📰 The farce of Israel's liberal investigative journalism
tags: [palestine]
📝 Zusammenfassung
Sebastian Ben Daniel (+972 Magazine) dekonstruiert Israels investigative TV-Sendungen HaMakor und Uvda: 45 Investigationen ueber Geiseln, null ueber getoetete Palaestinenser. Er dokumentiert Fälle von Zivilisten mit weissen Flaggen, die seit 2009 von israelischen Soldaten erschossen wurden -- Majda Abu Hajjaj (2009), Rawhiyya Al-Najjar (Kopfschuss aus 40m), Muhammad Qudayh (mit seinen Kindern, 2014). 'Liberale israelische Medien sind zur Geisel der dunkelsten Impulse ihres Publikums geworden. Sie schirmen die Zuschauer vor den Implikationen dessen ab, was sie sehen.'
---
tags: [palestine]
📰 Volltext (+972 Magazine) -- Sebastian Ben Daniel, 22. Mai 2026
Even without intimate knowledge of the details, one thing should have been clear from the outset: When soldiers fire from inside buildings at three shirtless men carrying a white flag, kill two of them, then pursue the third, call him out of hiding, and shoot him dead, the issue is not merely mistaken identity. The issue is that Israeli soldiers routinely shoot innocent people. One would have to be extraordinarily naive to believe that the single time this happened, the victims just happened to be Israelis.
Yet HaMakor fastidiously avoided that conclusion. It did not even entertain the question of whether the battalion commander had previously overseen another incident at Gaza Zikim beach in which Palestinians who had surrendered and posed no threat were killed.
Nor did HaMakor seriously grapple with the testimony of Yotam Haim mother, Iris, who revealed that the soldiers who killed her son had been operating under orders to shoot every male on sight, regardless of age -- an obviously illegal order, and one that, based on dozens of other incidents in Gaza, was likely not exceptional.
Over the past two and a half years, HaMakor and Uvda -- the two dominant investigative programs on Israeli commercial television -- aired 45 investigations on Israeli hostages, most framed around narratives of heroism; 11 episodes on the military failure of October 7; 12 on internal war management; and four on the war in Lebanon and Iran. The number of investigations devoted to innocent Palestinians killed by the Israeli army: precisely zero.
Similarly, more than 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since the start of the war, with clear signs of abuse documented by BTselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Yet HaMakor addressed detention-related maltreatment only once: in the case of an Israeli teenager who was not physically harmed.
These are not failures of journalistic ability. Raviv Drucker and Ilana Dayan are among the best journalists in Israel. Perhaps their survival in increasingly violent Israeli media has depended precisely on the ability to sense and internalize what may be said, and what must remain unsaid.
The result is a conscious editorial choice: The war may be criticized, but not from the perspective of its Palestinian victims. The failures of the army may be investigated, but primarily insofar as those failures harmed Israelis.
# IGNORING HISTORY
On Jan. 4, 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, around 30 members of the Abu Hajjaj family -- 20 of them children -- left their neighborhood waving white flags. An Israeli tank opened fire. Majda Abu Hajjaj, 37, was killed instantly; her mother, Raya, 64, was wounded and died shortly afterwards. Their bodies remained in the field for two days.
Nine days later, in Khuzaa, Rawhiyya and Yasmin Al-Najjar were the first to follow soldiers' orders, walking out waving white flags. A soldier 40 meters away opened fire. Rawhiyya was killed by a precise shot to the head. The soldier received 45 days confinement to base.
During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Muhammad Qudayh climbed out of his basement carrying a white flag alongside his two children to inform soldiers his family was sheltering below. The soldiers shot him dead on the spot. The case was quietly closed. The investigator later wrote a play about the cover-up titled Apart from that, nothing happened.
In all these cases, victims were civilians carrying white flags posing no threat. Soldiers were in no immediate danger. Yet Israel investigative television programs showed virtually no interest.
