How Haaretz has aided Israel’s genocide in Gaza

A week ago, Haaretz published a piece (in Hebrew thread with translations here) by Eitan Leshem, titled “In every house in Gaza we found olives, olive oil and loads of spices. We cook there with mixed feelings”. 

The article tells the story of soldiers who have taken over Palestinian homes and stolen food from the homeless, now starving Gazans who were made to flee, perhaps even by those very soldiers. It is really hard to imagine a more crass and wretched piece. 

The article was shocking to many, not only because of its content but also because of where it appeared. Haaretz is widely cited internationally, particularly by liberals, as a trustworthy left-leaning Israeli news outlet. Journalists like Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, who often cover the horrors of Israeli apartheid in more detail and with more teeth than any other mainstream Israeli journalist, are considered, for many, the brave truth-telling face of the outlet. 

But the paper also has a much darker side, and this has no doubt to do with the fact that, after all, it’s a Zionist paper, as Gideon Levy once clearly stated. 

Under the current genocidal attack on Gaza, its Zionist orientation has not only meant that its editors have under-represented Israeli popular support for the genocide – but it has also led the paper to publish and promote some of the most atrocious and dangerous propaganda of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. 

Al-Shifa’ Hospital fabrication

In November, Ronny Linder wrote a piece for Haaretz, titled “The Tragedy of Al-Shifa Hospital: Israel’s Biggest Moral Challenge in the Gaza War”. Here, Linder echoed the military propaganda that Al-Shifa is a “vast human shield,” serving as Hamas’s “main command center”:

“The combination of it being the largest, most important hospital in Gaza, a fast growing refugee camp for desperate Gazans of all ages, and a tool used by Hamas – as a vast human shield above the organization’s main command center – embodies the impossible challenge it presents for Israel.”

The piece was published on November 13, just two days before Israel enacted its final raid of the hospital. The Israeli military subsequently released a propaganda film claiming weapons were found in the basement, but did not prove a clear Hamas presence, not to mention a command center. As Mouni Rabbani commented to Al-Jazeera: “Israeli forces have invaded Al-Shifa’ Hospital and been inside it for 12 full hours – having refused any independent party to accompany them – and now we’re supposed to believe that there were Hamas militants in there being pursued by the Israeli military but they somehow left their weapons behind?”

In the end, Israel never proved the Al-Shifa’ “command center” claim, although Ehud Barak did surprise a stunned Christiane Amanpour on CNN when he told her Israel built some underground bunkers there in the early 1980s. It “remains elusive,” as AP explained it. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said on November 17 that one “cannot attack a hospital in the absence of clear evidence.” Türk called upon an investigation, but the matter had already been concluded in advance as far as Israel was concerned. The hospital was already attacked and disabled, all we had to do was believe the propaganda. 

This became a blueprint for the ensuing attacks on the rest of Gaza’s hospitals, a campaign that Forensic Architecture calls “a systematic pattern of intimidation and violence by the Israeli military as part of the ongoing invasion.” Currently, only a third of the 36 hospitals in Gaza remain partly functional – with Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest hospital, closing down last Sunday after an Israeli siege and arrest of medical staff and patients. Al-Amal Hospital, also in Khan Younis, has been under siege since the beginning of the month. 

All these attacks on Gaza’s medical sector followed the same playbook as the initial campaign against al-Shifa’, a campaign that Haaretz gave a critical platform to at a crucial time.

Linder’s and Haaretz’s roles in Israel’s ongoing assaults are reminiscent of that of Judith Miller and the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq war. Miller’s reporting of lies about Iraqi WMD’s as truths arguably ended her career at the NYT (the paper is still going strong). In fact, Miller’s own claim to exonerate herself from any wrongdoing might be very similar to how Linder sees her role as well: 

“My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

UNRWA smears

On December 12, Haaretz published another piece by Linder, this time about UNRWA. That article, “How UNRWA Became the Second-most Influential Organization in Gaza After Hamas,” reported alleged “connections to Hamas” and cites “critics” who “charge that the UN agency is playing a key role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Once again, timing and context are everything here. Israel has long attacked UNRWA for supposedly prolonging the Palestinian refugee issue. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said that UNRWA’s “mission must be terminated,” and that “it seeks to preserve the issue of Palestinian refugees”. This is wrong, of course, as Mitchell Plitnick explains here on Mondoweiss, citing the UN: “Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.”

