In early August of last year, on Israel’s Channel 12, a mainstream commercial network, a debate took place that highlighted the radicalization of the country’s news media. The subject under discussion was the legitimacy of wartime rape, and the on-air debate followed reports that five Israeli reservists had been under investigation for raping an accused Hamas detainee at the Sde Teiman prisoner detention facility.
Yehuda Schlesinger, a journalist for the right-wing outlet Israel Hayom, laid down his own position proudly: He supported the rapists. “I told my friends I couldn’t care less what happens to that guy,” he said about the accused victim. As the panel paused for a moment in stunned silence, Haaretz reporter Josh Breiner exclaimed, “The soldiers are accused of rape!”
Schlesinger doubled down, dismissing the criminal nature of the soldiers’ actions. “Doesn’t it concern you, the integrity of the soldiers?” Breiner asked, omitting to mention that the Palestinian victim was, according to a human rights report cited by Haaretz, hospitalized with a ruptured intestine, broken ribs and severe injuries to his anus and lungs. Unmoved, Schlesinger responded: “They [the Palestinian prisoners] deserve it. It’s great revenge and could be a deterrent.”
Raskin, the host, did not challenge Schlesinger over his disturbing remarks, which he would later retract in response to a widespread backlash. The conversation that day would be only one of several in which the matter of Sde Teiman emerged. Later, on the far-right Channel 14, one of the reservists accused of rape appeared on air, masked in a balaclava. Instead of being harshly questioned by reporters, he was given a platform by the network to speak. With his face covered, he did not bother to defend his actions, but instead condemned the news media itself for releasing video footage of the abuses, warning that exposing such crimes could damage the morale of Israeli soldiers.
The outbreak of tacit support for accused rapists was only one episode in a much longer story of the radicalization of the Israeli media. This radicalization is the outcome of a long, calculated effort to inject the views of the far-right settler movement into the mainstream. Since Israel launched its war in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis have been glued to their screens, obsessively consuming news and scrolling through social media. A country already known for its media fixation has become even more absorbed. And Israelis are now finding that the views that dominate their media are those of once-fringe settler extremists, who have today become hegemonic.
This right-wing takeover has been decades in the making. Shlomi Eldar, a documentary filmmaker who has reported from Gaza and the West Bank for over three decades, said that settlers “identified three areas of influence” through which they could make far-right positions mainstream — the military, the courts and the media. In all three fields, they have successfully entrenched themselves.
Israel Hayom, the free daily newspaper that is often referred to as the “Bibiton” — a portmanteau of “Bibi” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nickname) and “iton,” the Hebrew word for newspaper — openly promotes the settler agenda. Some of the most influential correspondents on the country’s most popular commercial news channels are also from the settler movement. Amit Segal, arguably the most influential political correspondent in Israel today, is the chief political analyst for Channel 12, where he has contributed to shifting the Israeli public toward its predominantly right-wing, anti-Palestinian position. Segal was raised in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. His father Haggai, the former editor of the right-wing newspaper Makor Rishon, is a Jewish convicted terrorist found guilty in 1980 of involvement in a bomb plot that blew off the leg of a Palestinian mayor. His brother, Arnon Segal, is a journalist and far-right activist who advocates for Jewish sovereignty over the holy site in Jerusalem that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims refer to as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. The cover of his book, “The House,” which promotes Israel’s takeover of the site, depicts Al-Aqsa Mosque flattened — a nod to his father’s terrorist cell, which sought to destroy it.
Settlers have even captured top jobs in the media, with executives like Moti Sklar and Shai Babad, both of whom lived or were educated on settlements, becoming CEOs of Israel’s Second Authority for Television and Radio — the independent regulatory body responsible for overseeing commercial broadcasting and radio activities, ensuring compliance with broadcasting laws and promoting ideological diversity in the Israeli media landscape.
The shift has been evident in coverage during the current war, even beyond the ugly spectacle of the Sde Teiman debate. In December, Zeev Kam, a parliamentary correspondent for the public broadcaster Kan 11, praised soldiers who stormed a mosque in Jenin and broadcast Hebrew prayers over the loudspeakers used for the Islamic call to prayer, saying they “spread light in this evil place.” Zvi Yehezkeli, the Arab affairs correspondent for Channel 13, who lives in Bat Ayin, a far-right West Bank settlement founded in 1989 on land confiscated from two neighboring Palestinian villages, said that 100,000 Palestinians should have been killed in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks.
