Israeli Government Bans State Advertising in Haaretz Newspaper on Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s Initiative

During its weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, the government of Israel unanimously approved a proposal by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi that no government body pay for advertising in Israel’s Hebrew daily newspaper Haaretz or have any contact with the paper. The government charges that Haaretz publishes items harmful to Israel’s security. Meanwhile, Karhi is also promoting the abolition of Israel’s Supreme Court.

Minister Karhi’s office made harsh allegations against Haaretz in a statement saying this move came, “following numerous articles that harmed the legitimacy of the State of Israel in the world and its right to self-defense, particularly in light of the recent statements by the publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, who expressed support for terrorism and called for sanctions against the government at the newspaper’s conference in London.”

Shlomo Karhi also tweeted a list of ten grievances he has with Haaretz:
1. Haaretz undermines the foundations of the Jewish state.
2. Haaretz, in fact, justifies the violence on the part of the Arabs of the country and their supporters against us.
3. Haaretz provides fuel for the classical anti-Semites from here (check who Jeffrey Goldberg is and what he said about Haaretz) and for the boycotters of Israel from here.
4. Haaretz, by spewing false incitement against Israel for years, prepared the ground, for example, for the arrest warrants in The Hague.
5. The amount of people from abroad who have told me over the years that they are unable to read the satanic writings that appear in it, not even Twitter X can contain.
6. The attached tweet from the deputy editor demonstrates well how the system works: it puts democratically elected prime ministers and a dictator president under one roof. She describes the cessation of the transfer of tax money to her system as “silencing”. why? Do we have to finance the incitement you write against us? But such a twisting of reality is an everyday thing in this sophisticated pamphlet.
7. The great absurdity that throughout all these years, the State of Israel both generously financed the drilling of the hole in its own ship, and also gave the country a special status of importance, including in the IDF.
8. At the same time, she held back for years from publishing ads in media outlets that supported her unreservedly. A characteristic weakness of Netanyahu.
9. So the decision to stop the government engagement with the newspaper that supports the enemy, did not come in time but very, very late. But better late than never.
10. Is this silencing [the press]? Absolutely not. In Israel there is freedom of speech which is the lifeblood of democracy. And the freedom to speak is not the freedom to promote national suicide. And more at our expense.

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“The time has come,” Shlomo Karhi also tweeted. “We do not finance newspapers that harm the country and the IDF.”

As for Israel’s Supreme Court, in an interview with ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Berama Shlomo Karhi said that it should be abolished.

And at a meeting of Israel’s Ministerial Committee on Legislation Shlomo Karhi said “Perhaps this is an opportunity to really establish a public committee that will discuss the limits of the ruling of the High Court, of the legal advisor to the government, who many times seem to exceed the limits of the legal mandate granted to them.”