Nine months into the war on Gaza, Israeli media hardly reports on the death and destruction there. Haggai Matar, executive director of +972 magazine, tells Jacobin about the self-censorship that dominates Israeli journalism.
An Israeli armored personnel vehicle rolls along the border with the Gaza Strip on July 17, 2024. (Menahem Kahana /AFP via Getty Images)
For months, horrifying footage of injured or killed Palestinians has been going around the world. Palestinian journalists show their everyday reality on social media, often reporting on attacks on hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets at the risk of their own lives. No other war in recent decades has claimed as many lives among media professionals as this one. As long ago as March, Reporters Without Borders spoke of well over a hundred dead. Other sources estimate even higher figures.
At the same time, the reporting on the Gaza war by many renowned Western media outlets has been subject to considerable criticism. The Intercept, for example, explains that media such as the New York Times use emotional language to describe Israeli casualties while Palestinian ones are painted in colder terms.
The media landscape within Israel is even more one-sided, says Haggai Matar, executive director of +972 magazine. In recent months,+972 has published many critical investigations into Israeli warfare in Gaza. This includes, for example, a report on the use of artificial intelligence by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In an interview with Jacobin’s Magdalena Berger, he explains why Israeli media hardly reports on the situation in Gaza and what consequences this has on the mood in the country.
Magdalena Berger
If you’re someone living in Israel seeking information about the war in Gaza, what kind of information do you get from Israeli media?
Haggai Matar
Very, very little. If we’re looking only at Hebrew language media outlets, there is basically only Local Call. Over the first few months of the war, even Haaretz did not offer any reporting from within Gaza. Now the reporting is better, but it’s by people who are outside of Gaza, talking to people over there. Local Call, which we copublish together with Just Vision, is the only outlet in Hebrew that has regular reporting from within Gaza, but it’s not an extremely well-known site.
If you actively look for information, you’ll find it. But if you’re just the average Israeli turning on television or opening most of the newspapers, there will be absolutely nothing.
Magdalena Berger
Why is that?
Haggai Matar
Journalists here see their role through a very “patriotic” lens. Everyone in the country is doing their part for the war effort. This means not supporting the “enemy” and not giving them legitimacy by talking about what’s happening in Gaza in terms of casualties and so on. That’s how they think of it.
But commercial interests also play a role. They recognize that the overall mood is so vitriolic that people expect journalists to fall in line. If journalists started talking about what’s happening in Gaza, people would stop buying their paper or switch to a different news channel. We have seen this spiral throughout the years, Israeli media never reports about Palestinian lives. So when it does, it is seen as treacherous. Therefore, media don’t want to do that. It goes back to that consensus and continues reaffirming the dehumanization of Palestinians.
Magdalena Berger
Would you say that this goes to a point where general journalistic principles are violated?
Haggai Matar
Yes, definitely. You see it especially when there are particularly violent events that get international attention. For example, about a month ago, several dozen people were burned to death in a refugee camp in Khan Younis. People all over the world saw these horrible images of burnt bodies. And it got to the point where the media couldn’t avoid it anymore. So you would have journalists in TV studios saying, “You have to remember, people abroad are seeing images that we are not showing.” They were actively pointing out that there was an important development that everybody in the world was talking about, but they would not let their viewers see it. This is really betraying journalistic responsibility.
It’s been nine months since October 7, and when you turn on the news, you don’t get any real stories about what’s happening to the people of Gaza. But you do get the stories of October 7 over and over again.
Magdalena Berger
Does this mean that the media inside Israel is dependent on outside journalists for critical reporting that is not done inside the country?
Haggai Matar
If Israeli media wanted to cover what’s going on in Gaza, there are Palestinian journalists on the ground who would be happy to do that work. Of course not everyone would want to work with an Israeli outlet, but some would. There are enough resources out there: news agencies, media outlets, not to mention social-media content.
If you wanted to show that something terrible happened, all you’d have to do is show the kind of videos that come out on social media. That is enough to get a pretty good idea of what is going on. Not using those sources is a deliberate choice — it’s not because Israeli media doesn’t have the capability to do so.
