The Man Who Tells the Truth Netanyahu Doesn’t Want the World to Hear

Under editor in chief Aluf Benn, Haaretz is the only major Israeli media outlet to show Israelis the images and tell them the stories they don’t want to see or hear.

There’s no media outlet more hated by the current Israeli government, nor heralded outside Israel, than Haaretz, the longest-running newspaper currently in print in the country (indeed, it was founded long before the country was). Inside Israel, Haaretz—the word means “the land” or “the earth”—is seen as the paper of the educated elite, a small slice of the population, while its English-language website has more than 2.5 million unique monthly visitors. It’s a must read for diplomats, foreign journalists, and followers of Israeli politics (the paper is currently expanding its US/English language bureau). 

Founded in 1918 as a literary newspaper by the Hebrew battalions of the British Army in Egypt, it was established as a general newspaper a year later. “Since then, for 108 years, it’s been published every day and hour,” editor in chief Aluf Benn told me when I sat with him in the paper’s Tel Aviv headquarters recently. 

Benn, 61, has been at its helm for the last 15 years, following his more than two decades as the paper’s national security and diplomatic correspondent. Born and raised in Tel Aviv (his father was one of Israel’s most prominent poets and literary figures), he is confident, warm, and informal. We met in Haaretz’s South Tel Aviv headquarters, among warehouses in a part of town fast becoming gentrified, in the Schocken Building, named for Amos Schocken, who owns 75 percent of the paper and whose family has shepherded it since 1935. The other 25 percent is owned by liberal Russian businessman and Putin enemy, Leonid Nevzlin, who is an Israeli citizen. The paper’s hallways are famously laden with contemporary, often provocative, Israeli artwork, art collecting being the other obsession of publisher Schocken. 

Haaretz’s unique place in Israeli political culture is amplified daily, especially since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, when self-imposed censorship by the rest of the Israeli media took hold. “We were the only ones in the Hebrew mainstream media reporting on what was happening in Gaza and Lebanon,” Benn noted. “About starvation, killing, destruction, war crimes, shooting people on their way to get food, maimed and crippled and wounded and dead and widowed and bereaved and orphaned families and people.”  

Indeed, this reporting hasn’t stopped. Haaretz reporter Nir Hasson can’t get into Gaza since Israel still won’t allow reporters inside without an official IDF escort, but he maintains contacts with sources via phone and Zoom from his home in Jerusalem. He had a story recently that was simply names and photos of Gazan children killed since the ceasefire.

“I think that this [Gaza coverage is] one of the most important journalistic things that we did,” Benn says. “You could always argue that it’s not enough. It was not enough to change public perception in Israel. But clearly, when the government goes against us, when people criticize us, it’s because of that reporting.… We gave names and........

© New Republic