Less than three weeks before the Oct. 7 massacre, the Israeli daily Haaretz announced its break with the Zionist creed. Its editor-in-chief, Aluf Benn, penned a piece just before Yom Kippur eve, entitled “Jewish and Democratic? It’s Time to Erase the Word Jewish.” 

The paper’s regular Hebrew readers were probably not all that surprised. After all, many variations on this theme have appeared in the periodical’s opinion pages, and its aversion to nationalism and religion, as well as its infatuation with the local version of globalist ideology—the idea of a non-national, so-called “state of all its citizens”—were well known. But never before had the editor himself announced the paper’s desire to dismantle the Jewish state and put an end to the Zionist enterprise.  

The editorial board must have thought that an international audience was not yet ready for the revelation, and so the English edition softened the title, cloaking Benn’s declaration in some warm Yiddishkeit. It read: “On Yom Kippur, Facing the Question: Where Is Israel Headed?” 

Still, the confession in Hebrew was, in fact, long overdue. The paper has been working consistently and diligently to undermine Zionism’s moral legitimacy for many years, without admitting that this was what it was doing. It has disseminated some of the worst blood libels against settlers and Israel Defense Forces soldiers and given respectability to pundits who used its pages to argue that Israel is inherently evil.

This was never just an editorial insistence on high moral standards or constructive criticism designed to rectify wrongs. As media scholar Eli Avraham noted in his recently published book, From David to Goliath: Coverage of Israel in the International Media, Haaretz in general, and its English-language edition in particular, is not merely critical of this or that Israeli government or this or that Israeli policy. It is, rather, bent on demonizing the Jewish state as such and on legitimizing political parties, academics and organizations—both Israeli and foreign—which see Israel as “the epitome of world evil.” The paper also worked, Avraham pointed out, to erode Israeli solidarity by attacking every “positive and unifying myth.” 

But it seems as though the paper also previously believed that declaring its anti-Zionist mission would be tactically unwise: that it would undermine its reputation for professional, balanced reporting and limit its ability to influence its largest target audience—liberals and especially liberal Zionists. It thus opted for an audacious strategy: It declared its supposed allegiance to Zionism. It also kept pretending to practice a form of “tough love” aimed at urging Israel to realize the so-called “two-state solution.”

For this purpose, it mostly took care to preserve for itself the possibility of plausible deniability: anti-Zionist writers, though ubiquitous in all sections of the paper—news, opinion, culture and leisure—were simply expressing their personal views. And when pushed, Haaretz could always portray its rejection of Zionism as no more than an objection to “the occupation,” to specific forms of discrimination or to the problem of church-and-state separation.

A writer can thus call Israel a “settler colonial project,” but then argue that he was only referring to Judea and Samaria (and formerly Gaza). Similarly, a writer can attack the idea of a Jewish state as inherently discriminatory, but do so under the cover of criticizing the policies of the Chief Rabbinate. Or—to take an example from an article by Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken—to pretend the suggestion to replace the national anthem with another, that wouldn’t mention Judaism was just an expression of the desire to make Arab citizens of Israel feel more at home when the anthem is sung. Haaretz writers often engage in such disingenuous sophistry, like the paper does on a larger scale as an editorial strategy.

What, then, caused Haaretz to abandon this double game and show its true colors? The answer lies in domestic politics, and the key to deciphering it is the timing. 

***
In the mid-1990s, the heyday of the Oslo years, Haaretz began to shift from its traditional liberalism to what we now call “progressivism.” This had far-reaching implications for the paper’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which it began to view through the fashionable lens of “postcolonialism.” 

All over the world, the postcolonial view is decidedly anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism is more than just a necessary conclusion from its very methodology. It has become the litmus test of the creed, which has turned victimhood into virtue, and power into the definition of evil, and which reads any political situation through the lens of Western colonialism and African-American slavery.

Israel’s local variant of the progressive postcolonial worldview, for which Haaretz is the chief public voice, is no different. It thus isn’t surprising that Haaretz tends to see Zionism as an illegitimate settler-colonial enterprise, and the Palestinians as its innocent indigenous victims.

