Israeli Self-Censorship: A Voluntary Boundary of Free Speech? / Meron Rapoport
About a year ago, I interviewed an exiled Iranian on his visit to Israel. The man, Hussien Derakhsham, had suffered from the Iranian regime, was forced to leave his country and his blog is censored by the authorities in Teheran. Yet his description of the society back home was somewhat surprising. Iran, he claimed, is a relatively free society with healthy discussion and a press which gives President Ahmadinejad a hard time. Democracy is active in Iran, far more than in other American-supported regimes in the Middle East such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and therefore, concluded Derakhsham, “the US is opposing Iran because Washington opposes democracy and not because of fear of Islam”.
I thought that such a statement, coming from an exiled Iranian, has a high journalistic value, fulfilling three basic criteria: it is new, it is interesting and it is important. Therefore I emphasized it in my article. Yet the readers of Haaretz did not have a chance to read this statement. My editor decided to erase it from my article. As there was no problem of space and since I am sure my editor was not blind to journalistic values, I am quite confident that his decision was due to other considerations. To claim that Iran is a (relative) democracy is contrary to the hegemonic view in Israel. It is probable that the editor could not have accepted this idea personally or that he feared that the readers would think that Haaretz and his writers (me, in this case) are too “extreme” or “detached from reality”. The editor decided to get rid of this embarrassing statement (according to him) and by doing so he denied the readers the opportunity of hearing a different view on Iran. This I call self-censorship. – because nobody told the editor to behave that way.
It is easy to explain what the boundaries of free speech are in North Korea: no independent media, official censorship, extremely tough restrictions on foreign reporters. It is much more difficult to see where these boundaries are in a seemingly open society like Israel, where the vast majority of the media is private and therefore theoretically independent, where journalists are free to criticize the government and they do it quite violently and thousands of foreign reporters are given free access to virtually any government official. In such an open environment, it is not easy to understand why most of the Israeli media tend to have identical views on many crucial issues – the Iranian threat, for example, and why they even tend to use identical terms to describe conflicting phenomena.
Before we get into the issue of self-censorship, we must note that there are a few important formal boundaries on free speech in Israel. They may be unseen by many Israeli, or to be more precise, by Israeli-Jewish journalists, but nonetheless they exist. Palestinian journalists have no freedom of movement under Israeli occupation. They cannot pass through the 500 checkpoints in the West Bank and they cannot distribute their newspapers freely. Israeli-Arabs journalists are subject to many restrictions in their work and more than one Arabic-written newspaper in Israel has been shut down by the Israeli Minister of Interior over the years.
More important: all Israeli newspapers, Hebrew or Arabic, are subject to military censorship. This means that they have to send any news concerning the Israeli defense forces, the Israeli nuclear industry, Israel’s foreign relations with “enemy” countries and even news concerning Israel foreign trade in “vital” goods, like oil or gas, to the military censor for approval. A failure to do so will lead to fines or even criminal procedures against the relevant media outlet. It is true that over the years, the role of the military censorship has been sized down considerably, but it is still alive and well. For example no Israeli newspaper has ever published an independent report on Israel’s nuclear capability or its implications.
Yet the boundaries of free speech, at least in the Hebrew-speaking media in Israel, are determined mainly by self-censorship, meaning by the self-imposed reluctance to deal with issues which are defined “irrelevant” or “extremist” or “unpopular” or “unpatriotic”. Israel is no different from other western-style democracies in which a hegemonic ideology sets the tone for the major part of the media, silencing many other independent voices. Only in Israel, this hegemonic discourse is much stronger than in other western countries and the independent voices are fewer and their silencing is sometimes total.
During the Second Intifada, I was night-editor in Yediot Ahronot, the largest circulation newspaper in Israel. On a certain day, an Israeli tank fired a few shells on a car in central Ramalla, killing a mother, her three children who were traveling in the car and two passers-by, both of them children. On the same day, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian doctor in Jenin, the head of the local Red Crescent. As the IDF itself acknowledged that its forces made “a mistake” by killing civilians, I decided to publish the full names of the Palestinian civilians killed that day, their ages and places of residence. The next day I was reprimanded by the Editor-in-Chief who explained that the newspaper had been flooded by calls of angry readers, complaining about the publishing of “enemy names” in their newspaper. A year later I was fired by Yediot Ahronot . The official reason was that I had not been “soft on Sharon” as the editor-in-chief had wanted me to be. The incident with the names of the killed Palestinian civilians was mentioned during the proceedings that followed as an example for my “disloyality” to the newspaper. Being loyal probably meant ignoring that there were also civilians on the other side.
This hegemonic discourse has one set language adopted in practically all the Israeli media, with occasional exceptions in Haaretz (there three main newspapers in Israel – Yedioth Ahronoth, Maariv and Haartez, and three TV networks – the governmental Israeli Broadcasting Authority and the private channel 2 and channel 10). According to this unified language, a Hizballa man fighting in battle with the Israeli army is a “terrorist” while the Israelis he is fighting against are “soldiers”. Palestinians casualties, whether civilians or armed militiamen, are “killed” or “shot at” while Israelis, even if we are talking about a soldier killed in fighting with Palestinian guerilla, are “murdered”. Israelis gathering for political purposes are “demonstrating” or “protesting”, while Palestinians doing the same thing will be “disturbing the public order”. These are only a few examples of a rich and complicated vocabulary.
This vocabulary is well known to every Israeli reporter or editor and very few want or dare to liberate themselves from it. Palestinian journalists complain that they encounter a similar problem: they tend to use a terminology which dehumanize the Israelis. But in their case much of this offensive vocabulary is dictated from above as most of the Palestinian media is controlled by the Palestinian Authority or by political parties. In Israel, this language is adopted by the media without any apparent coercion, yet the result is identical: the use of a limited and biased vocabulary.
But this use of words is just the more evident side of the problem. When your words do not respect the other side, your ability to discuss the reality that these words are supposed to represent tend to be limited too. In Israel, we have seen it (again) in a very clear way during the first two weeks of the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. Although many Israeli journalists and analysts were convinced from the start that Israel was wrong in this conflict, almost none of them dared to say it out loud. A careful study by Keshev, an Israeli media watchdog, showed that the media was unanimous in its support for the war and even pushed the army and the government to escalate their actions. The criticism came only after it became clear that Israel was not winning this war.
This unanimity should surprise us as every journalist in Israel is free to write whatever s/he wants and s/he would not have been formally punished, should s/he have written against the war. But when the boundaries of free speech are so tight, even though unseen, we can understand why the Israeli media behave the way they did during the last war. A recent example illustrates that nothing has changed in the last year. Human Rights Watch, a well respected organization, recently published a report on the Israeli action in the Lebanon War. The report, based on detailed evidences, concluded that the most of the Israeli bombing in Lebanon did not hit Hizballah targets but rather civilian ones, killing 850 civilians, among them hundreds of children. Out of the six main media outlets in Israel (3 newspapers and 3 TV channels) only one published a short summary of the report. No one ordered or even told the other news organizations not to mention this report. They did it out of their own free will. This is self-censorship, these are the boundaries of free speech in Israel.
