Netanyahu’s War on the Israeli Media

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always viewed the media as either his enemy or his servant. Over the years, he has had some successes in trying to turn it into the latter, but many more failures. Yet he’s never given up, even as some of his schemes have ended in criminal indictments. Netanyahu took the witness stand in his own trial on Dec. 10 to defend himself against the indictments, telling the court he isn’t bothered by negative media coverage.

But even as he faces jail time for some of these schemes, Netanyahu continues to try and tame the press. The government he leads includes an assortment of kowtowing loyalists, populists, and far rightists, none of whom have shown any great respect for democratic norms and nearly all share his disdain for the media. Given its gruesome origins in the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon has aroused nationalistic sentiments like no other war Israel has fought and has been exploited by those in power.

The Netanyahu government’s latest targets are the newspaper Haaretz and the public broadcaster Kan 11.

Haaretz, long detested by the right for its leftist politics and more recently for its critical reporting on the war, was placed under official sanction by Netanyahu’s ministerial cabinet on Nov. 24. That means that government bodies and state-owned companies are no longer allowed to advertise or “have contact with the Haaretz newspaper in any form.”

Officially, the measures were taken due to the war, and the “many editorials that have hurt the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to self-defense, and particularly the remarks made in London by Haaretz publisher, Amos Schocken, that support terrorism and call for imposing sanctions on the government.”

Schocken did speak of “Palestinian freedom fighters, that Israel calls terrorists” at a London conference in October, but he later clarified that he wasn’t referring to Hamas. The newspaper backtracked further in an editorial: “Even in his clarification, Schocken erred. The fact that he didn’t mean to include Hamas terrorists doesn’t mean that other terrorist acts are legitimate, even if their perpetrators’ goal is to free themselves from occupation.”

None of that would have helped because Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi has had Haaretz in his crosshairs for at least a year and was angling to act despite the measure’s dubious legality.

Karhi later put forth a bill that was portrayed as privatizing Kan 11 but in practice would simply kill it off. Approved by the Knesset in a preliminary vote at the end of November, the bill also says that if no private operator is found for Kan 11’s TV and radio services, then it will be shut down within two years and its archives and content rights will be transferred to the state.

“I’m working to expand freedom of expression and increase competition in the media market” was Karhi’s justification for the bill. But the reality is that Kan 11 would be disbanded, not privatized. And even the sale of its broadcast licenses is almost certainly destined to fail: Israel’s small media market (a population of around 9.8 million served by three major TV broadcasters and a handful of smaller ones) can’t support a fourth major competitor without the government assistance that Kan 11 enjoys.

The foreign press has not been exempt from government pressure. In October 2023, just weeks into Israel’s war with Hamas, the Israeli cabinet approved emergency regulations that allowed the government to temporarily shut down foreign media outlets deemed as national security threats. But as the war dragged on and the regulations were due to expire, the government won Knesset approval last April to make those powers into law.

The law allows the government to close foreign broadcasters operating in Israel and confiscate their equipment for as long as 90 days. Originally conceived as a temporary measure, the law has been extended twice, most recently in November, when it was extended until May 2025. The 90-day period was also expanded to as much as 120 days.

The legislation is popularly known as the Al Jazeera law, as it was clear to everyone who it was targeting. The Qatari government-owned outlet’s coverage does often portray Israel in a negative light, and it airs more graphic images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza than others.

Whether it constitutes a threat to national security is another issue. The defense establishment, which is required to issue an opinion, was far from unanimous. Nevertheless, the cabinet voted last May to ban Al Jazeera, and hours later the police seized equipment from its Jerusalem offices, while its TV broadcast and website were blocked inside Israel. Officials even tried to extend the ban to the Associated Press, whose gear was also seized briefly on the grounds that it had violated the law by providing images of Gaza to Al Jazeera. Karhi backed down under U.S. pressure.

Netanyahu’s distaste for independent media seems to be less about any authoritarian tendencies than about a thin skin and an inflated view of his importance as Israel’s leader and his place in history. He seems to think that a leader of his unique stature should be honored by journalists, not hounded by them. All of this is exacerbated by a dark view of a world he sees as divided into friends and enemies. There are no neutral parties. Thus, Netanyahu rarely holds press conferences or gives interviews to local media.

In Israel’s 1999 election, Netanyahu famously slammed the media coverage he was getting, saying, “They are afraid.” He lost that election and blamed it on a hostile media. “I need my own media,” he reportedly told associates afterward.