Naturally, under this view, the concept of a Jewish state appears as inherently racist, based not on the application of the universal right of self-determination to the case of the Jewish people, as Zionists would have it, but rather as an expression of the belief in “Jewish supremacy.” 

This is a hard sell in Israel. So, though Haaretz has managed to pull many liberals to the progressive camp—by blurring the difference between a liberal critique of “the occupation” and a progressive rejection of Zionism—it has known full well that it is not likely to convince the majority of Israelis to disown their right to national self-determination anytime soon. 

In September 2023, however, Aluf Benn saw an opportunity to bypass the objection of the majority: the collapse of the ruling Likud Party’s attempt at judicial reform. When Benn published his programmatic declaration of anti-Zionism, the reform’s defeat was nearly final. Worse, Likud’s attempt to restore the power of the Knesset, which was the aim of the reform, was about to backfire terribly. 

The reform was designed to limit the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, which holds sway over Israel’s politics like no court in any other Western democracy. The Court, which is decidedly progressive, has only been strengthened by the defeat of the reform, and it now seemed that it would be able to move—as it soon did—to dismantle the last check on its power: Basic Laws. 

Originally, the Court based its power of judicial review over legislation on the claim that what Israel has in lieu of a constitution—our Basic Laws—are a de facto constitution. Therefore, the Court argued, any legislation that cannot be reconciled with those laws can be struck down by the judges. This should have meant that the Basic Laws also limit the Court’s freedom of action, because it, too, is bound by them.  

But Israel’s activist judges do not recognize limits to their power. So, they have adopted a questionable legal theory according to which Basic Laws can also be subject to judicial review, based on the “fundamental principles” of our democratic system. Though these are not written anywhere, they are, according to the Court, implied, and it is up to judges, who are experts on constitutional law, to make what is implied explicit.

In other words, the “fundamental principles” are whatever the judges say they are. They waited with the application of that doomsday judicial weapon for an opportune moment, which came in the form of what they saw as an emergency: Likud’s judicial-reform moves. Since the reform was technically a series of amendments to Basic Laws, they unsheathed this judicial sword in order to give it the coup de grâce. And with it they established their complete domination over the Knesset—and the citizenry.

This was not a minor victory in some healthy competition—the kind that ensures a balance among the three branches of government; it was literally regime change. Henceforth, the Court, which is not elected, and in which progressive judges have veto power over the appointment of their associates, can justly say that it has—as current Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit reportedly told Israeli high school kids, “the final word.”

Indeed, if it is free to strike down what Israel has for a constitution, then it really does have “the final word” on anything and everything. 

Benn’s piece was published when the Court was getting ready to take the crucial step of striking down an amendment to a Basic Law for the first time, as Haaretz editorials repeatedly urged it to do. The Jewish character of the state could now be renounced through judicial feat. If this was Benn’s calculation, it was not unreasonable on its own terms.  

Israel’s Jewish character is enshrined in its Basic Laws. If the Court could be moved to strike down a Basic Law, or an amendment to it, then replacing the Jewish state with a non-national so-called “state of all its citizens” could be achieved without the consent of the governed, over the majority’s objection. Haaretz’s traditional double-speak, evasive tactics and plausible deniability would not do for that purpose. If one were to prod the Court in that direction, an explicit call to action would be needed.

Though Benn may not have expected the Court to move right away to strike down the Basic Law that defines Israel’s national character—”Basic Law: Israel-the Nation State of the Jewish People”—one can understand why he would think the timing opportune for urging the judges in that direction. 

It turned out that the timing could not have been worse, though Benn had no reason to think so. Oct. 7, 2023 was just over two weeks away. 

***
The paper’s political transformation was not achieved overnight. The intellectual foundations were to be laid before the opinion pages and news section were to be brought to heel. And so, from the early 1990s, Haaretz’s books, literature and culture supplements began to familiarize the paper’s readers with the then-fashionable trends of social constructivism, gender ideology, cultural Marxism and “radical postmodern epistemology.”

