In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on July 15th, 2025 from Jerusalem.

Professor Suzanne Last Stone has a great line and an essay about authority in the book, the Jewish political tradition that I think about a lot. She writes, “Who deserves our trust when the truth is unverifiable?” Think about that and hold onto it for now. Now let me ask a different question, a more basic and horrifying one. How many people have been killed in Gaza since the outset of the war?

You would think in our age of more access to information than humans have ever had at our disposal—and as relates to a question as crude as this, and as definitive as this kind of question, ’cause after all, either a human being is alive or they’re dead—we would have a clear consensus answer and of course you’d be wrong. The Hamas Controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza reports an official number of around 58,000. The Lancet published a study back in January, which got reported by CNN and Reuters, among other media outlets, that said that the numbers at the time, which were 46,000, were dramatically under-reporting the casualties that the number should have been much higher.

Last week, Haaretz threw out a number of 100,000 but then published a response by the Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola, contesting that number as inaccurate and signaling that it was thus inflammatory.

And I think we know that the exact number of deaths doesn’t really change the stakes of the moral conversation about the war. Every single death is a tragedy, and we should be able to conduct a much more serious moral conversation regardless of what we can calculate exactly about this massive human toll. It still feels intolerable to me that we simply cannot share exact or close to exact information, the basic facts before we can start to disagree about what those facts mean and how they invite us to respond.

I’ve been living in fear about the question of the fog of war since this war began over 20 months ago. The idea of the fog of war, that war is a kind of closed ecosystem characterized by uncertainty, that idea originated as a means of describing difficult conditions that armies have to make within wars without fully understanding what’s going on around them. But it expands to include us, those not fighting in the war, who struggle to understand from afar what’s happening on the battlefield and feel debilitated from doing what we as humans will naturally do: form moral and political judgments because of this atmosphere of uncertainty.

And while the fog of war for armies is changing, we have surveillance and other precise military technologies, drone warfare and other advancements would make it possible for armies to operate with greater precision than ever before. When it comes to the public, I think that “fog of war” feeling is actually getting worse. We’ve always had propaganda from the players and a mix of misinformation, the stuff which is just wrong and disinformation, the lies that are spread by people trying to change the narrative. And on this front, technological advancement is making those plagues against knowledge far more severe.

The consequences then, for those of us who care about Israel, its people and its actions, and who also care about Palestinians, about humanity—the consequences are extraordinary. Some people, I would guess the majority, respond to this crisis of knowledge simply by increasing their trust in their side, in their team, supplanting knowledge with loyalty. Very few of us are capable of responding to such a circumstance simply by saying, let me wait to form a moral judgment until all the facts are known. How would we do such a thing? How could we operate with such uncertainty?

And so we lean into our biases. We curate information from the media outlets who we trust, but maybe who also tell the story in a way we find most palatable. We, almost as an act of instinct, perpetuate the informational and moral echo chambers that already divide us and we make them worse. And I don’t really blame us. We’re at a different era in the history of humanity in terms of the volume of information we are meant to assimilate, subject to new ways and styles of being assaulted with data. And I’m quite sure that we as humans are not evolving quickly enough.

A few weeks ago, I noticed an expression of this phenomenon, how two Israeli news sources, the Times of Israel and Yediot reported completely opposite headlines about the statements of Iranian officials after their retaliation to American bombing raids. The Times of Israel headline read that Senior Iranian officials were still planning further retaliation. The Yediot headline in Hebrew at the exact same time said that Iranian officials wanted to now return to the negotiation table. The truth is, it’s probably the case that senior officials said both of those things. The truth is, reporters are humans too, and media outlets have particular orientations and styles and how they tell stories and why. Still, seeing these side by side was a reminder of something well known, that news itself is, at best, an act of interpretation, hopefully in good faith, of things that happen in the world that need words attached to them in order to become intelligible to us.

There are now a few online publications that present parallel stories from different news outlets side by side to help us notice bias or at least slant. And while I think it’s a really valuable public service in this confusing time, I also find that whenever I look at those sites, engage in this exercise, I feel more learned about news coverage and less knowledgeable about what actually happened in the news.

And what I really struggle is with this: I really want nothing more than to be able to form and hold a learned opinion about the most important issues that I care about. I wanna do so on the basis of believing that my opinions are rooted in truth. Is that too much to ask? And who in the end deserves our trust when the truth is unverifiable?

I’m joined today by one of the journalists here in Israel who I respect the most. David Horovitz, the founding editor and CEO of the Times of Israel, which launched in Jerusalem in February, 2012. Previously, David was the editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Report. I appreciate that you’re here with me today, talking about topics that I know are close to your heart, close to your life, close to your business. I want you to talk a little bit maybe about this phenomenon of experiencing the fog of war from the inside, what it feels like, not just emotionally, but actually professionally to navigate this ecosystem when sometimes you’re able to see things on the ground, your reporters are able to see things on the ground, but oftentimes you are also probably obscured from seeing all that you need to be able to see in order to tell the story as it needs to be told.

David: First of all, I’m very pleased to be here and thank you for inviting me. Look, I’ve done journalism. It’s all I’ve really ever done for in excess of 40 years, almost all of that in Israel, and I’ve had some very important-sounding jobs and so on. There’s never been a more difficult period than since October the seventh, 2023, and it is because of many of the factors that you cited there in your introduction.

