The Idea of Israel (32 page)

In the 1990s, changes began to occur in the Israeli press, as they did in academia, caused in part by new ideological insights but also facilitated by the partial privatisation of the print and electronic media at that time. The three leading dailies,
Haaretz, Maariv
, and
Yedioth Ahronoth
, were owned by three families, and Israel’s second TV channel, which appeared in the 1990s (as well as channel 10, which arrived with the advent of cable TV), was run by private companies that shared time on the screen.
¹²
This turned the media into a kind of liberal watchdog, a function it had not previously fulfilled. Now granted a greater degree of free speech and opinion, the press took stands against human rights abuses in Israel, which concerned Palestinians. Privatisation also led to the first bold articles exposing corruption and financial embezzlement in the army and the security forces.

Another factor that contributed to the relative openness and pluralism of the media was the debate concerning the First Lebanon War and the First Intifada. Although the intifada was launched at the end of 1987, it was not until 1989 that Israeli journalists, especially print journalists, began to report what the national television and radio had avoided presenting: the daily brutalities inflicted on the population in the occupied territories. There were several reasons for this
delay. As long as the national unity government was still in power (the Labour–Likud coalition was in office 1984–90), the press, with its pro-Labour orientation, hesitated to criticise the IDF’s actions in the territories. The right-wing coalition under Yitzhak Shamir that took over in 1990 was an easier target.

Among the Israeli reporters who already stood out for coverage of this debate was Gideon Levy of
Haaretz
, who brought to the attention of Israeli readers the human tragedies arising from the continuing closures of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and their moral implications. Also in
Haaretz
, columnist Amira Hass, who lived for three years in Gaza, made Israelis aware of life under occupation and later in the 1990s graphically conveyed the illusions and disappointments generated there by the Oslo Accords.

In those years, a few newspapers even stood up to the military censor. Since the early 1990s on a number of occasions, for example,
Haaretz
chose not to cooperate with the censor. The now-defunct daily
Hadashot
took the lead in this respect, and as early as 1984 was closed for several days for disobeying a direct instruction not to publish a photograph of two captive Palestinian guerrillas who had hijacked an Israeli bus. The Shin Bet objected to the photograph because it was the only evidence showing that the guerrillas, who were battered to death by senior commanders in the organisation immediately after the photograph was taken, had been captured alive.

In general, the print media were more advanced in their presentation of diverse views than were the electronic media, particularly television. The very division of print-media information into news sections, editorials and commentary by in-house and guest contributors, and cultural and weekend supplements offered more scope for unconventional thinking. It was in the cultural supplements that the debates of the ‘new historians’ and later of post-Zionist scholarship first appeared. Around the mid-1990s, echoes of the debate were reflected in the editorials, thereby enlarging the number of readers exposed to post-Zionist views. The debate also moved to cultural programmes on television, which, despite their relatively low ratings, still reached a wider and more diverse audience than academic journals
or conferences. The very fact that debates on post-Zionism came to be included in the print media and on both television channels (on educational programmes) was indicative of a significant change. This inclusiveness would have been inconceivable ten or fifteen years earlier. The term ‘Palestinians in Israel’ appeared not only in the editorial columns and commentaries, but even in the news sections of the press. The term ‘post-Zionist’ was now in common use, in both a positive and a negative sense.

Nevertheless, one should not exaggerate the extent of the transformation in the press or its impact in those days. The media was still Zionist, even if it allowed post-Zionist voices now and then to be presented in its midst. The cases cited above were exceptions that did not disprove the general conduct, even of
Haaretz
. No matter how frequently articles criticising the government’s policy towards its own Palestinian citizens and towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories appeared in the editorial pages, the representation of the Other in the news columns did not fundamentally change. The ‘factual’ news reports – radio, television, and print – continued to reflect an overall national agenda and employ a nationalistic discourse. TV and radio interviewers of Palestinians or Arab personalities continued to act as if they represented the government, or at least the consensual point of view.