They highlighted, front and center, “postcolonial scholarship” and historical revisionism, such as the anti-Zionist school of “New Historians,” the so-called “Critical Sociologists” and to fellow travelers in other disciplines (literary criticism, geography, political science and anthropology, among others).

All these promoted a view of Israel as morally flawed from its inception. They classified Zionism as a form of settler colonialism bent on “ethnic cleansing,” a relic of the bad old days, relegated to the wrong side of history. The Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, by contrast, were on the right side by virtue of being the losing side. Israeli anti-Zionists had their works prominently—and for the most part positively—reviewed in Haaretz. They also became a dominant group among the reviewers. 

Haaretz used to be Israel’s paper of record and, as of the 1990s, the only one with substantial book-review forums, so Israel’s intelligentsia was for decades indoctrinated by the disciples of Edward Said.

The coverage of the conflict followed suit, increasingly slanted along the same lines, though the news section took longer to fall into step and was harder to harness to the paper’s agenda. Still, as far back as the pre-Oslo days, the paper persistently downplayed Palestinian terrorism and later the increasingly obvious Palestinian refusal to recognize the right of Jews to any sovereign existence in any part of the land of Israel. If Haaretz was your main source of news, you were likely to believe that Israel, not the Palestinian leadership, was sabotaging the so-called “peace process” that otherwise would have borne fruit.   

While news coverage can camouflage an agenda under the pretense of objectivity, and ideological anti-Zionism in academia can be conveyed in the language of scholarly detachment, the editorials and opinion sections gradually stopped bothering with such niceties: Peddlers of the worst antisemitic blood libels became the paper’s star writers. Gideon Levy, a rabid anti-Zionist, in charge of covering the Palestinian scene in Judea and Samaria, is probably best known internationally. He’s had the same assignment since the 1980s and has bombarded his readers in Israel and abroad with hair-raising Arab testimonies to the alleged blood thirst and crazed sadism of Israeli settlers and soldiers. He did all this while relying on translators: despite his long tenure, Levy covers a population whose language he never bothered to learn. And whenever caught lying, he—and the paper—simply shrug.

One particularly infamous example is the “Donkey Procedure” article. This was a cover story for the Haaretz weekend magazine, penned by Levy. It told the shocking tale of a Palestinian Arab named Mahmoud Shawara who was allegedly tied to his own donkey by Israeli border police (a force under the joint command of the Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Police). The soldiers then drove the animal into a gallop, with Shawara being dragged by it until he sustained lethal head injuries from rocks along the way. Levy explained that this was not an isolated event, but rather a “procedure” applied by the IDF to terrorize the local population.

The story made headlines around the world, and understandably outraged many in and outside Israel, on both the left and the right. But not only was there never such a “procedure.” Even the single case reported never actually occurred.

The late editor of the Hebrew daily Maariv, Amnon Dankner, set out to fact-check it and found no evidence to support the tale; Police Internal Affairs investigated it and found nothing; Shawara’s family denied it; B’tzelem, the radical leftist human-rights organization, the Palestinian Authority and Haaretz itself failed to supply even a shred of proof.

Still, the paper never clarified that this was the case to its readers. For all Haaretz readers know, Israeli soldiers regularly execute innocent Palestinians in this horrendous way. According to Ben-Dror Yemini’s book, Industry of Lies, the actual details of how Shawara became entangled with his donkey are highly embarrassing and need no recounting here. Yemini’s book devotes a whole chapter to Haaretz under the title: “A Central Stage for Incitement.” Indeed, if you read Haaretz long enough, you’re likely to reach the conclusion that the Jews are the new Nazis.

Levy is not alone in peddling of antisemitic propaganda masquerading as investigative journalism. There is, as Yemini rightly argues, a whole industry of lies devoted to that trade, featuring many so-called “human rights” NGOs. These receive a great deal of uncritical coverage in Haaretz. One such infamous NGO is Breaking the Silence, which collects conveniently anonymous (and hence unverifiable) testimonies from soldiers about their—and their comrades’—alleged crimes. These include lies about the IDF shooting at Arabs and their property for fun, as in a video game.