If you look at the war in Gaza, most especially, essentially I think when we’re discussing this, you cannot actually cover it in any thorough, reliable way because physically you can’t be there. We have a very good military correspondent. We have very good diplomatic correspondent. The former spends more time in Gaza. The latter spends a little bit of time in Gaza, but all such time is on very limited short entries with the IDF where the army. Most importantly, I think from its point of view, does not want to get journalists killed and also wants to show journalists what it wants to show journalists. And I think by definition there are things that it’s not particularly interested in showing journalists.

But the bottom line is that this war has been running, was it more than 21 months now? And not only speaking very much about the Times of Israel, are we not able to cover it in the thorough, personal upfront way that we would want to, but it is our sense, and more than that, I think that there’s not really reliable journalism being done in Gaza at all. Not only is Israeli media largely barred from there, so is independent, reliable foreign media. I don’t think, as far as I know at any point, there has been a proven independent journalist able to file freely in an ongoing manner from Gaza.

There are news agencies. The three, I suppose, most used news agencies are Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. They have reporters in Gaza. I don’t think any of those reporters are part of their international staffs. I think they are local hires, some of whom may be burning with a sense of responsibility to try and get everything right, some of whom may have no such interest whatsoever, but all of whom are influenced, it seems clear, by the fact that Hamas is still potent and capable of wreaking terrible harm on people who do not do what it wants them to do.

And there is a constant stream, I mean, the terminology you use is the terminology I use. There’s a constant stream of unverifiable information coming out of Gaza. So on, if you like, the the Gazan side, or the Palestinian side, if you look at, for example, I think the most, I mean, I’ll go into minutiae here if you’re interested, in terms of the most productive of those news agencies, is Reuters, which if you look at the Reuters stream out of Gaza, it is an endless stream of unverifiable asserted pieces of information very much frequently with death tolls. X number of people killed in Israeli strike, and so on. AP and a FP do a little less, but none of it is verifiable because your reporter wasn’t there. And even ostensible verification such as Hamas claims or the health ministry in Gaza claims X number of people have been killed, and a reporter from this news agency saw bodies laid out the hospital. Okay. Whose bodies? How are they killed? Who are these people?

Compounding all of that is the fact that the Israeli official narrative largely doesn’t exist at all. The Army does give out some information. It does respond sometimes to particularly dramatic, sometimes egregious allegations about what it has done, but broadly speaking, I mean the most, maybe relevant example, because it set the tone, was October the 17th, 2023 when Hamas claimed that Israel had bombed Al Ahli Hospital and hundreds of people were killed. And the story went around the world. Of course, 10 days after October 7th, Israel had killed hundreds of people at hospital and there was, literally, there were no words said by official Israel, except for the Army saying it was looking into it.

Now, Israel had a policy. It retains that policy. I think in principle, although there are certainly departures from it, that it doesn’t target hospitals; it has targeted areas around hospitals and inside hospitals in circumstances where it was adamant that Hamas was operating and you know all about that. But there was no comment whatsoever from anybody on that October the 17th, except the Army saying it was looking into it, whereas the only narrative out there was the Hamas propelled narrative of, Hey, the Israelis have have bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of people, and it set the tone in many ways for lots of things that became the norm.

There are some outlets that accepted Hamas’ assertion as fact. There are some that attributed it to Hamas. There were some that sought an Israeli response. There were some that didn’t bother to find an Israeli response, but in terms of trying to get to the bottom of what was going on, it was immensely complicated by the fact that there was no Israeli response for about three hours. Then about three hours later, non-army spokespeople started issuing denials. And even that was a little bit confusing at first, ’cause I think the foreign ministry shared footage asserting that it had been an Islamic Jihad missile that had fallen short, but the footage was not in fact of that incident, as I recall.

But it took about three hours for any, I’m not just saying credible Israeli account of what had happened to appear. I’m talking about any words at all. And if you’re a news outlet, you have to have words, right? Somebody says something, you can write it down or you can relay it and broadcast it. If nobody’s saying anything, there’s literally nothing that you can say. You can quote former Israeli security officials. You can quote Israeli policy and so on. But that did set a tone.

And as far as Israel’s concerned, the Army has, broadly speaking, I think, has tried not to lie to reporters, but it has certainly, I don’t wanna say the norm, but very, very, very often not been willing to give any kind of account of, you know, serious account, individual account of an instant as opposed to restating policy and so on. And therefore, very often there’s no Israeli military side and the Israeli civilian effort, I mean, we could talk about that for hours. It’s just so awful. I don’t, I don’t wanna go into it. It’s not, I mean, I will if you make me, and it’s certainly not my job to tell the Israeli leadership that there are two battlefields.

There’s the stuff where things happen and there’s the stuff where people talk about the things that have happened, and if you don’t try to tell people what you believe or insist is going on, then you are leaving the second battlefield vacant for people who are peddling, in some cases, an honest, but in many cases a dishonest narrative. And that’s the reality. There is no effective Israeli civilian public advocacy.

There’s a, there’s a director in the Prime Minister’s office. I don’t even know who runs it. I’m not even sure anyone runs it anymore. There was a spokesman who everyone would’ve heard of called Eylon Levy, who now works, I think, independently. He was born for this job ’cause he was like a human being and he responded with emotion. And he was very effective. And he was suspended until further notice because he had had the temerity to join the anti-judicial overhaul protest in between working for the president and being asked to work for the government. Israel’s not in that game. It’s not entirely, you know, we don’t need to go into that in, in the context of this, but in terms of credible information.

