Netanyahu Wants to Boycott Haaretz

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TEL AVIV—On November 24, Israel’s cabinet unanimously adopted an unprecedented resolution to boycott an Israeli news organization. Opening with an Orwellian commitment to “free press even in wartime,” the government declared “its intent to disconnect any advertising ties with Haaretz” and called on its “arms, ministries, bodies, corporations, and any organ funded by it” to avoid any connection with the newspaper and “not publish anything” from Haaretz.

The immediate pretext for the boycott resolution involved controversial remarks by Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken, who spoke of “Palestinian freedom fighters whom we call terrorists” at a conference in London several weeks earlier. When his words floated back to Israel, a political and media maelstrom engulfed the newspaper. Many on our staff strongly disagreed with Schocken, and we published an editorial criticizing the publisher, stressing that nothing can justify terror. But it wasn’t enough to calm angry readers who canceled their subscriptions, not to mention the right wing, inside and outside of the government, which had a field day. 

When communications minister Shlomo Karhi, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s henchman, went on to formalize the government’s anti-Haaretz stance, we were hardly surprised. Haaretz was already in the crosshairs when Netanyahu returned to power two years ago, heading a far-right coalition committed to replacing Israel’s strained democracy with a racist theocratic autocracy. The agreements he reached with the other parties in his coalition, including ultra-Orthodox and far-right parties, were a blueprint for Jewish supremacy and curtailment of secular liberalism and included a provision to “reform the statutory advertising in daily newspapers” and replace it with “a designated website.” We knew exactly which daily they were targeting. A decade ago, most government advertising—a small but steady source of revenue for a shrinking industry—was already withdrawn from Haaretz by some regulatory trickery. Now they were going after the residue.

The advertising reform had yet to take off when, on October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel. Invading from Gaza, the assailants overran the border communities, a music festival, and military outposts. They murdered around twelve hundred people, including forty-six Americans, and raped, looted, maimed, or kidnapped thousands more, sparking a multifront war that is still being fought. It was the worst calamity in Israel’s seventy-six-year history. The public infighting over Netanyahu’s constitutional coup, which had split Israel’s Jewish society in the antebellum, was put temporarily on hold as hundreds of thousands of reservists rushed to their Israel Defense Force units and the country mourned the dead and worried about the hundreds of hostages taken to Gaza.

Not everybody celebrated the newfound, if temporary, national unity. Karhi, a disciple of one of Israel’s strongly antiliberal rabbis and a former professor of industrial engineering and management, sensed a rare opportunity to fulfill his ambition of silencing critical media. Mere days after the outbreak of war, he drafted an executive order giving him emergency powers to shut down any media outlet “undermining public and soldiers’ morale” or “assisting enemy propaganda,” to confiscate its equipment and arrest its staff. Albeit watered down on its way to becoming a formal decree, the motion still enabled the government to shut down the offices of Al Jazeera, a prime source of news for Israel’s Arab society, who make up one-fifth of the population. Al Jazeera has reported on the killing and destruction inflicted by Israel’s counteroffensive and eventual occupation in Gaza, uncensored. This was too much for the Israeli government. 

But Karhi would not stop there. In November 2023, he drafted a resolution targeting Haaretz, blaming the paper for “spreading defeatist, false propaganda against the State of Israel in wartime” and calling the government’s paymaster to block any funds for advertising or subscription to the paper. The justice ministry blocked the motion, citing the risk to press freedom. So the minister waited until a better opportunity came up last month. This time he bypassed the mandated legal advisory, and received the full backing of Netanyahu.

The longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history has built his long career on media manipulation, which he views as a necessary tool for holding power. Netanyahu never shied away from abusing the state regulatory power to reward or punish publishers and media owners. His dirty tricks before the crucial 2015 election, first exposed by Haaretz, have led to his indictment in two corruption cases that are still pending, along with a third case of receiving illegal gifts from tycoons. 

Akin to fellow democratically elected autocrats like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and India’s Narendra Modi, Netanyahu has been striving endlessly to control the media using several means. Billionaire supporters have established a pro-Netanyahu, free-delivered newspaper, Israel Hayom, followed by a mouthpiece television outlet, Channel 14, a kind of Fox on steroids in Hebrew. The government has adapted its TV regulation to ease the way for its pet channel, which has markedly grown in popularity during the current war. 

The older mainstream commercial TV channels, 12 and 13, have been under constant attack by the “Bibists,” chiding them as too hostile and too liberal. The government-owned public broadcaster, Kan, has been threatened with closure. On the same day of the Haaretz boycott resolution, Karhi sponsored a bill to shut down Kan and sell its frequencies to private entrepreneurs. The fact that these channels support Netanyahu’s war policy and included some of his vocal supporters in their commentariat would not protect them from his insatiable drive to control their message.

Haaretz fills a unique role in Israel’s public sphere—and on Netanyahu’s enemies list. The oldest existing publication in Hebrew (since 1919), and since 1997 also available in English, Haaretz has traditionally been a strongly critical voice within Israeli society. Described by The New Yorker’s David Remnick as “arguably the most important liberal institution in a country that has moved inexorably to the right,” Haaretz has held a firm stance against Israel’s occupation and the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. We stand for human and civil rights and, increasingly alone among Israeli mass media, constantly report on the abuses and atrocities of the occupation. Only Haaretz would question the morality of the Israel Defense Forces’ counterterrorism operations and tactics. And only Haaretz would publish anti-Zionist opinions. 

