1. It seems that what irked Israel's journalists most of all after the shocking results of the election became clear was the realization that their services as tribal witch doctors were no longer required. The job of little drummer boy was also no longer being offered to them. The public is doing just fine without them. In the distant past, prophets rose among the Israelites and they served as watchmen. The sages of Israel later inherited the role. In the modern age, when the Jewish people arose from a centuries-long slumber, it was writers, poets and intellectuals who assumed the role of watchmen. In recent decades, it seemed that the journalists were keeping the tradition alive and assuming the same responsibility. But no more. The Israeli media has forgotten that the job of the prophet, the intellectual, the cultural leader and tribe spokesman is not just to berate the people and chastise them for their failures and missteps, but also to lift the people up, to encourage them, to bolster buckling knees, to stand by them at times of need, to believe in their hopes and values and in their right to exist. 2. This election cycle served to underscore a process that has been ongoing for years, which saw the media posit itself almost uniformly on one particular end of the political spectrum. It has become the mouthpiece of a particular tribe, even though it pretends to represent the full spectrum of views among the Israeli public. With great fury, even a burning hatred at times, the media admonished us for our views and tried to dictate to us what to think, say, like and dislike. But above all, it tried to steer us toward casting a specific vote come election day. Over the last few months, a significant part of the Israeli public has become increasingly disgusted with the Israeli media. The average citizen saw the prime minister of his country stand up in the capital of a foreign country and fight for Israel's rights. They watched the same prime minister declare to the world, "Am Israel Chai" ("The People of Israel Live"), and convey the message that even if the entire world was against us we would not remain silent in the face of the Iranian evil. He did it with simplicity. With pride. In the Jewish tradition, his deeds would be characterized as glorifying the name of Israel and thereby the name of God. He explained Israel's reasoning and justified its existence to the world. But even if the people of Israel saw him do just that, what they heard was the cantankerous, negative, scornful soundtrack provided by the media. The public is smart enough to recognize this obvious dissonance. Many Israeli journalists wanted us to think differently than what our eyes were telling us. I cannot help but recall Yedioth Ahronoth columnist Nahum Barnea's adding insult to injury by calling attention to the "Jewish billionaires" sitting in the gallery during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at Congress. According to him, these unnamed "Jewish billionaires" were there to ensure that the American elected officials were "behaving properly toward the prime minister." The Jews are controlling U.S. politics with their money -- a highly respected Israeli journalist actually wrote that, and no one blinked. And why should they? Barnea is an opinion leader. He did what most journalists, editors and news anchors in Israel wanted him to do -- he disparaged Netanyahu (disparaging the entire U.S. Congress along the way). He dismissed Netanyahu's achievements and made him out to be a nuisance to the true Israeli interests. Who cares that he said that Jews control the world, deliberately using a well known anti-Semitic argument pulled directly out of the global bestseller "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"- 3. Barnea writes for Yedioth Ahronoth. So do Shimon Shiffer, Sima Kadmon and a slew of others. All of them (with the exception of a handful of fig leaves) share left-wing diplomatic and cultural views. Yedioth Ahronoth has served as a guide for many of the popular left-wing movements of recent years. It was Yedioth Ahronoth that provided the hatred for the settlers, for the Right, for the religious Israelis, for the ultra-Orthodox Israelis, for "mezuzah kissers," and of course for Netanyahu as a symbol of this coalition of minorities (which actually comprises an obvious majority). Yedioth Ahronoth's and its subsidiary website Ynet's unequivocal and obvious enlistment to help the left-wing camp ahead of the elections came as absolutely no surprise. Yedioth Ahronoth was conquered by the Left as far back as the late 1980s. Nothing has changed since, and not just in Yedioth Ahronoth: Most of the Israeli Left suffers from a psychological fixation. To them, there have been no geopolitical shifts in the region. Not in any Arab country and not in Israel. To hear them tell it, it is as though we did not go through all the terrible experiments, starting with the Oslo Accords and the destruction of Gush Katif in Gaza through the waves of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, intifadas and wars (Defensive Shield, Second Lebanon, Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense and most recently Protective Edge). To them, that is not the problem. The problem is Netanyahu. Many people on the Left were too quick to count their chickens, arrogantly prophesying the "end of the Netanyahu era," adding insults and contempt to their hearts' content. Well, in reality what actually appears to have happened is the end of the Noni Mozes era (Arnon "Noni" Mozes is the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth.) The Mozes coalition formed ahead of the election has lost significant steam. When I was a child, there were shady types in my neighborhood whom we used to call "toy hoodlums." They tended to boast a lot and use foul language to disparage their rivals. They did not hesitate to terrorize their surroundings with the threats of violence. The reason they were "toys" was that when other bullies used the same, if not more, violence on them, they would avoid them, or go complain to the adults that they were being bullied. 