 Hello, good morning, my name is Joshua Haber of the Middle East Task Force here at the New America Foundation, and this morning it is my pleasure to welcome you to this – it should be a fascinating discussion on the Israeli media's treatment of the occupation. We are particularly delighted to be cosponsoring this event this morning with Bate Selim, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupy Territories. And actually, right now I'm going to turn the program over to Ori Zaki, the director of Bate Selim USA, and our co-sponsor for this event. Thanks, Josh. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming. Bate Selim's USA – first of all, he's very proud to co-sponsor this event with the New America Foundation. We work closely with this organization for many years now – well, many years. The years we've been in existence, we've been working closely together, and that's around four years working in D.C. Bate Selim usually deals with the occupation, as Josh said, and we're an information center that deals with human rights violations on the ground, very specific focus. But here in the U.S., we're trying to also enrich the discussion about how the occupation is being perceived in Israel and how the discussion is being done there. That's the reason we have here today this program, featuring two Israeli journalists. And without further ado, I'll introduce our panel. We miss Gav, a good friend who I know for 15 years. He is a columnist and a blogger, a political blogger for Haaretz Daily. I'm sure that many of you read Haaretz. I have good news because his excellent blog is being translated now to English, and from next week it will be available also in English on the Haaretz Daily website. Linoy Bargefen, who's a TV persona in Israel, very well known, hosted two morning shows on Israeli national TV, now works for Channel 2, the biggest Israeli commercial television station, has a background of political writing for YNET, political reporting for Galeh Tzal, Israel's one of the two most important radio stations in Israel. As you see, a very rich career and also know her for 12 years. I'm bringing my friends here. Lastly, Sarah Wildman, who is, and I memorized that, a visiting scholar at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins, who's working now on a book, and she did not tell me the title, so we'll wait in anticipation. She also frequently writes for outlets such as The New York Times, Newsweek, many. And knows Israel very well, speaks Hebrew, despite the fact she doesn't use it that often. I know that her Hebrew is very good, so she knows what we're talking about. So the floor is yours. Great. Thank you. So the premise of the gathering was that the coverage of the conflict has changed radically in the last few years and that there has been a radical diminishment in the way that the Israeli press covers the occupation, the peace process, and we wanted to sort of look at what has happened, I mean what's taken place. And I thought we might start with, was there a time when the occupation and the peace process was better covered, a kind of golden age, maybe, of when journalism and coverage kind of intersected and the population was interested and journalists knew what they were talking about. So let's start with that. Maybe we'll start with Uri and then... Sure. Okay, first just a good morning again. It's a pleasure to be here. And when I say that, I don't mean that only to be polite. It is, I think for both of us, quite encouraging to see so many people, a whole community. Sometimes we feel it's a whole city or a whole nation so focused on the Middle East and on the conflict because you will hear this morning that this is not exactly, those are not exactly the terms in Israel at the moment. So it is encouraging in a way. And then now regarding your questions, I think the high time for coverage as for everything dealing with the conflict was the years of the Oslo agreement. This was like a groundbreaking era for young Israelis and even for older Israelis. Rules have changed. All of a sudden you could speak about the Palestinian people. You could meet them. You could learn so much and so quickly about them. And when I say that, I mean that even when the troubles had begun and the terror had begun and the fighting began later in the decade, it was still very well covered. And you could get, I wouldn't say not necessarily a balance covered but a wide range covering. We had reporters there. We could go there. There was no segregation wall and no limitation on entrance for journalists. And that was the decade of the 90s. I think those were what you call the golden years. And we don't see them as golden anymore in terms of what happened. But in terms of coverage, it was a whole different story. Just a small example. I did the story as a young journalist, a magazine story about the building of the national Palestinian team in soccer. In order to do that, I went three times on my own to Gaza Strip, interviewed, went with that team to Jordan to Amman to cover the pan-Arab games. These are things that I couldn't even dream of doing in this time. Can you explain a little bit more why you can't dream of doing it? Because I'm not sure that everybody understands there's not as much freedom of movement, both I mean certainly for Palestinians but also for Israelis. I mean there are certain areas that you can't go into now without sneaking in. Okay, so I'll try to do it very