On the night of the U.S. Presidential election, Yinon Magal, the host of a popular talk show on Israel’s Channel 14, burst onto the set wearing a “TRUMP 2024” baseball cap. “I’m a journalist first and foremost,” he told the studio audience. “So I won’t tell you who I’m supporting—Donald or Trump.” His fans gave him an obliging laugh; a father and son sitting beside me snickered loudly enough to be captured on camera. (Before the taping, a studio manager had advised the crowd to react generously, “or Yinon will kick you out.”)
The Trump bit was just a preamble; the show’s real focus was a scandal involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. An hour earlier, Netanyahu had called his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, into a private meeting and fired him. Netanyahu cited differences over Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. But, in Gallant’s telling, the main reason was political: he had refused to support a law exempting yeshiva students from military service—a sop to ultra-Orthodox politicians, who help fill out the coalition that keeps Netanyahu in power. The Prime Minister’s critics were accusing him of sacrificing military stability to advance his own interests. Magal offered a mocking rejoinder: “Hello! Calm down! You’re the ones who said that everyone responsible for October 7th should leave. So what’s the matter? We started with Gallant!”
Every week night at nine, Magal’s show—“Hapatriotim,” or “The Patriots”—assembles a roundtable of hard-right media personalities, nationalist former liberals, and politicians from Netanyahu’s Likud Party. Most of the guests, like Magal, belong to a loose confederation known as the Bibi-ists, devoted to defending the Prime Minister as he moves increasingly to the far reaches of the right wing. If Channel 14 is Netanyahu’s Fox News, Magal is its Tucker Carlson—an object of such devotion that his fans have to be dissuaded from charging the stage to take selfies with him during commercial breaks.
Magal was once a prime-time newscaster, and at fifty-five he still looks the part: a rugged beard, piercing blue eyes, a blandly wholesome face. These days, though, he is an unapologetic combatant, delivering his version of the news in a hunched-over-the-deck posture that has been described as “gorilla pose.” Magal favors building Jewish settlements among the ruins in Gaza. He thinks the military has courted catastrophe by being “too busy” integrating women into combat roles. He has encouraged the “voluntary migration” of political opponents, which would remove not just Palestinians from Gaza but also liberal Jews from Israel. He dismisses criticism of the government as sanctimonious and occasionally treasonous. He and his panelists heap contempt on judges, journalists, academics, and the opposition leader Yair Lapid, whose verbal flip-flopping is the subject of a daily segment. “The level is that of bullies in the locker room,” Chen Liberman, a reporter for the investigative program “Uvda,” told me.
In the past two years, Israel has undergone unrelenting political upheaval, war, and international criticism. Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, over allegations that he sought favorable media coverage and illicitly accepted expensive gifts. (He denies any wrongdoing.) Yet he has stayed in office, and Channel 14 has thrived as his defender. In early 2023, an effort to radically expand the government’s power by weakening the courts set off the largest protest movement in Israel’s history. Magal lashed out at the demonstrators, calling them “barn burners” and “Kapos,” connoting Nazi collaborators. Then came the attacks of October 7th, when a Hamas-led force stormed into Israel, massacring civilians and taking hostages. As Israel has carried out a devastating war of retribution in Gaza, Magal and his guests have projected a reassuring sense of moral conviction. Watching Channel 14, it is easy to believe that “we are winning, and everything is honey,” as Oren Persico, a writer for the media-criticism publication the Seventh Eye, put it. “After the trauma of October 7th, people were longing for that.”
Channel 14, once an obscure station known for interview shows and religious-themed children’s programming, has become the favored news source of a growing right-wing movement. Yet Magal still insists that he is an underdog. In his view, the Israeli left and its supporters in the media are a “thought dictatorship”—never mind that Netanyahu has held power for fifteen years. Liberman told me, “Victimization is his most effective fuel. So you preserve the sense of being a victim even after you’ve won over and over and over again.”
In the studio, as Magal argued that Netanyahu had had no choice but to fire Gallant, I was struck by the almost jubilant atmosphere. Military unity used to be sacrosanct in Israel—especially on the right, and especially in times of war. Yet now a defense minister had been sacked under dubious circumstances, and the audience cheered. Magal cut to a clip in which Gallant said, “Israel’s security has been and remains my life’s mission” and saluted the fallen soldiers. People sitting near me laughed, and Itamar Fleischmann, a panelist and a former political consultant, lingered on Gallant’s “strange salute.” Other guests expressed hope that the chief of staff would be the next to go.
