What writing for the Times of Israel taught a moroccan journalist |
I studied mass communication in Qatar – a country routinely described as a heaven for journalists, though the description has always struck me as more aspirational than empirical. I completed my master’s thesis on Israeli media framing of Morocco across three distinct phases – before normalization, after normalization, and during the Gaza war – analyzing the coverage according to three distinct editorial ideologies: left, center, and right.
I arrived at the subject carrying every assumption my academic environment had furnished me with: that Israeli media operates under military censorship so pervasive it functions as state propaganda, that the press serves as an extension of the security establishment, that the entire information ecosystem is engineered to manufacture consent for occupation. I was trained to see Israel as the graveyard of journalism.
What I found, when I actually engaged with the material – and later, with the institutions themselves – was something my professors in Doha had never prepared me for: a media landscape so free, so plural, so aggressively self-critical that it makes every Arab media ecosystem I have encountered, including the Moroccan one I belong to, look curated by comparison.
Let me begin with my own experience, because personal testimony is harder to dismiss than theory. I have written for The Times of Israel and continue to contribute to it to this day. Not once – not a single time – was any article of mine rejected, altered, or suppressed. I wrote pieces critical of Israeli government policy. I wrote pieces questioning Zionist narratives. I wrote pieces that would have made any nationalist editor in any Arab country reach for the delete button before finishing the first paragraph. Every single one was published. Every single one. I want the reader to sit with that fact for a moment, because it is not a small thing.
Here is a news outlet, operating in a country that much of the world has declared a pariah state, that accepts opinions from a Moroccan journalist even when those opinions challenge the very ideological foundations upon which the state was built. Name me one Arab outlet that would do the same in reverse.
Would Al Jazeera – which presents itself as the gold standard of Arab journalism, the fearless voice of the voiceless – publish an op-ed praising Zionism? Would it run a piece arguing that Israel’s existence is legitimate and its security concerns are valid? The question answers itself, and the silence that follows is the sound of a double standard so enormous it has become invisible.
In fact, I had been contributing to the Times of Israel since 2023 – writing freely, publishing without interference, never once told what to say or what to soften. The outlet that the Arab world brands as a propaganda arm of the Zionist entity never touched a comma of my criticism. It was not Israel that silenced me. It was Qatar. The university itself – the very institution that taught me to champion press freedom, to interrogate power, to speak truth without flinching – instructed me to stop writing for an Israeli publication.
The irony is not subtle; it is obscene. The country that hosts Al Jazeera, that markets itself as the citadel of Arab journalism, that hands out press freedom awards and convenes media ethics conferences in five-star hotels, could not tolerate a graduate student publishing opinion pieces in a newspaper three thousand kilometers away.
And the excuse will come – it always does – that these are merely opinions, that opinions do not represent the outlet, that the disclaimer at the bottom of every op-ed absolves the platform of its contributor’s views. Fine. Then explain to me why, if opinions truly do not represent the outlet, Arab media treats them as if they carry the explosive force of state policy. Explain why editors in Cairo kill columns that question normalization. Explain why Algerian platforms scrub comments that deviate from the regime’s position on Western Sahara. Explain why Qatari institutions panic at the sight of a Moroccan byline in an Israeli newspaper.
If opinions are harmless – if they are, as every Arab editor insists, the sole responsibility of their authors – then why does the entire Arab media establishment behave as though a single dissenting paragraph could bring down the house? The answer is that Arab media does not fear opinions. It fears the precedent of allowing them – because once you permit one voice to think freely, you lose the ability to guarantee that every other voice will remain obedient. And obedience, not journalism, is the product that Arab media actually manufactures.
Israel is a country where Haaretz – a mainstream, widely read daily newspaper – routinely describes its own government’s policies in the occupied territories as apartheid, as ethnic cleansing, as moral catastrophe. Where +972 Magazine operates openly, publishing investigations that would land journalists in prison in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in my own Morocco.
And here is the irony that should embarrass every Arab newsroom invoking press freedom: these are the very same Israeli platforms that furnish Arab media with the ammunition they later use to attack Israel. When Al Jazeera runs a segment on IDF violations, the sourcing is almost invariably Israeli – B’Tselem reports, Haaretz investigations, +972 exposés, Breaking the Silence testimonies. Arab media does not produce the critical journalism about Israel; it imports it – from Israel itself.
