Left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz has lost hundreds of subscriptions in response to its publisher Amos Schocken’s anti-Israel comments last week, Israeli news site Walla reported on Sunday.
At a Haaretz-organized London conference on Oct. 27, Schocken urged that sanctions be imposed on the Jewish state, accused Israel of imposing apartheid rule in Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, referred to Palestinian terrorists as “freedom fighters” and said the Israel Defense Forces was carrying out a second nakba, or “catastrophe” (the Arab term for the creation of the modern-day State of Israel in 1948).
In response to his statements, several government ministries also canceled subscriptions, including the Foreign Ministry, the Education Ministry, the Communications Ministry, the Culture and Sport Ministry and the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry.
The Interior Ministry was the first to make an announcement.
On Oct. 31, the day after Channel 14 broke the Schocken story, it issued a statement saying the publisher’s words “arouse disgust.” It ordered the cancellation of all “publication and collaborations” with Haaretz “until further notice.”
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi proposed that Jerusalem cut all ties with the newspaper, including canceling ads by the Government Press Office, a unit within the Prime Minister’s Office.
The mayor of Nesher, a town of about 23,000 near Haifa, announced on Oct. 31 that it would also cut ties with the paper.
The financial blow to the paper from the cancellation of various government and private campaigns is “one that has not been seen in many years,” Haaretz said, according to Walla, adding that during internal meetings at the paper on Sunday there was talk of “a crazy rate of cancellations and a sharp drop in newspaper advertising.”
Israel’s Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon will hold a meeting on the legality of the government ministry cancellations, Walla added.
The crisis has led to internal dissent within Haaretz itself. On Monday, the paper published an editorial, “Terrorists are not freedom fighters,” focusing on that aspect of Schocken’s comments, which the publisher had addressed in what was widely viewed as a half-hearted apology.
“Using violence against civilians and sowing terror among them to achieve political or ideological goals is terrorism. Any organization that advocates the murder of women, children and the elderly is a terrorist organization, and its members are terrorists. They certainly aren’t ‘freedom fighters,'” the editorial said.
On Oct. 31, Schocken backtracked, saying: “I reconsidered what I said. Many freedom fighters in the world and in history, maybe even on the road to the establishment of the State of Israel, committed shocking and terrible acts of terror and harmed innocents to reach their goals. I should have said ‘Freedom fighters, who use methods of terror and must be fought. The use of terrorism is not legitimate.'”
On Sunday, Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian-Israeli businessman who owns 25% of the paper, also distanced himself from Schocken’s words.
“I would like to express my complete disagreement with the view of Amos Schocken as the newspaper’s publisher in response to the events of October 7 and the current war,” said Nevzlin.
The remarks were “shocking, unacceptable and even inhumane,” he said, adding they showed “a lack of sensitivity” toward the victims of the war, those who suffered on the day of the invasion itself, the hostages and their families.
“Amos’s words conflict with the values of the newspaper, with my values and with the values of most journalists and newspaper employees. I regret that Amos took advantage of Haaretz‘s stage and spread his personal and extreme views, without emphasizing that these are his private views, which do not represent those of the newspaper,” he said.
On Oct. 31, employees of Haaretz and of The Marker, a Haaretz-owned business site, published a joint statement: “We, journalists who cover the war and its results, are unequivocally opposed to terrorists, terrorists of any kind, being considered freedom fighters. Our position is that acts of murder and attacks against innocents are not a suitable means of handling any struggle.”