Some of the worst anti-Israeli propaganda is manufactured by this organization, which has been caught lying repeatedly. Yet Yuli Novak, its former CEO, is a welcome contributor to the Haaretz op-ed pages. Noa Landau, the deputy editor-in-chief of the paper and the founder of Haaretz 21, a “project aimed at amplifying underrepresented voices and stories of Arab/Palestinian communities in Israel” (as her bio on the Haaretz site explains), is also the life partner of Avner Gvaryahu, who replaced Novak as CEO of Breaking the Silence in 2017. It’s a small world.

But not everyone at, or who publishes in, Haaretz always bothers to support antisemitic tropes with the pretense of investigation. Some just take literary license. Poet and playwright Yitzhak Laor was for many years the resident book reviewer for the “Culture and Literature” weekend supplement, in which he also published many Hebrew poems, as well as contributing regularly to the opinion pages.

For him, Zionism itself is racist, as is Israel. “The country practices racist discrimination against the Arabs, from baby clinics to academe,” he wrote in a Haaretz op-ed, insinuating, as he did on other occasions, that there is a demographic policy by the Israeli state, which relies on deliberately increased Arab baby mortality.

“Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation,” he wrote in a London Review of Books essay. “It is enough to destroy its social tissue, to starve dozens of villages, to develop high rates of infant mortality.”

One essay Laor wrote for the LRB was entitled “A Bullet Fired for Every Palestinian Child.” (The editor refused to run it, and it was published on the Counter Currents website). Laor is also known for a poem he penned about how matzah is prepared with the blood of Palestinian youths. This is a prominent staff writer at Haaretz, mind you, not an editor at Der Stürmer.

Laor was such a darling of the paper that for a time it retained him, even in the face of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, including rape, shielding his column from criticism by shutting off the reader comments function to his pieces.

The virulence of the paper’s anti-Israeli and antisemitic propaganda caused even a liberal like The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to drop Haaretz for its “hateful invectives” against the Jewish state. When Haaretz and Economist staff writer Anshel Pfeffer protested on Twitter (now X), Goldberg responded: “Look, when neo-Nazis are e-mailing me links to Haaretz op-eds declaring Israel to be evil, I’m going to take a break, sorry.” He then linked to a Gideon Levy piece titled “Stop living in denial, Israel is an evil state.”

Goldberg was not exaggerating. Haaretz has become a central pillar of antisemitic propaganda the world over, all the more effective because it is considered Israeli—and Jewish—self-testimony. And if the Jews of Israel confess their blood lust, racism and sadism, who are the Nazis to dispute them? Avowedly Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer regularly quote Haaretz. Hanan Amiur, editor of the Hebrew-language media monitor site Presspectiva noted that he found around 600 references to Haaretz articles on sites that are openly neo-Nazi. Apparently, Candace Owens is not the first to use the paper as “proof” that Israel is “an evil state.”

***

A disclosure is in order here. For some years, I was a regular columnist at Haaretz, publishing a piece every three weeks. It was a tense situation, since I was one of the few conservatives the paper allowed in its pages. Other staff and opinion writers sometimes called for closing down my column for “peddling conspiracy theories,” such as the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop; exposing the Russian-collusion affair for the hoax that it was; or explaining why the bribery case against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no evidentiary basis (a view that the judges in his trial would later confirm).

It was never an easy relationship from my perspective either (nor did it pay, since I wrote the column for free). But, given the near monopoly the paper had among educated Israelis, coupled with its relentless anti-Israeli propaganda, I kept at it on the assumption that I could punch an occasional hole in the narrative scaffolding, bringing a sliver of what I believed to be the truth to the more or less captive audience of the country’s only highbrow paper.