The rhetoric of right-wing Israeli journalists has become so extreme that South Africa cited statements from Israeli media at the International Court of Justice to support its case that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Coverage of the occupation of the West Bank has been largely removed from public discourse, and the line between the occupied territories and Israel proper has accordingly begun to vanish from the minds of most Israeli Jews. In its place, a jingoistic and racist discourse predominates on television broadcasts and news panels, echoing down the halls of the Knesset and into Israeli streets.
The change in Israeli media has affected society more broadly. Israel’s rightward shift was visible even before the current war, when right-wing lawmakers allied with Netanyahu to end the judiciary’s independence and make it subservient to the legislature, despite countrywide mass protests that continued for more than half of 2023. But the emotions around the attacks of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war have turbocharged the movement to the right, with the settler-dominated media strongly supportive of the change.
Ayala Panievsky, whose upcoming book “The New Censorship” examines how today’s media has unintentionally helped amplify antidemocratic forces. “The judicial coup is happening after the media coup, which allowed the most extreme forces to enter people’s living rooms,” she said. Today, “the voices that were normalized over the years are mouthpieces for the government, which in turn is not only giving them support and budgets, but attacking liberal media and journalists who dare to criticize it.”
Recent examples include attacks on liberal journalists like Raviv Druker, a fierce Netanyahu critic. Druker’s network came under intense pressure to cancel his investigative journalism program. Haaretz, Israel’s left-leaning broadsheet, has also been targeted, with the government imposing sanctions, cutting all ties and pulling advertising.
The media coup has taken time. The settler movement understood that in order to extend its presence in the West Bank, it would need to broaden its influence within the mainstream media. As the settler activist and historian Benny Katzover said, at a 2014 symposium commemorating the ninth anniversary of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal of its military bases and settlements from Gaza in 2005, “Back then we were on the outskirts. Today, we have entered every sphere, from academia and theater to the media.”
The long ideological march that Katzover described had indeed been decades in the making.
In the late 1970s, a peculiar bumper sticker rose to prominence around the Jewish settlements of the South Hebron Hills in the West Bank: a microphone with a snake wrapped around it. The symbol was the logo of a ragtag organization called “The People Against Hostile Media,” founded by settlement activist and politician Elyakim Haetzni.
Haetzni’s makeshift organization expressed the sentiment of a large part of the settler movement, which felt itself to be loathed by Israel’s mainstream press and, accordingly, by much of Israeli society. As many settlers later determined, the solution to this problem lay in gaining control of the media and using it as a tool to change public perceptions.
For many decades, as they boycotted mainstream media, many settlers relied on local press, whose coverage was often limited to religious debates and opinion articles. A turning point came in December 1987, during the Palestinian uprising that would later be known as the First Intifada, when Uri Orbach — then a columnist for Nekuda, a now-defunct newspaper of the settler movement — published a manifesto titled “The Best to the Media,” whose title was a play on the military recruitment slogan calling for “The best to the air force.”
In the essay, Orbach addressed the religious Zionist army-bound youth, trying to convince them to enlist for mandatory service in the media branch of the army spokesperson’s office. Orbach argued that the situation in which religious Zionism found itself, forced to defend itself in the public discourse, was not predetermined, but the result of an underestimation of the importance and power of the media to shape reality. By taking positions of power within mainstream media, settlers could tell their story and make the settlements part of the Israeli ethos.
“For a young religious person, going into the media is to be a pioneer, to turn over this barren ignorance, to weed out thorns and plant roses. Sitting in front of a microphone is as important today as draining swamps used to be, despite the naysayers,” Orbach wrote. Amit Segal, Channel 12’s right-wing political correspondent, who grew up in the religious national Zionist movement, later wrote, in an introduction to a posthumous collection of essays by Orbach, that the manifesto “created a generation of religious journalists.”
Despite their quiet growth in influence, settlers found themselves stuck in the position of dissidents for years. Successive Israeli governments, including those of Yitzhak Shamir and later Yitzhak Rabin, pursued talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the Oslo Accords. The right-wing public, spurred on by its leaders and the press, transformed into an aggressive and violent mob aimed at halting these developments. On TV, settlers were shown holding signs depicting Rabin — who would later be assassinated by a settler extremist — dressed in an SS uniform, while chanting “Death to Rabin” and “Rabin is a traitor.”
A huge wake-up call for the settler movement came in 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, effectively ending its direct control over the territory. The decision required the uprooting of 7,500 settlers from their homes, leaving them feeling betrayed by the state. “The collective shock wasn’t just the evacuation,” Panievsky said, “but that the general public didn’t sympathize with them and most favored the withdrawal.”