Our position led Netanyahu to name Haaretz, along with the New York Times, among “the main enemies of Israel” in 2012. (When his remarks leaked, he denied them.) And over the years, we got into occasional trouble with some of our subscribers, who may share our oppositional view of Netanyahu and the right wing in general, but might be offended by moral critique of the military, which they revere. We wouldn’t budge, however. When we see or suspect war crimes, we report them as they occur, rather than wait until the fighting is over or bury the story altogether.

In Israel, we have military censorship by law. Each news item involving military intelligence or nuclear affairs, or secret diplomacy, must go through prepublication review by the censor. While this is definitely a nuisance and a major obstacle to press freedom, it is far more relaxed today than in Israel’s early years. Yet the censor still enforces government “ambiguities” over Israel’s nuclear program or certain cross-border operations, forcing the media to cite “foreign sources” rather than its own reporting.

During the war, however, the official censorship has been a smaller obstacle to press freedom than mainstream public attitudes. Israel’s Jewish society has been growing deaf to the suffering on the other side, especially since the suicide bombings of the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000–2005) in Israel’s cities, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007 following the Israeli “disengagement” two years earlier. The daily lives of Palestinians under occupation are underreported by mainstream Israeli media, and external criticism of Israeli practices is labeled there as anti-Semitic smears. Allegations of war crimes are usually framed as “legal risk at The Hague,” referring to the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant and might pursue other Israeli officials and military brass. 

The current war has only exacerbated and escalated this attitude, as Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas while the IDF failed to prevent the invasion or curtail it in time. Since then, Israel’s media has been replaying the horrors of October 7 and the plight of survivors over and over again. Retribution—in the form of mass killing, destruction, and forced depopulation in Gaza—is seen by the Israeli Jewish mainstream as justified punishment to an evil enemy that tried to reenact the Holocaust. They have brought the disaster upon themselves and had it coming, goes the popular thinking even among erstwhile center-leftists who had once supported the two-state solution. 

Following suit, Israel’s mainstream media—Channel 12 TV and Ynetnews—have accordingly shied away from reporting extensively on the plight of Gazans (or Lebanese, once the war with Hezbollah escalated along Israel’s northern front). The reporting from Gaza in Western media has not been matched in detail by most of their Israeli counterparts. And the mainstream Israeli media described the ICC arrest warrants as expressions of anti-Semitism, instead of investigating and reporting on the factual basis of the accusations of crimes against humanity. 

At the Haaretz newsroom, we were shocked and aggrieved by October 7, like the rest of Israel. Our staff members who lived in or visited their friends and family in the border zone barely survived the massacre, or escaped it by chance. Others who grew up in the kibbutzim along the Gaza border have lost family members and close friends, who were killed or kidnapped by Hamas. A couple of our editors worked during that horrible day while maintaining phone contact with their parents, who were hiding in Be‘eri and Nir Oz, the sites of the worst atrocities. Our reporters in the field were shot at and helped in loading body bags of victims on ambulances. Other writers and editors reported to their military reserve units. We offered psychological support to the staff.

Yet even in the midst of shock and grief, we stuck to our journalistic mission: reporting the widest possible story about the war. This meant that while covering the Israeli side just like our counterparts, we also documented what was happening in Gaza and Lebanon. Unable to field reporters in the war zones outside the constraints of military embedding with the IDF, we relied on phone contact with Palestinians and Lebanese sources, running syndicated stories from the New York Times, The Guardian, and wire services, and analyzing satellite imagery of the battlefields. In our editorials, we justified the fight against Hamas and Hezbollah following their unprovoked attacks—but from day one, put the blame on Netanyahu’s prewar intransigence and deliberate provocations toward the Palestinians. We demanded the return of the hostages atop the national priorities and warned against permanent occupation and future rebuilding of Israeli settlements in Gaza. And we have kept warning of the disastrous policy of the current government, calling time and again for its replacement sooner rather than later. 

Netanyahu supports only one kind of press freedom—its freedom to sing his praises and absolve him of any responsibility for the October 7 disaster and its aftermath. To the prime minister and his believers, Haaretz reports from Gaza, as well as our critical editorials and investigative stories, are anathema and must be silenced. That was the background and motivation behind the Haaretz boycott resolution. 

But Haaretz will not be silenced. The boycott led to a surge of new subscriptions, and we launched a legal battle against the advertising ban. In a democracy, the government should not be allowed to treat its budget as a punishment tool against its critics. Nor should it officially declare media as illegitimate or unpatriotic and “assisting the enemy,” thereby putting its journalists at immediate, grave risk. But Haaretz will prevail. In a battered democracy like today’s Israel, facing the simultaneous strain of an aspiring autocrat and an unending war, speaking truth to power could not be more crucial. 

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Aluf Benn has been the editor in chief of Haaretz since 2011.