I was rarely censored, and had only two pieces rejected outright. The unspoken agreement between the paper and myself was that I would be allowed to write polemics against specific pieces in its pages, but could not attack the paper as a whole. So, I reverted to using the euphemism “the left-wing press” when I wanted to criticize it.

I will say this, at least, in the paper’s favor: When my work with it began in December 2015, its editors were well aware that I had been attacking their anti-Zionism directly for many years. Though the paper’s liberal tradition was rapidly eroding, back in 2015, it was still committed to pluralism and free speech. And I was free to express opposing opinions, to the chagrin of its increasingly woke newsroom and subscriber audience. The first piece I published when I began to regularly write for Haaretz was entitled “Truth is Forbidden: Why Obama Refuses to Recognize Islamic Terrorism.”

But when Likud’s judicial reform was announced in January 2023, and the left’s power over Israel’s democracy through the Court was in real danger, the paper’s metamorphosis from liberal pluralism to progressive censorship was abruptly completed. It promptly shook off the remnants of what became a shell of liberal pretense. Breaking rank was no longer tolerated. The piece I wrote in support of the reform was rejected. (I ended up publishing it on the conservative website, Mida, and my column was promptly terminated.) The publisher, Amos Schocken, on his paper’s podcast, declared that “Taub’s view is illegitimate” and therefore it “should not be voiced.”

My “illegitimate” view was, incidentally, the view of the majority of the Knesset. I argued that the anti-reform forces were not out to save democracy, but to prevent its restoration, by protected the excessive power of the court through which they were imposing their progressive agenda from above.

But Haaretz was then bent on misleading its readership about the alleged evils of the reform, and it could not afford a piece calling its bluff. It was, for the paper, a real emergency. Since its views were consistently rejected by the majority, it pinned all its hopes on bypassing democratic politics—by attempting to elicit international pressure on Israel for concessions to the Palestinians, and by supporting the augmentation of the already excessive powers of the progressive Court.

Once the reform was launched, the real—as opposed to the mere formal—power base of the Court came into view. The activation of the extra-electoral power-centers that the old elite still held revealed that no matter what electoral politics produced, the old hegemony still saw itself as the proprietor of the country.

To understand the confidence that drove Benn to declare his paper’s anti-Zionist mission, it is necessary to understand the determination of the old elites and the powers they still muster. The reform was defeated—under the ironic banner of “saving democracy”—by breaking the rules of democratic politics, tearing the fabric of Israeli solidarity in the process.

Likud politicians, like most of us, didn’t see it coming. The coalition had the majority to push the reform through. And, indeed, at first, it was confident it would. Shortly after the reform was briefly presented by Justice Minister Yariv Levin in a press conference, I hosted him for an hour-long conversation on my Hebrew-language podcast, “Shomer Saf” (“Gatekeeper”), in which he explained all the reform’s elements and the logic behind them. (See the video with English subtitles here.)

The protest was, at that stage, only in its inchoate stage. Standing at the door of his Tel Aviv office, located in a tower overlooking the venue of the weekly anti-government rallies at the intersection of Kaplan and Begin streets, as my team was folding up our equipment, I asked him if the protest was a threat to his policy. He shrugged it off. He didn’t think the protesters could do anything against a solid majority in the Knesset. Neither did I. 

At first, these were just demonstrations. Wild, violent and chaotic like the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020 in the United States, but still just demonstrations. Then, however, the elites mobilized their power from within the bureaucracy, the army, the press, academia and the upper echelons of the economy. They demonstrated their willingness to cut the proverbial baby in half, as in the story of King Solomon’s judgement. And when they organized mass walkouts of reservists and put the country’s security in jeopardy, and when the chiefs of the armed services joined in with almost open rebellion, refusing to say they would obey the elected government if it clashed with the court, the coalition began to crack.

Israel seemed to be in real danger of disintegration. This is when the proverbial real mother, Israel’s conservative Knesset majority, opted to save the baby, and shelved the reform—with the exception of one largely symbolic piece of legislation left over from the plan for a meaningful reform. It was an amendment to one of our semi-constitutional Basic Laws that attempted to limit the ability of the Court to strike down executive actions for “unreasonableness”—essentially limiting the power to void whatever the judges didn’t even when executive action was perfectly legal.