And going back to your original, your original question, it’s incredibly complicated. And then so you know, your follow up question might be so well, so how do you deal with that? You haven’t got a reporter in Gaza. Reuters, FP, and AP may be saying this, Israel is saying nothing. What do you do? Obviously at the very basic level, we do try to give at least both sides of what is being asserted. If there’s a, a, I don’t know how to, how to define this. If there’s material coming out of Gaza that seems important and seems to be credible, I’d like to say of course, if the wire news agencies are reporting it, of course it’s credible. That is not a statement that I could make as definitively today as I would’ve made it before the war. If this material that we think needs reporting, we try to be very careful to attribute it, and we do seek both sides of the story. The ideal thing, of course, would be to send the reporter; brings us back to what I was saying in the beginning—almost all of the time, you cannot send your reporter.

Yehuda: I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about the military censor, ’cause my understanding is that the military censor is not a legal framework, but something of an expectation of Israeli media outlets that if they ask media sources to hold information or or to control information, that it’s, I think you’ve used the phrase before, it’s a kind of a gentleman’s agreement about how that’s supposed to operate.

And I hear the frustration essentially in your voice, the responsibility to get the stories out into the world, to tell the public what’s going on, to present truth. And maybe we’ll come back to that word. It’s a tricky word. But you have this big apparatus that serves the state more than it necessarily serves the dissemination of information.

I’d love to hear just first on a technical level, how it works, in terms of engaging with the military censor and whether there’s been real resistance over time. Precisely ’cause of the frustration that you’ve said about Israel not being forthcoming on the governmental level, about even shaping a public narrative, only this kind of defensive or protective shield, and whether there’s room or space for Israeli journalists to push against that and to be able to put information out in the world, even if the state and government of Israel doesn’t want that information to be published.

David: Yeah. I wouldn’t have the state to sense that, and I wouldn’t link it as absolutely as you seem to do in putting that question. The problem that I talked about in answering your previous question is simply, it’s not a censorship issue. It’s, uh, we are not there. We don’t believe one side instinctively and the other side generally isn’t saying anything.That’s the real issue I’m dealing with. And all journalists who are trying to cover this conflict properly are dealing with, in terms of military censorship, I think it is a legal requirement. I don’t even… smarter people and knowledgeable people with, maybe with better memories than me will know. But I know that at some stage I was asked to sign something that basically said if I’m about to publish material that might be prejudicial to national security, I will submit it to the censor for approval.

And I, and there’s a whole legal mechanism because if something is censored that you feel it’s outrageous and should not be censored, you can, there’s legal recourse. There’s judicial recourse as of this morning. And you can, you can go to the court and say, we’re being prevented from blocking this, not for reasons that are legitimate.

And in many cases, in many cases, it is a gentleman’s agreement in terms of the implementation. I mean, that’s the point. The point is that when it started, I don’t know, way, decades ago, and certainly in years that I, you know, in the pre-internet era, they could enforce it. You know, if you’re trying to send a telex abroad, I think they could probably intercept it.

I remember getting a phone call during the Gulf War, which I think was in 1990 or 1991, and I was, I don’t even know who I was speaking to. I just remember the censor coming on the phone and saying, you can’t say that. And I was talking about where an Iraqi missile had, you know, gone down the street in Tel Aviv. That’s not the world we live in anymore. The censor cannot practically stop people reporting what they want to report, but they require you to submit material that they assert would be prejudicial to national security if it was published. And on the whole, it’s… the demands are not unreasonable.

In other words, if, when as is all too often, soldiers are killed and the family hasn’t been told yet. They ask you not to publish the name, for example, that’s the military censorship, and very few people would argue with that. At least give the army time to inform the families of the loss of their loved one. There are instances where it’s silly, and I think we’re in a situation where the censor’s office knows that it’s silly, but hasn’t moved past that yet. And maybe because there are things sometimes that are so important that they think it’s, you know, worth maintaining this, ultimately, I suspect unworkable arrangement.

For example, we just had a war with Iran and Israel did not want Iran to know where its missiles were hitting. And very, I think it was a specific case where Al Jazeera was showing the scene in Haifa Bay and a refinery was hit. It was censored, I think for days. We were not allowed to, certainly weren’t allowed to report the full extent of the damage there. The whole world has seen it. An even better example—worse example, however you wanna define it—Hezbollah fired a drone that impacted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s home in Caesarea and smashed a window on the outside of the building and the whole world reported it and saw the picture of it, and you can be sure that Hezbollah knew exactly what it had hit and all the damage had caused. And Israeli media was not allowed to report that the house had been hit.

And I actually spoke to the censor, and it’s not some, I mean, I, I don’t actually know how, how many people work there or how it works, but there’s somebody who manages the shifts and I spoke to the person who was running the shift, just barred us from publishing the photograph and the fact of Netanyahu’s home being hit by Hezbollah drone. And I said, this is ridiculous. I mean, nevermind the Times of Israel. All Israeli media is being made ridiculous by this. The whole world knows that this happened. Why are you refusing to allow people to report it?