short. Technically we can't go to the Gaza Strip anymore. When you're talking about a siege, it means that you can't go in and can't go up. We can't go to the West Bank as journalists. Linoy has done it I think a few times. I've done it earlier. But again, it's not secured it was. But more if we talk about substance, those stories are not that welcomed anymore. The Israeli public, and I think we'll talk about it later, in many ways has lost its interest in stories like that. I think a new generation of journalists like Linoy and me and others are trying now to change that balance. But those stories, let's say this magazine, optimistic story about a soccer team were very welcomed in the last decade. I don't think many people want to read them. And do you find the same thing? Yeah, it's not only that people don't want to read them. They became more cynical about it. We're lacking inspirational stories. We don't have these almost anymore. And the coverage during the recent past, the recent 10 years became more and more cynical. And more sophisticated like no more stories about meetings, gatherings, project, common project. Just a few months ago, I participated in a project that brought together Palestinians and Israelis, media personas, not necessarily journalists, but also writers and directors. And at the first hour of our meeting, the Palestinian group spent a lot of time accusing us of not trying to influence our government to do something to move the peace process and to stop the occupation. And they had a lot of accusations. Some I could relate to, to some I didn't. But as they were talking, all I could think of was, oh my God, I don't remember when was the last time I heard a conversation about the conflict. These people actually think that we're thinking about them, that we're talking about them, that we care for them. And during the 90s and the beginning of the last decade, I think what we were mostly scared about is the rising of hatred. But what happened to us is even worse, we became indifferent. We don't think about the Palestinians anymore. We don't talk about them. If we cover stories about the conflict, it's usually very violent or very small stories about violence between Palestinians and settlers. We don't do big stories with context. We don't cover anything that has to do with the talks between the Israeli government and Palestinian leaders. Only during wars or violent events, you can hear about the Palestinians, but you don't really hear a lot about them. I mean, even if it's bad news, we don't want to hear about it. I mean, I did a documentary about an Arab-Israeli Arab citizen, and it made him look bad. And it was broadcast on Channel 2 almost a year ago. And the common reaction, the most common reaction I got from viewers was, why do you even let him speak? And I said, well, he doesn't look good. The movie makes him look bad. I mean, it's not like I glorified this guy. He said, well, that's not important. You give him a stage, and that's bad enough to even give a stage to an Arab persona to talk. And it's not racism or something like that. It's just, we just don't want to hear about it anymore. We let go of the Palestinian behind the fence. We want to go and do different stories and cover different stories. We've got our domestic problems, and the whole Israeli perception changed from, first let's finish the conflict and then move to deal with domestic problems. Now it completely changed. Now let's solve domestic problems, and after we'll solve them, we'll deal with the Palestinians. We've got all the time in the world. Nothing will happen. Maybe we can transition that into this idea. I mean, last year I was covering a story for the nation on 972, which is a blog, which is quite far to the left, written in English by Israelis mostly, that covers sort of little pieces of the conflict, you know, the Friday protests in Nabi Saleh, or the problems of evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, or problems that are happening both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem and around the country. When I was told by a lot of mainstream journalists was that just like in America, journalism is suffering. It's hard to sell newspapers. It's hard to sell television programs. Funding is dying. There's no money for journalism anymore, and for investigative journalism in particular, but in particular, the conflict does not sell. It doesn't sell your newspaper if you put the conflict on the cover. And then the problem, I suppose, is that then you juxtapose it against this question of the Golden Age being Oslo into the Second Intifada, which means in suicide bombing gets covered because that's a very extreme vision, but not a humanized picture of what's happening in the West Bank. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that, about how you've seen that economic perception, and we could move into what we all were talking about yesterday, which was that the summer of 2011, people might remember that there were huge protests across Israel, in particular in Tel Aviv. All of Rothschild Boulevard was covered in these tents, because there was massive sort of cost of living protests, but they were really focused on the domestic policies of Israel, about the cost of buying an apartment, or inability to buy an apartment, or famously the price of cottage cheese. And this became a big question about why is the price of cottage cheese debated outside of the context of the cost of the occupation? So these are huge questions, but let's start with this question of the changing nature of journalism in Israel and what sells a paper or sells a, you know, a column, or a newspaper, I mean a television program, and what that means in terms of how not so much about censorship, because we can get into that, but more about how it ends up self-censoring journalists towards what they cover. Okay. I'll speak about the print media, okay? Nothing sells papers. Papers are not being sold anymore. There was a major shift in Israeli print media and the moment Mr. Sheldon Edelson has built a free newspaper called Israel Today, Israel I AM. I think the role model was maybe USA Today, the way it looks, the way it reads, but the papers was totally different. It had a political purpose. This, it's an interesting story, the Israel I AM story, because I think that as a paper it's being widely read. It's the most read daily newspaper in Israel, because it's being handed free to people's door, not only in metros and buses, but we feel, and I spoke to many people about it, it has no real influence. It has no real impact. You never hear or read follow-up stories to their stories, but it had different effect. It really scared and really pushed to the corners the other newspaper, the more traditional papers like, of course, Haaretz, but more, I'm talking about Yedi Otachonot and Ma'arib, which is declining at the moment. And so the whole print media has got into this crisis that, okay, people get Israel I AM for free. Why should they pay for a newspaper, even a few shekels a day? So the print media is in ongoing crisis. It's been shrinking. It's been firing people. It's very hard to get new people to work in, and if you get, they have to be either students or very young or willing to work in very low salaries. These are not good news. Now I want to say what I think is the optimistic, my optimistic view is that journalism is finding bypasses. It's finding new ways. You have to be creative, but even, I'll talk personally, even my political blog, it's becoming a hit. It's been very well read and Haaretz realizes it, and now it translated. I mean, you will find a ways to speak. I don't think journalism in Israel will decline. It's a country that loves media. Israel is a freaks of news. I don't know if you know that. We used to have in Israel breaking news, you know that it's very famous that in Israel, everybody runs to the radio to listen to the news once an hour. We used to have an era where they had breaking news every 30 minutes. Now they don't need it because everybody is online all the time. If you're going to visit Israel soon, don't be offended. Everybody is like that with a smartphone. It's nothing personal. That's what Israelis do. So there is an hunger, there is an eagerness for news, and maybe we'll talk a bit later. I think this is a time when Israelis accept again to hear good news. You're talking about that uprising, we'll talk about it later, but the uprising for me was an encouraging event. Something is going on. Something Israelis are slowly but truly waking up and they accept good news, they accept hope, and we're not going to let you go here with only bad news. For me, this is good news. If to continue what Uri was saying, if you look at the coverage of Prime Minister Netanyahu, what's going on behind the scenes of Israeli newspapers. There is Israel Ayom, Sheldon Edelson newspaper. Sheldon Edelson never hide his motivation to ruin the Israeli press to ruin it. He said it directly. I'm aiming to kill the left wing Israeli press who supported the terrible Oslo agreements and delusion all the world and Israel in particular. His goal was to support Netanyahu and right wing government. He did it, not quite succeed, but to a great extent he did. It affected, of course, the way Yadiot Achronot covers Netanyahu. If Edelson is pro- Netanyahu, then Yadiot Achronot would be against him. Now comes a new force, Yair Lapid. Yair Lapid was a journalist with a columnist in Yadiot Achronot. Yadiot Achronot supported Yair Lapid during his campaign and had a lot to do with his 19 seats winning. But a few weeks after the election, Yair Lapid met with Sheldon Edelson. Nobody knows what happened in this meeting, but you can see in the days after this meeting a shift in the way Yadiot Achronot covers Yair Lapid. Now all of a sudden, it's not too supportive of his ideas and cuts. He's now the financial minister. All of a sudden things changed. So the behind the scenes politics affects the coverage of the government, the peace initiatives and everything that has to do with the conflict as well. And you started talking about what happened in 2011 and the demonstrations and the fact that people didn't relate between the high prices of goods and the rising prices of apartments. They didn't connect between that and the conflict. It's true and it was intended. It was intended because the protest leaders wanted to bring as many people to the streets as they can. And so they decided to say these demonstrations has nothing to do with the classic left and right divisions in Israel. You can demonstrate against the rise of cottage cheese, the rise of the prices of cottage cheese and still think that the settlements are a thing that Israel has to have. It's okay. They don't connect between the two. And what I think that happened in the past two years and it has to do a lot with the frustrations more