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Transcript
Introduction
Before the deadly Hamas attack on 7th of October 2023, the big story in Israel was
an attempt to overhaul the judiciary by the most right-wing government in the country’s history.
It prompted a wave of mass protests against what many Israelis saw as an attack on democracy.
But another big transformation was already under way - that went somewhat under the radar.
Centre stage again - the man who’s been called Israel’s first TV prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 1999 he had lost an election and he even said “next time I'm back,
I'll have my own media outlet”. He starts to cosy up to Channel 14, in the past few years
what some Israelis would describe as Fox News. On Netanyahu’s watch, some news outlets were
nurtured while others were deprived of funding. The Union of Journalists
decried a cabinet order suspending public advertising in the newspaper Haaretz.
“I think the Israeli government drafted a masterplan to silence independent media in
Israel and to weaken press freedom in Israel.” The justification for this sounds familiar.
Netanyahu is talking about some kind of deep state conspiracy against him.
It's the liberal media, according to him, it's the Supreme Court, according to him, it's the
Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. Critics have described this process as a
“hostile takeover” of the media. In this episode of The Global Jigsaw we
take a look at what people in Israel see about the war in Gaza on their TV screens.
We examine the methods and the motives behind the prime minister’s media squeeze, and we ask
what this means for the country priding itself on being “the only democracy” in the Middle East.
I’m Krassi Ivanova Twigg and this is The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring, where we look at the world through the lens of its media,
exploring the narratives, the propaganda and the disinformation.
What do Israelis know of the war in Gaza
So how is the war in Gaza being reported in Israel? Our guide through the Israeli media landscape is Shaina Oppenheimer. She monitors
Israeli as well as Palestinian news sources from our Jerusalem bureau. Well, you know a lot about what the army wants you to know about the war in Gaza, which is looking at
something fully from a military lens, and then also fully from the perspective of the hostage
crisis. So there is a lot of coverage about the war, it’s very selective, it is sanitized,
there is a lot of information about what the Israeli army is doing on the ground.
But looking through only one lens would surely produce something like a tunnel vision,
so what’s missing from the coverage? There's almost nothing about the civilian
impact of Israeli military action in Gaza. You don't really get regular updates about
the Palestinian civilian death toll, about the growing humanitarian crisis there.
And if anything, there are questions about how genuine the humanitarian crisis is. You often
see segments showing Palestinians, let's say celebrating Ramadan or eating a meal.
And then these go into questions of, is there really any kind of issue with hunger? There was one warm
day where quite a number of Palestinians, just kind of enjoying a day at the beach,
and there was so much media criticism of this. And I even remember one commentator said that those
images of people at the beach were disturbing. Which says a lot the way that the media focus
on questioning how much civilian life people are allowed to have or are there
even civilians in Gaza? Which is a regular topic of debate in mainstream Israeli media outlets.
There was this interesting segment, I believe it was Channel 13, where one of the presenters
asked somebody “so there's this polio outbreak in Gaza, army spokesman, so what does this mean?”
And he responded about how dangerous polio outbreaks can be, how it might impact public
health. And she stopped him, and she said “no, no, no, no, what does this mean for our soldiers?”
It is perhaps understandable that Israeli media would adopt a tone in support of “our boys”,
especially after an atrocity like the 7th of October. The media focus on Israeli suffering
is linked to that same trigger event - the Hamas attack in which more than 1,200 people
were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the
Holocaust. Here’s how Israel declared war. “Israel is at war. We didn’t want this war,
it was forced upon us in the most brutal and savage way. But though Israel didn’t start this war, Israel will finish it.” There are protesters every single week
going out in masses, protesting for a hostage deal and against the war.
But a lot of the rhetoric isn't engaged with the humanitarian crisis, the death toll,
how this war is affecting Palestinians. It's about the hostages, of what happened on October 7,
almost every single day, there are media interviews with somebody who survived the attacks, a family member who lost a loved one, a family member of a hostage.
This whole issue isn't resolved because there are still hostages in Gaza, but it is quite remarkable
that so much of the world has moved on and really looked at what is continuing to happen in Gaza.
Media access is strictly limited to those embedded with the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces.
Newsgathering from the strip is mostly done by Palestinian journalists and residents.
More than 160 media workers have been killed in this war, according to the International Federation
of Journalists, and reporting from there comes with other caveats, too. The Strip is controlled
by an organisation which is a proscribed terror group by the EU, UK and the US.
In Gaza, you can't do anything without Hamas. You have to cooperate with them on some level to function. I think the same goes for being a journalist there.
When it comes to Israeli media, it feels the clock stopped on 7 October 2023.
