The Israeli government is set to sanction the country’s most establish left-wing newspaper, Haaretz, by banning all government officials and state-funded bodies from communicating with the paper and halting all government advertisements in its pages and its website.
It comes after a unanimous vote by government ministers on Sunday in favour of the motion proposed by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, which will see the cancellation of all Haaretz subscriptions for state employees and workers at state-owned companies.
Justifying the government’s move to boycott the country’s oldest newspaper, Karhi said it’s a response to “numerous articles that harmed the legitimacy of the State of Israel in the world and its right to self-defense”.
“We will not allow a reality in which the publisher of an official newspaper in the state of Israel will call for the imposition of sanctions against it and will support the enemies of the state in the midst of a war and will be financed by it,” he said in a statement.
The communication minister said the decision follows recent statements made by the publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, including remarks “that support terrorism and call for imposing sanctions on the government”.
He was referring to remarks made by Schocken on October 27 at a conference in London organised by the newspaper, where he said in a speech that “the Netanyahu government 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”.
After public outcry and the cancellation of hundreds of Haaretz subscriptions, Schocken clarified that his reference to Palestinian freedom fighters did not mean Hamas. “I should have said: freedom fighters, who also resort to terror tactics – which must be combated. The use of terror is not legitimate,” the publisher said. He also said that the perpetrators of October 7 should be severely punished.
“As for Hamas,” Schocken added, “they are not freedom fighters as their ideology essentially states: ‘It’s all ours, others should leave.’”
Haaretz has accused government ministers of passing the “opportunist” resolution without a proper legal review.
The newspaper said the proposal did not appear in the government’s agenda published ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting, and that the Attorney General’s office, unaware of the plan to bring the proposal to a vote, did not review the motion and did not present its opinion, as is customary.
The resolution was therefore presented to ministers during the discussion without any legal opinion.
“Like his friends Putin, Erdoğan, and Orbán, Netanyahu is trying to silence a critical, independent newspaper. Haaretz will not balk and will not morph into a government pamphlet that publishes messages approved by the government and its leader,” said Haaretz in a statement on Sunday.
Condemned the boycott, the newspaper called it “another step in Netanyahu’s journey to dismantle Israeli democracy.”
“Haaretz will not balk and will not morph into a government pamphlet that publishes messages approved by the government and its leader.”
This is not the first time the Israeli government has attempted to boycott the paper.
Last year, Karhi presented the cabinet secretary with a draft resolution to halt the Government Advertising Bureau’s publications in Haaretz and to cancel all subscriptions to the newspaper by government employees — including in the IDF, the police, the Israel Prison Service, government ministries, and state-owned companies.