Abstract
Most Israeli journalists decline to question the activities of the country’s military, however contentious they may be
On March 13, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets over Beirut proclaiming that the “remarkable success” of the IDF’s war in Gaza would be arriving in Lebanon. The Israeli invasion of Gaza has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, about 20,000 of them children, displaced about two million people and levelled most of the buildings in the coastal enclave. And despite the enormous difference in scale, Israel’s treatment of Lebanon in its drive to curb Hezbollah and its rocket-firing militiamen bears important resemblances to the Gaza conquest launched after the October 7 Hamas atrocities: displacement of more than a million people, airstrikes on medical personnel and journalists for allegedly being terrorist operatives, and demolition of entire villages near the border so that the displaced would have nowhere to come back to.
Another similarity is that Israel’s media, in covering the war within the larger Iran war, largely behaved as mobilised soldiers presenting what the IDF wanted them to show and trying to boost morale at the expense of conveying the human toll on the other side, or showing the other side at all. The air force’s April 8 strikes included many in central Beirut and killed at least 357 people across the country, according to an updated toll of civil defence authorities cited by The Washington Post after the ceasefire. The carnage, with a heavy toll on civilians, was not worthy of questioning for the Israeli media. Television and radio simply repeated the army’s boast that it had struck 100 Hezbollah targets in only 10 minutes.
Defenders of the Israeli media could say morale-boosting and denial of the other side’s civilian toll must be viewed within the context of Israel’s own suffering, with most of the country’s population constantly running to shelters as a result of Iranian or Hezbollah missile attacks, some of them lethal. Meanwhile, soldiers were getting killed in the Lebanon fighting, their funerals being stressed in media coverage.
But Israeli analysts interviewed for this article say the explanation for the blind coverage is that Israeli media, like society as a whole, is militaristic and constantly moving right. Even after the ceasefire, militarism and patriotism continued to trump journalism in Israel’s Lebanon coverage. This was embodied in the broadcasts of Nir Dvori, the defence correspondent of the most popular television station, Channel 12. Reporting as an IDF embed from a southern Lebanon area close to the border while Israel was busy bulldozing villages, Dvori opened next to a soldier, who said, as if on cue: “We do not break. We understand this is a just war.” Later, Dvori voiced the rationale for leveling a swath of Lebanon, a project so big the IDF had to task it to the same private sector bulldozer operators it had paid in Gaza. “In every house there are signs of Hezbollah,” he told viewers.
“If it is necessary, the IDF will cross the Litani [River]” and push deeper into Lebanon, Dvori said. “The plans are ready,” he added, neglecting to mention that advancing too far in 1982 led the IDF into complicity in a massacre of Palestinians in Beirut and caused a disastrous 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. It helped trigger the rise of Hezbollah. The sense of history repeating itself was emphasised in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper by military correspondent Yaniv Kubovich, the most critical journalist covering the army, who wrote that Israel is sinking into the “mud” of Lebanon again and setting up the same failed “security zone” along the border that it had established after Ariel Sharon’s invasion 43 years ago.
Instead, Dvori stressed that morale is high, including among reservists, who he said are backed up by their families. “Do you miss being at home?” he asked soldiers, probably the toughest question in his report. One soldier told him: “We are working as if the ceasefire doesn’t exist.” Nobody saw anything amiss with that.
It was not only most military correspondents who failed to inform about the ramifications of IDF policies when viewers around the world were seeing images of tents housing the displaced Lebanese of the south. Israel again suffered from one of the major flaws in television coverage of its wars and operations, in Gaza, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank or the confrontation with Iran: ex-generals who toe the IDF line dominate the airwaves as commentators. “Our most harmful and incurable addiction is to generals in the studios,” Channel 13 host Guy Lerer posted on social media in March.
He has a point. The ex-generals tend to set the tone with assumptions that almost any operation is essential and by playing up questionable actions as huge military successes, while explaining away setbacks. They contributed to euphoria in Israel over the first day of airstrikes against Iran, which included the assassination of the supreme leader Ali Khameinei and other top-level figures. Anat Saragusti, a veteran left-wing journalist who is also in charge of protecting freedom of the media at the Union of Journalists in Israel, says Israeli commentators and media outlets overestimate the impact of the assassinations the IDF carries out. “The mere fact the assassinations are seen as a success is questionable,” she says. “There are people who say that assassinating Khamenei was a mistake because he was more moderate than those who replaced him.”
Did Netanyahu have ulterior motives for waging war?