The press’s approach to conflicting interpretations of the current reality was well illustrated in its coverage of the September 1996 clashes in the occupied territories. That month, the Netanyahu government had decided to open a tunnel under the Haram al-Sharif, angering and infuriating the Arab and Muslim worlds and triggering a mini-uprising in the West Bank. The press was almost unanimously critical of this decision. Nonetheless, with respect to the clashes that followed the decision, most of the journalists took it for granted that the Palestinian Authority had ordered its police to fire on Israeli soldiers. The possibility, as reported in the international media, that the Palestinian police might have been moved to enter the fray by the spectacle of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers shooting at unarmed Palestinian protesters was not deemed credible in any of the major Israeli papers or TV programmes.

The operating style of the Israeli media involved a combination of self-imposed national censorship on the one hand and an attempt to act as a liberal marketplace of ideas on the other. This produced a reality wherein the press served two masters that were sometimes, indeed often, at odds with one another, and this reality fed the self-image of the Israeli press as being a liberal organ but not unpatriotic. It was an intentional ambivalence, probably based on the reasonable assumption that the news sections were read more widely and were more influential than the columns and commentaries. Still, there was some improvement. Several years earlier, the Palestinian or Arab version of events was not mentioned at all; now it was mentioned at times, though with an obvious preference for ‘our’ version.

It should be noted that there were attempts to found newspapers that would present the news in an integrated fashion – that is, seeking a ‘post-Zionist’ or ‘non-Zionist’ approach to the way the news itself was covered and commented on. Most of these attempts did not last long. Uri Avnery tried with
HaOlam HaZeh
, but even his use of succulent gossip and unclad females did not help the paper survive, and it finally closed in the early 1980s as a financial failure.
Hadashot
tried fashioning itself as a tabloid with an ideological, non-Zionist edge; as a daily paper, it presented a different discourse, more neutral and at times even radical, but it, too, was forced to close after nine years because of financial problems. The local Jerusalem weekly,
Kol Ha’ir
, was the only paper in Israel which continued the fair-minded – which in Israeli eyes meant radical – reporting of daily events in the country and the region.

Despite the various failures, attempts at creating an alternative press continued. A Hebrew version of the weekly report prepared by the Alternative Information Center appeared in the 1990s, aptly called
Mitsad Sheni
(The Other Front). It provided a window not only into the official Palestinian position but also introduced Hebrew readers to the pluralistic nature of Palestinian politics and culture, so often misrepresented in a one-dimensional and reductionist way by mainstream media. Behind such a publication stood the still unfulfilled goal of establishing a common front between all those who have been victimised by Zionism in modern times. In those
days, the potential partners included Hamas, the leftist Palestinian anti-Oslo organisations, Palestinians in Israel, Mizrachi Jews in the development towns, and feminist organisations. But it appeared that
Mitsad Sheni
was read only within the world of activists and did not reach the wider public – it was simply a weekly circulated among interested people.

One should wait and see if, in future, similar enterprises will be able to open the eyes of the conventional Israeli reader.
Socialism Now
tried presenting an anti-Zionist agenda for a short period.
Mitan
(the Hebrew word for both a bomb and a burden) is still in print. The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, Hadash, publishes a Hebrew weekly,
Zo Haderech
(This Is the Way) and 2005 saw the founding of an excellent monthly edited by Yitzhak Laor,
Mita’am
(not an easy term to translate, it means both on behalf of – either the authority or the counterforces – but is also associated with the Hebrew word for ‘taste’), which ceased publication after seven years of providing one of the few genuinely critical spaces for public debate.

In recent years, the media struggle around knowledge and information has moved to cyberspace. Several very active websites and blogs are there for any Israeli reader who wishes to know the truth about the occupation and the oppression inside Israel, or to be introduced to more profound analytical pieces about Zionism, globalism, US imperialism, or anything else that places local realities in a regional and international context. It is still difficult to tell at this point how influential these efforts have been. While Facebook networking enabled a toothless and depoliticised Israeli protest movement to emerge in the summer of 2011, neither Facebook nor similar electronic arenas have had an impact on the continued allegiance of knowledge producers and consumers to the classically Zionist idea of Israel or even, of late, its new, neo-Zionist interpretation. The most vibrant among these websites is Ha-Oketz (The Sting), a rare open forum for challenging views in a society rigid with censorship.