The journalist Moria Kor, opinion editor for Israel Hayom, asserted in a TV interview that settling in the Gaza Strip was seen as a “favor” to the Israeli public, referring to a common claim among the right that the settlements constituted a physical security barrier to protect Israel’s border towns and cities. “That favor wasn’t acknowledged,” she said.
After the evacuation was complete, the TV crews departed and the public moved on, but settlers continued to dwell on the lessons of the withdrawal. It was no longer enough to simply capture another hill; to ensure the movement’s future, they needed to “settle in the hearts” of the Israeli people — a phrase coined by Yoel Bin-Nun, founder of Har Etzion Yeshiva, one of the elite yeshivas (schools for Talmudic study) of the settlement movement.
As Baruch Gutman, a settler-sympathetic columnist for the far-right digital media outlet Arutz 7: Israel National News, wrote: “The Israeli government has expelled and wants to continue expelling the settlers of the West Bank. Our response to this will be entering the central cities in order to influence and bring the people of Israel closer to God.”
While the forced evacuation of the Gaza settlements made 2005 a watershed year for the settlement movement, the inspiration for the organized campaign to gain control of the media came in 1993. That was the year that saw the launch of Channel 2, Israel’s first commercial TV channel, and the election of Netanyahu as leader of the Likud party.
Netanyahu had returned to Israel after serving for eight years as a diplomat in the United States, where he was deputy ambassador at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and later Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. During his time in the U.S., he gained a reputation on the speaker circuit as a sharp pro-Israel advocate.
As head of Likud and leader of the political opposition when Rabin was serving a second term as prime minister (his first was in the 1970s), Netanyahu became a primary voice against the Oslo Accords. He stood on a balcony in Jerusalem overlooking a crowd of zealous settlers as they shouted “Rabin is a traitor” and held signs depicting the premier in an SS uniform.
Netanyahu won a shock election victory following Rabin’s assassination in 1995. Yet despite his victory, he held a grudge over what he felt were unfair media portrayals of him during the campaign. He berated the media for pursuing stories involving his son and wife, and others attacking his choice of attorney general as unqualified. In time, Netanyahu would create a political identity based on his antagonism toward the mainstream press.
In 1999, Netanyahu lost an election to Ehud Barak and took a hiatus from public life. During that low point, Netanyahu realized that opposing the mainstream media alone was not enough. To regain control, he would in fact need to control the media. On the eve of his loss, reporters heard him say, “When I’m back, I’ll have my media outlet.”
In 2007, as chair of Likud, Netanyahu finally received his outlet. Israeli media would never be the same. Israel Hayom is a free daily newspaper previously bankrolled by the late American-Jewish casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who was Netanyahu’s patron as well as a major donor to the U.S. Republican Party. Adelson and his wife Miriam, who was born in Israel, also lent significant financial support to the settlement project, including through large donations to Ariel University, a university based in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
Itamar Benzaquen, a reporter for The Seventh Eye, a media watchdog group, described how Israel Hayom upended the small and concentrated media market. “What’s different between Israel Hayom and other publications, even on the ideological right, is that it unapologetically served as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu: [It is] a national daily newspaper with no sustainable business model,” Benzaquen said. Haaretz reported in 2017 that Israel Hayom had lost $190 million in seven years, in addition to the $50 million invested by Sheldon Adelson, the American casino mogul who was a major Netanyahu supporter.
The paper, then, was essentially one of the largest political donations ever given. The Adelsons managed to break the market. Yedioth Ahronoth — a competing paper that was, until then, the undisputed Israeli political kingmaker — was forced to lower prices and began publishing sponsored articles, which severely damaged its prestige. Its rival, Maariv, all but collapsed. It still exists, but in a much diminished digital version.
Israel Hayom’s role in the decline of mainstream local papers also provided an opening for settlers seeking to penetrate the media. As other papers that had served as training grounds for young journalists shuttered for economic reasons, Israel Hayom filled the vacuum.
Less than two years after its launch, Israel Hayom became the most widely read paper in Israel — a crucial shift that helped Netanyahu win the 2009 elections. The paper became such a strategic asset for Netanyahu and his base that, in 2014, he dissolved his government to overcome opposition to a bill that would have prevented major newspapers from being given away for free — a clear shot at the paper that Adelson had subsidized for his benefit.
When Netanyahu won the 2015 elections, he added the role of minister of communications to his portfolio. This gave him regulatory control over cellular service, internet providers, private broadcast channels and public television and radio, thereby ensuring greater control over the Israeli media landscape. As Netanyahu continued to implement policies that hollowed out veteran media institutions, one could discern a clear shift to the right in Israel’s once-diverse media establishment.