Magal says that he is both a journalist and an entertainer, just “as a cucumber is both green and long.” After the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza held a vigil to mark a hundred days of war, he performed a burlesque of sympathy on the air: “Oh, the grief! The grief!” During the taping I saw, he showed footage from Tel Aviv, where protesters had swarmed the Ayalon Highway, blocking traffic and lighting bonfires. “It’s Lag b’Omer on Ayalon again,” he said, referring to a Jewish holiday that is marked with fire. “And these are the same people who cried for years about pollution and the environment?”
Channel 14 seems to run on a simple equation. Whatever serves Netanyahu’s interests, Magal and “The Patriots” promote. What doesn’t, they mock and dismiss. “There’s no coherence,” Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a media expert at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, told me. “It doesn’t matter what Bibi said yesterday. It’s all about what serves him today.” Magal once described himself as a “vessel” for messages from Netanyahu. When he was asked who he saw as a potential heir to the Prime Minister, he deadpanned, “Me.”
“Are you with me or against me?” Magal texted, with a winking emoji, when I asked him to meet. Then he invited me to an apartment that he keeps as an office, in a tree-lined section of northern Tel Aviv. The neighborhood is a center of liberal Israel—though, as the left has lost influence, it has come to resemble an embattled bastion. Down the street from Magal’s building, a sign hanging from a balcony referred to Netanyahu without mentioning his name: “GUILTY.”
I knocked at Magal’s door, and he yelled for me to come in. He was sitting at the kitchen table, which was strewn with bills and a copy of the Talmud. On one wall was a rendering of the Third Temple, which he believes will be built in Jerusalem. “I don’t know if it will take a year or a hundred years or ten years, but it will happen,” he said. The State of Israel had become disconnected from its Jewish identity, Magal argued: “The alternative brought disaster on us. The so-called rationalism of seeing all people as equal, and thinking that the Palestinians, like us, just want peace and a state—that rationalism ended in Kalashnikovs and pickup trucks and R.P.G.s.” Magal’s world view—nationalistic, tribal, intolerant—is ascendant, not only in Israel, he said, but around the world. “We are winning everything. Trump. Ratings. The war—of course.”
The operation to support Netanyahu and to diminish his opponents appears so well orchestrated that it has gained a quasi-military nickname: the poison machine. In 2022, the Israeli parliamentarian Naftali Bennett recalled negotiating with Netanyahu after a recent election failed to yield a clear winner. According to Bennett, when Netanyahu realized that he was considering forming a government without him, he warned, “I’ll send the Army on you.” (Bennett explained that Netanyahu meant “his mouthpieces, the whole operation.”) Bennett’s tenure as Prime Minister lasted only a year.
In recent years, people close to Netanyahu have promoted a series of outlandish falsehoods, claiming that Ehud Barak, a former Prime Minister, is a pedophile; that Benny Gantz, another political opponent, had an affair that made him susceptible to blackmail by Iran; that the husband of a prominent anti-government protester was in contact with the leader of Hamas days before the October 7th massacre. Gideon Sa’ar, an opposition legislator who withstood such attacks for years, told me, in 2023, “It’s a working method of slandering and tainting political rivals. Everyone who criticizes Netanyahu receives ‘treatment.’ ” (Last November, Sa’ar relented and joined the government; he is now the foreign minister.) “Uvda” recently uncovered text messages sent by Netanyahu’s wife, Sara. In them, she orders a longtime aide to dispatch protesters—“full force”—to the homes of people involved in Netanyahu’s trial, including the chief prosecutor, a prominent witness, and the state’s attorney general.
Magal dismisses the notion of an orchestrated campaign. Instead, he described a “battle” being waged between Netanyahu’s camp and everyone else. “I see my role as deciding the battle and insuring that we will win,” he told me. “I collect people. I influence people. I make people small, I make people weak.”
As we spoke, his phone kept lighting up. “Want to see?” he asked. He scrolled through dozens of messages: “The greatest media personality we’ve ever had here.” “You’re the man.” “The charisma . . .” “Thank you for making us stop apologizing.”