The Court later struck that piece of legislation down, despite the fact that the law had the status of a constitutional amendment. It was then that the Court established its authority over the process of constitution-formation. As some scholars of jurisprudence argued, this was the formal replacement of democracy with juristocracy—the rule of judges. Because, if sovereignty is the final authority over legislation in a given commonwealth, as political science has taught us since the 16th century, then sovereignty now resided with the Court.  

But the formal legal aspect is just one side of an essentially socio-political upheaval: Israel’s elites broke the backs of the “deplorables,” decimating their pride and demonstrating to the majority that it was powerless. Demoralized and shocked, disillusioned about democracy, the majority seemed weak enough to acquiesce in whatever its masters would impose on it. Without the social forces that backed the court, it would have been hard even for Aluf Benn to imagine the court moving to impose the de-Judaization of the state from above. 

Oct. 7 changed all that. There could hardly be a more vivid demonstration of why a Jewish state was needed. But there was more: after the shocking failure of the armed services on Oct.7, this was hardly a time for those who played with our security in order to defeat the reform, to continue crushing the demoralized brethren. The anti-Zionist banner was quickly tucked away. And, so, Haaretz beat a hasty retreat to its old cover story: hiding its rejection of the Jewish state behind a critique of “the occupation.”

For a while, at least, even on the progressive wing of the left, few were in the mood to blame the disaster on Israel’s existence. So even Haaretz, for the most part, had to make do with blaming the Israeli right, rather than Zionism as such. It was, however, certainly not going to drop its whole progressive worldview and blame the Palestinians. Thus, the first editorial Haaretz published in response to the massacre, in its Oct. 8, 2023 edition, opened with these words: “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.”

One person. There was no room for Yahya Sinwar to share any of the blame. “The prime minister,” the editorial continued, “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession” and “embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” In Haaretz’s view, the perpetrators were the real victims. 

Clearly, dreaming up a globalist non-national future for Israel would have to wait. The first order of business now was to prevent the complete collapse of the left, along with the dream of a Palestinian state, which had become its raison d’etre.

The next morning, on Oct. 9, when Israel was just beginning to learn of the unfathomable extent of bloodlust and sadism of the terrorists, Haaretz ran a piece by Amira Hass, who covers Gaza for the paper. Hass could hardly contain her admiration for Hamas.

“Things were suddenly turned upside down, and the nightmare of Palestinian routine burst the veneer of phony normality that had characterized the lives of Israelis for decades,” she wrote. “Hamas trampled over it with a sudden blow it delivered, revealing its military ingenuity and its ability to plan, to keep its plans secret, and to create diversions. Its operatives showed creativity when they used different methods to break through the walls of the world’s largest prison, where Israel holds captive two million souls. Its armed men ventured on a journey, willing to sacrifice their own lives, knowing many of them will be killed. Some of them killed Israelis in what looked like an orgy of revenge, that their commanders failed to stop, even for tactical reasons.”

The paper’s editors may not have shared Hass’s breathless glorification of Hamas’s dedication to killing Jews or their “creativity” in doing so, but they apparently thought the text appropriate for publishing, because the paper’s very DNA rests on the assumption that the just side in the conflict isn’t us. Clearly, the one thing the paper’s opinion columnists found hard to do was condemn Hamas. As one lone naïve voice complained in an op-ed piece, Hamas was “the great absentee” from the barrage of angry pieces the paper ran.  

Though Haaretz did not repeat the mistake of confessing its anti-Zionist mission, it was clearly bent on salvaging the postcolonial map by which it was reading the conflict, through blaming Jews for the deeds of Arabs. Palestinian bloodthirst, sadism and wild antisemitism had to be recast, therefore, as “resistance.” 