“It’s been a method of Israel for years to ‘decapitate the snake’ but that doesn’t necessarily weaken the organisation,” she says. “Decapitating leaders doesn’t work because military success needs to have follow-up diplomacy and we never use diplomacy as the end of the action.” Saragusti took issue with journalists for not fact-checking the descriptions given by the army. “The IDF gives a name and I don’t see anyone fact-checking what the army claims in terms of him being an ultra-terrorist. Every time there is a military campaign, all the studios wear khaki and are part of the hasbara (public diplomacy) of the IDF,” she says. “They adopt the language, the tone, the explanation of why this was hit and say that we are winning and have superiority in the air and that our technology is the best. They are trying to keep morale high without questioning the justification of the war.” In fact, sometimes criticisms were levelled against aspects of Israel’s handling of tactical aspects of the wars but the basic decision to wage the Iran war was not criticised, despite the possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu, defending himself in court against corruption charges, might have had ulterior motives, Oren Persico, a senior staffer at Israel’s leading media watchdog the Seventh Eye noted.
Haaretz’s Uri Misgav penned an article that was an exception, arguing that there should be a state commission of inquiry about the war, including the decision-making preceding it. Questions that need to be answered, he wrote, include: “Were decision-makers presented with an alternative concept according to which it is possible to face the present Iranian threat through other means?”
The dominant unquestioning approach was also reflected in the near-consensus the decision to go to war with Iran enjoyed among politicians. Waging the war in Lebanon was also very popular, mostly out of identification with northern border communities under fire from Hezbollah. Still, Channel 13 journalists Raviv Drucker and Alon Ben-David stood out by calling for negotiations with the Lebanese government rather than military escalation to address the Hezbollah challenge.
Persico says the widespread media indifference to the harm to civilians in Lebanon stemmed from “inertia” following Israeli journalists’ non-coverage of civilian death and suffering in Gaza, which was widely reported internationally and prompted allegations that Israel is carrying out genocide, something it strongly denies. He said that trauma from the October 7 Hamas attack and the holding of Israeli hostages “gave the media the opportunity to justify war crimes” in Gaza. These factors are not at play in the fighting with Hezbollah and Iran, yet the media still ignored that about a million Lebanese were displaced and that the US bombed a school in Iran, Persico says. “For a mobilised media like there was during the Gaza war, it’s a big task to return to professionalism. This is certainly the case when the war [with Iran and Hezbollah] isn’t over and there hasn’t been a period of time to gain perspective and calm down,” he said.
In the current wars, journalists’ perceived mission of keeping morale high became very challenging in light of Iran’s success in penetrating Israel’s air defence and the highly visible damage its missiles caused. On March 21, while watching television reports about two devastating missile strikes, it became difficult for Israelis to dismiss the thought that their country might not be “winning the war” against Iran, despite what the media generals had been saying. In subsequent days, a wave of further missile strikes saw more than half the entire population ordered into shelters, raising the prospect in people’s minds that Iran might remain an ongoing threat in a protracted war of attrition, even after the war “ends”.
As The Jewish Independent in Australia noted, the Israeli media transmitted conflicting messages: on the one hand thoroughly covering the missile strikes and their impact, while on the other promoting patriotic endurance and statements of army spokesmen and commentators that Israel has the upper hand. Channel 12 showed shocking footage of a large building from the southern city of Arad whose façade had been blown off, exposing destroyed apartments. “Complete devastation. Complete destruction. Why wasn’t the missile shot down?” a journalist asked.
The devastation followed only hours after a mass casualty missile attack on another southern city, Dimona. Channel 12’s host Yair Cherki, speaking as the pictures came out of Arad, permitted himself to put his finger on their impact. “Many people at home are frightened by this,” he said. It was a clear admission of vulnerability and unease.
But another Channel 12 commentator, former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, later tried to reassure viewers by conveying that Israel is bombing the daylights out of Iran. “The pace of their firing is the same as it was or declining, 10-20 missiles a day. Most are intercepted but nothing can be hermetic. If the public behaves properly, it minimises it,” Yadlin said. “We’ve received a very severe blow. Yes, sometimes Israel gets hit. But it’s a ratio of 100 [Israeli bombs] to one [Iranian missile].”
In what also seemed to be an effort to boost morale, the veteran military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai argued in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth the day before the Arad and Dimona calamities that everything is going well and that what is needed is more time and patience. “The air force doesn’t miss any opportunity to strike targets whose destruction shapes consciousness and indicates the regime is not able to function. Sources in Israel say there are already results: chaos and confusion in the political leadership and also desertions among the Basij [internal security] forces,” Ben-Yishai wrote.
Still disquiet and fatigue grew in the period after the Arad and Dimona strikes. The public was tired, and aware that the original war aims of toppling the regime and eliminating nuclear and ballistic missile threats had not been achieved. There was a sense among many of relief when Donald Trump announced a ceasefire. The reality of an inconclusive war had caught up with Israelis. It was now apparent that the early euphoria fanned by Netanyahu and the media was illusory. It remains to be seen whether the Israeli public and media will learn the lesson and stop following their leaders into wars without raising questions about motives, aims and impacts.
Ben Lynfield is a journalist based in Jerusalem, specialising in Israeli and Palestinian affairs.