’m there to point out where politicians are lying to us, where the army is lying to us, and to point out where things don’t make sense.” One of the lies to which she has called attention: that military force could bring all the hostages home alive.
From the early 1900s, amid accelerating Jewish immigration to Palestine, politically affiliated newspapers served as a forum for public debate over Israeli statehood and the obstacles to achieving it. There was the question of how to integrate waves of refugees arriving from around the world, and the fact that their presence provoked violent confrontation with the local Arab population, who fostered national aspirations of their own. (Palestine was under Ottoman and, later, British rule.) Zionist leaders believed that journalists should avoid writing things that might be corrosive to the fledgling country’s sense of security and collective identity. “Everyone in their different roles—journalists and military people and politicians—were all recruited to the same goal,” Anat Balint, a media scholar and chair of Israel studies at the University of Arizona, told me. “This was a greater effort of building a nation, of protecting it, of making it real.” It was the formation of tikshoret miguyeset, the enlisted press.
In 1948, Israel declared independence. Then the five surrounding nations declared war. It was a fight that almost no one expected Israel to win. Victory did not assuage the country’s overwhelming sense of precarity; everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the next war broke out. How could the country’s nascent press report on the subject without jeopardizing military strategy? There was a censorship law on the books, a holdover from British rule, that required reporters to submit certain articles for military review. But David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was keen on a less formal approach. He convened the Editors Committee, a group with representatives from the major Hebrew publications, for off-the-record briefings with officials over tea and sweets. “I’ll take the thief and make him a guardsman,” Ben-Gurion said of the arrangement.
The system wasn’t airtight. There were always journalists who refused to cooperate. One of them, Uri Avnery, built an antiestablishment publication called HaOlam HaZeh that would remain a source of irritation for Ben-Gurion for decades. His magazine, part tabloid, part news outlet, espoused controversial ideas about Palestinian-Israeli cooperation and questioned the need for violence. Still, by 1967—when Israel overcame an imminent invasion with a sweeping victory, seizing huge swaths of territory in the process—collective faith in the Israeli military, seen as an almost sacred force protecting the perpetually beleaguered Jewish people, reached an all-time high.
But just six years later, after a surprise attack led to near defeat during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the public’s confidence in the army was shaken. The press also came under criticism: The Editors Committee, it was discovered, had intelligence about the attack that members had agreed to conceal, not wanting to cause panic. The news media had failed to do its part. “The main lesson was that when you join hands for a greater cause, you may be working against the security of the state,” Balint said. “Journalists have their own purposes and goals and should not always just follow what the government or the military censorship asks.” For other reasons, too, the cozy relationship between the press and the security establishment began to drift: By the eighties, life in Israel started to become more comfortable. The country had signed a peace agreement with Egypt; the economy grew. “The idea that the greater cause of the nation is more important than individual liberty and human rights—all that started to change,” Balint said.
The press came to be less obedient. In 1984, in defiance of a censorship order, a newspaper called Hadashot published a report revealing that the security establishment had lied about the fate of two Palestinian attackers who were captured alive at the scene of a bus hijacking. The two men were brought to a secluded field where they were beaten to death with rocks and iron bars. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, claimed that the men had lost their lives in an operation to free the passengers. (In reality, the only casualty had been a young Israeli soldier, killed by Israeli fire.) A photo, taken by a journalist and published in the New York Times, proved otherwise: it showed one of the two men being led away from the bus—alive and apparently uninjured. The Israeli press was instructed not to report on an internal investigation into the matter. “It was a moment where Hadashot said ‘We consider human rights and keeping the rules of war more important than the pressure coming from the government,’” Balint told me. As punishment for defying the censor, the newspaper was closed for four days. (It shuttered permanently in 1993 for unrelated reasons.) Many would come to see the incident as a seminal moment for journalistic freedom in Israel. Several years later, Israel’s censorship law was relaxed. Today, information can be restricted only if there is “near certainty” that it will harm state security. (Sparing the reputation of Shin Bet is not, as it turns out, good enough.)
The bus hijacking was one of a series of violent attacks that, alongside a campaign of civil disobedience, reflected a growing despair among Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza. By the late eighties, many Israelis had come to the conclusion that it was time to relinquish control of the territories, seeing their country’s continued presence there as inhumane or a strain on national resources or both. In 1992, facing mounting international pressure to address the situation, Israeli and Palestinian leadership began peace negotiations. The first part of the process culminated, in 1993, with the signing of the first Oslo Accord on the White House lawn by Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The accords outlined a plan for Palestinian self-governance.