In October 2024, one year after the massacre, publisher Amos Schocken, the architect of the paper’s shift to anti-Zionism, spoke at a Haaretz conference in London, where he said that Israel is imposing an “apartheid regime” on the Palestinians and called Palestinian terrorists “freedom fighters.” He also called the establishment of a Palestinian state a necessity, and demanded that the international community impose “sanctions against Israel, against the leaders who oppose [a Palestinian state] and against the settlers.” 

During the entire duration of the war, Haaretz played a central role in almost all anti-Israeli and anti-Netanyahu info ops. It gave tail wind to the “Bring Them Home Now!” campaign—a lavishly funded left-wing political organization designed to topple Netanyahu’s coalition at the expense of the hostages, by demanding complete surrender to Hamas. It participated in the lie that Netanyahu was deliberately sabotaging the hostage-deal negotiations because he needed the war to continue in order to stay in power.

At one point, a member of the editorial board penned a piece favorably comparing Sinwar to Netanyahu (this same writer, Amir Oren, tweeted about Zohran Mamdani that he is “eloquent, sophisticated  and moving to the center.” The paper failed to inform its readers about the severity of then-President Joe Biden’s anti-Israel policies and the extent of his weapons embargo; it denigrated Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign and championed Kamala Harris; it published articles falsely accusing Israel of war crimes; and, of course, it legitimized the “genocide” blood libel.  

Shrill hit pieces against Netanyahu dominated all sections—news, opinion, books and culture—like a collective form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, occasionally redirected against his religious coalition partners, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Orit Strook and the settlers and ultra-Orthodox in general. The daily cartoons by Amos Biderman regularly invoked antisemitic tropes against all of the above. Moral outrage and grandstanding eclipsed news and basic journalistic standards.

While maintaining its broadsheet format and impeccable proofreading, the paper seemed increasingly more like a tabloid bent on exciting emotions rather than encouraging reasoned debate. At times, it stooped to Der Stürmer-grade antisemitism. One newsletter writer, for example, explained that the relatives of hostages had no choice but to use “almost pornographic” descriptions of the horrors the captive women were enduring, because “only in this way can one move the crude hearts of rightwing legislators.”

The rape of hostage women speaks “directly to the most primal right-wing emotions of the decision-makers,” said the newsletter, and not because they are sensitive to rape, but because it poses a threat to their presumably misogynist sense of proprietorship: These are “Our girls! Ours!”

While the confession of anti-Zionism was shelved, the pretense that Haaretz was not anti-Zionist will be hard to resurrect, except perhaps, among its die-hard subscribers. Because Israel has changed. It has moved to the right to such an extent that left-wing politicians pin their hopes on convincing their potential voters that they are actually on the right. 

A recent Channel 12 news program covered the campaign of the emerging leading contender for the premiership on the left, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot. His adviser, former IDF spokesperson Ronen Manelis, was caught on tape during a campaign-strategizing session, saying, “Tell me what I should do, and what subjects I should speak about, so that one would think I’m on the right.”

The truth is that the new, post-Oct. 7 Israel has turned the Haaretz moral map obsolete. The paper’s increasing vulgarity is a sign of growing desperation. Because no manipulation of “the context” in which the massacre was perpetrated, no smearing of the settlers and no blood libels about IDF soldiers can restore the idea that the good guys are on the other side of the fence and that we are the bad guys. 

The great majority of Israelis, including on the left, had the atrocities of that day burned into their psyches and they can no longer be led to believe that Palestinian terrorists are freedom-fighters, or that raping girls to death is “armed resistance.”

The position that Haaretz takes, while jarring during more peaceful times, is impossible to swallow while the country is at war. And, thus, the sentiment that drives the paper becomes visible when its moralistic façade disintegrates to expose its crude disgust with Zionism, with Judaism, with Israel. 

And then it all becomes clear: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then maybe it is a duck after all. And the duck is, quite obviously, no more and no less than the indigenous Jewish variation on run-of-the-mill progressive antisemitism. Which is to say that anti-Zionism is just a disguise for antisemitism. And so it’s no coincidence that Haaretz is one of the most effective engines of Jew-hatred the world over.