Netanyahu’s fixation on the media directly led to the corruption and breach of trust trials that have dogged him in recent years. It is alleged that, as prime minister, he pressured editors to provide favorable coverage of him and his wife in exchange for regulatory benefits — a clear attempt to hollow out Israeli institutions.
His animosity toward the media runs so deep that, in a 2017 speech, he accused the media of contributing to the downfall of the Likud government in 1992 and of “bringing us the Oslo Accords, bus bombings and casualties in restaurants.”
Although their views did not always align, the consolidation of the media into the hands of a small number of pro-Netanyahu moguls created opportunities for the settler movement. A new generation of young settler journalists, those who Orbach had called upon in his famous essay, began to take up jobs in the Israeli media. Outside groups like the Tikvah Fund, a far-right nongovernmental organization based in the U.S. — which also funds Kohelet Forum, a legal organization that is driving Israel’s controversial judicial coup — took advantage of the collapse of old papers to back new publications that aligned with their ideological goals.
However, no single figure captures settlers’ move to the mainstream quite as well as Amit Segal, who started out as a teenage journalist for a local magazine in Jerusalem and eventually became the most influential political correspondent in Israel.
At only 13 years old, the younger Segal appeared on a children’s TV show dedicated to discussing the assassination of Rabin and the Oslo Accords. Segal asserted that the mainstream media was inciting hatred against settlers by promoting the view that they were responsible for Rabin’s assassination. “People on both sides, but especially on the left, must tone down the hateful speech. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon a right-wing leader is also shot,” the precocious Segal proclaimed.
Segal’s budding media career continued during his army service, which he spent in the prestigious post of political correspondent for Galatz, the Israeli army’s radio station — a common starting point for the children of well-connected elites in the media industry. In 2008, he joined Channel 12 News, Israel’s most popular news program, quickly becoming a household name due to his encyclopedic knowledge of Israeli politics, insider connections in the Knesset and active social media presence.
Segal is also establishing a reputation outside Israel. Jonathan Freedland, the prominent British Guardian journalist, has had Segal on Unholy, his Israeli politics podcast. Segal has also been a guest commentator for Fox News. More recently, he has written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, arguing that Israel should annex Gaza and reject a hostage deal with Hamas.
The concerted assault on the old press, the establishment of Israel Hayom under Netanyahu’s patronage and the emergence of new settler personalities like Segal have collectively revolutionized the Israeli media environment. Journalistic ethics and integrity have become secondary to ideological affiliation, with the new definition of politically correct speech reoriented around the views of the settler movement and the radical right.
After Israel Hayom secured dominance over the print market, firmly placing it in the right wing’s grasp, the focus shifted to television. Established as a cable television channel in 2014, Channel 20, now known as Channel 14, was founded by the Georgian-Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Mirilashvili. The channel has become a hub for the promotion of far-right ideology far in excess of anything previously available to Israeli viewers. In 2018, the channel broadcast a sympathetic and cordial interview with Yitzhak Gabbai, a member of the extreme right-wing Lehava organization, which set fire to a bilingual Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem. Gabbai appeared in the segment alongside his lawyer, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would one day become minister of national security under Netanyahu. During the segment, Ben-Gvir laughed and said to Gabbai, “I’m on your side.”
A similarly illustrative segment came during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas, when a reporter covering a rocket attack on an Arab town in Israel lamented the lack of casualties among Palestinian citizens of Israel. No sanctions for his comment were imposed by the Second Authority for Television and Radio.
Thanks to the indulgence of sympathetic regulators, Channel 14 has received an exemption from various obligations imposed on major broadcasters like Channels 12 and 13. These include exemptions on payments to regulatory bodies, requirements to fund productions as a derivative of their revenues and requirements that no single stakeholder control half or more of the company.
With such financial and regulatory privileges, Channel 14 has become a mainstay of the Israeli media. Over the past year, Netanyahu has only given interviews to hosts on Channel 14. Once ridiculed for its minuscule ratings, the channel now boasts of its viewing figures. Experts say the rise of Channel 14 mirrors a process common to far-right channels in other countries. “It took four tries to set up Fox News. Once they found the money, the right mix of personnel, and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, they skyrocketed and influenced the entire American political public discourse,” Panievsky said. “This is what Channel 14 can become.”
Over the course of the current war, Channel 14 has become the second most popular news channel. It has also turned into a hub for genocidal rhetoric, attacks on hostage families and, above all, an unwavering defense of Netanyahu’s government.