But there was also a growing movement of right-wing Israelis, known as Religious Zionists, who, in violation of international law, lived in the occupied territories. They were violently opposed to the peace process and saw the Oslo Accords as tantamount to treason; unlike early Zionists, who were largely secular, they believed that the land was Jewish by divine right. They were bolstered by Netanyahu, then a young member of parliament. At a rally, Netanyahu addressed a crowd from behind a banner reading “Death to Arabs.” At another he led a mock funeral featuring a coffin and a noose for Rabin.
In response, the Israeli left organized a rally in support of peace. On November 4, 1995, more than a hundred thousand people gathered in the square outside Tel Aviv’s City Hall. When the final speech of the night concluded, Rabin led the crowd in a rendition of a folk tune whose lyrics went, “Lift your eyes with hope / Not through the rifle sights.” Moments later, as Rabin made his way to his car, a Religious Zionist named Yigal Amir approached and shot him three times in the stomach and chest, killing him. The song’s lyrics were later found in Rabin’s pocket, soaked through with his blood.
Six months later, Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel. To this day, the assassination of Rabin remains one of the most seismic events in Israeli politics, the beginning of the end of the peace process and the moment that the right gained a foothold. It also marked a much quieter moment of transition. Two years earlier, Israel had granted the first license to a privately operated channel to compete with the state broadcast: Channel 2, which would later become Channel 12. In the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination, Channel 2 outbid the public broadcaster for the only footage of the assassination, captured by someone watching the rally from a nearby rooftop. Viewers flocked. It was the dawning of a new era in Israel’s relationship with broadcast television: a time of choice.
The night Rabin was shot, Liberman was ten, at home watching Crocodile Dundee on Israel’s public station. The program cut away; news of Rabin’s death followed. “I remember the feeling of the earth moving,” she said.
At the time, Liberman was living in the northern port city of Haifa, the youngest of four siblings in a middle-class home. Her mother was a nurse, born in Poland—her parents had returned there after meeting as Holocaust refugees in Uzbekistan—who later moved to Israel. Liberman’s father, who sold AC units, was born in Israel, also to Eastern European refugees. Liberman spent happy summer afternoons driving with her father around the country’s lush north, visiting HVAC wholesalers and listening to American music on the radio.
From an early age, it was clear that Liberman was clever and ambitious, but it wasn’t until she received her army enlistment letter—the military is mandatory for most Israeli Jews—that she began to pay attention to the news. She set her sights on a prestigious unit: Galei Tzahal, the army radio station that operates a news channel for the public. Many of Israel’s most prominent journalists have served in this unit; for years, it was the only formal journalism education that existed in the country. To get in, Liberman would have to pass through a highly selective testing and interview process. “I would sit in the cafeteria during recess with a newspaper,” she said. “Preparing myself to be familiar with the ministers in the government, the parliament members, the history of Israel’s wars.”
Liberman’s political consciousness evolved. “When I was growing up, I considered myself right-wing,” she said. “I really liked saying things like ‘Peace is for peace, not for land!’” It was the years before Oslo, when debate was raging about whether, as part of a peace agreement with Palestinian leadership, Israel should cede territory captured in 1967. The left said yes. The right said no. “Now I understand that that land is actually the occupied territories in the West Bank,” she said.
Her pre-enlistment studying paid off: she was accepted into Galei Tzahal as a reporter. That did not, it turned out, exempt her from basic training. “That’s to make sure you remember that before you’re a journalist, you’re a soldier,” she said. She spent a miserable month sleeping in a tent in the desert and being screamed at by drill sergeants before finally starting her life as a reporter.
She took her job seriously. Once, she was sent to cover a memorial ceremony where a prominent politician would be speaking. She caught a ride to the event with the speaker’s aide, who gave her a printout of the remarks. “In his written speech, he said, ‘What makes the Palestinians choose terror? Is it cultural?’” Liberman said. “But then he improvised and said, ‘Is it cultural or is it genetic?’” She recognized this form of racism from her lessons on the Holocaust: “Hearing a politician suggesting that there is a genetic flaw in an entire group of people—it triggered the right alarms.” Liberman called the story into the station. “Then I told his spokesperson that I couldn’t take the ride back with her because I knew the story was about to be on the radio,” she said. “Today, I’m sure it wouldn’t be newsworthy,” she added. “That’s the process that we’ve gone through.” But at the time, the report made a splash.