4. Up until recently, Yedioth Ahronoth was the neighborhood bully. The newspaper that singlehandedly controlled Israeli politics and culture. Using its unprecedented popularity, the paper marketed the Israeli Left as a miracle cure for all of society's ills and presented right-wing and Zionist ideology as a clear and present danger to Israel. One thing that may have marked the beginning of this era was a series of essays by the late writer Shulamit Hareven published in September 1985 titled "Ikaleh (The World of Ikaleh Gotkind [Not his Real Name], a Gush Emunim Man)". Using an outlandish and condescending tone, Hareven created a character of a young religious idealist, symbolizing the Israeli Right. It began like this: "Our story about Hilkiah Gotkind, known as Ikaleh, should begin with a word of praise: Ikaleh is among those very few people in Israel, and certainly in the world, that assign great importance to ideas and are willing to realize them. In this he differs from the average pragmatist, which make up of the majority of the people in the world. But alongside his ability to grasp ideas in their fullest form, he also has a diminished body of knowledge, his self control is faulty and so is his capacity for autonomous thinking, making him far more dangerous than the average pragmatist, and with the potential to cause great harm." It is as though 30 years have not gone by since this text was featured prominently in Yedioth Ahronoth's Yom Kippur supplement. It was only last month that we heard similar sentiments uttered by cultural figures identified with the Left like Amos Oz and Yair Garbuz and a thousand more members of that angry tribe. 5. In June 1989, Yedioth Ahronoth published the Left's most constitutive text. It was printed with reverence on an entire page, without any counterbalance or opposing opinion. The text was a speech, given by the tribe's chief elder, Amos Oz, during a Peace Now demonstration. In his speech, Oz characterized his ideological opponents as a "messianic junta, insular and cruel; a band of armed gangsters, criminals against humanity, sadists, pogromists and murderers, that sprung forth from some dark corner of Judaism ... from out of cellars of bestiality and defilement ... in order to impose the rule of a thirsty and insane blood worship." These are texts written by people whose very lives rest on the written word. This was not a slip of the tongue. Do you understand whom today's artists and authors are trying to emulate when they awkwardly make their remarks? When you read their newspaper columns or listen to them on the radio or watch them on television, you have to remember that these are their own constitutive texts. These are dinosaurs from the roaring 1970s and 1980s speaking to us today. Thanks to the passage of time, we can now dismiss these malicious texts as naive. Keep in mind that they were written in the 1980s, before the big "peace" experiments. But we cannot say the same about more recent texts, and certainly not about similar remarks made in the run-up to the latest election. The existence of similar texts, referring to parts of Israeli society as "second Israel" (and yes, for all intents and purposes, Netanyahu is the leader of that second Israel) in 2015 indicates an obvious psychological fixation, not to mention a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Think about it: Whose self control and capacity for autonomous thought is faulty here- I debated whether to bring the following text, but there is something fascinating about the free speech of a woman who considers herself a writer, Alona Kimhi. The first written response she issued after learning the final election results was this: "Every people has the leadership it deserves. Long live stupidity, maliciousness and false consciousness. Drink some cyanide, f---ing Neanderthals. You won. Only death will save you from yourselves." The truth is that this was not even the most biting response, provided by a long list of writers with totalitarian thinking who do not think very much of us. 6. In the 24 hours since the Right won the election, I have heard a number of people talk about the media "taking stock" and doing some serious "soul-searching." Nonsense. It is not real. Their "soul-searching" has to do with the fact that they were so wrong in forecasting the results of the election, not the fact that they frighteningly and completely enlisted to the service of the Left and against Netanyahu and the right-wing voters. This is the story in a radiophonic nutshell: Radio hosts Razi Barkai and Ilana Dayan are interviewing former Haaretz reporter Uzi Benziman alone. Three leftists talking amongst themselves about soul-searching. Benziman is a representative of old-school Israeli journalism and the periodical he founded, the Seventh Eye, is trying to create a media orthodoxy with rules and practices meant to preserve the old way. That