And it, you know, the only people who don’t know, of course, who do know because the internet exists, are Israelis and the person, very nice person who’s running the shift said, yeah, but you know, if the Times of Israel reports it, then Hezbollah will know that it’s true. I said it’s very flattering and so on, but I assume they have, you know, pretty good cameras on their, on their drones and guidance systems. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to, you know, blow up a drone at Netanyahu’s house. And therefore they probably don’t need the Times of Israel to tell them what happened. So, you know, we’re in crazy world.

Yehuda: What’s your explanation then, of why the Israeli military wants to keep Israelis themselves in this fog of war? Is it about maintaining support for the war? Is it about morale? It is very strange to be in a position where, as an American, I feel like I know more about what’s happening in Gaza and maybe unreliably…

David: Yeah, I don’t think you do. If you’re an american.

Yehuda: Great, that’s fair, but even something like the example that you described, you have access to news and information that Israelis are being protected from. And it creates a very powerful confusion in relationship with Israelis about what we know, what we don’t know, and what feelings or opinions we form on the basis of values.

David: Yeah. Again, I wouldn’t overstate it and I think it’s, I think their prime motivation. I think if the, you were speaking to the censor they would say, listen, you know, it’s most relevant in times of war, and we don’t want to give that information that will help the enemy kill more of us, and that’s why, you know, those have been the issues in, in the last, I suppose 21 months, but especially with the Iranian 12 days of war. I’m sure that’s what they think they’re doing. They think they’re making it harder for the enemy to kill people. And that’s a laudable goal. I just don’t think it’s working and they need to rethink what’s practicable and worth doing against the cost of having a situation where everybody knows everything.

Actually, you know, all Israelis know it too, ’cause if they have particular interest, everything is out there on social media. So you’ve got this, you know, this artificial, ostensible blanket on information that is out there and everyone knows about.

Yehuda: So in terms of going back to the dividing between the military censor and access to Gaza, I think one of the things that’s troubling to me is that, you know, we’re, we are meant as free thinkers or ostensibly free thinkers to operate with a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion and to ask why if information is being controlled from the public, what the motivation is about, and Israel as it is suffering in the public narrative globally from the perception that there’s only one powerful side in this conflict and that it’s a moral narrative between the powerful and the vulnerable.

We can problematize all of that, but the control of access information to Gaza feeds into the narrative that what Israel is doing in Gaza is something it just doesn’t want other people to see. And therefore, when you get a reporter, maybe an unreliable one who’s embedded in Gaza, who tells these stories, it allows people to trust that story, to believe it, because it’s going against a military and a government that’s not allowing other stories to be there. It feels like a very self-defeating approach by Israel in terms of the public narrative that it wants to tell to the world.

I assume you agree, you signal a kind of frustration about not being able to get deeper access, but do you have an understanding about what the motivation is for not allowing a deeper openness to journalists, not embedding more journalists within even the IDF? What’s going on?

David: Yeah, so I think, I think there’s two different things here, and I’m not sure I fully agree with the premise of what you’re saying, but I’ll try and elaborate effectively. I think there’s an endemic, decades-long problem in that Israel does not seem to know how to advocate for its own interests. And then there’s the coverage of this war where I understand to some extent where the army is coming from in that it doesn’t wanna get people killed. It does not want a CNN TV crew to be hit in Gaza. It doesn’t matter by whom, because it feels it will be blamed. And the price of not being blamed for the killing of international journalists is that there is not open reporting from Gaza. That’s the one half.

The other half is, and I don’t know if it’s defeatism or ineptitude, but I mean dates back really decades, and what’s staggering about it is that as the years have passed, official Israel has chosen not to invest real resources and thinking and planning and trying to have people understand what it is dealing with, what it is grappling with, what it is trying to achieve. It’s, to me, unfathomable, I don’t have an adequate answer for it because I see, constantly, first of all, independent efforts that then try to help the government explain Israel’s official position, which are all doomed to fail because no journalist is interested in any kind of kind of private initiative. If the government isn’t saying it, it’s not material they’re gonna use anyway. Like I say, defeatism or ineptitude or a mixture of both.

I mean, we, we live in an era now where Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel for as long as most people can remember with, you know, very small little breaks. There are people who argue that Netanyahu thinks that he’s so good at this, and everybody else is so appalling that he’ll just do it. But I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation.

I mentioned Eylon Levy as, as a case of ridiculous marginal considerations preventing somebody who was effective at doing it. The foreign ministry was just allocated several hundred million shekels, as far as I know, to set up a media room, which, if you took our line of discussions so far, you’d say, oh, that’s good. So in other words, they’ll have resources so that when journalists ask them stuff, they can find out or they can even initiate and put material out there. If that’s the case, I’m not aware of it. I don’t know what they, what they’re doing with this money. I think, as far as we’ve been able to find out, it’s kind of getting in touch with outlets, although I hadn’t had any direct experience of this, and saying that they’re doing things wrong or, you know, criticizing them. It’s certainly not doing what I would want it to do, which is, Hey, we have issues about this incident, or, Can you tell us more about that? And why is this happening? None of that is going on.