After spending her mandatory two years in the army, Liberman was recruited as an entertainment reporter for a commercial channel. Later, she decided to move to New York. She got a degree, worked in the Israeli consulate and at a hummus spot, took an internship at ABC News. Living in the United States, she said, “helped me to understand how we look from the outside.” She struggled to gain momentum; still, she didn’t consider moving back. “I kept using the metaphor of a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond—asking, Which do I prefer to be?” she said.
Liberman can pinpoint the moment her answer changed. She was home in Israel for a visit in 2013, sitting on the beach with a friend. “I remember buying a beer from a kid and thinking, ‘There are so many illegal things happening right now—and I like it,’” Liberman said. “I had wanted to leave this kind of lawless, chaotic place where everybody’s just doing whatever they want.” But then, she said, “something about the lawlessness drove me back.” In Israel, life felt more relaxed, less cutthroat. Beyond that, as a journalist, “the question is if you can be heard,” she said. “In New York, I didn’t really feel like I was part of the story. In Israel, I knew that I could be heard.”
Last fall, I met Lieberman at a serene café in a tree-filled neighborhood that sits just south of the square where Rabin was murdered. It was a beautiful day and, except for the posters of hostages plastered around the city, and the occasional reservist passing with an assault rifle strapped to his back, it was difficult to imagine that war was raging just fifty miles south. Liberman arrived on a bicycle affixed with a child seat, her hair still wet from a morning swim. We sat outside in the shade of an awning and ordered coffee.
A passerby with a salt-and-pepper beard and a knitted kippah caught Liberman’s eye: Shimon Riklin, she told me, lowering her voice. Riklin, I knew, is an anchor at Channel 14, which consistently provides favorable coverage of Netanyahu. In 2018, during a previous iteration of the network, Netanyahu had helped it bypass regulations, clearing the way for its rise as a cultural force. Recently, its audience has ballooned. Days before meeting Liberman, I had reported for CJR about complaints sent by lawyers representing three Israeli human rights groups to the country’s broadcast authority and attorney general; the groups had documented hundreds of statements made during the war on Channel 14 that they believed broke Israeli laws against incitement to war crimes and genocide. (Statements on the channel and Israel’s failure to censure it have been cited at the International Court of Justice as evidence of genocidal intent.) Riklin, who has helped found Israeli outposts in the West Bank, featured multiple times on the list. In an email to CJR at the time, a Channel 14 spokesperson called the allegations “grossly defamatory, untrue, and being made maliciously by organizations who are politically motivated.” Many of the statements cited, the spokesperson said, were “either taken out of context or were made by guest interviewees who have voiced the same opinions on other channels.” (Israeli authorities have not responded to the complaints; the human rights lawyers have not yet taken further action.) At the café, neither newscaster acknowledged the other.
Liberman told me that she returned to Israel at a time when the right wing was picking up political steam. Facing a rising tide of populism, the way she understood her responsibility as a journalist began to change. In 2015, when Liberman was working as a culture reporter, Netanyahu appointed as culture minister a woman named Miri Regev, who threatened to pull funding from artists who did not pledge loyalty to Israel. Regev especially targeted Palestinian citizens of Israel and artists who spoke openly about the Nakba—the violent forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948. “She used the Culture Ministry as a way to hurt freedom of speech,” Liberman said. “But freedom of speech is a very important part of democracy. I saw it as my job to point that out, and that’s how I became more and more political.”
This approach helped her land a job at Hamakor, an investigative program on Channel 13, another commercial channel, and later with Uvda, on Channel 12. Since then, the government and its ministers have become more flagrantly hostile to the press. The influence of Channel 14, Balint told me, has made it “the norm for all media outlets to have a Bibi mouthpiece in every debate.” In 2007, Sheldon Adelson—a billionaire casino magnate and a longtime Netanyahu supporter (now deceased)—founded a newspaper, Israel Hayom, to give the Israeli right wing, and especially Netanyahu, a bespoke megaphone. It was distributed for free, and quickly became Israel’s most widely read news source, putting other outlets on the defensive. One of three ongoing corruption cases against Netanyahu concerns a deal he allegedly made with the controlling shareholder of a rival newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth; according to the complaint, he agreed to support legislation that would curb Israel Hayom’s growth in exchange for favorable coverage. (Another case against Netanyahu also involves an alleged attempt to influence the media; he is accused of providing regulatory benefits to the owner of a news site called Walla.) Netanyahu denies wrongdoing in all three cases, as have the other figures involved.