is where their criticism against Yedioth Ahronoth stems from and the reason they loathe Israel Hayom, the newspaper that pulled the rug right out from under the old-school journalism. They do not acknowledge the years-long injustice committed by the Israeli media: Silencing the majority and using (almost) all the microphones to serve a small group within Israeli society. I wrote a message to a prominent media figure this week, saying, "Try to imagine how I felt for decades: My peers and I did not have a media outlet to represent us, no port or anchor, no home court where we would not be treated like beggars asking for favors, or even a bit of decency, from this or that anchor or editor. Think about the reality in which I am at an eternal disadvantage in the television and radio studios (with five opponents on Channel 10 or with three on Army Radio, as a matter of routine)." This bunch was never subjected to the silencing that the Right suffered, so when they say they are doing some "soul-searching" it is an artificial remark, designed to preserve their control over the country's power centers. A control that they took, incidentally. No one ever elected them. I was asked why I view Barkai and Dayan as leftists. The answer is easy: I survey their texts -- the words they broadcasts, the people they interview, the topics they discuss, the questions they ask, the difference between the way they treat rightists and the way they treat leftists. Any first-year literature student can do it: extract the "hidden author" from the text, or, in other words, uncover what the author truly thinks about his characters or, in this case, what the journalist truly thinks about the people in the news he is covering. Barkai will not be doing any soul-searching over his radio broadcasts in the last few months, which included ramped-up media tricks designed to vilify Netanyahu and the Right and to turn the public against them. It started with the bottles that Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister's wife, allegedly recycled, and continued with allegations made by the Netanyahus' former house manager, all the way to the publication of the libelous "concessions document" published by Yedioth Ahronoth that made it look as if Netanyahu was ready to withdraw to 1967 borders. Barkai reported on the document without telling his listeners that Dennis Ross -- who is not among Netanyahu's biggest fans -- explicitly said that the document did not represent Netanyahu's position, but was merely an American draft. He should know, he was the American mediator between Israel and the Palestinians at the time the document was allegedly issued. 7. Imagine the current election but without Israel Hayom and without social media. It gives me chills. The victory for the Right in this election is also proof of Israel Hayom's influence. The journalistic elite can ignore it all they want, but the conservative right wing in Israel now has a home. We served as the fig leaf when almost every other media outlet chose a side, and it was the political side opposite ours. That is the reason for the media's resounding failure in this election. You live inside your little nook, inside the artificial consciousness you have constructed for yourselves, and within its imaginary confines you possess superpowers that allow you to see things that mere mortals like us cannot. But the truth is that it was not just the election results that you got all wrong. You also got a long list of political experiments wrong over the last few decades, starting with your blind support of the Oslo Accords and the trampling of the settlements in the 2005 "disengagement" and ending with your permanent cultural condescension. The criticism you sounded against one of your own recently (Garbuz, who called the Right superstitious idol worshippers and amulet-kissers) was still well within the boundaries of political correctness, because his remarks were too overt and brazen. We did not hear any criticism when Amos Oz made similar comments -- saying that 70 percent of Israelis "don't read books, but they read Israel Hayom." Oz dictated the spirit to Garbuz, and Garbuz simply finished the job. Not only do they not read books, they also kiss mezuzahs. The fact that Oz's remarks were well-received and failed to elicit any criticism, while Garbuz's similar remarks did elicit a fair share of criticism, is the equivalent of the bogus soul-searching being conducted by the media. Their criticism is selective and not real. It hinges on the amount of damage they think the remark in question can do to their ideas. 8. How do I know that there will not be any soul-searching? Because the moment the election results came in, the media immediately began scare-mongering with its worn-out warnings of a "narrow right-wing haredi government." Almost 70 seats wide, but to the Left it is narrow and bad. The Oslo Accords, the most fateful agreement since the establishment of the state, were passed by merit of one vote that had to be bought, and no one warned of the perils of a "narrow government" then. Renowned journalist Yaakov Ahimeir wrote this week that "from watching the political talk shows on television I get the impression that some of the television hosts aren't aware of the fact that the election is over and the results are in. In any case, they are continuing down their own path." One can hope that from a historical perspective, this election will be a watershed event that brings a similar upset to the Israeli media.
