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WHAT’S NEW N E W S ’ W H A T OPINION: HOW THE ISRAELI MEDIA IS FIGHTING THE WAR IN GAZA Palestinian voices are mostly absent from Israeli news reporting on the Gaza war. This has led to a dramatic gulf between the press coverage of the conflict in Israel and that of the rest of the world, says Sam Stein Sitting here in Israel, as I turn on the mainstream TV or follow the online news, there is one word that sums up how the media here is covering the war in Gaza: soldiers. There are images of IDF soldiers everywhere – sitting atop tanks, storming into buildings and, in a piece from Ha’aretz that went viral, even soldiers cooking bruschetta and curries in abandoned Palestinian homes using the spices and lentils they had found there. Then there are the daily updates on the hostages and their families, on survivors of the 7 October attacks and new footage emerging regularly of the events of that terrible day. Some of the footage is accompanied by surging patriotic music, such as Harbu Darbu (Swords and Strikes) by Israeli duo Ness & Stilla, which shot to number one shortly after 7 October. “We’ve brought the entire army against you and we swear there won’t be forgiveness, sons of Amalek,” raps Dor Stilla, referencing the mythical nation the Israelites are commanded to wipe out in the Torah. By comparison, when I check in with the international media – BBC, CNN, or any online newspaper – I feel as if I might be living on a different planet. It’s impossible to miss the images of devastation in Gaza: of hospitals overflowing with horrifically injured and dying people, parents searching for their children under rubble and most recently of severely malnourished children and adults staring out limply from hospital beds. Most foreign media reports the latest death count in the territory as over 30,000, in figures released by Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Although these figures are often disputed as being unreliable, or too high, or even too low by some foreign press, 6 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024