An attack like this really validated a lot of Israelis who viewed Hamas and
Palestinians at large as people, when given the opportunity, would want to wipe Israel
off the face of the earth. But it's much deeper than that. Israel's policies on Palestinians,
that is largely out of sight for the average Israeli in their day-to-day life.
And in school there's a really significant focus on Jewish history, Jewish lineage, the Holocaust,
Jewish suffering. And there's a real link between the state of Israel and Jewish
safety. With this in mind, you get an event as devastating as October 7. It was so shocking,
and it really seemed to validate all of these pre-existing beliefs. And then comments by some
world leaders that history didn't start on October 7. And that for so many people, validated the fact
that they see the world as increasingly hostile towards Jews, as antisemitic and saying that
no one can prevent something like what happened from happening again, except for this country.
It is in this environment that the Israeli media operates. To get more context on that,
here’s a factfile, read by Yara Farag from BBC Monitoring’s Middle East team.
Israel currently ranks 112th on the World Press Freedom index, out of 180 countries.
While the country’s media enjoy a great deal of freedom, there are no laws that protect freedom of expression. Because it does not have a written constitution, such freedoms are protected
under rulings by the Supreme Court, which acts as checks and balances for the government.
The media are free to criticise the government and investigate its activities but are subject
to military censorship which can restrict or bar publication of information deemed harmful
to national security. Nonetheless, the media regularly report on sensitive security matters
and when they do so, they quote foreign news sources to circumvent the military censor.
Much of the Israeli media is owned by a handful of tycoons. Two media magnates have
been implicated in cases of alleged corruption involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
who has been charged with exchanging official favours for positive media coverage. In April 2024, the Israeli parliament passed a law that empowers the minister of communications to
halt broadcasts of foreign media if the content is found to be harmful to state security. One
month later, the government voted to shut down Qatari-funded Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel.
The effect of the Gaza war on the media landscape
What you described earlier, if we can imagine the split screen with what people in the rest
of the world are seeing about the war in Gaza and what people in Israel see, it couldn't be a more different picture. Is there awareness in Israel at all about this disconnect?
I would flip it and say that there is a large awareness but Israelis largely perceive this gap
as, oh the world does not understand us, the world is increasingly hostile towards us increasingly
antisemitic. There are protests in major cities in support of Hamas, that's what they see,
because there's this tendency to conflate the Palestinian flag with Hamas. People are
aware of the gap but they think that that gap is actually more problematic from the opposite end.
If you want to see the humanitarian crisis. You can also watch BBC,
you can watch CNN, you can open Instagram. As monitors, we know how crucial the media
is in shaping our views. And although Israeli media is considered mostly free,
it has undergone changes in recent years that have alarmed defenders of media freedom.
I think that in the past couple years, people have felt the rise of right-wing media outlets,
and Channel 14 is really prime example of that. It was established in 2014 as Channel 20,
it was supposed to be a Jewish heritage channel, and then Netanyahu pushed through the channel
to start doing news, and they even got some regulatory benefits that exempted them from
payments other news outlets are subjected to. They started off as very kind of this fringe
channel, and quite quickly they became the second most-watched channel in Israel.
How can it be explained? There must be a need for this kind of information so it
must answer what the public wants to hear. I would say that there were two things that
happened simultaneously. Netanyahu has very long had an obsession with the media,
he criticised it for what he says is bias against him, bias against his family.
In 1999 he had lost an election and he even said, “next time I'm back, I'll have
my own media outlet”. And in 2007 Israel Hayom is established. It is this right-wing free newspaper,
it is handed out for free and the idea was that Netanyahu wanted some counter to Yediot Ahronoth
which was this mass circulation newspaper, very widely popular. So Israel Hayom is created giving
favourable coverage to Netanyahu. And then he goes on and he makes a deal with Walla!,
which is a new site. And these are two key cases Netanyahu is currently standing trial for.
Netanyahu has been accused of trading benefits to two outlets in return for favourable coverage.
He has denied any wrongdoing. And then the other aspect of this really big change in the
media landscape is this idea of more right-wing people getting into mainstream media outlets.
Before we get to that, a quick note that two media moguls behind the Yedioth Ahronoth media group and the news website Walla! are co-defendants in the Netanyahu
corruption trial. They all deny any wrongdoing. Yinon Magal, who is the anchor of The Patriots,
which is Channel 14's premier news programme. Let's say he's very entertaining. There's
often singing and dancing on the show. He has quite the personality. When the war started,
he started wearing a hat that said “total victory”, which kind of encompassed this view
that Israel should stop at nothing in Gaza. That it should fight until Hamas is fully
eradicated. He had frequently far-right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister, who have been the most adamant against any kind
of ceasefire deal. And then suddenly, when Israel agreed to a ceasefire in January, Magal took off
his total victory hat and he put on a yellow pin, a national symbol calling for the return
of the hostages. So you quickly see, a switch in messaging because this is what Netanyahu has now
decided they're kind of gonna get on board. How does Netanyahu talk about the media to justify his attempt to control it? Netanyahu is still talking about the
idea that there's not enough, let's say media diversity in Israel. He talked about
it as being biased against him, as having a liberal agenda, as being slanderous.