“It’s infinite! A thousand a day,” he said. Often, he selects his favorite messages and forwards them to his mother. “True,” she responds. “Very true!”
Magal calls himself a dos, a derogatory Hebrew term for the religiously observant. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. During my visit, he wore a clingy gray T-shirt and jeans, with no kippah; he has a buzz cut, which evokes his days in an élite special-forces unit called Sayeret Matkal. Netanyahu also served in Sayeret Matkal, and the two men’s biographies contain striking similarities. Both spent most of their childhood in Jerusalem, with secular Ashkenazi parents. Both followed an admired older brother to Sayeret Matkal, and both became commanding officers. Both saw themselves as outsiders in a hostile environment. Magal’s father, a career military man, voted for the Labor Party but told his sons, “You’re Jews first and foremost. You’re closer to the Haredi man in Brooklyn than you are to the Druze soldier fighting alongside you.”
In the military, Magal was doggedly ambitious, according to a former soldier from Sayeret Matkal. He rankled his subordinates by volunteering them for extra navigation sessions. As a leader, though, he was introverted and tentative. The former soldier recalled that during field exercises team members “would ask him on the military radio, ‘Yinon, left or right?,’ and he would dawdle and say, ‘I’m still thinking.’ He was the exact opposite of who he is today.” Later, his unit mates started a WhatsApp group but excluded Magal. “The team is supposed to be like brothers, but no one is in touch with him,” the former soldier said. “He was never liked.”
In 1995, Magal was twenty-six, out of the Army, and feeling aimless. “My wheels were spinning in the air,” he told me. It was an anxious time in Israel. The government of Yitzhak Rabin had negotiated a historic peace accord with Palestinian leaders, but hard-liners on both sides felt betrayed. Suicide bombers struck repeatedly inside Israel, and right-wing demonstrations grew violent. Though Magal was skeptical of the peace agreement, he didn’t get involved in the political dispute. Instead, he travelled to India—“the cliché of the Israeli who goes searching for himself”—and spent a year trekking, riding motorcycles, and taking drugs.
One night in Dharamkot, a destination for Israeli seekers, a friend invited him to join a predawn meditation ritual, which led to an unexpected epiphany. At the end of the session, Magal recalls, he opened his eyes and saw his friend bowing to a statue of the Buddha—a grave violation of Jewish law. “It rocked me,” he said. He began to frequent Chabad centers in India, and he returned home with a newfound piety and a deepened commitment to right-wing ideas.
He got a job at Army Radio, a popular station run by the military, and worked his way up from stringer to reporter. In 1999, he asked to become the correspondent in the West Bank, which was then a source of stories about the excesses of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. He had a clear goal—“I wanted to change the coverage of the settlers”—but he did not announce his politics. Nadav Eyal, a columnist and author who worked at the station at the time, recalled, “He wore shalwars from India and wasn’t ideologically affiliated. He was a good guy. Journalism was different then. We didn’t know anything about his opinions.”
Israel is a media-obsessed place; the first Hebrew-language newspapers appeared before the founding of the country. Yet for decades there was only one television channel, a PBS-style public network, and three-quarters of the population tuned in to its evening news broadcast. Barely a decade after Magal secured his first media job, he became the network’s top anchor, and soon he was famous enough that fans stopped him on the street. Still, he felt scorned by his peers. He told me that he was compelled to keep his views “mostly in the closet,” and has compared being a right-leaning journalist in a liberal environment to undergoing a forced conversion.
Netanyahu made similar complaints, but at greater volume. He once griped that the media and the left were “trying to carry out a governmental coup.” After a failed campaign in 1999, he blamed negative coverage, telling associates, “I need my own media.” Magal was not yet ready to provide it. Although he supported Likud, he criticized those who exhibited a cultish devotion to Netanyahu. As he puts it now, he was still a “values voter.”
The popular sketch-comedy show “It’s a Wonderful Country,” on Channel 12, has a recurrent Magal character: a derisive, pearl-clutching blowhard whose tagline is “Oy, oy, oy!” (As in: “Oy, oy, oy! They took away our democracy!”) In November, the show aired a fierce takedown of “The Patriots.” The subject was the hostages—“Who, I remind you, weren’t democratically elected,” the Magal character announces—and the panel credulously parsed a series of outrageous conspiracies. “I’m not so sure that when we look at what happened we won’t find that those kibbutzniks kidnapped themselves to topple Netanyahu,” the Fleischmann character muses. “If true, then it’s crazy!” Magal responds.
People who worked with Magal a decade ago remember a more centrist figure. In 2012, he left his television job and joined the online news site Walla. Its politics did not align with his. “The news desk was very leftist, very Tel Avivian, very gay-friendly,” Dan Magen, a former colleague there, said. But Magal was warmly received; he was a star in media circles, and a low-grade heartthrob in Tel Aviv. Magen recalled “a lot of excitement among female producers.”
The next year, Magal was promoted to editor-in-chief, and launched a section called Walla Judaism. In 2014, during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, he came up with a slogan—“First of all, Israeli!”—that the site used in a national advertising campaign. But his tenure was not without conflict. Walla journalists regularly complained that Netanyahu and Sara sought to influence coverage of them, and by all accounts Magal repeatedly backed his employees. (The Netanyahus deny the allegations.) When the site ran a story about the Netanyahus’ inflated expenses, which included more than a thousand dollars’ worth of scented candles, the C.E.O. texted Magal to remove the article from the home page. Thirty minutes later, he wrote again: “Lose the goddam candles already.” Magal assented, but told his boss, “By the way, I went to that house once and felt like I was at a séance.”
Finally, Magal was ordered to kill the article altogether, and he grew furious. “This goes beyond any ethical boundary,” he wrote back. “With all due respect, we can’t make stories about the Prime Minister disappear.” These days, Magal argues that many politicians tried to influence coverage. But, when we spoke, he allowed that the Netanyahus’ interference was particularly onerous. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “I just wanted to escape.”
In 2014, Magal was offered an appealing way out. Naftali Bennett was rebuilding his party, Jewish Home, in preparation for a forthcoming election. He and Magal had served together in Sayeret Matkal, and they remained on good terms. Did Magal want to join? Magal soon got a seat in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, where he revealed a swaggering, cantankerous side. He addressed Arab lawmakers in Arabic, telling them from the lectern, “There will be no Palestinian state from the river to the sea!” Chaim Levinson, a journalist for the liberal newspaper Haaretz, recalled joining a staid panel on the role of the press in which “Yinon suddenly started screaming at me, ‘You! The media! Tried to shut me up!’ ”
Magal’s fans are so devoted that they have to be dissuaded from charging the stage to take selfies with him during commercial breaks.
Magal savored the performative aspect of politics. “I was a meteor,” he says. Yet his career didn’t last long. That November, a Walla writer named Racheli Rottner accused him of harassing her during his farewell party, at a bar in Tel Aviv. Rottner wrote on social media that she had always liked Magal, defending him whenever colleagues “dismissed him out of what felt to me like blind, automatic leftism.” So she was surprised when he leaned in close at the bar and told her, “The entire time we were working together I was horny for you. I would look at you and think about your tits and ass.”
Rottner’s post spread quickly, setting off what was perhaps Israel’s first #MeToo scandal. Magal—married, with four young boys—quickly issued a response on Facebook, in which he described the incident as “things that were said between friends” and apologized vaguely to “anyone who was hurt.” Then he fled to Rome with his wife, hoping that the scandal would pass. Instead, three more women came forward to accuse him of unwanted sexual advances, including grabbing one by her backside and forcing a kiss on another. (The police opened a criminal investigation, then closed it, citing a lack of evidence.) Though Magal wanted to fight the allegations, Bennett sought his immediate resignation from official duties, and he left parliament soon afterward.
When I asked about the farewell party, Magal told me, “I was drunk and high. I didn’t remember it at all.” Then he made an attempt at introspection: “I’m relatively good-looking, and I’m successful, and things come easily for me, so I allowed myself too much, and that’s not O.K.” Yet, even after a decade, he seemed freshly aggrieved. Magal has blamed Bennett for “calling me a true friend and then stabbing me in the back.” He still sounds angry at Yediot Ahronot, the country’s leading daily paper, for devoting fifteen pages to the scandal. “I went through a lynching,” he told me. “I’m mad at the media more than I am at the women, because the women wanted publicity.” Rottner declined to sit for an interview with me, but she wrote a tart response to Magal’s assertion: “I certainly enjoyed the death threats, curses, and false rumors calling me a cheating slut that I was awarded thanks to this coveted ‘publicity.’ ”
After leaving the Knesset, Magal was out of work for two years, with rising debts that he had to ask his family to help pay off. “I was broken,” he says. His outlook fundamentally changed. “He got into an Archie Bunker mind-set,” Levinson, the Haaretz journalist, who was once friendly with Magal, said. “He saw the left as a hypocritical camp that was out to destroy him. Since then, he has developed not a right-wing ideology but a social hatred of the left.”
The Walla interference case led to an indictment, and Netanyahu faced criminal charges for bribery and fraud. In the summer of 2023, Magal appeared in the district court in Jerusalem to testify. It was a surreal spectacle: Netanyahu’s foremost media defender had been called as a witness for the prosecution. His fans filled the courtroom. At one point, according to a report in the Seventh Eye, Magal turned to them and murmured, “Oy, oy, oy!,” generating waves of laughter.
On the witness stand, Magal argued that Walla had been “hostile” toward Netanyahu. When prosecutors read him a previous statement in which he had called the site’s coverage “objective,” he waved away the discrepancy. “I suppose it was convenient for me to think that I was maintaining some kind of objectivity when I worked there,” he said.
Shimon Riklin, a close friend of Magal’s and a host on Channel 14, recalled his own conversion to Bibi-ism. An ardent settler leader, Riklin used to attack the government from the right, arguing that Netanyahu was not building housing fast enough in the occupied West Bank. One day in 2016, he got a phone call: the Prime Minister wanted to meet at his office. Riklin recalls that Netanyahu opened with a joke. Two men, a left-winger and a right-winger, apply for a job. The leftist goes before the application committee and is asked, “When did World War Two start?” He replies, “1939.” “Very good,” they tell him. “And when did it end?” “1945.” “Very good. How many Jews were killed?” “Six million.” “Very good.” The rightist walks in and gets the same questions. “How many Jews were killed?” “Six million,” he answers. This time, the committee says, “Names! We want names!” Netanyahu’s implication, Riklin said, was that “we’re the alliance of the oppressed. They will never accept us.” He told me, “That moment, everything clicked for me. I heard him out and thought, That’s exactly how I feel.”
Around that time, Magal and Riklin helped form a group, which they described as the “new right,” to coördinate efforts to fight what they saw as the media’s left-wing bias. A debate broke out within the group over whether it was better to infiltrate mainstream organizations or to attack the establishment from the outside. One of the members, a political reporter named Amit Segal, told me that it was a “choice between evolution and revolution.” Segal had chosen the former; he works for Channel 12, Israel’s most watched news outlet, where he presents right-wing views while preserving an air of scrupulous independence. Riklin and Magal went outside, eventually taking jobs at Channel 14. The station was obscure, but its mission attracted Magal. As he put it, the goal was to “change the consciousness of the State of Israel—turn it into something more religious, more Jewish. In the battle between being Israeli and being Jewish, Channel 14 brings the agenda of being Jewish first of all.”
In 2020, at the height of campaign season, a video spread online. Shot at Netanyahu’s residence, it shows Magal, Riklin, and another Channel 14 host playing guitars and singing a song from Psalms. At one point, Netanyahu, wearing a suit, walks in and joins them. By then, the three hosts had established a WhatsApp group that they call the Bureau, in which they discuss the slant they will take on the day’s news. Their messages are then amplified on Channel 14 and on social media, where Magal has nearly a million followers across various platforms—a considerable number in a country of ten million. When Netanyahu appears on “The Patriots,” he posts on social media, urging his citizens to tune in.
The hosts’ tools are journalistic, but their content is propaganda, according to Achiya Schatz, the director of Fake Reporter, a nonprofit group that monitors disinformation. “They are the superspreaders,” Schatz said. “They shape our political culture.” Their messages often echo those from the Prime Minister’s office. In October, Channel 14’s Web site ran a column by Jacob Bardugo, a political adviser to Netanyahu who is one of the network’s stars. It appeared to be a talking-points memo from Netanyahu’s inner circle: “You have to mention that this brings us closer to a deal. . . .” “You have to talk about how it’s not a coincidence. . . .”