and more Israelis feel from Yair Lapid, I think that people are now more and more connecting between the price, the high price of occupation and the price of cottage cheese. I mean, it's not only the result of a moral thinking that you can't demand justice for the Israeli consumer and ignore what's going on behind the green line. It's also I think that it has to do with being reasonable. And now you see the demonstrations much more political. They're smaller, but every Saturday there's a demonstration, at least one demonstration of hundreds of people in Tel Aviv. And it's political. We're not hiding the demonstrations, don't hide the connection that they see between the occupation and the economical situation that we're involved in. I wonder if you guys could both address a little bit, though, about, I mean, there's been a shift a little bit in the way that the Israeli public feels the impact of the occupation. I mean, in some ways, you know, people will say to us as Americans, you know, we don't feel what happens in Kabul or Baghdad. They're happening thousands of miles away. Very few of us know people in the service or know people who've had something happen to them. It's very classed and it's very distinct. It's almost regional here. You can live your entire life and not know anybody in the service. It's not like previous eras. I mean, it's not like certainly not even, you know, not Vietnam or even Korea, let alone the Second World War. And in Israel, the integration of the army has shifted a little bit as well. And the fact that you can live in indifference or apathy now is something that has really shifted since the 90s. And maybe you can speak a little bit about that, both as commentators and as journalists, about how it's possible to live 30 minutes from the conflict and not feel it. Okay. Good question. I maybe some of you know the classic Pink Floyd album, The Wall, which is a good symbol. The best song there is called Comfortably Nump. Israelis at this present, the mainstream Israelis are Nump. And why is that? Because there were ways found to bypass the conflict. For the average Israeli, he can bypass it. Israelis don't go to the West Bank, most of them. They have nothing to look for there. But also, many soldiers don't go there anymore. Some of the checkpoints were even privatized for security, private security organizations. And the units that have been sent there are, what I would say, it's mainly the border police, which get soldiers from and troops from certain groups of the Israeli society. Soldiers are almost not being killed there, because it's very quiet, securely speaking. Of course, we have, and thank God for that, we don't have bombs exploding in the streets of inner Israel anymore. And all that combined with all the bypasses roads, that even if you go through the West Bank, if you want to go on the highway to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, you can go through Route 443, which is into the West Bank, but you don't feel it. You've got two checkpoints. It's very sterilized, very well-defense. And all that, I think, has damaged the sense of urgency. You can live with that. I'm going to be honest here. You can live with that. If you have a developed moral, you don't live with that well. You think about it, but there's nothing you can do. And years go by. And I think that answers part of the question. You can go now your entire life without running into a Palestinian even once. If you live in Tel Aviv, if you live in Kfar Saba, if you live in Petah Tikva, if you're not a settler, you can go through life without ever meeting a Palestinian. I think that the settlers meet more Palestinians in one week than the Tel Aviv regular person meets in his entire life. Because if he didn't serve in the occupied territories, and if he is not an activist, then he can go through life without ever meeting a Palestinian. But it also goes both ways. When you don't meet with the people behind the wall, it's easier to dehumanize them. It's easier to not think about them. The news that are coming from the Palestinian side are always bad. And so you don't have to think about them. And when you do, you don't have to look at them as human beings. And so you can be, like Ulysses said, comfortably numb. But also you can think whatever you want about them. Nothing changes your mind because Palestinians don't work in Israel anymore. You don't work with them. You don't done less and less civilian initiatives that meet Israeli and Palestinians. And we grow apart. And that's what we were saying before, that the problem is not hatred. The problem is indifference. We don't meet. We don't talk. We are growing apart. We were talking yesterday about one trigger, for lack of a better word, that actually reinvigorated the conversation recently was the visit of our president, Barack Obama. And maybe you guys could address why. That was actually very successful, perceived as successful, especially among young people. And if Hillary Clinton did anything similar, and what Secretary Kerry could do now going forward, to do something similar. And then I think we'll go back to this question of the kind of social justice protests and what that means. Because I think that there's two things that have happened, right? I mean, there was a suppression of the left in the wake of the Second Intifada, where everyone sort of gave up on everything and just wanted to live quietly. A lot of people that I