But I would tend… I know this might sound incredibly naive, which I don’t think I am. It’s more ineptitude than malice. An example of this that’s from way back is the Mavi Marmara, which you’ll remember was an effort to breach the Gaza blockade, I think it was in 2010. And this boat was commandeered by Israeli Naval Commandos, who thought they would be boarding a ship with peace activists, and in fact were beaten as they repelled down onto the deck and took out their personal weapons, which was the only thing they were carrying. And I think nine people were killed. Nine of the people on the boat were killed and the 10th died afterwards. And Israel had all the footage of what had happened and that they were, and they resorted to the use of live fire ’cause they feared for their lives and so on, and did not make this material available until, I don’t even remember how many, so, so long after as to be completely irrelevant.

And what’s staggering, like I said, is that here we are 15 years later, in, in the midst of a war where certainly the Israeli narrative of what, what it is doing militarily is not effectively disseminated, shall we say. I’m not sure—I’ll come back to that point in a second—that this is still a situation.

I don’t think that effective Israeli public diplomacy would change from side to side the way in which this war is perceived. I think ultimately there are factors, including that Israel is perceived to be the strong, powerful side of this conflict and therefore is perceived to be capable of ending it or waging it in a way that causes less harm.

I think there’s also extreme anti Zionism very, very well fueled. In some cases overt and blatant antisemitism. There are, there are factors at play other than the fact that Israel isn’t very good at providing information, but if it did a better job at public diplomacy, if it was available and providing information to journalists in a credible way, it would move the needle.

I don’t, like I said, I don’t think it changes things, anything from A to Z, but I know people who are very supportive of Israel, in some cases, in very prominent positions abroad, and they would like to be able to say, yeah, but that’s not what happened. Or, but don’t you understand Israel was whatever. And they’ve said to me, we can’t, ’cause we don’t have that information. By the way, we kind of think that that is the case, that this is not, did not happen in the way it’s being reported, but we don’t have any information and therefore we can’t stand up in Parliament and say, but that’s not what happened! You know, here’s this material, because we don’t have that material. So it would make a difference.

Yehuda: So there’s been a lot of criticism over the years. Matti Friedman, most prominently making the case about outside journalists, foreign correspondence, and the limitations on foreign coverage of what takes place here in Israel. And it’s a weird criticism because it both signals that this place is heavily overreported and at the same time makes arguments, that’s part of Matti’s argument, was, disproportionate coverage of this story more than anywhere else, even sources of conflict elsewhere in the world. And at the same time that long critiques about the kind of ignorance of foreign correspondence, what they don’t understand culturally, linguistically, politically about this place.

At the same time, you could make the kind of counter-argument about citizen journalists, their own biases, their own rootedness within the society, and I’m, I’m curious if you could give a kind of analysis on how you see the state of… independent, essentially, of the coverage of the war, maybe the war is magnifying some of this, what the relative advantages that coverage of this place have. If it’s someone who has been sent here for a couple of years on assignment versus those who are embedded here, but who are also stakeholders in the society in a different way, who may have their children fighting in the war, who may themselves be veterans, who have a relationship with the state as stakeholders in what the state is about?

David: I think the answer to that is a function of people’s personality and intellectual rigor and smarts. And I’m not sure the differences between people who are stakeholders ’cause they live here and the people who come in for a couple of years at a time, as much as the people who come in for a week at a time and actually know nothing. And I don’t know where Matti has placed his emphasis lately, but I know he feels that there’s sort of endemic issues and there are endemic issues with some media outlets, I’m sure.

But I think the most problematic coverage is provided by people who don’t know. I mean, if you don’t know some, you know, journalism is a very interesting profession in that it’s not like you study, although I’m not certain that this would make much of a difference, years at a university, and then you, you know, you do your two years internship and then you’re allowed to go out and report. You know, if somebody has good reporting skills, has some proven ability to accurately report material, to present it in an effective and compelling way, nobody’s gonna care too much where they went to school or how much training they had. Oh, those clips are great. Or those, you know, those pieces that you wrote are great.

The people that you know can have very prominent positions in international media organizations and be fire people that when there’s a major conflict, they get sent to the place. They don’t, they may not know. Some of them are brilliant at it, some of them are not. They, some of them have, will have prepared as much as they possibly could. Some of them will come into a conflict zone or a highly reported circumstance without. Any of the background knowledge. So I think that’s the biggest problem that people, you know, fly in, cover stuff that they don’t really know about, and you’re gonna, you’re gonna misreport it.

Then there are the questions of an endemic narrative that you know, which, where, where Matti has focused a lot of argument, the notion, and there’s the context for that I think is fairly straightforward, that from ’48 to, shall we say, ’73, Israel was the David in a region, a tiny little country that everyone around it was trying to wipe out. And then in 1982, we initiated a war, and broadly speaking, not the entire period, but most of the period ever since Israel has been the Goliath, refusing the Palestinian statehood, and dominating its part of the neighborhood. I mean, these are incredibly oversimplistic ways of looking at things, but they, I think, are the context in which lots of things are looked at.

I think October the seventh is a whole different thing, and the degree to which very, very soon after October the seventh, there was an effort to deny Israel the legitimacy to defend itself, not deep into the war, I’m talking very, very, very early in the war, I think that’s a real issue, and that was a function of planning and organization by people who are, who did invest immense amounts of resource and, financial and intellectual to create an environment in which they would be bashing and delegitimizing Israel. And Israel, basically, as, as I think I’ve said at length, already did and has done almost nothing to counter that.

