An ultranationalist Israeli television channel backed by the government is fast emerging as one of the country’s most-watched news sources, despite allegations from liberal groups that it is inciting war crimes, and claims from the army that it is riling up hatred of its generals for not being far enough to the right.
Last month Channel 14, also known as Now 14, beat Israel’s principal mainstream news outlet, Channel 12, in viewer ratings when 343,000 Israelis watched Channel 14’s “Patriots” talkshow, known for its virulent rhetoric on Gaza.
Media analysts say Channel 14’s rise is both a sign and a driver of the shift of Israeli public opinion to the extreme right that has rapidly accelerated since the start of the Gaza war a year ago.
Ayala Panievsky, a presidential fellow in the journalism department of City St George’s, University of London, said: “It is pretty wild, because Israelis consume a lot of news through the big TV channels, 12 and 13, and to a lesser extent the public broadcaster, but Channel 14 was not even in the game until very recently. The war seemed to have helped this channel ride the ‘rally around the flag’ effect and the rising time of nationalism to gain more support.”
Channel 14 has even questioned the loyalty of the Israeli army because of its perceived lack of ideological zeal. Last week, the spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), R Adm Daniel Hagari, wrote a formal complaint to the broadcasting authority and the ministry of defence accusing Channel 14 of incitement against its leadership.
The broadcast that prompted the letter showed doctored pictures of the IDF’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, his face distorted to make him look deranged and shrieking at the sight of messianic religious insignia on a soldier’s uniform. Hagari said the IDF could accept criticism but the channel had “crossed a red line”.
He wrote: “It is deliberate incitement and humiliation of the IDF and its commanders during a war. Unfortunately, this is not the first time Channel 14 has taken such action towards the IDF.”
Channel 14 denied the claim that the broadcast was inflammatory and sardonically advised Hagari not to become a television critic. Netanyahu’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, backed the channel over the army.
Just over a month earlier, three Israeli civil society groups formally demanded that the country’s attorney general launch a criminal investigation into the channel, accusing it of broadcasting material that incited war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide.
In their complaint on 23 September, the organisations – Zulat – Equality and Human Rights; the Democratic Bloc; and the Association for Fair Regulation – supplied a list of 265 quotes from talkshow hosts and guests on Channel 14.
The remarks included guests or presenters using phrases such as “total annihilation” and “exterminate” in reference to people in Gaza. The legal complaint alleged at least 50 of the quotes on the list “call for or support the commission of genocide”.
In a response to the Guardian via its US-based lawyers, Channel 14 denied the claims that its coverage incited genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. It referred to the complaint as “baseless and highly defamatory” and added that the complaint was made by an extreme group in Israel, and that it had been dismissed by the high Court in August.
The complaint argues that the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, is legally obliged to launch an investigation on the grounds that Israel is a signatory to the genocide convention, and because the international court of justice (ICJ) issued an interim order in January instructing the Israeli government to prevent and punish incitement to genocide.
“The explicit calls for committing horrifying crimes against millions of civilians find a home and are legitimised within the Israeli public, partly due to the statements made on the channel,” the groups alleged in their legal complaint.
Channel 14 responded to say the complainants filed an identical or substantially similar “complaint against Channel 14 in the Israeli high court of justice” which was dismissed. “Because the previous complaint was deemed entirely baseless, the high court recommended that plaintiffs withdraw the pleading so that it could be deleted,” the channel’s lawyers said.
Zehava Galon, the president of Zulat and the former leader of the Meretz party, said the high court case was on a different subject, “primarily concerning fake news and a smear campaign against the judicial system”.
“Most of these complaints were from the months preceding October 7. None of the complaints in the appeal pertained to crimes against humanity,” Galon said, adding that the recommendation to withdraw “was based on a conservative policy that discourages the court from substituting the judgment of the regulator”.
The three organisations sent a similar letter to Israel’s media regulator. The letters do not make a judgment on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation being considered by the ICJ following a legal proceeding instigated by South Africa in December which discusses incitement at length.
