Even before Oct 7, no one wanted to hear anything about Palestinian suffering
Journalist Raviv Drucker spoke at the Haaretz conference about the Israeli media’s self-censorship of everything related to what is happening in the Gaza Strip, He mentioned the emotional difficulty of dealing with the Palestinian victims, and the difficulty of obtaining interviewees from inside the Gaza Strip. ■ “The only prism we look at in this matter is always the Israeli Hasbara and how we look. That’s the maximum. In other words, the problem is not the children who died, but that it doesn’t look good for us”
By Oren Persico • the7eye.org • Translated by Sol Salbe
News 13 journalist Raviv Drucker said on 21 January that after the outbreak of the Gaza war, he asked Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy to stop participating as a panellist on his program on Reshet 13, due to the positions Levy expressed on air regarding the war and the emphasis Levy placed on the Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip.
Drucker, one of Israel’s most senior and respected journalists, made the remarks at a conference held in Tel Aviv by Haaretz and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. According to him, he approached Levy with this request following being approached himself by both panellists on the program, the Channel own reporters, and people who work behind the scenes at the news company.
“The issue of the suffering in Gaza is undoubtedly an extreme form of under-coverage,” Drucker said in a conversation with Haaretz editor Aluf Benn. “It doesn’t stem from [IDF Spokesperson Brigadier- General Daniel] Hagari’s phone call, nor from [Communications Minister Shlomo] Karhi’s phone call, nor from a phone call from Bibi’s. These… inner feelings that you just can’t bring up this thing, or because others won’t accept it and the viewers won’t accept it and the people sitting next to you won’t accept it, and some people just can’t see it, especially in the days close to October 7.
“I don’t defend this decision, even in my show that I decide upon and I don’t have anyone to tell me what to do, there was under-coverage,” Drucker added. “There was a panellist, Gideon Levy, to whom at some point I said: ‘Listen, give us some time off.’”
In response to Benn’s question, Drucker explained the motive for his request from Levy. According to him, despite his great appreciation for Levy and his journalistic life’s work, “When he said some of his things after October 7, people came to me […] Very, very mainstream people, anti-government, just couldn’t bear listening to him. They didn’t threaten, they didn’t say, ‘I won’t appear on your panel anymore,’ but panellists, people behind the scenes, reporters. It was very, very difficult, people felt the pain.
Drucker said that he “felt apologetic” as he confessed to the incident, adding that perhaps that was rightly so, but at the same time noted that he was trying to recall how the US media covered civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to compare the Israeli coverage of the casualties in Gaza. He said that because he was in the United States at the time, he remembers the criticism that the mainstream media there received from left-wing elements for not covering the victims in Iraq at all.
“I remember reading Seymour Hersh’s memoirs, about his exposure of the My Lai massacre in 1968,” Drucker added. “Vietnam, which did not exactly threaten the American home front, and did not capture any communities or kidnap people… After all, no one there served a sentence. There was one person there who was serving a sentence, it was house arrest. And the media tried to suppress it and deny it and fight it. So that’s not an excuse, and it’s not a good enough reason. I’m trying to say that among nations in certain situations, certainly us after October 7, people just couldn’t handle it.”
Similar remarks were made by Uvda TV journalist Chen Lieberman, in a panel moderated by Haaretz reporter Chaim Levinson. “. “During this war, the most leftist thing I allowed myself in the TV studio panels was to be in favour of the abductees, as if that was a leftist thing,” she said, “but it would have been difficult hard for me to come and talk about what is happening in Gaza. It would have been difficult for me because I felt that it really didn’t gainany attention and that it really had no place.”
There is no one to answer the phone
In addition to what Drucker called an “emotional difficulty” in discussing the suffering in Gaza, there is also an objective difficulty. The ban on journalists entering the Gaza Strip has made the Israeli media dependent on information received from the IDF Spokesperson and reports from the Palestinian media in Gaza.
According to Drucker, the explosion that occurred near the beginning of the war at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza was “quite a formative event” that affected the way the war was covered later — precisely because there were no international journalists in the Gaza Strip, it was Hamas’s version that took centre stage. “Two versions have emerged,” Drucker recalled. “Now I’m telling you, as a veteran reporter of the second intifada, who wrote a book about it, the minute the IDF Spokesperson provides a version I start suspecting it, I become very, very suspicious, but there were two versions and the IDF told the truth. It turned out that there’s a 90-something per cent chance that I was a Palestinian rocket.”
Drucker’s attempts to contact the Gazans directly, in order to hear from them and not from the media in Gaza about what is happening in the Gaza Strip, were also in vain.
“I tried a lot to talk to Wael Al-Dahdouh,” Drucker said, “the correspondent for Al-Jazeera who became the biblical Job of this war, stoically accepting his suffering. He was a star of Al-Jazeera, who lost almost his entire family and in the end also lost his child, He was registered as a journalist, but the IDF claimed that he was registered as a Hamas activist, and that the car in which he travelled with other people was on a mission to transport weapons.
“You can’t check it, he doesn’t want to talk to you either, almost no one else wants to talk to you. Almost the only one we managed to get to talk to from Gaza is an UNRWA spokesperson — every time we had him on the program, the audience didn’t like it, but I don’t have a problem in that they didn’t like it — it’s just that he was limited in what he could see. And some poor resident of Rafah, Sami Obeid, who at first we called a journalist because he once wrote something, but he’s not a journalist, he’s a resident. He’s a resident of Rafah and he told us what happened because he agrees to answer an Israeli phone and go up on Zoom. So our objective ability to also give something, to say explicitly, ‘Today was a terrible thing’… It’s also very difficult.”
“Nobody was interested”
In response to Benn’s question, Drucker replied that in his opinion, the current state of indifference to Palestinian suffering is not expected to change anytime soon. “Let’s tell the truth,” Drucker said, “even before October 7, no one wanted to hear anything about the Palestinian suffering.”
Drucker testified about himself that in the past 15 years, the program HaMakor that he hosts has had two investigations into the suffering of Palestinians. “Neither of them received any traction, any influence, nobody was interested,” he said. “I wish they would exhort against us, incite against us, not even that. There was nothing. And certainly after October 7 there is no attention to this matter and I don’t think it will change and I don’t see any way it will change in the near future.
“The only prism we look at in this matter is always the Israeli Hasbara and how we look. That’s the maximum. In other words, the problem is not the children who died, but that it doesn’t look good for us.”