You know, part of your question was about the difference between international correspondence as opposed to people who have a stake. So if you take that to an Israeli website, trying to cover the Israeli-Hamas war, and we come back to something you said, you said before about defining truth and so on, I think the fact that we have a stake in it, you know, I don’t know. I’d like to think that if we, if my team at the Times of Israel, if our team at the Times had less of a stake in it, we’d still try and do the most serious job. The fact that we have a stake in it, as people who live here and who live with the consequences, and in some cases, do reserve duty and certainly have family who are doing reserve duty, as far as I’m concerned, it’s, it makes our obligation and commitment to try to get it right and to report it accurately, you know, even more iImportant, personally important.

It doesn’t mean that we would want to skew it in one way or another. It means that we would feel this tremendous responsibility because of its direct importance to try and report things as accurately as we can.

Yehuda: So I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about the post-October 7th whiplash, because so much of the previous 10 months had been spent covering the judicial reforms, a kind of seismic event in Israeli political history. You were unabashed in your opinion pieces at the Times of Israel about the criticism of the way the judicial reform was being conducted. You’ve remained consistent on that front. In fact, you wrote a piece a couple of months ago entitled The Smooth Malevolent Unraveling of Israel’s Vulnerable Democracy, which connected the dots between the judicial reform efforts, and some of the way in which Israel was prosecuting the war, communicating to its people and so forth.

But I’m curious about how you experienced that whiplash as a reporter, as a journalist, where one story immediately gets replaced with another story. One’s, in essence, bias about the set of concerns about what [00:35:00] is going on in this country are now met with a very different set of questions about what the government and the military are gonna need to do to respond to October 7th.

If you could just kind of take us into your own thinking as a leader in this space, as the editor of a major publication, how you guided your team or thought about what the voice of the publication and its emphasis needed to be in that turn from basically October 6th to October 8th.

David: I, first of all, I’d, I’d go back a little bit even before what I would not call judicial reform, ’cause I think reform implies an effort to make things better. It might not be what the dictionary will tell you, but I think that’s how the word reform is understood. It’s not a reform, it’s an overhaul. It’s the subjugation of the judiciary to the political will and so on. So the terminology for me is quite important.

The complexity of this job, and this… the strain of this job, ’cause that’s where I wanna go with a bit of this answer, extends before that, to this endless sequence of elections that we had in Israel. So, you know, running a 24/7 website and having a team who essentially have to be knowledgeable about what’s happened 24/7, doesn’t mean they’re all working all the time, 24/7, although several people are working, you know, crazy amounts of time. Day after day after day.

But there was this sequence of elections and it just went on and on. There was another election, another election, I think there were five and four years. And then at the end of 2022, there was another election and the current coalition came to power. And within days, I mean the first major policy initiative it unveiled was the radical subjugation of the judiciary.

Now, I’m saying that, and that, that’s the kind of terminology I use. We don’t use those terminologies, not in our news reporting, ’cause I recognize that that is not neutral terminology. Which by the way brings us onto something that… which I should also call attention to, which is, I’m running a website where I don’t know the politics of our reporters. I don’t want to,I don’t want the politics to become clear, but I write opinion pieces. So, insofar as the Times of Israel has any kind of an editorial voice, it’s pieces I suppose that I write that are marked op-ed.

But at the same time, when our reporters, who are supposed to be telling us the news, I don’t want their particular opinions coming through in their copy. I want them to report as honestly as they can, and we present material, physically present it differently so that people can tell the difference. There are news pieces and they look like news pieces. There are analysis pieces which are analytical as opposed to driving a personal opinion. And there are pieces that are presented on the blogs platform or that are marked op-ed, which are clearly opinion pieces.

Coming back to where I was going here, the first thing to appreciate is the simple task of keeping track of events and reporting, and getting to the truth as best we can, and reporting them as best we can, is an overwhelming challenge. It’s a huge challenge and there’s never been anything like it previous to the last few years, and it just gets harder and harder. So elections, the overhaul, October the seventh, and, you know, those 12 days of Iran war, you know, we would, okay, are we calling this a war? Are we already in a war? It just rolls relentlessly on. And that is, that’s the hardest thing. If you wanna understand, before we get to, well, how do you focus on that when you are focusing on the other? And how does, how does the one impact the other?

You know, we’re a team of about 50 people. Just the mechanics of it. If you think about it, we’re a 24/7 website. Just think, if you’re 24/7, by definition, and you want a full-time copy editor, for example, working 24/7, that’s four jobs, right? That’s four jobs. That’s not one job. If you want two people dealing with breaking news on your desk, most of the hours of the day, think of the resources involved in that. The person who’s running the site, the reporters who are out in the field, the fact that you have people who, hey, they work full, full-time, full-time is, you know, 180 hours a month, something like that. What about the other three quarters of the hours on the clock when they’re not working?

So just being able to do our job, and we don’t use AI and we don’t, you know, slap stuff up. We actually try, by the way, we certainly make mistakes, but we try not to, and we certainly don’t publish material that we haven’t thought about publishing as best we can. The simple mechanics are a huge thing, a huge and a huge strain.

You know, you have people working on a desk who work five shifts a week, but if they come back to work after a day when they didn’t work, for example, and they don’t know what’s been happening, they’re not gonna do their work well, they’re gonna miss things. Wait a minute, that story moved on and didn’t that person say something and why do we think this is new, when it was said yesterday or something similar was said? You have to be on the ball all the time. That’s very, very difficult. I know people who’ve left journalism ’cause they can’t anymore. I know really, really good people who have left journalism because—why would I put myself through this anymore? It’s incredibly bleak. It’s incredibly challenging. And you know, I’d like to have something of a life.