Increasing the pressure on Israeli journalists is a throng of Netanyahu loyalists who patrol the internet and appear on news shows, harassing those who are deemed to be against him—a systematic attack referred to as the “poison machine.” Some Channel 12 reporters have been assigned security details. There are unapologetically critical outlets, Haaretz being the best known, but their audience is marginal and they operate in fear of a crackdown. Recently, Netanyahu’s coalition approved a measure to bar state-funded bodies from communicating with or advertising in Haaretz.
When the war erupted, Liberman’s coverage focused on the home front. She investigated the military failures that left a unit of soldiers besieged by Hamas militants for hours on October 7; she profiled a soldier reeling from the choices he was forced to make about who to save. She cast a critical look at the government’s lack of support for hostages upon their release. (“I didn’t expect that no one would pick up the phone to call,” Moran Stella Yanai, who was taken by militants after fleeing from the Nova music festival, told Liberman. “Okay, maybe not Bibi, but someone.”) Liberman also reported from the makeshift headquarters of a civilian group that advocated on behalf of hostages’ families. There, she met Mirit and Ilan Regev, whose son and daughter, Maya and Itay, had both been taken to Gaza. She followed the parents as they visited President Isaac Herzog’s house in Jerusalem, insisting that the government do everything in its power to make a deal with Hamas. Her coverage carried a clear message: “Military pressure is a gamble on the hostages’ lives.” (Maya and Itay were released as part of a deal in late November 2023.)
Liberman did not produce in-depth investigations on civilian casualties in Gaza, though she did mention them: During an on-air discussion, she pushed back against a panelist who dismissed the deaths of Palestinian children; another time, she ended up in a shouting match over whether Kamala Harris had accused Israel of “genocide”; at one point, she said that Donald Trump should pressure Netanyahu, not just Hamas, to end the war. After the last of these appearances, she received death threats. “I’m considered on the edges of what is considered okay to say on TV,” she said.
On social media, she has been bolder. Yotam Zimri, a prominent figure on Channel 14, once quoted Eyal Golan, a pop star, before a live studio audience: “Four point nine million Palestinians. Who remembers when it was five million? We’re getting the job done in this war.” In response, Liberman tweeted: “We’ve gone from delusional tantrums about the few journalists who still dare to express sorrow for the deaths of innocent people, to celebration and laughter surrounding their deaths.” A few comments on the tweet condemned what Golan had said. Most mocked Liberman as a “leftist” or asserted that none of the civilians in Gaza were innocent. “So this is what we’re dealing with,” she told me.
For most of the past year and a half, Liberman said, in Israeli media, the sole entry into criticism of the war has seemed to be the hostages. I asked if the public’s attitude made her feel that coverage of Palestinian suffering was too unpalatable to show. She considered the question from several angles. “I think that now is the time to look at what’s going on in Gaza,” she replied. “I mean, I think the time was a few months ago. But it’s not as easy as saying, ‘Okay, let’s start covering what’s happening in Gaza.’” Uvda does investigative stories, she noted, and “finding a Palestinian that will want to speak on record on Israeli TV—that’s also not such an easy task.” Then she added, “It also sounds like an excuse, because uncovering what happened to the intelligence on October 7—that’s also not an easy task. But you do it.”
Maybe, she said, responsibility lies more with news desks. “It’s not such a difficult task to just take from CNN or other channels some of the footage that they bring from Gaza,” she told me. “On the other hand, no one in Israel trusts that footage.” Ultimately, there has just been so much to cover: stories of soldiers who have been killed, of the families they left behind, of failures on the part of both the government and the army. “In our hearts, we do have room for everything,” she said. “But in our lineups? That’s a different story.” She paused for a moment and then countered: “If people cared,” she said, the media “would find a way.”
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, the Israeli press was roundly praised within the country for the way it covered the unfolding violence, piecing together what was happening while the government and military response faltered. Some rigorous investigations followed, including several reports on the “spotters,” an army unit of women who had repeatedly raised the alarm that a Hamas attack might be imminent. But that level of critical assessment was not sustained. In addition to the absence of reporting on death and destruction in Gaza, few Israeli outlets scrutinized internal military operations, and most dismissed the idea that Israeli officers were engaging in genocide. When photos and videos circulated on social media showing Israeli soldiers filming themselves stripping prisoners to their underwear and looting Gazan homes, Israeli outlets reported that anti-Israel activists and terrorists had “targeted” members of the military. (In response to coverage about the “doxxing,” an Israeli government minister tweeted, “Hello to our human rights activist. Watch your pager.”) According to Haggai Matar, a codirector of Local Call, a left-wing local Hebrew language news site established in 2014, the overall approach reflects something about the relationship between the Israeli public and the military, especially during war. “People feel that they and the army are one,” Matar told me. “So if you criticize the army, if you criticize ‘our boys,’ you’re criticizing us.”
