Many newspaper pages and hours of television and radio broadcasts (not to mention tweets, posts, TikTok videos and other content across every possible noise hub) are currently dedicated to fears about the loss of democracy in Israel.
There are no collective cries of outrage, no urgent intervention demanded by members of the so-called "democratic" wing of the Knesset, and, of course, the prosecution and the attorney general’s loyal media army remain silent. Apparently, the problem isn’t democracy.
What’s even more perplexing is that, despite this being such an unusual step with dramatic implications for freedom of the press (which, in Israel, isn’t even enshrined in law but rather in court rulings), the media is making relentless and rather acrobatic efforts to unspool and rationalize the arrest in ways that ease suspicions that the system simply targeted a journalist for doing their job.
Journalism, after all, sometimes involves interactions with people who aren’t exactly saints. Instead of demanding explanations from the attorney general’s office, the state prosecution and the police—who know how to provide them when they want to, without disrupting investigations, as we see every evening—they’re trying to justify the arrest.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the relative silence surrounding this case is tied to the identity of the arrested journalist. He’s not a household name, to say the least: he’s not a sharp commentator opposing Netanyahu on the big mainstream media channels, not a veteran columnist for the Yedioth Ahronoth-Ynet group and not a familiar face around Tel Aviv’s coffee shops. The journalist in question is Zvika Klein, with his Anglo-Saxon accent and slightly nerdy appearance, who edits a newspaper most people recognize from the ad, "Want to know where my English comes from?" None of this, of course, shields him from the possibility that he broke the law.
However, so far, there’s no indication that he did anything beyond what any self-respecting journalist does: talk to relevant and interesting people, even if they’re enemies of Israel or shady lobbyists, and report on it according to basic professional standards. If that’s the whole story and it’s indeed a criminal offense, then journalists like Smadar Perry, Ohad Hemo and Zvi Yehezkeli might as well pack a toothbrush and save up for the prison canteen: the police van is on its way.
If it turns out this is a case without merit, and even if the system manages to utter the two phrases it struggles so hard with ("sorry" and "we were wrong"), real damage has already been done to the fight against the absurd effort to crush the rule of law under claims of a "deep state" and other conspiracies.
If, in the end, those who place a journalist under arrest (and house arrest is still a deprivation of liberty that no one wishes on anyone) are the same people for whom hundreds of thousands took to the streets, what exactly have we achieved? And if the Israeli press, in all its diversity, doesn’t drop everything and unite around the demand to let journalists do their job, then not only is the concept of collegiality meaningless, but the press itself isn’t worth much either.