The Diet-Zionist Media

Finally, what of the journalists themselves? Except for the notable cases of Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, and also perhaps Tom Segev, who has displayed similarly critical instincts, few other names from either the 1990s or the present day can be added to the list.

For the media, post-Zionism did not signify a legitimate position. It was not the left pole of the political field; it was located outside it. ‘Left’ in Israel meant, and still means, a willingness in principle to give up territory for peace and to recognise the Palestinian right to self-determination. It is a definition which had very little to do with a socialist point of view or economic issues.

Consequently, the journalists on the left have presented an agenda very different from that of the academics and artists of the 1990s. They limited their criticism to post-1967 Israeli policy and conduct towards the Arab world and specifically the Palestinians. In this way they legitimatised what the State of Israel, and before 1948 the Zionist movement, had done to, and in, Palestine up to 1967. They adopted what might be called an Israeli-centric or Judaeocentric concern about the effect of the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories on Israel’s external image and on its internal and eternal ‘soul’; the plight of the Palestinians was of secondary importance, if indeed it figured at all. Their desire for peace with the Palestinians derived more from a wish to enclave (if I may coin a verb) the Palestinians in a way that would absolve Israel from any future responsibility for them, and less from a desire to redress historical injustice or to end immoral behaviour. Their approach also excluded from any future solution two Palestinian groups: the refugees and the Palestinian minority within Israel. The refugees, according to this point of view, could return to whatever would be defined as the future Palestinian state; any other suggestion, such as the return of the refugees to Palestine as a whole, was and still is regarded as an existential threat to the Jewish state. As for the sizeable Palestinian minority within pre-1967 Israel – a problem that cannot be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel – any inclusion of them in peace talks is interpreted in a similarly hysterical way. Indeed,
left-leaning journalists have avoided including the Palestinians in Israel in any discussion on the question of Palestine. To do so could open a debate on the very nature of the state, bringing to the fore its more racist and non-democratic features – issues no one on the Zionist left has been willing to address. This point of view would also garner substantial support among mainstream academics who viewed themselves as left but fought the post-Zionist and anti-Zionist scholars of the 1990s harder than anyone else.

These journalists and academics had a political home – the liberal Zionist party Meretz (although some remained loyal to the Labour Party) and a daily paper,
Haaretz
. The academics of the left Zionist parties are the ones who populated the op-ed sections of the more liberal publications and were brought in as guest commentators on news bulletins and talk shows. In our present century, many of the leading journalists in
Haaretz
, as well as those who had ‘leftist’ radio shows, joined either Meretz or Labour as politicians. One of them, Shelly Yachimovich, led the Labour Party in the 2012 elections.

A typical example of the liberal Zionist discourse is a book by Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist who made frequent media appearances during the 1990s as the voice of reason and the left. His book
Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel
was one of a number of such books unleashed by liberal Zionist journalists in reaction to the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987.
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The book is a combination of personal soul-searching and academic analysis – one of the best in this genre. It is also the best example I have found to convey the esprit de corps of the liberal Zionist media, of which
Haaretz
is also a prime example and which lately has become well represented by additional forces and organisations, such as the J Street lobby in the United States and internationally renowned Israeli movies such as
Waltz with Bashir
and
The Gatekeepers
.
¹⁴
Rubber Bullets
is a well-balanced book that moves smoothly between the personal and the general, as well as between the immediate reaction to particular events in the Intifada and the more distant assessment of the process overall. In this sense, readers interested in the psychological and, above all, ideological world of a peace activist on the Israeli
Zionist left could not wish for a more authentic presentation – one that reveals not only the strength but also, more important for the present discussion, the absurdity and ambiguity of this position.