To a degree, that is what he got. The first was the free daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which was launched in 2007 and soon became Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper thanks to generous subsidies by its owner, the late U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson. It accomplished two things for Netanyahu: providing seamlessly fawning coverage of the prime minister and (just as importantly) his wife, Sara, and cutting into the revenues of its rivals such as Yedioth Aharonot.

Netanyahu’s second success was the TV broadcaster 14 Now, also known as Channel 14. Launched a decade ago as a minor-league broadcaster with programming for the religious community, it was allowed to transform itself into a news channel offering wall-to-wall Netanyahu-friendly coverage while peddling conspiracy theories and incendiary content. Its editorial line parallels Netanyahu to the point that his policy changes often surface in its broadcasts before the prime minister himself articulates them.

Netanyahu has worked hard to keep both media properties alive and kicking. It is widely believed that he brought down his own government in 2015 to block a Knesset bill that would have banned the distribution of full-size freebie newspapers like Israel Hayom. Channel 14 has been showered with regulatory benefits that others are denied, which have helped stem its losses. Today, its news broadcast has the second-highest ratings among the networks.

Netanyahu has tried to do more to establish a grip on the media, but it has come to naught. He got another U.S. billionaire, Ronald Lauder, to invest in Israel’s now-defunct Channel 10, but it never resulted in the worshipful coverage he hoped for. Other efforts ended in criminal indictments—the first for allegedly trying to reach a deal with Yedioth Aharonot publisher Noni Mozes to swap friendly coverage for legislation curbing Israel Hayom and the second for allegedly trading regulatory benefits to the telecoms company Bezeq in exchange for friendly coverage on its Walla news site.

Appearing in court on Tuesday in connection with those indictments, Netanyahu said he was only trying to correct an imbalance in which most Israeli journalists identified with leftist politics. “I constantly tried to bring new [people] so that there would be diversity, to convince people to come and invest, and occasionally tried to convince people to diversify within their own media outlets,” he said.

The prime minister’s vanity-based war on the press has found allies like never before in the current government. While Karhi is the chief one, he only represents the sharp edge of an authoritarian and anti-establishment streak that runs through the coalition.

The government spent most of its first year in power failing to legislate a package of measures designed to undercut and politicize the judicial system and rule of law. Israel’s war with Hamas put that project into abeyance, but recently Justice Minister Yariv Levin has talked about reviving it. Meanwhile, a host of other anti-democratic bills are making their way through the Knesset.

A decline in the media’s image over the past decade has made it vulnerable to official hostility. A 2023 survey found that around 24 percent of Israeli respondents expressed trust in the media, half the rate in 2011. Like everywhere in the world, traditional media’s power to influence public opinion has been weakened by social media. Netanyahu has an apparently organized contingent of online loyalists, known by its critics as the “poison machine,” to laud him and attack his enemies.

Israel’s war with Hamas has played a role, as well. Netanyahu has certainly not escaped criticism for his war conduct, but the trauma of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the fate of the hostages has made the public more receptive than in past wars when leaders accused the media of being insufficiently patriotic. “We advocate a free press and freedom of expression, but also the freedom of the government to decide not to fund incitement against the state of Israel,” said Karhi about the Haaretz ban.

On the surface, it seems as if Netanyahu and company are following the playbook of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. Since returning to power in 2010, Orban’s government has overhauled Hungary’s media law and staffed media regulators with loyalists. Public broadcast journalists were replaced with government mouthpieces. In 2018, a foundation close to Orban took control of around 500 media outlets across the country.

If Netanyahu and his cohorts aspire to something similar, they are likely to face popular resistance, as they did when they unveiled their judicial overhaul in 2023. The Israeli ethos is argumentative and undisciplined, and freedom of expression is deeply ingrained. The Al Jazeera ban is unlikely to survive the war. The Haaretz sanctions will likely have little financial impact on the newspaper even if the measures aren’t struck down by the courts. Analysts say the Kan 11 privatization will probably never win Knesset approval.

The Israeli government’s strategy, if there is one, seems less about seizing control of the media than about intimidating it. However, that could change. If Levin gets his judicial overhaul, the courts would be helpless to defend independence of the press. Unlike U.S. President Joe Biden, President-elect Donald Trump cannot be counted on to deter Netanyahu when his government undertakes anti-democratic policies. For the Israeli media, the chill is on, and it may well grow colder.