Magdalena Berger
How does such a media landscape affect the sentiment in the country?
Haggai Matar
It preserves a collective sense of victimization. It’s been nine months since October 7, and when you turn on the news, you don’t get any real stories about what’s happening to the people of Gaza. But you do get the stories of October 7 over and over again. Unfortunately, there have been so many people killed and kidnapped and wounded that there are literally thousands of stories that can be told every night for years.
You will see story after story of October 7 and stories of soldiers killed in Gaza, stories of Hezbollah attacks on the Israeli north. And you have the stories of the hostages. All of that is true and relevant. But that’s only what you get when you don’t see what’s happening in Gaza. So the feeling is that we are the victims here. We are just being attacked and defending ourselves.
This war is disproportionately worse than anything we’ve seen before. But if you go back ten years to 2014, there was another war where the Israeli media didn’t show anything that was going on in Gaza. After the war, there were discussions where journalists started to say that they were getting calls from Benjamin Netanyahu and from the IDF spokesperson asking them to start showing the suffering in Gaza because there was a feeling that he couldn’t end the war. Then he wanted to end the war; now he doesn’t.
When he wanted to end the war, he knew that Israelis only saw themselves as victims who hadn’t done anything to Palestinians. But Netanyahu needed political legitimacy to end a war that Israelis thought they were losing. So he called journalists and asked them to show the killing of Palestinians. Then the Israeli media felt it was the patriotic thing to do, to basically do their job and report what was happening. They admitted this mistake ten years ago, but now they are repeating it.
Magdalena Berger
The current war is also specifically targeting the media. The Committee to Protect Journalists writes that the war in Gaza is the deadliest for journalists since records began in 1992. So far, at least 108 media workers have been killed in Gaza. Other sources even say 147. How does Israel deal with critical journalists inside the country — Palestinians as well as Israelis?
Haggai Matar
They are not alike. The treatment of Palestinian journalists is not the same as the treatment of Jewish Israeli journalists.
By and large, Jewish journalists are fine. I mean, you have the occasional incident where there is a protest, and policemen push journalists. This is not nice of course, and I am also on the board of the Journalists’ Union, where such cases of violence against journalists are reported. But it does not endanger or prevent the ability to do serious reporting. For Palestinian journalists, it can be quite a different story — inside Israel, but especially in the West Bank and of course in Gaza.
We see more journalists being attacked by right-wing mobs than by the state.
I think it is also important to remember that there is a military censor in Israel; we have to submit stories to the censor before publication. Everybody has to do that, but generally speaking, this censorship will not prevent you from telling most of the big and important stories. They will stop you from talking about a particular weapon that is being developed because they don’t want their enemy to know about it. But they won’t stop you from reporting on Gaza.
I think the threat we face right now has two different layers. One is popular sentiment, where we see more journalists being attacked by right-wing mobs than by the state. So you have incitement against journalists from the people in power, and then you have mobs that attack in the streets.
That’s a bigger risk in terms of how we think about our work inside Israel. And there are certain laws that [the government] is trying to pass to limit the freedom of the media, although they haven’t passed them yet. But they’re trying. And if they do pass, then we’re going to face some serious risks.
But it is important to emphasize — the real victims, the ones most at risk, are clearly the journalists in Gaza. We have colleagues working there under impossible circumstances, and we stand in solidarity with them, trying to do whatever we can to protect them.
Magdalena Berger
What laws is the Israeli government trying to change?
Haggai Matar
Basically, [changing the laws to limit] the ability to report about violence against Palestinians. In the past few years, it was already not possible to mention the names of the soldiers and police officers who were suspected of using excessive violence against Palestinians. Now they are talking about expanding the Al Jazeera law, so that it will apply to Israeli outlets as well. The Ministry of Defense could basically decide that an outlet is threatening national security and outlaw that media. Again, we’re not there yet, but it could happen.
There is also an additional layer, but it is less directly relevant to us. It’s Netanyahu’s attempt to take over the media, which has been going on for fifteen years. We’re too small [to be affected by] that, but we’re seeing a process where there’s an attempt to take over the mainstream media, to buy political coverage. This is part of the big-picture things that are being done, which are not about the Palestinian issue; it’s about how favorable the media is to Netanyahu personally. But this is definitely a threat to the press, and it is also one of the battlegrounds between the Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu camps.