More right-wing channels are also entering the mix. Last year, i24, a channel owned by the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi — another of Netanyahu’s patrons — began broadcasting a 24-hour channel focused on highlighting the views of far-right commentators and members of the settlement movement. Among them are Zvi Yehezkeli, a former Arab-world analyst for Channel 13, who, at the start of the war, said Israel should have killed 100,000 Palestinians in an initial blow.
Even aside from the settler takeover of print and television, structural factors were already starting to tilt Israeli media to the right when it came to topics like the occupation. Before the Second Intifada and the construction of Israel’s towering wall in the West Bank, physical intermingling between Israelis and Palestinians was more common. Israeli journalists were able to develop contacts in the Palestinian community and convey their perspectives to the Israeli public. But restrictions on movement in the occupied West Bank, in addition to a complete ban on Israeli journalists entering Gaza from 2006, have created physical barriers that make such contacts far more difficult. Israelis and Palestinians are now increasingly strangers to one another. This, coupled with the growing hostility that has emerged between the two peoples since the Second Intifada, has meant that Israeli journalists today have less access to Palestinian sources and wind up relying heavily on Israeli military and government spokespeople for information.
These conditions have laid the groundwork for settler media to close the public mind to the crimes of the occupation. The debate around the ethical nature of the occupation is rarely discussed in the press today, with the West Bank only coming into the headlines in the wake of a militant attack or army operation. As a result, the Israeli public today is far less critical of the occupation than it was in generations past, with fewer people seeing any problem with the situation. “After decades where there’s no horizon, where Palestinians are demonized, the Israeli public doesn’t know what’s going on — and doesn’t want to hear,” said Eldar, the veteran documentarian.
In addition to devaluing Palestinian narratives, the media’s rightward turn has also generated a favorable public image of the settler movement. Where settlers were previously caricatured as Uzi-toting bearded zealots, now they take care to present themselves as clean-shaven, stylishly dressed, worldly and professional. Naftali Bennett, leader of the New Right party and (briefly) a former prime minister, was previously spokesperson of the Yesha Council. (“Yesha” is the Hebrew acronym of the settler movement, which stands for “Judea, Samaria and Gaza.”) Bennett made his fortune when he sold the tech company he founded for $145 million. The son of immigrants from the U.S., he speaks unaccented English and lived for several years in New York City. Segal, too, wears well-cut suits and fashionably knotted ties; only the vanishingly small yarmulke on his head indicates his religious identity.
Settlements have likewise been redefined in the public imagination. Instead of being viewed as isolated outposts for religious extremists with weapons, news pieces now portray settlements as suburb-like communities with villas, pools, tourism and cultural events. Establishing a favorable image of themselves and of settlements has allowed settlers to reframe discourse around the occupation.
Along with this visual transformation in the public mind, the use of euphemistic language has become common in the press. The term “hitnachlut,” which refers to biblical ancestral estates, carried negative connotations in popular Israeli discourse, often evoking images of radical religious settlers toting Uzi submachine guns. This term has gradually been replaced by “yishuv,” a word used to evoke a sense of traditional, small residential communities or hamlets, thereby reshaping the narrative to make settlements appear more aligned with conventional community-building. Palestinians, meanwhile, when they suffer violence and death from Israeli soldiers in the territories, are not killed, but instead merely “neutralized.”
The sanitization of language by settler-controlled media has already shaped a new Israeli reality. The next step, according to Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi, is to bend what remains of the free, public press to the right wing’s will. Karhi plans to dissolve regulatory bodies like the Second Authority for Television and Radio and the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Council. In their place, a new nine-person regulatory entity, mainly appointed by politicians, will be established, allowing greater political control of the press by the right.
The right has aggressively targeted the remaining bastions of a free and liberal press, not only to normalize the settlement project but also to obscure the crimes committed in its defense. Today, even as much of the world watches in horror, the Israeli public is largely unaware of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the death toll and its own soldiers’ conduct. Similarly, Israelis are uninformed about the expulsions of Palestinians from places like Masafer Yatta, the ongoing dispossession in East Jerusalem and the daily toll of violence and subjugation in the West Bank. This ignorance is fueled by a media market that self-censors and echoes military and right-wing narratives, leaving the few critical journalists who continue to work under constant attack.
A year and a half after Oct. 7 and the start of the Gaza war, it appears that the voices calling for revenge and defending the government from accountability have grown louder. These voices work to erase the images of Gaza’s devastation from the public consciousness. The so-called “poison machine” — a term often used to describe the propaganda apparatus — is operating seamlessly, reinforcing a narrative of denial and repression that has come to characterize Israeli life today.
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