From New Lines Magazine.
How settlers took over the country’s press and transformed it into a vehicle for their movement
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.
Etan Nechin is a New York-based Israeli journalist and author.