know in Israel will say, well, I just want to live in peace. I don't want to think about anything. But peace means more or less apathy or indifference. And so the question is about a reinvigoration of the left, and we can think about what's positive a little bit too, not just the negative. So let's start with the Obama visit. That was 100% positive. The Obama visit could be a groundbreaking event. That's what I thought it had the potential for that. My only problem with the Obama visit, and especially with the great Obama speech in Jerusalem, was that it happened four years too late. We wasted four years there. And it proved again how quickly and how dramatically you can change the Israeli mainstream public opinion. You can give one good focus, very well-wisted speech, and everything changes. Suddenly people start to speak again about hope, about dreams, they see an horizon. This was an amazing visit. And my only message to whenever I meet here is that's the kind of American leadership and involvement I think the Israeli public needs. It needs people of high profile to speak to the people, not just behind closed doors with the Israeli leaders. We never know what's going on behind those closed doors. It doesn't reach the public. As Obama spoke to the people, I expect Secretary of State Kerry to speak to the people. He's a very impressive figure in Israeli terms. That's the man who's been into combat. Israeli know his personality. And whenever an American leader has a chance or a choice to do that, he should do that. Israelis like to be talked. They like to be cuddled. They like to feel secured and addressed. And that's the best way I think American leaders can behave at the moment. Speak to the people. Yeah, I totally agree. The average Israeli can say on an everyday basis, well the Americans don't know what's going on in Israel, so they shouldn't get involved and stuff like that. But as soon as Obama arrived in Israel and talked to the Israeli press and public, they were shocked. They were amazed. They fell in love with him completely. And they were so suspicious about him just a few years ago. But when they finally saw him in Israel, walking in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they were blown away. They were completely in love. And they wanted to hear him. Because I don't know if they realized how many years it's been since they heard a message of hope towards them. A message of hope. It's nothing that we've heard in Israel for years now. I think that's also why Yair Lapid has had so much success in the recent election. His name, his party's name is Yesh Atid. There's a future. Who talks about future in Israel? Bibi Netanyahu always talks about the dangers of Iran. Leaders from the right always talk about the dangers from the Oslo agreement. Who talks about optimism in Israel? Nobody talks about it. Yair Lapid succeeded because he was telling the Israeli public, let's look at the future and be optimistic and build a better future for Israel. And he- He was not addressing the conflict. Maybe you can kind of- He didn't address the conflict. Yeah, that's right. He didn't address the conflict. But the main thing is that he was saying an optimistic line. And you can say that about the economy, but you can also say that it regards the political situation. Because as we can see, economic didn't get better because of Yair Lapid. Now the public is very frustrated with his cuts. But you can change the public's opinion. You can move them towards optimism, motivate them to be more involved in initiatives and listen. You can change cynicism in Israel. You can't. It's not completely lost. Maybe we can jump in now to this idea of whether- I mean, I think when I was discussing this with Leila Hillel, who's unfortunately not here, she asked me about censorship. I mean, what are you allowed to say and not allowed to say? And that's not really about that. It's more about self-censorship than censorship. And maybe we can jump into that a little bit. And then this idea of how these two things integrate. The question of the future, the economy, and thinking about how coverage might change a little bit. And then we'll go into the Prisoner X question. But if you want to address the censorship question. It's not censorship like governmental censorship. It's just like we said before, if it doesn't sell, then we won't print it. We won't talk about it. We won't cover it because it doesn't sell. Self-censorship, well, you're being lashed at when you write something good about the peace process or Palestinian. You're being lashed at. We can hide that. But sometimes I feel like journalists a little bit celebrate the self-censorship. It's like it's an easy way to cup out of regard addressing the subject to say, well, it doesn't sell. It's an easy way to cup out of trying to be creative. To think of new ways to bring the Palestinian subject to the table and to the lineup. And that's disappointing to me because I think that in times of distress we need to be even more creative, even more optimistic. To think harder of ways to address the subject because I don't think we have the privilege to ignore the situation. I don't think we have the privilege to say, well, we'll wait a few years for all sides to grow up and sit back again to the discussion table, to the negotiation table. Well, maybe the question then would be, then we can go into the prisoner X. We've already been covering this prisoner X