There’s no media outlet more hated by the current Israeli government, nor heralded outside Israel, than Haaretz, the longest-running newspaper currently in print in the country (indeed, it was founded long before the country was). Inside Israel, Haaretz—the word means “the land” or “the earth”—is seen as the paper of the educated elite, a small slice of the population, while its English-language website has more than 2.5 million unique monthly visitors. It’s a must read for diplomats, foreign journalists, and followers of Israeli politics (the paper is currently expanding its US/English language bureau).
Founded in 1918 as a literary newspaper by the Hebrew battalions of the British Army in Egypt, it was established as a general newspaper a year later. “Since then, for 108 years, it’s been published every day and hour,” editor in chief Aluf Benn told me when I sat with him in the paper’s Tel Aviv headquarters recently.
Benn, 61, has been at its helm for the last 15 years, following his more than two decades as the paper’s national security and diplomatic correspondent. Born and raised in Tel Aviv (his father was one of Israel’s most prominent poets and literary figures), he is confident, warm, and informal. We met in Haaretz’s South Tel Aviv headquarters, among warehouses in a part of town fast becoming gentrified, in the Schocken Building, named for Amos Schocken, who owns 75 percent of the paper and whose family has shepherded it since 1935. The other 25 percent is owned by liberal Russian businessman and Putin enemy, Leonid Nevzlin, who is an Israeli citizen. The paper’s hallways are famously laden with contemporary, often provocative, Israeli artwork, art collecting being the other obsession of publisher Schocken.
Haaretz’s unique place in Israeli political culture is amplified daily, especially since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, when self-imposed censorship by the rest of the Israeli media took hold. “We were the only ones in the Hebrew mainstream media reporting on what was happening in Gaza and Lebanon,” Benn noted. “About starvation, killing, destruction, war crimes, shooting people on their way to get food, maimed and crippled and wounded and dead and widowed and bereaved and orphaned families and people.”
Indeed, this reporting hasn’t stopped. Haaretz reporter Nir Hasson can’t get into Gaza since Israel still won’t allow reporters inside without an official IDF escort, but he maintains contacts with sources via phone and Zoom from his home in Jerusalem. He had a story recently that was simply names and photos of Gazan children killed since the ceasefire.
“I think that this [Gaza coverage is] one of the most important journalistic things that we did,” Benn says. “You could always argue that it’s not enough. It was not enough to change public perception in Israel. But clearly, when the government goes against us, when people criticize us, it’s because of that reporting.… We gave names and faces to dead Palestinian children, or to hungry Palestinian people, sick people who could not get treatment.”
He continued: “We obviously reported more about the Israeli side. We’re not some external force dividing attention between the two sides. But you cannot cover a war by one side.” The rest of the Israeli media, though, ignored Palestinian suffering almost completely, despite there being no government censorship.
“The bombs Israel dropped on Gaza happened 50 miles away from here,” he noted. “We could hear it … in Tel Aviv, the bombing in Gaza. It’s not something that happened in outer space. But it was not reported…. Most Israelis don’t want to hear about it.”
Indeed, Haaretz, to its immense credit, consistently invests significant reporting not only in covering Gaza but the West Bank as well. Occasionally, and ironically, its reporters get boycotted outside of the region (for instance, the Columbia University encampment leaders refused to give the paper an interview), but Gazan and West Bank Palestinians talk to the paper regularly. They’ve also developed a reporting team of Palestinian citizens of Israel who speak fluent Arabic. “It’s not just about the language; it’s about their ability to communicate on a much more equal basis,” Benn said.
These days, Haaretz invests in open-source and video reporting, and recently established a cybersecurity, technology, and open-source investigation desk—four reporters Benn calls the “secret service.” Even as I was writing this story, Haaretz’s imaging research revealed misinformation from the Israeli government regarding placement of troops and Israeli resources nearly a mile past the official demarcation line inside Gaza. This method is used by the paper in the West Bank too, identifying new settlement growth instigated by the government, even though reporters can roam freely there.
With the Netanyahu government taking frequent aim at what it considers the cultural elites in the media, Haaretz and other outlets have become targets—sometimes literally. In July, there were three attacks by a masked man hauling a brick, two on the headquarters of TV Channel 12 and one on Haaretz’s headquarters. Even after the alleged perpetrator was caught there was no government condemnation. No surprise there.
The government’s attacks on Haaretz continue. A government lawyer successfully just argued that new billboards sponsored by Haaretz and promoting a free press as a prerequisite for democracy be removed as “electioneering.” After the war in Gaza began, the government, led by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, “started talking about the need to boycott us because we’re collaborators of Hamas.… They stopped the residual government advertising. They also told their government employees that they will not pay for the subscriptions any longer.” Haaretz hasn’t been barred from any press gaggles, but that is rather a moot point since Netanyahu has none.