Magdalena Berger
One of your most prominent investigations with +972 and Local Call has been about the use of artificial intelligence in the war. Much of this is based on intelligence sources within the Israeli military. How do you gain access to these sources?
Haggai Matar
Israeli society is very small and tight. Everybody is only one or two steps away from anybody else. You can reach anyone you want pretty easily, especially when we are talking about the war. There are so many people in the army that everybody knows somebody in the army, and everybody knows somebody who is not happy with what they’re doing in the army. We talk to those people, make sure that they share their contacts, and just go from one person to the next.
We have published quite a few stories based on intelligence sources, so we have developed a reputation in those circles. Now we actually have people coming to us and saying, “I want to talk about what happened too.” So it’s kind of become this confessional institution where people can come and talk about the things that they’ve done or that others are still doing.
Magdalena Berger
Your reporting has received a lot of global attention in the last months. How did the public react toward these investigations in Israel?
Haggai Matar
It is very different here and globally. Globally, there has been outrage. We’ve seen the White House denouncing the use of AI to decide who is going to die. We’ve seen the United Nations condemn this. There was a lot of shock and criticism in media outlets and in politics.
Even the IDF has been branded as a liberal or leftist institution, as part of the supposed ‘left-wing deep state.’
Locally, it did get more attraction than most of our stories. But we didn’t see any politician, including from the Zionist opposition, speak out against it. Only the very small and pretty marginal parties like Hadash would speak out against it. But the rest, including the opposition that is branded as liberal, said nothing.
A lot of media outlets picked it up, especially because it was reported so significantly in the Guardian. But this also wasn’t followed up by an opinion piece of anyone saying, this is dreadful; we shouldn’t do this.
Magdalena Berger
Left-wing political influence in Israel has also significantly declined in recent years. While this is a trend in many countries, what factors do you think have contributed to this in Israel?
Haggai Matar
Since 2009, it has been the policy of Netanyahu and his allies to delegitimize the Left as a political camp. Some would say that this began in the 1990s with his attacks on Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords. But it has increased significantly since 2009 and is now at the pinnacle of this process, where [there is anti-left] sentiment across the board. All Palestinians are branded as terrorists, and anyone who works with them or on any joint initiative is considered a terrorist sympathizer. This has been extended to basically all the liberal media, to a degree that is really hard to understand abroad.
Even the army has been branded as a liberal or leftist institution, as part of the supposed “left-wing deep state.” This was a process that started with small civil-society organizations and communists, and it’s reached a point where it’s affecting anyone who challenges the Netanyahu government, including the army or the media or the courts.
The notion of Jewish supremacy has become really inherent to Israeli politics.
The media, from my point of view, supported this process: branding leftists as traitors, going after anyone who uses nonviolent resistance. It was aiding and abetting the process while at the same time pandering to another political project, which was to remove the Palestinian issue as a topic of political debate. That used to be the one thing that differentiated the political camps here. And until October 7, Netanyahu basically successfully sold this idea that the Palestinian issue is no longer an issue.
His new sentiment was, if we want peace, we can go to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. We don’t need Palestinians; we can just control them. And if you look at our current parliament, about 110 out of 120 members of the Knesset, had thought until October 7 that we don’t need to talk about Palestinians. The notion of Jewish supremacy has become inherent to Israeli politics.
This combination of a diligent immunization of anything that’s left and a depoliticization of the Palestinian question has really guaranteed right-wing hegemony. October 7, to a great degree, intensified that, because now Palestinians are basically presented as equivalent to ISIS or Nazis and anyone who criticizes our treatment of them is a Nazi sympathizer. It’s like you can’t do anything worse than support Palestinians.
Magdalena Berger
In what ways have the last nine months made this situation even worse?
Haggai Matar
Mostly it’s Palestinian citizens of Israel who are targeted because they are the natural candidates to show sympathy for Gaza. The scale of the attack has really been unprecedented in terms of arrests. In the first few weeks, people who made an Instagram post saying, “My heart goes out to Gaza,” were arrested for five days, lost their jobs, got kicked out of universities — things like that. It was really intense in the first few months.
