Israel Targets Journalists
Can a Country Be a Democracy If It Doesn't Allow Reporters to Do Their Jobs?
Jewish Currents posted a statement to its website in the wake of Israel’s accusations against six Palestinian journalists in Gaza that they were working with Hamas.
The statement “condemns Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists in the strongest terms, and calls upon every media institution in the United States to do the same.”
Israel, as Jewish Currents points out, has a “history of targeting and killing Palestinian journalists.” In this context, Jewish Currents writes, the announcement made Wednesday by the IDF that six Al Jazeera journalists were working with Hamas “should be read as threats to murder them.”
As a journalistic institution, we generally refrain from putting out statements or calling on others to take action, but our position as media workers compels us to stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza. The normalization of Israel’s flagrant targeting of journalists has implications for reporters around the world. Media institutions have a responsibility to speak out to deter the Israeli military from any further attacks on Palestinian journalists.
As the Times of Israel reports, the IDF says it "uncovered documents in the Gaza Strip that show six active Al Jazeera reporters are operatives in the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups.” On Thursday, the IDF said additional documents show a relationship between Al Jazerra and Hamas and that Hamas was directing news coverage.
Al Jazeera called the IDF’s claims “fabrications,” and said the military was seeking to silence critical reporting.
Democracies do not act this way, or are not supposed to. Israel, which calls itself the lone democracy in the region, already banned Al Jazeera and has imposed dangerous limits on what journalists can cover in war zones. On Oct. 13, according to Haaretz, it arrested two Palestinian journalists working for a Turkish news agency. Police said the men “are suspected of behavior likely to disturb the peace.”
Israel also has empowered its police and government ministries to act as censors, shutting down critical film screenings and threatening Haaretz, Israel’s liberal daily, with closure.
This does little more than protect the military and its leaders from oversight and makes it easier for soldiers to commit atrocities and act with impunity.
Israel, sadly, is not an outlier in this, even among supposed democracies. The United States created a system during the Iraq War of restrictions on press movement that it paired with a program of embedding the press into combat units — a structure that resulted in friendly press coverage and a free rein for military leaders in a war that never should have been fought.
Coverage of Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and its bombardment of southern Lebanon has been mostly one-sided, both here and in Israel, because too much of the reporting must rely on Israeli sources, and much of the Israeli media has been cowed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing and theocratic allies into providing fawning coverage.
Press freedoms around the globe are in retreat, including here in the United States, as right-wing and proto-fascist governments have come to power and have proclaimed a free press an “enemy of the people,” as Donald Trump has done. This is intentional, of course, as Haaretz writes, “Harming journalists means harming freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of occupation. But it also always harms the public's right to know.” The paper added that
Harm done to any journalist always harms all journalists, as well as the public as a whole, because it always has the potential – and indeed, this is one of its purposes – to create a chilling effect on journalistic work by making journalists afraid to publish the truth.
And the last thing Netanyahu is interested in is the truth.