scandal. Maybe you can just quickly give a snapshot of what happened there. But also it ties into the fact that it's not just about self-censorship. It's a little bit about not recognizing how the occupation in various ways legally, journalistically affects the population of Israel. I mean, ultimately, judicially, let's say, I mean, your own rights. I want to say something. Politically, there is an ongoing and existing freedom of speech and freedom of press in Israel. It is very important to emphasize. I, as a political journalist from a very young age, had the freedom to write severe and sometimes even blunt criticism on politicians in Israel. It's important to emphasize this. The problems are in two other fields. Whenever there's economical interest and you work in commercial media, you know that it's complicated sometimes. And the other wall is, of course, the security censorship, which is defended by law in Israel. And actually, formally in every word you write every reported, I mean, every reporting journalism, you write about security issues in Israel, especially about the army. You have to hand off for approval. That censorship is not being mishandled and hasn't been, I think, abused. They use it most of the time, really carefully, in my 20 years, almost 20 years of journalism now, a bit less. I have never suffered from the security censorship. I mean, they don't use it on a daily basis. This is important to say. But regarding prisoner X, what really bothered me in this story? Okay. Very shortly, briefly, prisoner X is the nickname of a Jewish Zionist young man named Ben Ziggur, Australian, that was drafted and working for the Mossad, then got into trouble. We don't know yet what was the trouble, what he did, but he got investigated and then arrested in an Israeli prison and died there at the end of that year. Do you think he committed suicide? Yes, he committed suicide, most probably. And this story wasn't brought to the public media, wasn't brought to the public at all. We actually started to know about it, read about it, write about it, research it, research it, only almost two years after it happened because it leaked to the Australian media. It was a high-profile story for a while in Israel, but then it sank down. And most Israelis at the moment, I think, are okay with the story. And many of my friends tell me since I'm almost one of the only journalists that keep digging about it, they say, listen, it's great that you're doing that job, but people don't care about it anymore, move on. And I keep saying them, but I care and I want them to care. This is a story that should be investigated. And it deals with security censorship and more severe to me. It deals with how the law system in Israel backs up whenever security issues are on the table. Whenever the security authorities tell them, listen, we've got them, we know what we're doing, they back up. And so I think that makes it a human rights story, much wider in scope than the sad story of one Australian Jew. And that's why I keep digging about it. By the way, could I add a comment? Yeah, of course. It's important for me to say that we're addressing, we're talking about the Israeli media, the Israeli press, we're talking about television, we're talking about the print and the internet, but something completely different happens in the Israeli movie industry. The Israeli movie industry deals with the conflict a lot. Only in the past year, movies that were released were The Gatekeepers, Five Broken Cameras, also not only documentaries about the occupation, but also fiction movies. They're not extremely successful in the Israeli public, but the movie industry deals with the conflict all the time, intensively in a very bold way, in a very courageous way, because I don't really know why, but it's happening. And those movies are later on broadcast on Israeli television, not only in cinemas. So what's going on in the press is one thing, and what's going on in the movie industry is completely different. That's true. Just before we jump into the audience, I just feel like we didn't exactly address the positivity of the social justice protests, and maybe you could talk a little bit about an increased sense of political awareness around that, and then we'll go to the audience. Okay. I was encouraged and encouraging the uprising of 2011, although I knew from the beginning, this is not the real protest that I would have wanted, because the main message was, we are apolitical. This is not a political, and as we know, everything is political. And it is also very strange to claim for justice for all, or social justice without talking about justice behind the green line. But I did encourage that because it was a start. After many years, even decades, the Israeli masses went back to the streets, taking responsibility for the future. And there is a huge disappointment and disillusionment after the surprising, but it's only a stage. I'm very optimistic. As I am very optimistic about the political situation, Lenoy was right. Yael Apid, party was, there is a future. So, okay, Israel is found out very quickly that it's a false future, and it's a false hope. But it doesn't mean that they won't seek the next hope. And I think we, I keep telling, we need our Obama. We need our John Kerry. We need figures in that profile. I can't see them at the moment at the center left field of the political field in Israel, but I'm sure they will rise up. They have to.