Reporters take cover during a rocket attack from Gaza, in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, 23 October 2023 G E T T Y when I check the Israeli news sites, I can barely find mention of any death toll at all. If it is mentioned, it is usually to question the veracity of the figures; but most sites have not updated their figures since December. The Wikipedia page ‘Casualties of the Israel–Hamas war’ quotes 30,000 dead, but does not have a Hebrew entry. Even when casualties are counted by the Israeli press, the results are not always clear. Channel 14, which was originally set up to air ‘Jewish’ programming and has now become a significant media platform, has a counter that logs the number of buildings demolished in Gaza, the number of Palestinians wounded and the number of “terrorists killed” – but it labels all casualties under “terrorists”. The lens through which everything is seen is 7 October. And that is understandable. The attack by Hamas, when more than 1,200 Israelis were killed and 243 were taken as hostages to Gaza, was one of the most devastating days in Israel’s history, and the deadliest day for the Jewish people since 1945. For the first time in the country, an enemy breached its borders and controlled its territory. “We interview people about 7 October — we are stuck on 7 October,” said Ilana Dayan, one of Israel’s most highly-regarded journalists in an interview for The New Yorker. Nevertheless, some Israeli media is openly critical of the government. Recently, Ha’aretz, the most prominent left-wing newspaper in Israel (although only read by around five percent of Israelis), has criticised the government for causing starvation in Gaza. On 3 April, it became the first mainstream Israeli publication to call for an end to the war, following the deaths of seven aid workers in Gaza. Israelis are also still processing this trauma. News outlets are not only feeding the public with a particular narrative, but also reflecting public sentiment. “I’m sorry for the children there,” one Israeli journalist, who didn’t want to be named, told JR. “But truthfully, we don’t care a jot about what’s going on in Gaza. We can’t trust any of them.” Ben Caspit, senior reporter for the leading Israeli daily paper Maariv, recently said on X that Israeli media shouldn’t cover Gazans at all. “Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]?” he wrote. “They’ve earned that hell fairly and I don’t have a milligram of empathy.” The more left-wing online media, most notably +972 Magazine and its Hebrew counterpart Sicha Mekomit, have been very outspoken against the war, with +972 critical of the role of the Israeli media and, most recently, Sicha Mekomit querying the military investigation into allegations that the IDF shot into a crowd at an aid convoy in Gaza City in February, leaving over 100 Palestinians dead. While there have been ongoing protests calling for the return of the hostages taken by Hamas, and a huge protest on 1 April, in which thousands of people across the country protested against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, dissent against the war itself has barely been visible. In many cases, this Since October, TV news channels in particular have overwhelmingly employed ‘hasbara’. The word means ‘explaining ’ in Hebrew and is deployed to advocate Israel’s position, often to the outside world, but also to create a national unity. For example, since 7 October, each TV channel’s logo has been modified to include the Israeli flag and the government slogan, ‘yachad nenatzeach’ (together we will win). “One story showed soldiers cooking bruschetta in abandoned homes” is because Israeli police have clamped down on such protest, denying or cancelling permits for marches by anti-war groups, including the grassroots movement Standing Together, which works to improve relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. In addition, as I’ve followed the news over the last six months, it has felt as if a narrative of the war has been created and controlled by the IDF, rather than as news reported by journalists. For the first three months of the military campaign, the head of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Daniel Hagari, gave daily press conferences that were broadcast live on every channel during primetime. One of the biggest issues is access to information in Gaza as journalists are only allowed into the territory with IDF escort. In a letter on 28 February, 55 international journalists wrote that “foreign reporters are still being denied access to the territory, outside of the rare and escorted trips with the Israeli military”. Journalists say that when they are let in, these trips are highly controlled, with journalists unable to interview Palestinians or access ruined sites. Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit organisation that works to protect the right to freedom of information, has criticised Israel, writing on its website that “under Israel’s military censorship, reporting on a variety of security issues requires prior approval by the authorities.” If they do take place, the events are heavily policed. Last October, activists from Standing Together were detained by police in Jerusalem for hanging posters that read “We will get through this together” in Arabic and Hebrew. Israelis can, of course, watch foreign news and are aware of the death tolls, but many view the international media as biased, citing the slow response to report the sexual assaults on Israeli women, or the absence of reporting on repression by Hamas of any dissent. Many Israeli journalists view it as their job to help win the war. “I don’t care if I’m criticised,” said Channel 14’s host Shimon Riklin on a recent show. “I’m unable to sleep unless I see houses being destroyed in Gaza … I want to see more of them destroyed. I want there to be nothing for them to return to.” It’s not unusual in a war for one side to minimise the suffering of another but this extreme disconnect from what the rest of the world is seeing is problematic. Whatever stance you take on Gaza, finding any kind of peaceful solution to the conflict will be much harder if Israelis rarely see the faces or hear the voices of Palestinians affected by the conflict. n Sam Stein is a peace activist based in Jerusalem. W H A T ’ S N E W SPRING 2024 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK 7

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OPINION: HOW THE ISRAELI MEDIA IS FIGHTING THE WAR IN GAZA Palestinian voices are mostly absent from Israeli news reporting on the Gaza war. This has led to a dramatic gulf between the press coverage of the conflict in Israel and that of the rest of the world, says Sam Stein

Sitting here in Israel, as I turn on the mainstream TV or follow the online news, there is one word that sums up how the media here is covering the war in Gaza: soldiers. There are images of IDF soldiers everywhere – sitting atop tanks, storming into buildings and, in a piece from Ha’aretz that went viral, even soldiers cooking bruschetta and curries in abandoned Palestinian homes using the spices and lentils they had found there.

Then there are the daily updates on the hostages and their families, on survivors of the 7 October attacks and new footage emerging regularly of the events of that terrible day. Some of the footage is accompanied by surging patriotic music, such as Harbu Darbu (Swords and Strikes) by Israeli duo Ness & Stilla, which shot to number one shortly after 7 October. “We’ve brought the entire army against you and we swear there won’t be forgiveness, sons of Amalek,” raps Dor Stilla, referencing the mythical nation the Israelites are commanded to wipe out in the Torah.

By comparison, when I check in with the international media – BBC, CNN, or any online newspaper – I feel as if I might be living on a different planet. It’s impossible to miss the images of devastation in Gaza: of hospitals overflowing with horrifically injured and dying people, parents searching for their children under rubble and most recently of severely malnourished children and adults staring out limply from hospital beds. Most foreign media reports the latest death count in the territory as over 30,000, in figures released by Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Although these figures are often disputed as being unreliable, or too high, or even too low by some foreign press,

6 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024

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