So that’s a big deal thing. In terms of, you know, what you call whiplash. So I suppose somewhere in your question is, wait a minute, so now that there was this terrible government, David, that you thought was terrible ’cause you thought it was destroying Israeli democracy, and then we were invaded and now the country’s in real existential peril, and are the same people doing a better job this time on the war front than they were? Are we allowing… Am I allowing for, if you speak, speak to me, my criticisms of this government in the context of the judicial overhaul to impact and adversely skew my reporting on how the war is being handled?

You know, I’ll answer this personally as opposed to our report coverage. You know, again, you try to be honest. Was the Hezbollah pager operation an absolute disaster because Netanyahu orchestrated it? Of course not. It was an incredibly effective operation. Whereas as far as I know, it was so sophisticated that, you know, they knew where, I think, every individual Hezbollah beeper pager was held and where the person was when they detonated the explosives. I mean, that’s just a staggering thing.

The 12 days against Iran, you know, do you judge that differently because this Prime Minister who has been running a dysfunctional and I think very problematic government is the Prime Minister. You know, you try to be honest and you try to distinguish and assess and present fairly and make points that you think are important for people to know.

It’s very easy to say, well, it’s, it’s Netanyahu. I dislike everything he’s done on the judicial front. Therefore, everything he’s doing is, I don’t, I don’t feel that way. I’m, you, you, you noticed how critical I have been of the judicial overhaul, which I absolutely continue to feel and we’re deep in it again right now.

I was always very, very critical of the 2015 Obama-led accord with Iran, ’cause I thought it was a terrible accord. And I know there arguments that said that they couldn’t have been more firm and capable, because it would not have got through the UN, and Russia and China would not have supported it and would’ve objected to it or what, whatever. I thought that was a terrible accord ’cause it did not stop Iran’s nuclear program. It manifested, it did not stop it, leave aside the sunset clauses of things that were expiring. They were able to carry on research and so on. And I mean, they were able to move ahead and we, and we know that they didn’t move ahead.

I, I don’t know how effective this 12 days has been. I mean on this, the army actually, you know, did give fairly thorough briefings. I know what Israel thinks and so on. You know, you, you judge an issue, you try to judge an issue on its merits and that’s what I try to do.

Yehuda: I’ll ask you one philosophical question and then one last one, which is, do you think that it’s actually… that truth is no longer the objective in this work?

I mean, I think about the terms like truth versus honesty versus reporting and you know, so like I read your site. I’m, by the way, I’m blown away that you only have 50 employees for what you’re producing.

David: Five zero, right?

Yehuda: Five zero. That’s, that’s astonishing actually, given the volume that you produce and, and the comprehensive nature of the coverage. But I, I kind of… I don’t know. I wonder whether even that language of truth is so big that it might not be the goal anymore. That the best we can do is honest renderings of the stories that we’re able to tell based on the information that’s available to us. Do you have thoughts on that?

David: Well, that’s, I don’t have an issue with your, your second definition, trying to get to, I mean, you can call it an honest rendering or trying to get to the truth. Trying to present information that you know to be accurate as best as you can to try to get to it.

I thought was really, really interesting, ’cause the, the example you cited right at the very beginning of the two ostensibly contradictory headlines in, in YNet and the Times of Israel, about whether Iran was saying it was gonna do some more attacking or, or wanted diplomacy. I’m sure that Iran was saying both of those things. I don’t, I don’t remember that particular story that day. I, I’m, I have no doubt whatsoever that there were Iranian officials who are saying, Hey, we want diplomacy, and there were Iranian officials who are saying, and we will be attacking as soon as we can, as effectively as we can.

Again, those are not the things that I would focus on. I would focus on, hey, 74 members of the same family killed in an Israeli airstrike, stated as a headline without attribution, as opposed to, Hamas claims dozens of people killed an Israeli airstrike; Israel, we were targeting Hamas gunmen. Right? Those are the issues where I think we should be paying some attention.

And remember you just quoted a headline there, right? The headline is by definition, I mean, depending on how a newspaper or a website acts, limited by the number of characters that will fit on the page of a print edition or across the top of a page on the internet. It’s often not the whole story. I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I don’t know this, if the, if the YNet story that had the one thing in the headline also had the other part also lower down, and ours did too. Those are not the issues.

The issues are, you know, the, the big, what, what is the big bottom line of this event or this trend and so on, and are you reporting that accurately? Are you attributing as carefully as you could? Are you taking at face value something you should not take at face value? Are you making it clear to your readers that you’re not entirely sure about this? And at the very least, you are making sure to cite the other side’s narrative? And so on. Those are, you know, the big dilemmas.

And they’re not limited to a single story. They’re the whole thrust of it, the boilerplate language. You know, wait a minute. All these people that were killed in Gaza yesterday, how far back do you need to go in your story, in your boilerplate language, in your background, in your context, to say, of course, this began on October the seventh, when Hamas invaded. You wanna go further back, you know, and provide more history and more context. I mean, those are considerations and those, if I was a reader, would be among the factors that would help me weigh up whether this is a source that I trust. You know, they’ve, they’ve said this, but they haven’t explained why that came to pass, why those people were there, you know.

