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 credibility it has not earned at home. Former US correspondent Shmuel Rosner said it plainly back in 2007: people who read Haaretz are better educated and more sophisticated than most, but the rest of the country barely knows it exists. A former editor-in-chief, Hanoch Marmari, was blunter still: Haaretz lost its political influence in Israel because it had become detached from the country’s political life.
Israel and Haaretz stopped speaking to one another some time ago, and Haaretz has been speaking about it ever since.
Media watchdog HonestReporting has documented what this breakup produced. Despite its negligible domestic market share, Haaretz became the newspaper of choice for foreign journalists, commentators and political figures. Many of the negative stories about Israel that find themselves circulating in the international press originate with a Haaretz report.
Haaretz, unable to move Israeli public opinion at home, turned to a different lever: it could use its English platform to encourage external pressure on Israel instead. The boycotts it cannot achieve domestically, it lobbies for abroad.
Without fully realising it, I was a part of that apparatus. When I submitted my articles, I told myself I was reaching a serious domestic audience that I had previously been separated from (my previous articles were mostly to be found in the Times of Israel), who were interested in Israel’s legal and diplomatic position. But that audience was overwhelmingly not Israeli. It was the international readership Haaretz has spent the better part of three decades cultivating. These are readers who arrive already primed by anti-Israel framing, already receptive to the Haaretz worldview. My pieces, whatever their argument, lent the paper a veneer of balance. A writer staunchly in defence of Israel’s position, published by Haaretz, could be cited as evidence of pluralism in the publication.
The newspaper is currently facing government boycotts following October 2024 comments by its publisher, Amos Schocken, in London, who referred to terrorists as ‘Palestinian freedom fighters’ and suggested sanctions against Israel. The paper later disavowed the term, but that speech was filmed and picked up across the international press within hours. Inside Israel, hundreds of subscriptions were cancelled, multiple government ministries severed ties and his own editorial board published a rebuke. His minority shareholder, Leonid Nevzlin, called the remarks appalling. Even after Schocken clarified that he had not meant to include Hamas, it did not matter. The speech had done its work.
That is the mechanism. This London address was the model made visible. A paper that cannot shape Israeli opinion travels to a foreign city and performs for a foreign room instead.
When the Guardian or the BBC quotes Haaretz as an Israeli newspaper, the implication is authority. It suggests that a meaningful portion of Israeli society holds these views; but a paper with 4.8% domestic market share, sustained almost entirely by international subscriptions after its own host country boycotts it, co-published with the New York Times, whose own former editor admitted that the rest of Israel doesn’t know it exists – at what point does the Israeli newspaper label become a branding exercise rather than a description of fact?
A British MP trying to gauge Israeli opinion reads Haaretz and believes he has done so. He has not; he has read the views of a small, internationally oriented publication that has been, for the last 30 years, in a long-distance relationship with Israel.
Israel’s free press is one of its genuine achievements, and minority publications have every right to exist. But the paper’s domestic right to publish is entirely distinct from the international press’ habit of treating it as representative.
I set aside my doubt twice. I submitted my work and told myself the platform was serious enough, the readership broad enough, the exercise worthwhile. What I understand now is that the doubt was well-founded; Haaretz is not where you write to reach Israel from the diaspora.
For a paper called The Land, it has remarkably little interest in the people who live there; it has spent the last 30 years looking elsewhere. The paper has found its audience abroad, built its revenue abroad, and hosts its most consequential conversations abroad. The masthead is the only Israeli thing left about Haaretz.
English writer exploring Zionism, diaspora, and what makes a democracy. Contributor to the Times of Israel, Haaretz and other platforms.