“Listen, maybe stop telling lies, stop. I hear enough of your lies every day.
Now listen to the truth I will tell.” He champions outlets like Channel 14, even
something like i24 news, which was founded as, they say, an alternative to Al Jazeera.
They used to be Arabic and English, and now they've started as Hebrew to compete with what he sees as the more
liberal outlets like Channel 12, 11 and 13. And let's return very briefly to Channel 14
and The Patriots, what are the kind of things you hear on Channel 14? There was a study that found that the channel had called for genocide more than 50 times,
and they made 150 statements calling for war crimes since the start of the Israel-Gaza war,
you see them really criticis e calls for a ceasefire. They've poked about hostage
families and in the protests against the judicial overhaul, they suggested that the
protests were being funded by the CIA, all sorts of kind of conspiracies or unfounded claims.
Responding to allegations that they’ve incited war crimes, Channel 14 said it’s untrue and that
any quotes to the contrary “are either taken out of context or were made by guest interviewees who
have voiced the same opinions on other channels”. You are listening to The Global
Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring. We've spoken about right-wing media.
Press under attack
What about the media that are at the other end of the spectrum? Who are they? How popular are they? What's their narrative? There's one newspaper Haaretz that has long
been seen as the champion of Israeli left, of opposition to Netanyahu,
that is seen as a left-wing paper here. A lot of people don't really like it. It's quite liberal it
was behind a lot of the investigations that led to Netanyahu’s indictment. It has repeatedly covered
the current war shedding light on the humanitarian crisis, while also heavily covering the hostage
crisis. They've come under a lot of scrutiny time and time again. In 2021, after a short
war between Israel and Hamas they had published the photos of over 100 children killed in Gaza,
they got a lot of criticism for that. Haaretz is the only major subscription-based
publication in Israel, and while it is one of the most respected sources for western journalists
it’s not very popular in Israel itself. And one episode from the paper’s recent history
illustrates how out of sync it’s become with a large part of the public and with some of its own journalists. Since the war started they got to the point where
the Haaretz publisher, Amos Schocken, referred to Hamas militants as freedom fighters. And this
caused huge uproar within the Israeli public, and it led the Communications Minister Shlomo
Karhi to mandate some kind of government boycott of the paper, so they stopped all advertisements
from government agencies and newspapers. They cancelled all subscriptions any government employees might have. Haaretz is currently trying to challenge this in the court system.
Amos Schocken later clarified that he didn’t mean that Hamas are freedom fighters, but the damage was done. I would imagine that Haaretz is under
very significant financial constraints. Shaina’s insight comes from personal
experience. She used to work as a journalist at the paper, before joining BBC Monitoring.
Haaretz is not the only news outlet to come under attack from this government.
There are emergency regulatory laws in Israel that says that they're able to
take steps if it's in interest of national security. So Shlomo Karhi accused Al Jazeera
as being a wing or a mouthpiece for Hamas. They also accused the channel of previously
revealing the locations of soldiers which he said was a very serious security issue.
They ordered the closure of Al Jazeera’s offices. As of now, you cannot access their website if you
are in Israel, you can still get it via satellite channel but you can't access the website here,
which I think a lot of the public doesn't have the most favourable view of Al Jazeera.
The law that was used to shut down Al Jazeera is being challenged in the Supreme Court. And if you compare Al Jazeera popularity to any of the Israeli Arab language channels, what is
it that that Arabic speakers would tune into? So there's no real data on Palestinian citizens of
Israel. Not Palestinians in the West Bank, we know that Al Jazeera there is quite popular, and the
same goes for Palestinians in Gaza. There isn't really a lot of data on what Palestinians who
live in Israel watch, what they like. They make up 20% of the population. There's Arab 48, there's
Makan which is the Arabic language version of Kan the public broadcaster, there's i24 news, there's
al-Shams radio, which is interesting because they regularly interview Hamas members there.
Long before Haaretz and Al Jazeera were targeted, another outlet received some unwanted attention.
Two years ago, the Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi who’s behind some of the government’s media
strategy, floated the idea that the public broadcaster Kan should be defunded.
