The Truth about the Gaza report from the Committee to Protect Journalists

Israel doesn't target journalists systematically, but it also underrates the problem

The Committee to Protect Journalists just issued a damning report showing that a huge amount of journalists were killed in the Gaza war in 2023: 72, which is three-quarters of the total number of journalists killed around the world, and the most ever recorded by the organization from any one place in any given year. It’s bad, and I urge Israel to take it seriously, investigate each case, and project urgency.

But it is also extremely misleading to present the report as evidence of systematic or even frequent targeting of journalists. While rogue actions are possible, and I think are sometimes taken too lightly, Israel does not target journalists in the way that lawless countries do, with arrests and assassinations and intimidation and control. Certainly not in Israel proper (which is a remarkably freewheeling democracy despite everything), and also not in the occupied territories (it simply oppresses the journalists no less than anyone else there, unwise though that may be).

What Israel is certainly guilty of is great cynicism about Palestinian journalists, which is partly merited (sure, some are Hamas sympathizers, and they can collude) and mostly not (since the majority are quite courageous and professional). And it has a pointlessly prickly relationship with the foreign media (which for a time I tried to manage as the chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem). That part is not just wrong but truly idiotic: Beyond any imperative to protect journalists, an intelligent country would also coddle them if only for the reputational advantage. Israel generally sneers at them instead, especially when there is a right-wing government in power.

Israel’s calamitous right-wing governments take that position because the world’s media doesn’t trouble itself to hide its disdain for the Israeli occupation of (and settlement project in) the West Bank — a sentiment generally shared at all levels from the humblest of fixers to the loftiest of editors. It is also shared by the vast majority of educated and informed Israelis, and by the Israeli security establishment. So the media is on fairly solid ground.

What Israel seems to be missing is that the journalists who cover Israel generally also do not question its right to exist (although that position is being eroded); that makes them Zionists, even if they don’t realize it, and this has not escaped the Palestinians. So the foreign media covering this conflict has tended to please no one — which in journalistic circles is sometimes taken as a sign of ultimate success.

In my interview on the CPJ report on Qatar-based Al Jazeera (above), I faced questions that basically indeed presumed that Israel targets journalists, and I did my best to set the record straight, before a pleasantly combative interviewer. Essentially, the real story is that there are three ways journalists die in a war zone: First, they cover events bravely and are unlucky, much like any other civilian; second, the combatants are cavalier and manifest a light trigger finger; third, they’re targeted for their work. Many readers of these CPJ reports automatically assume the latter, which is reasonable enough in Russia and elsewhere. But not in Israel. It is the other scenarios that apply with the Gaza war — not a great look either, a tragedy to be sure, but not a matter of targeting (with some possible exceptions, as the CPJ points out).

Here are a few other points: