The Haaretz “exposé” on President Herzog’s conversations with hostage families isn’t journalism. It’s cynicism disguised as moral concern. The paper would have readers believe there’s something corrupt in the idea that desperate parents — people whose children were being held underground by terrorists — might have discussed endorsing a pardon for Benjamin Netanyahu if it could help bring them home. To anyone grounded in reality, that’s not scandalous. That’s human.
From the very beginning of this nightmare, some families even tried to reach Hamas directly. They sent messages through anyone who might listen. They searched for backchannels, pleaded with intermediaries, and tried every conceivable path to their sons and daughters. Can you really fault them? These aren’t political operatives testing strategy. They’re parents living in a kind of pain most of us can’t begin to comprehend. When every day brings another rumor of death, you’ll do anything — anything — that might bring your child home.
Haaretz treats this as a “moral question.” It isn’t. It’s a moral failure. The issue isn’t that the families discussed a pardon; it’s that too many journalists have lost the ability to see human desperation without turning it into a story about corruption. A parent’s plea becomes a headline. Compassion becomes evidence of a deal. The press doesn’t report human pain anymore — it audits it, as though love itself requires a legal disclaimer.
By the time the reader finishes the headline — “Herzog Urged Hostage Families to Back a Netanyahu Pardon” — the damage is already done. The nuance buried deeper in the story doesn’t matter. The frame is set: that something indecent occurred when, in truth, it was one of the few moments in this long ordeal that still reflected decency.
No one should pretend that every decision by the hostage families has been perfect. Desperation leads to mistakes. But Haaretz’s attempt to twist that desperation into a political indictment of Herzog or Netanyahu says far more about the paper than about the people it covers. This wasn’t an exposé. It was an act of projection. It revealed not the corruption of others, but the cynicism of a press that has forgotten how to see human beings before it sees politics.
Haaretz may as well be bought out by Al Jazeera. Same type of fake news.