Shlomo Karhi has long despised Kan, seeing it as another liberal outlet that's far too critical of
right-wing policies. During the war, he introduced this bill to essentially stop public funding of
Kan. That bill passed a preliminary reading. At the moment it is put on pause, but it does
speak to a louder desire to curb public funds to broadcasters that they see as
too liberal. So Kan came under fire. Shlomo Karhi said it was defeatist that they were
spreading false propaganda and that it undermines the goals of the war.
It weakens the military effort. It is against the State of Israel,
essentially. Even described it as, I think, the mouthpiece of incitement of Israel's enemies.
But he also sees Kan, which is showing only the Israeli side of the war,
for him that is kind of biased and liberal because it is critical of Netanyahu.
There were also discussions about Israeli army radio asking why the public is funding it.
Why soldiers who are doing their compulsory military service are going to serve in an
outlet that they see as biased and liberal, and it goes into this larger picture that
Netanyahu is talking about, some kind of deep state conspiracy against him.
It's the liberal media, according to him, it's the Supreme Court, according to him, now it's the
Shin Bet Israel's internal security service. And all of this being echoed by Channel 14.
Anytime the Supreme Court, for example, blocks the government move saying that the government
is exceeding its power, Channel 14 reports that the Supreme Court is overextending its
power by stopping an elected government from carrying out what the people want. Before 7 October, Netanyahu was so heavily criticised over allegations of corruption,
that he was called “crime minister” by protesters while he was crowned “King Bibi” by his supporters. To grow his appeal, he carefully curated his media appearances.
Late 2022 he returns to power, and he essentially stops giving interviews to any Israeli outlets
with exception of Channel 14. During the judicial overhaul he does the same. He does appear in
international media, giving a much softer version of the overhaul when he was asked about it,
than what was presented to the Israeli public. He no longer does press conferences with Israeli
media. I think he might have done one actually. He regularly shares clips of Channel 14 on his
social media account. He really clearly has a very strong preference for Channel 14, and he has kind
of continued to criticize media outlets that might be critical of his handling of the war, of his
handling of the judicial overhaul, of his handling of kind of dismissing Ronen Bar, all of it.
“I have a spoiler for you. propaganda Channels 12 and 13 will try to brainwash you with unending
false and distorted leaks. Leaks from investigations are a criminal offence.
For the media, all means are justified to force [the installing of] a left-wing regime against the will of the public. It won’t work if you don’t let them.”
Shaina gave us an insight into Netanyahu’s reasoning. This idea that there is a deep
state conspiracy against him and it’s the media, the Supreme Court and the security services.
What are the implications
Despite the prime minister’s efforts to grow his popularity via his selective media appearances,
it seems many Israelis are unhappy with their government. I would say that in the very immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the war,
there was a huge sense of public unity. And you saw that echoed in all Israeli media channels
that displayed slogans of wartime unity, like together we will win, Israeli flags everywhere.
“The citizens of the state of Israel, all of us, left and right, secular and religious,
Jews, Christians, Druze, Muslims, minorities and immigrants from all over the world stand
united together in this fight. Stand with us, on the right side of history.”
But then very quickly, it really turned back into huge public divide, which was very clear from the
protests against the judicial overhaul. The kind of polling that we've seen in terms of support
for Netanyahu and his Likud party, if anything, they've kind of lost a bit of support since the
outbreak of the war. What has happened in terms of the war and the way that people perceive
Netanyahu’s handling it, and kind of things like “Qatargate” and the firing of Ronen Bar,
the Shin Bet head, has really exacerbated already existing divides in the Israeli public.
A couple of weeks ago, the Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi unveiled a detailed
plan to transform the broadcasting landscape, including reforms that could
reduce the independence of the regulator. This plan was apparently drafted back in
2023 but it was shelved in the wake of the mass anti-government protests. The cabinet’s
vision for the media often draws comparisons with Hungary’s model of “illiberal democracy”,
fuelling yet more fears about press freedom and government influence on independent media.
The attempts to crack down on outlets anywhere from liberal and left-wing to quite centrist
could have pretty serious repercussions in terms of the existence of the free press in Israel.
Even though Israeli media can be rather limited in its coverage of external affairs, especially vis-a-vis
the Palestinians, they are very, very critical and robust in reporting on domestic issues and
attempts to curb an outlet like Kan, which could lead to potentially it being defunded or even it
being privatized, it would have a significant effect on just the types of discussions being
had and the very critical coverage of what many Israelis see as attempts to crack down
on independent and democratic institutions, and that could happen at an even more rapid pace.
This episode was produced by the Global Jigsaw podcast team, Kriszta Satori and me Krassi Ivanova Twigg,
featuring BBC Monitoring’s Shaina Oppenheimer. The technical producer is Elchin Suleymanov,
the sound engineer is Martin Appleby and our editor is Judy King. Thank you for your time,
please get in touch and check our back catalogue of Middle East related episodes. Till next time.
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