During the latest Gaza war, independent outlets worldwide published investigation after investigation: +972 Magazine reporting on AI-assisted mass targeting; the New York Times on the Jabalia strike killing 126 civilians including 68 children; Forensic Architecture on the killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab and 15 aid workers. In Israeli mainstream media, most of this barely registered.
Israeli soldiers themselves uploaded hundreds of videos documenting war crimes, secure in the knowledge that such acts would be met with admiration rather than punishment.
# A MORAL FOUNDATION FOR LOOKING AWAY
Mainstream Israeli media has become one of the clearest examples in any so-called democracy of wartime information management fused with active manufacturing of public consent. Military correspondents recite army briefings almost verbatim: Civilian deaths are Hamas lies; if civilians are killed, they were human shields; every destroyed neighborhood was a military necessity.
Arab correspondents virtually disappeared from Israeli television during the first year of the war, because their very presence disrupted the dehumanization on which coverage depended. Commentators like Almog Boker and Moria Asraf became central precisely because of their obsessive repetition of the consensus that there are no innocents in Gaza.
In January 2024, Channel 13 investigations editor Roi Yanovsky -- while simultaneously serving as a reserve soldier -- wrote that Hamas ideology is in almost every house in the Strip. Hamas in Gaza is like Messi in Argentina. He asked rhetorically why Gazan parents would send their children to kindergartens that serve as terror infrastructure.
After activists protested outside Channel 12 studios against media indifference to suffering in Gaza, chief editor Ron Yaron wrote in a leaked WhatsApp chat: With all due respect for our journalistic duty, when you hear the story of the Israeli women who survived captivity, it is somewhat hard to connect with the message of this protest.
# THE LIBERAL PUBLIC'S MECHANISM OF DENIAL
Openly genocidal slogans like there are no innocents in Gaza are too vulgar for an educated, liberal audience. The liberal public requires a more sophisticated mechanism of denial, one with pretensions to critical inquiry while carefully avoiding the conclusions such inquiry demands. This is the role Drucker and Dayan came to occupy.
Drucker continues to produce sharp investigations into corruption. Dayan delivers sincere liberal monologues warning of the judicial overhaul threat to Israeli democracy. Both have shown great courage against the government, and far greater cowardice toward the Israeli army and their own audience.
Their leftist dissent is always presented as an opinion, never as the product of investigative reporting on Gaza. An investigation establishing that the army had systematically killed civilians would rupture one of the most basic common sense assumptions of Israeli society: that its military is the most moral in the world. But that is precisely where the line of legitimacy was drawn, with the pen of self-censorship.
This architecture of denial is one I know well from my time researching Argentina under the junta. In Israel in 2026, journalists fear ratings collapse, online mobs, and being branded traitors on right-wing channels. Liberal media has become a willing hostage to the darkest impulses of its viewers.
This is not censorship in the classical sense. It is a shared system of boundaries that determines in advance what can be known. Israelis may see images of dying children in Gaza on CNN, but the local media shields viewers from the implications, preventing those images from becoming a moral indictment of the society that produced them.
While much of the world watches images of devastated neighborhoods, starving civilians, and dismembered children, Israelis inhabit a television greenhouse of heroism, military strategy, and concern for hostages and soldiers. It is no surprise that the average Israeli genuinely does not understand why the entire world is against us.
The absence of coverage accelerates moral numbing that makes ever more extreme forms of warfare seem permissible. Once the Palestinian civilian is erased from prime time, terms like total victory and flattening neighborhoods become abstract ideas, stripped of any human or moral cost.
A society trained to ignore the humanitarian disaster beyond the fence will find it increasingly difficult to confront political repression, attacks on civil rights, and silencing of critical voices at home. By shielding the public from a difficult truth, Israeli media is not merely failing in its duty; it is hastening the collapse of the very public it claims to serve.
Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) is an Israeli academic and blogger.
---
tags: [palestine]