Riklin told me that he and Magal inform Netanyahu’s positions as much as he informs theirs. In 2016, when an Israeli medic fatally shot a wounded Palestinian militant who had earlier stabbed a soldier in Hebron, military leaders pressed for a severe prison sentence. Netanyahu went along at first. Then, a few days later, amid an uproar orchestrated by Magal and Riklin, he began to express sympathy for the medic. Riklin said, “We’re presented as a bunch of idiots with a fax. But, from my experience, there’s total balance between us and him.”
In 2023, the government’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary divided Israeli society. There seemed to be new proposals every day: to override Supreme Court decisions, to give the government effective veto power over the selection of judges, to transform outside legal advisers into political appointees. Liberal Israelis viewed these efforts as anti-democratic and dangerous. But Netanyahu’s administration and its political base were undeterred.
One of the regular panelists on “The Patriots” is Irit Linur, an author once known for her liberal views. When I met her recently, she quoted a lyric that had become a staple of the anti-government protests: “I will not be silent, for my country has changed its face.” Then she rolled her eyes. “Well, countries change their faces,” she said, sipping a cappuccino. (Like Magal and Riklin, she lives in Tel Aviv; as one journalist put it, “They enjoy the comforts of the world they incite against every evening.”)
Linur complained that protesters “call Netanyahu a dictator”—but would a dictator be standing trial, as Netanyahu is doing? Her camp was attacked for being unenlightened. And yet, she insisted, “I care more about minority rights than Aharon Barak,” a famously liberal Supreme Court Justice, who is now retired. Which minorities was she referring to? “The Haredim, for example,” she said. I asked about Palestinian Israelis, who account for a fifth of the population. She told me that she supported their rights—as long as they didn’t have national aspirations. “You know what?” she said, growing irritated. “Even if I’m less ‘enlightened,’ I am the majority!”
Magal covered the protests with his usual gleeful disdain. Inwardly, though, he was worried. (He told me he believed in hindsight that the protesters had won: “They managed to convince people that it was the end of democracy.”) Netanyahu, sliding in the polls, needed a friendly venue. That April, he appeared on “The Patriots,” where he was welcomed like a ballplayer on his home turf.
The left “has woken up,” Magal complained to him. They’re “in ecstasy.” What’s more, intelligence reports indicated that Israel’s enemies were paying close attention; the threat of war was looming. “Is it serious?” Magal asked.
“I think it’s overblown,” Netanyahu replied, with a half smile. He added that Israel was prepared for every scenario. Six months later, Hamas launched its attack across the border.
October 7th, 2023, fell on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, so Channel 14 paused its programming, instead filling the screen with a colorful slide that read “Broadcasts will resume after the holiday.” There was no coverage as thousands of militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad infiltrated border communities and killed some twelve hundred people; as they took civilian hostages and set homes ablaze with families trapped inside; as the terrorists uploaded euphoric videos of themselves parading their human loot through the streets of Gaza.
No one doubts that Hamas instigated and carried out the massacre. Ask Israelis what caused it, however, and you’ll get wildly different answers. Magal believes that Israelis “brought October 7th on ourselves” by not being tough enough. Palestinians—whom he calls Arabs—“need to understand that we are the landlords here.” On the night of the attacks, he tweeted, “It’s time for Nakba 2,” referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians during the formation of Israel.
Throughout the war, “The Patriots” has insisted that Netanyahu was not at fault for missing the signs of an invasion—that security officials purposefully kept intelligence from him. The idea was planted by Netanyahu, in a late-night social-media post, and, though the post was quickly deleted, Magal took up the argument. Even after a military report concluded that senior commanders had begun calling the Prime Minister’s office at two o’clock on the morning of the attacks, the Bibi-ists insisted that the security officers were at fault. “They didn’t wake you!” Magal told Netanyahu in June, sounding exasperated. The occasion was the Prime Minister’s first interview with Israeli media since the attacks, eight months before, and Magal proved reliably unexacting. “How would things have been different had they woken you up?” he asked. Netanyahu affected a magnanimous tone: “Yinon, there’s no point getting into these things.”
