The Disengagement, the Media, and Dan Halutz, by by Hillel Fendel (Israel National News)
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Top Israeli broadcast journalist Ilana Dayan: “The ‘level of truth’ in the media decreased during the Disengagement – and thousands of expelled residents paid the price.”
Delivering a lecture entitled “The Truth” to a group of media students at Bar Ilan University this week, Dayan – a leading popular broadcaster not known for espousing right-wing views – implied that Israeli journalists did not carry out their job properly.
“Journalists knew that this Disengagement would have a high price in security,” she said. “But they did not ask these questions, and they continue not to ask where the rain of Kassams on Sderot is coming from. We didn’t ask, because we had a strong Prime Minister, who had a firm hold on Israeli media power centers, and he therefore succeeded in lowering the level of truth… The price for this was paid by some 8,000 Jews who were uprooted from their homes, while no one really clarified totally whether this Disengagement was just.”
Dayan said that journalists claim to tell the truth, and “my work is to tell the truth,” reported Hagit Ritterman for B’Sheva. “But the more a journalist is honest with himself,” Dayan continued, “the more he realizes that this definition is weak.”
B’Sheva Editor Emanuel Shilo also had some thoughts on the Disengagement and the media. Reporting on a real-time movie of IDF commanders – including outgoing Chief of Staff Halutz – making decisions during the Second Lebanon War, Shilo writes:
“Three months after the Disengagement, [the movie’s director] Menashe Raz returned to Halutz with a question regarding the possibility that Halutz might be go down in history as the ‘Chief of the Staff of the Disengagement.’ Halutz hurried to answer, ‘Menashe, I have another three years to be the Chief of Staff. Do you know how many things will happen here in that time? I can assume that I will yet receive another title or two…'”The film was released only after the Lebanon War, and it concludes with this caption: “While Halutz and the top IDF Division Commanders had to deal with planning and executing the mission of removing citizens from their homes, the preparations for the real war with Hizbullah in Lebanon were ignored. Halutz was right; he won’t be remembered as the ‘Chief of the Staff of the Disengagement.'”
Shilo writes that this caption can be understood in several ways:
“Did the producers mean to blame the uprooted citizens of Gush Katif for not accepting the decree and for refusing to abandon their communities, thereby forcing the IDF to invest its resources in uprooting them? [Or] it could be that this could be an accusation against the government for assigning the IDF with a mission that [should have belonged to the police], thus forcing it to neglect its truly important missions.“It can also be read as an accusation against Halutz and friends, who girded up for this police mission hoisted upon them without trying to warn of the dangerous price it could cost.”