This is a true story. All the facts in it are based on open sources that can be verified. I added some of my own conclusions, but in a very prudence manner. I hope that it will help you see that there is no need for all kinds of exotic conspiracies or satanic rituals to be involved, in order to explain how the rich and powerful can manipulate us. The way they can do it is much more simple. Why? Because we let them.
This is chapter 2 of a series of posts. Please see index of previous parts at the end of the post.
The night of April 7th 1977, is one of the most memorable nights in Israeli history. On that night, Maccabi Tel Aviv’s basketball team won the European basketball cup for the first time, one of the greatest achievement of an Israeli sports team ever, and certainly the greatest up to that time. A wave of euphoria swept through the whole country. People went out to the streets, celebrating, in what was true pride about the sports achievement, but probably also an act of escapism in the midst of a political and social crisis. Thus, no one really cared to notice that on the same night, then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, announced his resignation from the leadership of the Israeli labor party. Rabin would certainly go further and announce his resignation from the prime ministry, but he couldn't because his government was a transient government, with the date for the next elections already set for few weeks later. Elections in which that labour party lost for the first time, to the right wing “Likud”.
Rabin’s stepping down came after Dan Margalit, then a young journalist, working in the “Ha’aretz” newspaper, published a story about a secret bank account that Rabin and his wife, Leah, held in Washington while violating the Israeli foreign bank accounts regulations of that time.
In an historical perspective, this story did not matter that much. The labor would lose the the elections anyway, and Rabin’s political career was not harmed too badly. He was prime minister again from 1993 until his assassination in 1995. But it was the kind of story that any journalist dreams about, and for Dan Margalit, it was the story that made him a key figure in the Israeli media arena.
Margalit spent most of his career as the host of TV news magazines, but kept writing in “Ha’aretz” and then in “Maariv”. For a short period he acted as the chief editor of “Maariv”, a position that he left while accusing the newspaper's publisher at that time, Yaakov Nimrodi, of meddling too much in the editor's work. I will get back to Nimrodi and “Maariv” in another chapter.
Margalit joined “Yisrael Ha'Yom” after, according to his autobiographical book, his political stance changed towards the right. His critique of Ehud Olmert was mostly accepted as sincere, especially in view of the lack of such criticism in the other Israeli newspapers. He was given the same writing freedom as all the other writers in “Yisrael Ha'Yom”. It was clear though that he had some seniority over the other columnists in the tabloid. Having such a major media figure on board was very important for Adelson. It helped him shape “Yisrael Ha’Yom” into something that looks almost exactly like a real newspaper, so much that he could now make his facade be accepted to the Israeli board of press, which opened the door for adding a weekend magazine and attracting advertisers.
But the fact that “Yisrael Ha'Yom” is not really a newspaper, can be clearly seen, first through the fact that in its almost decade of existence, it costed Adelson several hundreds of millions of dollars, and given what happened to the printed press worldwide in this time, never had any prospect of becoming profitable, and then through the writing of its news writers and columnists, that gradually seemed to be more and more aligned with the interests of their publisher. This was most notable in the opinions column of Dan Margalit. Margalit has become to be known in the Israeli journalists circles as, “His master’s voice”. A symbol of what happens to journalists who cross the line between journalism and PR.
And while all this was happening, Olmert was eventually forced to step down, and at the beginning of 2009, Israel went to elections again. Elections that their somewhat perplexing results, gave our story another twist.
Index of previous parts:
(Source of image: Wikipedia)