On “The Patriots,” the discussion of the war alternates between triumphal and venomous. Moshe Feiglin, a former member of the Knesset, said, soon after the attacks, “If the goal of this operation is not destruction, conquest, eviction, and settlement, then we haven’t done a thing!”A few weeks later, a Likud lawmaker named Keti Shitrit said, “If you ask me personally . . . I flatten Gaza, I have no sentiments.” Last February, Fleischmann said of civilians in Gaza, “I think the more humane solution is to starve them.” Magal himself suggested, in June, “Wipe those people out. As far as I’m concerned, let five hundred civilians remain there.” Until recently, the home page of Channel 14’s Web site kept a running tally of Palestinian casualties, including women and children, with the headline “Terrorists we eliminated.”
Since the war began, participants in Channel 14’s shows have called at least fifty times for the military to carry out genocide in Gaza, according to Israeli nonprofits that monitor the broadcasts. In September, the groups—the Democratic Bloc, Zulat, and the Association for Fair Regulation—filed a complaint with the attorney general against the station. Michael Sfard, a human-rights attorney who represents them, said that the complaint was part of a larger story, “about an Israeli network that has turned into a platform for incitement to war crimes at a time of war, and that is closely backed and supported by the Prime Minister and his allies.”
Channel 14 enjoys huge regulatory benefits that its competitors—which have to maintain independent news departments with a publicly appointed board of directors, and are obligated to hand over a percentage of their earnings to support original Israeli productions—do not. The government “turned the entire regulation of television on its head in order to help out Channel 14,” Shwartz Altshuler, of the Israel Democracy Institute, told me. In 2018, she was asked before parliament to speak about media regulation. She called out the lopsided treatment that Channel 14 received. “It was the only time I was ever kicked out of a Knesset committee,” she said. That year, a former Netanyahu spokesman told police investigators about a meeting that Netanyahu had held whose subject was “the need to provide a tailwind” to the network. According to the investigative site Shakuf, the current government has quadrupled its advertising spending on Channel 14, while cutting ad funds for its main competitors by more than half.
Occasionally, Channel 14 participants are forced to issue apologies. Yet the network has been undeterred in its coverage of the war. Its owner is a reclusive billionaire named Yitzchak Mirilashvili. Born in St. Petersburg, Mirilashvili grew up during the tumultuous period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As rival oligarchs fought to secure the assets once held by the state, Mirilashvili’s father made a huge fortune in businesses spanning oil, real estate, and diamonds. Yitzchak, who moved to Israel in his youth, made his own fortune by helping found Russia’s largest social-media site, VK. Both he and his father are major donors to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
The channel’s coverage of Netanyahu has prompted comparisons to Fox News, but a more apt analogy may be to Russia’s Channel One, the Kremlin-affiliated network. Channel One broadcasts are “a gladiator arena of opinion-makers, each inflaming the other, in front of a live audience,” Persico, of the Seventh Eye, said. “That’s ‘The Patriots’ exactly.” On both outlets, he added, the investigative reporting is negligible. And there is little distance between officials and those who cover them. When I spoke to Magal, he indicated that he had spoken to Netanyahu just a few days earlier, after news broke that one of his aides had been accused of leaking a highly classified security document to the German tabloid Bild. Magal said of Netanyahu, “When he has a message, he calls me.”
Critics of Channel 14 argue that the real problem is not simply the coverage, which is easy enough to turn off. It’s that the network has changed the media landscape: by going so far to the right, it has forced the mainstream to the right, too. Liberman, the “Uvda” reporter, told me, “Once you have an outlet that cries out the loudest and has people on it who call for genocide, if a reporter is out there working on a story about the plight of the Gazan people, then they’ll attack you and label you Al Jazeera.”
More than a year into a war that, according to the Gaza health ministry, has killed an estimated forty-six thousand Palestinians, Israel has not allowed a single journalist into the Gaza Strip without military supervision. On the rare occasion when news of the humanitarian disaster there reaches Israeli screens, it tends to focus on the soldiers and their targets in Hamas. At times, the boundary between the press and the Army vanishes altogether. Last October, Danny Cushmaro, a respected longtime presenter on Channel 12, embedded with a military battalion in southern Lebanon. In one report, a soldier teaches him how to detonate an explosive device. Cushmaro is then seen pressing a button, and a thunderous explosion reduces a building to rubble. Persico, of the Seventh Eye, said that the incident was a “direct result” of Channel 14’s influence.