Israel is a country that does not fear outside critics because it manufactures its own critics in industrial quantities, funds their newsrooms, protects their legal right to publish, and tolerates their conclusions even when those conclusions accuse the state of war crimes. Israel investigates its own military, publishes its own failures, airs its own atrocities on its own evening news – and then watches as Arab networks repackage that self-criticism as evidence of Israeli villainy, without ever pausing to ask why no equivalent self-criticism exists in their own countries.
Where far-right outlets like Israel Hayom and Arutz Sheva push narratives so nationalist they would make the most hardline settler blush – and all of these exist simultaneously, in the same media market, funded, read, and debated without anyone being detained at three in the morning for what they wrote.
This is not a controlled information environment. This is a marketplace of ideas so volatile, so unmanageable, so ferociously competitive that it produces more self-criticism per square kilometer than any country in the Middle East and North Africa combined.
Consider i24News, which broadcasts in four languages – English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew – each with a distinct editorial personality. The Arabic edition operates with such sensitivity to Arab audiences that it frequently feels less like an Israeli channel than a Palestinian one broadcasting from inside Israel. Arab citizens of Israel operate their own media outlets – Makan, Panet, Arab48, Kul al-Arab – covering their communities in Arabic, criticizing Israeli policies, advocating for Palestinian rights, and doing so under the legal protection of the very state they critique.
Where else in the region does this exist? In Morocco, where the majority of the population is Amazigh, we struggled to secure a single television channel in Tamazight until 2010 – and even now, its editorial independence is a subject best discussed in whispers.
In Qatar, where Al Jazeera is headquartered, can any journalist publish a critical investigation into the Emir’s finances? Into the Al Thani family’s real estate empire across London and Paris? Into labor conditions that built the studios from which Al Jazeera broadcasts? Into Doha’s documented channels of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, for Hamas, for Islamist movements across the region that every neighboring Gulf state has designated as threats to national security? Into the billions spent on a World Cup built on the backs of migrant workers whose passports were confiscated under a kafala system that human rights organizations have called modern slavery? The answer is not merely no – the answer is that the question itself is dangerous to ask.
The accusation that Israel is the graveyard of journalists has become a reflex, repeated so often it has acquired the texture of established fact. And yes, journalists have died in conflict zones where the IDF operates – deaths that deserve investigation, accountability, and institutional reform. I do not dismiss them.
But the phrase “graveyard of journalism” implies the systematic destruction of press freedom as institutional practice, and that is a description that applies far more accurately to the countries making the accusation than to the country being accused. Journalists in Egypt rot in prison for years without trial. Saudi Arabia dismembered one inside a consulate. Syria buried its press corps under barrel bombs. Algeria prosecutes reporters under counterterrorism laws for covering protests.
And yet it is Israel – where Cabinet ministers are called criminals on the evening news, where a sitting prime minister’s corruption trial is broadcast live, where the Supreme Court is criticized and defended in the same newspaper on the same day – that the Arab world has decided is hostile to journalism.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, has been called a fascist by Haaretz columnists, a dictator by protest movements covered sympathetically on prime-time television, and a criminal defendant in a corruption trial that Israeli media broadcasts live, dissects nightly, and editorializes about with a ferocity that would be unimaginable in any Arab capital.
President Isaac Herzog fares no better – routinely dismissed as ceremonially irrelevant by right-wing commentators and criticized as insufficiently vocal by the left, his every public statement parsed, challenged, and often ridiculed in real time across Israeli social media and broadcast networks.
These are not fringe voices operating from exile. These are mainstream journalists, on mainstream platforms, in mainstream Israel – treating their most powerful leaders not as untouchable sovereigns but as public servants accountable to public scrutiny. Now ask yourself: in which Arab country can a journalist call the head of state a criminal on the evening news, keep their job, and sleep in their own bed that night?
This is not analysis. It is projection. Arab media establishments that cannot tolerate a cartoon mocking their head of state have appointed themselves arbiters of press freedom in a country where the head of state is mocked, investigated, indicted, and satirized as a matter of daily routine. The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is architectural.
Let me be clear: Israeli media is not perfect. Military censorship exists on narrow security grounds. Editorial pressures operate, as they do everywhere. But the distance between Israel’s media reality and the Arab world’s media reality is not a gap – it is a chasm so wide that the two sides cannot see each other.
When Arab media reaches the minimum threshold of allowing a journalist to call the president a liar on national television without disappearing the next morning, then – and only then – will the accusation that Israel is a graveyard of journalism deserve to be taken seriously. Until that day, the charge is not criticism. It is confession dressed as accusation, and the Arab world would do well to look in the mirror before pointing at Tel Aviv.