On 21 April last year, I published a piece in Israeli left-wing newspaper Haaretz questioning whether the British legal system could handle Gaza war crime allegations against British IDF soldiers. Four months later, on 20 August, I published a second, arguing that the UK’s ultimatum to Israel on Palestine was ‘ill-timed and morally incoherent.’ Both times, though, something nagged at me: it was a quiet unease that I could not quite name and chose not to examine too closely.

I have examined it now.

The question I should have asked before submitting either piece was not whether Haaretz would publish it. It was, instead, exactly who Haaretz was publishing it for. Look closely at the numbers: Haaretz commands 4.8% of the Israeli newspaper market. Israel HaYom leads at nearly 30%; Yedioth Ahronoth sits at 22%. Haaretz is a very distant third. Nineteen out of every twenty Israelis who read a newspaper choose something else. The paper I wrote this column for – the paper, mind, styled as Israel’s newspaper of record – is one most Israelis have either quietly set aside or never picked up at all.

In 1997, Haaretz launched its English-language edition, and describes that issue today as content tailored for its international audience. Its websites attract 11.7 million unique visitors a month worldwide. Its print edition is bundled and sold with the New York Times International Edition – borrowing, in a single commercial arrangement, decades of........

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