“Today the freedom of the press in Israel is basically defended by two institutions: the attorney general, who is the strongest voice for democracy, at least within the Green Line … and the Supreme Court,” said Benn, though he acknowledged that, due to recent appointments, “the Supreme Court is going further and further to the right.”
Indeed, in early July, a right-wing high court judge proclaimed that anyone who called Israel an “apartheid” state should be denied entry to Israel. Benn: “That was shocking, actually.… At some point, since we do write these words, they might come back and try to fight us seriously. So there is a risk. They don’t want us to be here.”
Benn, the erstwhile diplomatic correspondent, remains a keen observer of how Israel is seen globally and especially in the United States, where Haaretz also has its largest English-language readership. Just as the right-wing government in Israel hates it, liberals consider the paper a necessary read. Those on the Israeli right blame Haaretz’s thorough reporting for some of Israel’s bad image. But Benn knows that newspapers report the news; they don’t create it. “Israel’s image can be fixed if it changes direction towards a serious effort at peacemaking with the Palestinians toward a two-state solution, with Syria and Lebanon,” he said.
While many in the Jewish community in the U.S. are especially concerned about diminishing support for Israel in the Democratic Party, Benn asserted that Israel’s image problem is, for now, in both parties: “Both sides of the American aisle hate its continuous war policy.” Regarding the stranglehold on Israeli democracy that is so prevalent on the minds of Benn and his readers, he concludes that “Israel’s domestic crisis matters less to Americans, especially to Republicans who support similar autocratic policies as Netanyahu’s.”
Back on the domestic front: There is no doubt that in October, Israel is facing arguably the most consequential election of its history. Existential issues like democracy—not only for the Jewish people of Israel, but for the Palestinian people—will lie before the next prime minister.
Whoever wins the upcoming Israeli election will face monumental issues left by this current government that will impact Israel greatly on the world stage, not just in America. “One of the biggest challenges for any future govern in Israel would be whether to make Bibi the scapegoat for whatever Israel did wrong in the eyes of the world,” Benn says. “That includes dealing with his poisonous legacies—the occupied lands in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, and West Bank ethnic cleansing and Jewish terror.”
Additionally, and perhaps most ominously, the current government has instituted the death penalty for the first time in the history of Israel (except for the execution of nazi leader Adolf Eichman) at the urging of far-right Minister Ben Gvir. This inhumane law (being contested presently in the courts), activates the death penalty only for Palestinian perpetrators of terror, not those who are Jewish. Once there will be trials for the October 7 Hamas perpetrators currently in Israeli prisons, there could be hundreds of death penalties issued, with dire consequences for Israel’s image, despite the heinous crimes committed on that day.
Indeed, the next prime minister will be handed a profoundly difficult mess to unravel. But what happens if Netanyahu wins reelection? “It’s going to be a flood,” Benn says. “Because at some point they would be able to turn the Supreme Court even more to the right. The Attorney General would leave. She’s not there indefinitely. But at the end of the day, clearly, this is the country that they want to build. A country where it would be impossible to replace the government, where criticism of policy like apartheid would be illegal, where the press would look like a government mouthpiece.”
Israeli polls increasingly point to a very close election, with Netanyahu for the time being trailing an alliance led by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. Yet Benn is wary, admitting that he is “in a minority position among my peers here who argue that there’s no way for Netanyahu to survive the election.” Indeed, there’s fear that Netanyahu could make ample use of his security services to maintain indefinite power. Additionally, a stalemate election could find Netanyahu governing without a mandate with near dictatorial means. “I’m afraid that he could stay on because he doesn’t need to win decisively with this coalition as he did last time,” Benn says.
He bemoans the Israel he was raised in; the Israel his parents helped create. “We grew up believing in liberal values and lifestyles like science and technology. We never realized the lesson of, I hate these analogies, but the lesson of the 1930s throughout Europe and the United States was that it can be turned back. The same was true about the peace process. We thought that these things were irreversible. Well, they’re not exactly reversible, but they could take a very bad turn as we see in Gaza and in Lebanon and even in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is just a prisoner of COGAT (the Israeli military civil administration), basically, and there’s no money going in; it’s just atrophied there.
“I think this goes back to our mission at Haaretz. You always need to be on watch and guard and try to protect these liberal values of democracy, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and not look the other way, even in wartime.”
Benn has a particular litmus test for Israeli democracy. He tells me about an article from 2022 that foreshadowed what Netanyahu has done regarding the implosion of Israeli democracy—with his attacks on the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, the media, culture, corruption—in his current term, which would no doubt intensify in another. He wonders: “Will this article still be publishable after the election if it ushers in a right-wing government led by Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir? All signs indicate that this trio is plotting to turn Israel into an authoritarian state in which criticizing the government or replacing it will only be a pipe dream. Well, it could, and it still can, but it’s becoming more difficult.”
The article was a frontal attack on an Israeli government that indeed has ruled for the last four years. It was written by Benn.