And that’s, by the way, that’s incredibly complicated. How much are you obligated to give? How much knowledge do you assume? How central is it to put some of that background in? Because otherwise people won’t understand what’s actually happened today or yesterday and so on. Those are huge, huge and complicated dilemmas.

Yehuda: Yeah. So that’s where I wanna finish, which is the nature of how most of us consume news and information these days is not with single loyalty and fidelity to one outlet or publication. I’m sure if you, as you run a media company and a website, you want people to stay on the site as much as possible, but we get things curated through our feeds, through people we trust recommend this article, that article, we become much more, I don’t know, we kind of bounce around sites based on what interests us, what other people recommend to us.

You started to hint at this, but I, I’d love to hear you maybe offer some even pastoral guidance to, how do you want readers to read the stories of what’s going on in Israel and where’s the space to then be able to formulate what they can actually think about this? How would you encourage readers who are trying, who actually come from a sympathetic place? Not only, I wanna understand this place, I care about it. But I’m lost a little bit and I don’t know what to trust. What would you encourage folks to do on how to read, what the, the news that comes out from Israel, especially during this contentious time, and then to be able to form their views on what they think about what they’re seeing?

David: You know, I, I don’t wanna be simplistic about this and give you a flip answer about, you know, you should just read The Times of Israel, you know, you’ll be fine. I don’t actually say that to people. I obviously want people to read the Times of Israel, and as often as, as they’re comfortable reading it. But if you read more widely, you will, and if you read more that provides you context, you will understand better. And best of all, of course, in any subject is go and see stuff for yourself. Right? Which most people in most areas are not gonna be able to do.

You know, I’d, I’d recommend, if you wanna understand this conflict and where it’s going and where it’s come from, or, you know, the daily adventures of the state of Israel, you know, like some good history books would be useful too. You know, I’d encourage people to read widely and I, you know, I, I don’t even know how, how people choose what to read, or what to rely upon. I would hope that people gradually develop an understanding of, well, this isn’t material that is credible based on what I have now learned. They seem to be trying to tell me what is going on. And I think I can trust them to a relative degree. I don’t exactly understand why they’re reporting this or not reporting that and so on, but you know, I’ve grown to trust this or that source. I think people are forming that.

At the same time, I also think people are driven to, I mean, it’s something in the human condition to sensationalism. I think we all do it and maybe sort of take our eye off the ball a little and realize, wait a minute, why am I even reading this? It’s obviously not true. It’s incredibly interesting, but it’s almost certainly not true. I don’t believe that it’s true. I think it’s, there’s almost an act of will, to remind yourself that when you’re reading something, well, it may not be entirely credible.

I’m sounding very philosophical and vague here, but you know, I get asked all the time, why hasn’t the Times of Israel covered this? I don’t know, five Iranians were killed in Syria last week or a few months ago, this an actual story. Hezbollah’s blown up six Israeli tanks in the, on the northern border, probably the Times of Israel isn’t reporting it ’cause it’s been impossible to verify, or in fact is not true. Smart, sensible people ask me why stories that it’s fairly obvious are not true and not being reported by us because we’re trying to tell you what we think is going on.

So I really think it’s an act of will, I think. Oh wow, that’s amazing. We are grabbed by sensational stuff and I’m not even sure there’s much other… people on my staff, I, I know, disagree with me about this, I’m not even sure there’s much consequence to constant misreporting of sensationalism. Among the most popular news sites in the world are some whose content is so unreliable that you’re not allowed to even use them in college essays, as far as I know, or certainly not acceptable on Wikipedia. I mean, that this is how the world has changed in the last few years, that Wikipedia used to be the lowest of the low. You obviously couldn’t cite Wikipedia in university material, and now some of the most successful newspapers in the world will not be acceptable to Wikipedia as sources because they’re so unreliable.

So I think people read widely and gradually, you know, keep that antenna up. I mean, that’s what we try to do as journalists, what we’re meant to do as journalists, which is sort of, have one eyebrow perpetually raised in skepticism. Right? Are we sure about this? Does that sound likely? You know, do we really think that if Hezbollah had blown up six Israeli tanks, this went out on one of the wires a few months ago, Hezbollah claims six Israeli, five or six Israeli tanks blown up in, in Northern Israel. How little of Israel would you need to know to just publish that? Yet a major news agency published that story.

And when the Times of Israel, by the way, just to take you into our, went to the Army and said, I mean obviously this isn’t true, are you issuing a denial? And the Army said no, we’re not issuing a denial. And we said, well, why not? It’s not true. They said, well, we don’t need to get, that’s not our business to, you know… I don’t know. So there’s some, there’s some interesting considerations going on there in, in high places.

But try to keep one eyebrow raised, be skeptical, and gradually I think people will, I think there’s room to fairly easily establish, this is a source of material that they seem to be at least trying to get it right, and this is a source of material that they’re not really interested if it’s true, ’cause it’s a great headline. So if you want to read one for entertainment, I think that’s a dangerous business, but be aware that they may not be actually trying to… call it what you like, an honest accounting or you know, give you an honest accounting or give you the truth. There are lots of media outlets that aren’t as bothered as they should be about an honest accounting or the truth.

Yehuda: Thanks so much for coming to the show today.

David: Thank you.