I studied mass communication in Qatar – a country routinely described as a heaven for journalists, though the description has always struck me as more aspirational than empirical. I completed my master’s thesis on Israeli media framing of Morocco across three distinct phases – before normalization, after normalization, and during the Gaza war – analyzing the coverage according to three distinct editorial ideologies: left, center, and right.

I arrived at the subject carrying every assumption my academic environment had furnished me with: that Israeli media operates under military censorship so pervasive it functions as state propaganda, that the press serves as an extension of the security establishment, that the entire information ecosystem is engineered to manufacture consent for occupation. I was trained to see Israel as the graveyard of journalism.

What I found, when I actually engaged with the material – and later, with the institutions themselves – was something my professors in Doha had never prepared me for: a media landscape so free, so plural, so aggressively self-critical that it makes every Arab media ecosystem I have encountered, including the Moroccan one I belong to, look curated by comparison.

Let me begin with my own experience, because personal testimony is harder to dismiss than theory. I have written for The Times of Israel and continue to contribute to it to this day. Not once – not a single time – was any article of mine rejected, altered, or suppressed. I wrote pieces critical of Israeli government policy. I wrote pieces questioning Zionist narratives. I wrote pieces that would have made any nationalist editor in any Arab country reach for the delete button before finishing the first paragraph. Every single one was published. Every single one. I want the reader to sit with that fact for a moment, because it is not a small thing.

Here is a news outlet, operating in a country that much of the world has declared a pariah state, that accepts opinions from a Moroccan journalist even when those opinions challenge the very ideological foundations upon which the state was built. Name me one Arab outlet that would do the same in reverse.

Would Al Jazeera – which presents itself as the gold standard of Arab journalism, the fearless voice of the voiceless – publish an op-ed praising Zionism? Would it run a piece arguing that Israel’s existence is legitimate and its security concerns are valid? The question answers itself, and the silence that follows is the sound of a double standard so enormous it has become invisible.

In fact, I had been contributing to the Times of Israel since 2023 – writing freely, publishing without interference, never once told what to say or what to soften. The outlet that the Arab world brands as a propaganda arm of the Zionist entity never touched a comma of my criticism. It was not Israel that silenced me. It was........

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