On January 26, the day that the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel was committing genocide, Israel claimed, without providing evidence, that 12 UNRWA workers somehow affiliated with Hamas were involved in the October 7 attack. The allegation was enough to start a cascade of countries, started by the U.S. and followed by some 16 other countries, halting their support for the humanitarian organization. 

Head of the International Federation for Human Rights, Yosra Frawes, commented: “The suspension of funds to UNRWA equals to potentially condemning millions of Palestinian refugees to die of hunger and disease. This is complicity manifest to the ongoing genocide, and a totally baffling contravening of the ICJ’s decision.”

So, timing is everything. Israel used the UNRWA-HAMAS card precisely at the point when it was facing charges for the gravest crime of them all and turned the tables against the organization which is most central to alleviating the most basic needs of the population, which is now facing starvation. 

How does such a thing happen? With the complicity of journalists, among others. Linder’s piece was an incitement against UNRWA, garnering support for its dismantling, which Netanyahu later demanded.  

“Since the October 7 massacre”, Linder writes, “every day seemingly brings more stories about alleged connections between Hamas and UNRWA and its institutions in the Gaza Strip: from open and widespread identification with the terror group on social media by UNRWA workers or students who were educated by the organization, to the alleged involvement of some of them in actual terrorism.” 

These “stories” about “alleged connections” don’t need to be accurate or factual to have an impact, they just need to be told, as Linder does. 

She starts by citing a claim by a released Israeli hostage that he was held by a UNRWA teacher – which UNRWA refuted as baseless, demanding proof that the journalist making the claim would not provide. Then Linder cites the IDF Spokesperson (the same ones offering the propaganda tours at Al-Shifa) as saying that “dozens of rockets and other arms were found under UNRWA crates in private homes in the northern Gaza Strip.” Once again, loose allegations from untrustworthy sources.

Then Linder cites unnamed “research institutes” that “have been tracking the organization for many years,” which allegedly “revealed that many members of the Nukhba Force (the elite Hamas unit that led the massacre) and additional Hamas members who perpetrated the slaughter are graduates of UNRWA schools or employees of the organization.”

It goes on and on. It is not worth going into detail to analyze every claim Linder makes, and every expert she interviews (who are exclusively Israeli, besides the obligatory UNRWA response added at the end) to make her point that UNRWA is a “key player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving entities that have no interest in seeing it resolved.” The thrust of the piece is to frame UNRWA as a hotbed of incitement and terrorism, in the midst of a genocide against the people UNRWA is meant to serve. 

False allegations are disseminated as fact, and no evidence is forthcoming. But Israel acts on this reporting and discourse to destroy Palestinian society and life, its friends abroad team up and act upon the allegations by this notoriously lying state, and when they find out that the evidence is not forthcoming, it’s too late because Israel already acted with impunity. 

A mirror for the liberal Israeli

It is clear that Haaretz has become a mirror for the liberal Israeli public. Returning to Eitan Leshem’s lifestyle article about Israeli soldiers cooking in depopulated Palestinian homes, “shooting and crying” has become “cooking and crying” and Haaretz is here to serve the story. That article, in fact, serves as an archetype for the material the paper provides for internal liberal Israeli consumption as a “feel good” piece, as it were. 

Haaretz asks the soldiers their feelings about eating in Gazans’ houses, knowing they were forced to flee. “Yes, there are mixed feelings for sure, because I’m using their tools in their house. But on the other hand, we have to eat. Our instincts and our wish to eat supersedes this”.

Any “mixed feelings” the readers might hold have been assuaged by knowing that Israel is flattening Gaza anyway, so what difference does it make? “It’s important to clarify that these are abandoned houses, some of which are destroyed or are planned to be destroyed, and this is how we fight in Gaza.”

This is how we fight in Gaza. We flatten Gaza. And we have to eat. I want to vomit. 

But this is not just about them consuming food. This is about Haaretz producing such an outrageous lifestyle piece from the midst of genocide, and its liberal readers consuming it as inspiration. Haaretz has become a place where its readers, like the soldiers in the story, can “turn the food into a place of sanity” amid a genocide. 

This is what Haaretz has been feeding us. Dangerous genocidal propaganda and sought to make us feel good about it. I have canceled my subscription.