(JTA) — The publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most influential left-leaning publication, sent shockwaves through his newspaper and beyond after saying Israel killed “Palestinian freedom fighters” and calling for sanctions against Israel.
In Amos Schocken’s remarks last week, he also accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of apartheid and a “second Nakba” and compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.
The remarks have led to backlash from a major stakeholder in the newspaper and some subscription cancellations, as well as threats from Israel’s communications minister. The episode threatens to jeopardize the credibility of an outlet that serves as an essential news source and ideological home for the dwindling ranks of the Israeli left.
Schocken, 79, whose family has owned Haaretz since the 1930s, made the comments at a London conference sponsored by the paper and other left-leaning groups on Oct. 27. Other speakers included former centrist Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former British Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative who recently served as foreign secretary.
“Israel has a government that opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state,” the publisher stated during his prepared remarks. “It doesn’t care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs of both sides for defending the settlements, while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists.”
He added, “The only recourse with such disastrous government is to ask other countries to bring pressure to bear, as they did in order to end apartheid in South Africa. … A Palestinian state must be established and the only way to achieve this, I think, is to apply sanctions against Israel, against the leaders who oppose [Palestinian statehood], and against the settlers who are in the occupied territories in contravention of international law.”
Schocken also said the Israeli government “supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from parts of the occupied territories,” and accused Israel of carrying out “a second Nakba,” the Palestinian term for the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians upon Israel’s establishment.
Calls for sanctions — as well as apartheid accusations — of the kind Schocken made are often treated as offensive and beyond the pale in Israeli public discourse, though a recent survey found that a third of Israelis said sanctions against extremist settlers were justified. Hundreds of Haaretz subscribers, including several Israeli government ministries, also canceled their subscriptions over the weekend in response to Schocken’s comments, according to Walla, which is owned by The Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning rival of Haaretz. Advertisers have also reportedly begun to pull back. (Haaretz is a syndication client of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, as is The Jerusalem Post.)
His remarks also prompted blowback from people who objected to his mention of “freedom fighters,” which some took as a reference to Hamas, which killed 1,200 Israelis in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that launched the war in Gaza.
The paper’s own minority stakeholder, Russian-Israeli oil magnate Leonid Nevzlin, who owns 25% of Haaretz, called Schocken’s comments “appalling, unacceptable, and inhumane, displaying profound insensitivity toward the victims of that tragic day, the casualties of the ongoing war, the hostages and their families, and the people of Israel as a whole.”
He asserted that the publisher’s views also conflict with “the vast majority of the newspaper’s journalists and staff.”
The country’s communications minister has suggested a government-wide boycott of the paper (an idea he also proposed in November 2023 over anger with its coverage). A group representing Israeli victims of terror attacks has filed a complaint accusing Schocken of incitement. And the country’s Diaspora Ministry accused Haaretz of joining in with a global campaign to delegitimize Israel.
By Thursday evening, Schocken had issued a statement walking back some of his remarks.
“Many freedom fighters around the world and throughout history, possibly even those who fought for Israel’s establishment, committed terrible acts of terrorism, harming innocent people to achieve their goals,” he said. “I should have said: freedom fighters, who also resort to terror tactics — which must be combated. The use of terror is not legitimate.”
He added, “As for Hamas, they are not freedom fighters as their ideology essentially states, ‘It’s all ours, others should leave.’ … [The] organizers and perpetrators of the October 7 attacks should be severely punished. … There are Palestinian freedom fighters who do not use terrorism.”
While Haaretz — which publishes in both Hebrew and English — has a relatively small audience within Israel compared to its centrist and right-leaning rivals, its journalism and editorials have a wide global reach and an international reputation for independent reporting. This is not the first time it has stirred controversy through its commentary — a 2014 column lambasting Israeli pilots for Gaza airstrikes drew significant backlash — but this incident comes after Israel has cracked down on dissent and shut down the local operations of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based publication.
The paper’s English-language editor Esther Solomon, who also organized the conference and introduced Schocken, responded to a JTA request for comment by referring to an editorial published Monday in the paper repudiating Schocken’s comments.
The unsigned editorial, published in both Hebrew and English and titled “Terrorists Are Not Freedom Fighters,” states that Schocken did not apply the term to “Hamas terrorists” and defended his reputation. But it also chastised the publisher for his remarks.
“The fact that he didn’t mean to include Hamas terrorists doesn’t mean that other terrorist acts are legitimate, even if their perpetrators’ goal is to free themselves from occupation,” the editorial reads. “Deliberately harming civilians is illegitimate. Using violence against civilians and sowing terror among them to achieve political or ideological goals is terrorism. Any organization that advocates the murder of women, children and the elderly is a terrorist organization, and its members are terrorists.”
The editorial also kept up the paper’s longstanding critique of Netanyahu, saying that he has routinely painted non-violent Palestinian activity as “terror” and that he has “blurred the critical difference between genuine terrorism and activities that, even if many Israelis dislike them, are nevertheless legitimate.”
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