Among the examples presented in the legal complaint is a Channel 14 anchor threatening the “annihilation” of Palestinians, killing “numbers not seen before in Arab history”.
Another presenter, Shimon Riklin, said on 7 October of Palestinians in Gaza: “We should supply them with neither water nor electricity. Let them drop dead in there!” and tweeted: “Gaza should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Danny Neuman, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a regular Channel 14 panellist, said: “We should have killed 100,000 Gazans in the first two days.”
In a broadcast on 6 May, Neuman said: “A tiny few of them can be deemed human there. Ninety per cent are terrorists and ‘involved’! ”
Channel 14’s lawyers said many remarks referred to in the complaint were “made by guests and reporters on Channel 14 in the wake of the horrific 7 October terrorist attacks”. The lawyers also say that the remarks “were repeated on multiple news stations in Israel”.
There has been a rise in hate speech in Israeli public discourse generally since the 7 October Hamas attack, and it has featured on other news outlets. Neuman was also quoted as calling for the “extermination” of Palestinians in Gaza on Channel 13 for example. Channel 12 broadcast a report from Lebanon on the weekend, in which Danny Kushmaro, the lead reporter, was allowed by the army to press a button blowing up a building in a south Lebanese village.
The groups behind the complaint to the attorney general claim that such rhetoric is far more concentrated on Channel 14.
Panievsky argued: “There is no equivalent at all between what’s happening on Channels 12 or 13, the mainstream media in Israel, and what you see on Channel 14. This is a totally different universe.”
Channel 14’s lawyers disagreed, saying the complainants “are small NGOs closely affiliated with the Israeli far-left who are anxious to defame and disparage Channel 14 and its reporting.” They said questions should be raised about the motivations of the groups, who were “abusing the Israeli legal system in the hopes of garnering negative media for Channel 14”.
Israel’s state attorney, Amit Aisman, said in August that his office examined calls to investigate public figures such as Eyal Golan, a singer, for incitement but decided not to proceed. Aisman did not say why that decision had been taken.
Netanyahu has long been an enthusiastic backer of Channel 14, claiming to have “fought like a lion” for it, and granted it the only interview he has given to local broadcast media in recent years.
The channel is owned by a 40-year-old Russian-born oligarch, Yitzchak Mirilashvili, who co-founded the Russian social networking platform, VKontakte. Mirilashvili’s television venture started out as Channel 20, a niche station covering “heritage” issues, but with Netanyahu’s backing, the Knesset passed an amendment in February 2018 allowing the outlet to broadcast as Channel 14 and to identify itself as a news broadcaster.
It was subsequently granted millions of shekels in state benefits but was officially defined as a “microchannel”, which excused it from many of the rules and restrictions applied to its mainstream competition, Channels 12 and 13.
“They get a lot of regulatory benefits without having any regulation,” Zehava Galon, of Zulat, said.
“The channel has high ratings in the army. Many officers, many soldiers, are exposed to [its rhetoric] .”
Proving incitement to genocide in international courts had to pass a high bar, said Anna Vyshnyakova, a Ukrainian consultant on international humanitarian law who is involved in developing a genocide incitement case at the international criminal court against Russian propaganda channels.
“You need to justify that there is incitement to destroy Palestinians as such, and as such means not because of territorial claims, but because they are Palestinians,” Vyshnyakova said. “Without that, it could be persecution, it could be propaganda for war, but it is not incitement to genocide.”
Channel 14’s lawyers also said the channel, as well as all other Israeli news organisations, was overseen by the Second Television and Radio Authority of Israel which, the company explains, “monitors all daily broadcasts and takes action when any reporting potentially violates Israeli law. If the authority identifies a potential violation of the law, it requests a response from the channel and, if necessary, takes appropriate action. None of the statements contained in the complaint have been questioned by the authority.”
Panievsky said the authority had ceased to be an effective regulator since it had been “packed with people that are comfortable with the government”.