Palestinians are basically presented as equivalent to ISIS or Nazis — and anyone who criticizes our treatment of them is a Nazi sympathizer.
It is not so intense now, but the state sets very clear limits on what is allowed and what is not allowed. The chief of police used to say, “If you demonstrate in support of Gaza, we’ll put you on a bus and send you to Gaza,” which means you can’t protest. This was also enforced against Jews.
Then you also have a media landscape that for nine months has not offered any information from Gaza or, more critically, challenged the main narrative of the government. It has been nine months, and obviously nothing has worked, but there are still no people invited to TV panels to say that the way forward is to end the occupation and to make peace; that this is the way to guarantee our security, let alone the moral way to go; that recurrent military operations don’t work. The media does not allow such voices to be heard, and the police repress them in the streets.
Magdalena Berger
Internationally, the Israeli left is also rather isolated. Large parts of the pro-Palestinian movement meet it with at least skepticism. What could be the reason for this?
Haggai Matar
I have some criticism of the Israeli left, or at least parts of it, myself. Over the years, some of the Left has abandoned the Palestinian question and focused, for instance, on protests for “protecting Israeli democracy,” which is a myth. If this is the Left, then it is legitimate to criticize them for abandoning the Palestinian issue.
We did see many leftists supporting the war in the beginning. Haaretz took a terrible stance for a few months, and it is representative of parts of the Zionist left. That warrants criticism.
At the same time, I’m also very concerned about some trends in the global left, where on the positive side, an anti-colonial discourse has become more and more prominent in relation to Israel-Palestine. And being against colonialism is a good thing. But the rationale around it has become that Jewish existence in this land is illegitimate. If you’re a Jewish Israeli, if you live here, you’re a criminal by default because you’re living on stolen Palestinian land. And there is no way, no matter what you do — you can refuse the draft, you can go to jail, you can demonstrate against apartheid and the war, you can do whatever you want — you are still an illegitimate settler. That is why you should leave. That is why you are a legitimate target.
Over the years, some of the Left has abandoned the Palestinian question and focused, for instance, on protests for ‘protecting Israeli democracy,’ which is a myth.
This position fails to criticize Hamas for its actions. Delegitimizing Jewish existence here is both morally and politically wrong and deeply unhelpful. Those of us who try to work with our society here face many difficulties anyway. To be told, look, your allies around the world, they don’t want a peaceful arrangement here, they want us all to be destroyed or to leave . . . that’s perceived here as what the Palestinians and the Left want. It makes our work harder.
We are obviously not the victims here, and I understand where this notion comes from. We want a decolonial discourse, and what Israel is doing is shocking. And you don’t want to say anything that would be seen as legitimizing it. So people avoid criticizing what Hamas did on October 7 because it would seem to legitimize what Israel is doing.
What we are trying to do is to have a discourse that criticizes all war crimes — in proportion, recognizing which ones are bigger and ongoing and which ones are smaller.
Magdalena Berger
In recent weeks, we’ve seen anti-government protests start up again. Despite their political ambiguity, especially toward the occupation, do you anticipate any resurgence of left-wing influence? Or do you think the right-wing dominance will continue?
Haggai Matar
I have my criticism of it. Most of the movement is in line with everything we’ve been saying so far: It pays zero attention to Gaza. It’s end the war for us and not for them. But in the current context, any antiwar movement needs to be encouraged.
People avoid criticizing what Hamas did on October 7 because it would seem to legitimize what Israel is doing. What we are trying to do is to have a discourse that criticizes all war crimes, in proportion.
We started out with no one being willing to speak out against the war. Several public opinion polls now show that the vast majority of the public supports a cease-fire agreement or a deal to release hostages and Palestinian prisoners. That actually gets majority support, and that’s a positive thing. I would have wanted them to talk about Palestinians, but if it increases the pressure on the government because people are tired of the war and see that it’s not working, then I’ll take it as a process toward something better down the line. Definitely better than where we were a few months back.