Not long ago, Magal posted an illustration on X of a man standing before a split screen. On the left side are demons, stormy skies, and the logos of Israel’s three mainstream television channels. On the right: flowers and sunshine and the logo of Channel 14. “That’s the entire difference,” Magal wrote. For once, even his critics agreed.
Tune in to “The Patriots” on any given night and you’ll see Magal and his guests having a blast. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we don’t have a sourpuss look on our faces,” Linur, the panelist, said. They seem to spend more time picking apart social-media posts by liberal activists than they do discussing policy. Magal’s name recently cropped up in the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, as part of genocide allegations brought against Israel by South Africa. (A video he shared in 2023 showed Israeli soldiers singing that they would “wipe out Amalek”—a Biblical enemy of the people of Israel.) Yet he grows visibly bored when asked to consider the kind of Palestinian leadership he would like to see replace Hamas.
When we spoke, I asked about the dissonance between the show’s lighthearted packaging and its inflammatory rhetoric. In a segment last summer, Magal announced that an Israeli air strike had killed a top Hamas commander. Then he paused, and added, in an oh-by-the-way tone, that it had also killed forty-two Gazan civilians. The live audience was briefly silent, adjusting to his cue. Then it broke into applause. Magal took in the response with a teasing smile.
Magal laughed when I mentioned the segment. “It’s a kind of game of walking on the edge between what I can say and what I can’t, between what’s politically correct and what people really feel,” he said. “These are games that I enjoy playing out on television, because everyone understands the situation, and the leftists get angry and the right-wingers are happy, and it creates high emotions. So it’s good television.”
O.K., forget television, I said. Are there innocent civilians in Gaza?
It was the only time, in an hour and a half of conversation, that he paused to think before replying. Finally, he said, “What’s innocent? I think they all want to eradicate us.”
Even children? I asked. “What do I know, children?” he said. “You see what they’re taught in kindergartens with weapons and grenades and mortars. It’s a violent, primitive culture.”
Later, he returned to the subject. “Personally, it often hurts me to see their pain. And immediately I tell myself, ‘Yinon, have no mercy. Have no mercy! Even when the pictures are hard to take. Yinon, remember, he who shows mercy to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.’ ”
For months, Magal and his fellow-panelists had argued against a deal with Hamas that would bring about a ceasefire in Gaza and free the hostages—even as most of the hostage families, and a substantial majority of the population, pleaded for such a deal. Magal said that the families, in their protests and vigils, were “playing into the hands of Hamas.” An investigation published last year by the financial newspaper TheMarker showed a “systematic effort” on social media to delegitimatize the hostage families and depict them as politically motivated. The poison machine has come for them.
“The Patriots” didn’t dwell on the accusations that Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners had threatened to topple the government if a ceasefire deal was reached. But last year Magal told Eli Elbag, whose teen-age daughter is among the captives, that a deal will never be negotiated, because “if there is a deal, there will not be a government.”
In December, the negotiations between Israel and Hamas reportedly reached a breakthrough, raising hopes of a “partial” deal, in which a six-week ceasefire would be exchanged for the release of some thirty hostages. For once, Netanyahu’s coalition partners did not veto the agreement outright. Almost overnight, the tone on Channel 14 changed. Magal welcomed the prospect—“God willing.”
The reality of a partial deal is hard to fathom: scores of wounded people returning home from the Gazan underworld after more than a year in captivity; a brief cessation of hostilities that are then resumed—even as famine spreads across Gaza. But it is harder still to fathom a continuation of the status quo: strikes on schools and hospitals across Gaza; fires raging in Palestinian tent cities that are supposed to provide safe zones; a daily drip of Israeli military casualties; a hundred hostages left behind in airless tunnels.
Israel is a difficult place to live, Magal conceded when we spoke. He mentioned a recent exodus of liberal Israelis, fed up with the rocket strikes and the government’s extremism. “People think that they are choosing to leave, but they’re not,” he said. “The land is vomiting them out.” What will the new country—the country he has fought to achieve—look like? I asked. “I’m not worried,” Magal replied. “The Haredim will serve in the Army, and they will work. And people from the left wing who are still here will become right-wing. It’s a process. This place will not crumble.” He smiled. “Things will only get better and better and better.” ♦