That personal relationship with the military exists not only among news consumers but also journalists. Many members of Israel’s press remain in the reserves—and some have recently been called up to fight. Channel 13 reporter Roi Yanovsky compiled GoPro footage he took as a soldier in Gaza into a film called 100 Days in October. Roy Sharon of Channel 11, Israel’s public station, was sent out on reserve duty to the border with Lebanon. When he returned, he was interviewed by Asaf Liberman, a radio host (no relation to Chen). “We are warriors,” Sharon said. “Part of the greater story that is the defense of the State of Israel, and to be part of that is a wonderful feeling.” Sharon then resumed his role as a correspondent covering the military.
The result has been a widening gap between the way Israelis have seen the war and the way much of the world has viewed it. Nowhere was this clearer than in the public’s response to the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former minister of defense. (Netanyahu and Gallant have denied the allegations underlying the warrants. Warrants were also issued for Hamas leadership. In the US, the House of Representatives passed a bill sanctioning the ICC for going after Israel’s heads of state.) Only in the final few months leading up to the ceasefire did arguments start to break into mainstream public discourse—over the death toll of soldiers, Netanyahu’s lack of a plan for Gaza’s governance, the political ramifications. “If a war is not properly covered, if ten million Israelis have no clue about the crimes that the army is committing in Gaza, this shapes political attitudes,” Haartez’s Levy told me. “That’s directly the fault of the media, which does not fulfill its duty.”
Chen Liberman agrees, to an extent. The long shadow of military occupation “is what the world knows about us, but this is not something that we know about us,” she observed. For most Israelis, it’s background noise, a fact of life. But Liberman doesn’t believe that means journalists can solve the problem with better coverage. “It’s a question of what’s the right way to balance between what you want to say and what you allow yourself to say in order for you to still be heard,” she said. In the eyes of the Israeli public, she believes, speaking too much about the Palestinian perspective would cost her credibility. “It’s just not effective,” she said.
In all of our conversations, Liberman was quick to temper her observations with notes on how the situation might look from an opposing perspective: a reflexive one-woman journalistic debate. On the one hand, she told me, she wishes Israelis understood that killing more civilians won’t make anyone “want to quit terror” (though she said that nothing justifies terrorism). On the other hand, she understands the impact that decades of trauma have had on the Israeli psyche, and how this has contributed to the public’s indifference toward the suffering of Gazans (which, she emphasized, still is not justified).
One topic about which she spoke decisively was the vitriolic tenor of public rhetoric. “Channel 14 is creating a new standard,” she said. “A new, really, really bad, destructive standard of not only ignoring civilian deaths but also celebrating them.” The political agenda, she said, is transparent: Netanyahu’s coalition doesn’t want to end the war “because they want to go back into Gaza to settle it.” When the news of the ceasefire was about to break, she told me, “Watching Channel 14 and realizing how depressed they all were made me realize that this time it’s really going to happen.”
Once the news was out, the public’s first priority remained the hostages—who was free, who remained in Gaza. Then came the process questions, Liberman said: “Is this a deal that we could have had back in May? Who is in charge of putting this deal together? Is it Trump pressing Netanyahu? Is it Trump pressuring Hamas? Is it Biden—I mean, it’s not Biden. No one thinks it’s Biden.” The Netanyahu spin, she observed, has been that “he didn’t surrender.” Now Liberman is focused on whether the deal will be derailed. “For those who want to see the second phase of the deal, who want the return of the hostages at the end of everything, the end of the war, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on Trump,” she said on a televised panel. He may find the situation “less pressing” now that he’s taken office, she argued.
The ceasefire presents a possibility of what Liberman called “a different path.” But she worries that it might be too late for Israel to change course. “Back in the days when I grew up, everybody wanted peace,” she said. “The means we can argue about, but the end was peace. Today, I feel like the end is an endless war.” That is one of the things that has been most upsetting to her about the public calls for violence on TV. “If we don’t see Palestinians as humans,” she said, “what future are we providing our children?” For now, that question is unsettled.
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