Press Freedom in Israel Endangered by Legislative Push, Critics Say

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cracked down on liberal news sources in Israel, stopped foreign journalists from reporting in Gaza, and attempted to privatize or shutter Israel’s public broadcasting channel

More than a year after the October 7 attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reignited efforts to overhaul the judiciary and reshape the country’s media landscape, sparking warnings from critics about threats to democracy. While the war temporarily paused debates over controversial policies, Netanyahu’s government has returned to its agenda, proposing reforms that critics say could erode judicial independence and press freedoms.

Proposed measures include banning Al Jazeera, sanctioning the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, and privatizing the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation.

“The government is flooding the Knesset with extreme bills, many of which will likely be struck down by the Supreme Court. However, this tactic is deliberate—it allows them to claim the judiciary and the press are conspiring against them,” Oren Persico, an Israeli media analyst at HaAyin HaShevi’it, a website that covers Israeli mass media, explained during a recent online event. “They hope to overwhelm the system, passing some laws and enforcing others selectively. Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to create a media landscape where only pro-government outlets thrive.”

Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to create a media landscape where only pro-government outlets thrive

Persico said the crackdown on judicial and media independence was part of Netanyahu’s attempt to turn Israel into an illiberal democracy in the style of Hungary. “The aim is to preserve the facade of democracy while ensuring perpetual political dominance,” he said.

Pro-government analysts say that critics like Persico fail to recognize that the reforms reflect the will of the public, which is mostly right-wing.

“What you see in the last two years is that Netanyahu had formed a fully right government, which for the first time in many years is not aligned with that habitat of the left,” Nevo Cohen, an Israeli political strategist and adviser to far-right Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, told The Media Line.

He described the attempt to reform the judicial system as a legitimate response to the fact that the Supreme Court is “completely on the left side.”

Shelly Tal Meron, an opposition Knesset member representing the Yesh Atid party, said that the government crackdown on media freedom and judicial independence was misguided.

“Despite the various fronts Israel is battling—Gaza, Lebanon, the Houthis, Iran, and now Syria—this government insists on declaring war on the free media in Israel. Before the war, the judicial reform debate deeply divided the nation. When the war started, I assumed these initiatives would pause indefinitely,” Meron told The Media Line. “Yet, in the past few months, the government has reintroduced the judicial overhaul and initiated a new battle against free media.”

She said that closing the public broadcasting channel or the army radio station would undermine Israeli democracy.

The dangerous reforms targeting Israeli media … threaten democracy itself

Shutting down Al Jazeera’s operations in the country, which Israel did in April, is a different matter, Meron said. “On October 7, thousands of terrorists attacked Israel, committing horrific atrocities. These events, akin to the Holocaust in their brutality, resulted in the worst tragedy since our nation’s founding. Ignoring these events and focusing solely on Gaza’s narrative is not journalism—it’s an abdication of moral responsibility,” she said. “Al Jazeera’s coverage, which often denies or downplays October 7, crosses that line. However, this is separate from the dangerous reforms targeting Israeli media, which threaten democracy itself.”

While Meron and others try to separate the ban on Al Jazeera from the wider media crackdown, some say that the Al Jazeera ban sets a dangerous precedent.

Hagar Shechter, an attorney with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, told The Media Line of a proposed expansion to the Al Jazeera law that would allow the government to shut down other media outlets and block access to news websites.

“The Al Jazeera law’s broad definitions could indeed apply to any foreign media,” Shechter said. “While CNN may not be the first target, the government’s appetite for control suggests they could move against international outlets with Arabic-language platforms, like BBC Arabic or Sky News Arabic, before turning to agencies like AP or CNN.”

She said that shutting down foreign media hurts Israel’s democracy and keeps Israelis from being aware of what’s happening in Gaza.

Israeli journalist, filmmaker, and human rights activist Anat Saragusti told The Media Line that the proposed Al Jazeera law expansion would make Israel’s media landscape similar to that China or Russia.

She said that the Netanyahu government is engaged in “a very organized, orchestrated, and sometimes funded smear campaign against media outlets and individual journalists.” She described Netanyahu as extremely hostile to the press, refusing to grant interviews to Israeli media except for the occasional “friendly, non-journalistic interview” with the right-wing Channel 14.

There is an intensive smear campaign against individual journalists, particularly those covering [Netanyahu’s] trial

“He also ridicules journalists when and if he opens his rare press conferences to questions,” she said. “When they ask questions, he doesn’t answer properly and behaves very cynically. He even refers to the three main TV channels as ‘Al Jazeera’ to indicate they are engaging in treason. There is an intensive smear campaign against individual journalists, particularly those covering his trial.”

Cohen, the right-wing political strategist, dismissed the concerns about sanctioning Haaretz, describing the paper as an “anti-Zionist media outlet.”

Chaim Noy, chair of the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University, noted that press freedom is a spectrum, not a binary.

“Israeli press generally enjoys a degree of freedom that is common in democracies, yet there are certain exceptions,” he told The Media Line. “By exceptions, I am referring to those consistent fields whereby the press does not serve its duties, namely supplying reliable and significant information to the public and being critical of the state and other powerful agencies and institutions.”

Noy said that the press often performs self-censorship on material critical of the state, especially during times of war. “The press is critical of wars in which Israel is involved only at very late times or when state institutions malfunction ostensibly,” he said. “The default position of the Israeli press at times of war is highly non-critical, withholding information from the Israeli public and feeding misinformation instead.”

Cohen, on the other hand, said that Israeli media is significantly more liberal than the Israeli public. He said that Israel’s public television channel, which a controversial bill is attempting to privatize or shut down, has “leftist DNA.”

Many Israelis have turned to social media rather than mainstream news to stay up to date. According to Noy, that’s no solution. “Democracy relies on the truth-value of the facts being reported. There is very little to no responsible gatekeeping regarding social media,” he said.

As the Netanyahu government continues its legislative push, Israeli journalists are still hard at work publishing their scoops, Israeli news consumers are trying to make sense of the current reality, and the question looms: Can Israel balance its democratic values with its security priorities, or will the pressures of conflict and Netanyahu’s gambit to stay in power reshape the nation’s foundational identity?