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Uri Avnery - 'Hadashot' steals our thunder (311/315)

85 views · Published 11 July 2017 · 3:22 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · News & Politics

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Uri Avnery (1923-2018) was an Israeli writer, journalist and peace activist. He was editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine "HaOlam HaZeh" and founded the Gush Shalom peace movement. [Listener: Anat Saragusti; date recorded: 2017]

TRANSCRIPT: A struggle started regarding the need, the possibility [of publishing the photo]. I met with the censor and I said: 'I don't understand you. You are saying that all four of them were killed during the attack. Here is a picture taken after the assault, so this can't be one of the hijackers; it is obviously a Jew who was mistakenly thought to be a hijacker − so there is no reason to prohibit the publication of the photograph'. There was no answer to that. 'It is forbidden'.  Then pandemonium broke out behind the scenes, and the army started to make all kinds of excuses, that it was like this, and they thought it was like that, and that is what happened. There was no response. A commission of enquiry was appointed. During the enquiry, the General Security Services claimed that the Head of Central Command had killed him, the Head of Central Command who appears in our photograph. During this there was no longer any justification to censor the photograph and so we published the photograph on the cover of "HaOlam HaZeh". All of the other newspapers were asked not to publish it and they complied with our request. There followed one of the most irksome events in my career as a newspaper editor. There was the "Haaretz" newspaper − it was the second newspaper of "Haaretz" called "Hadashot" – and they did not publish it at the request of the government spokesman or the IDF spokesman, but they published the photograph three weeks after us. There was a very interesting psychological phenomenon: a rumour was circulated that they had published it first, and everyone repeated this myth, this lie, this falsehood for years. And yet if the covers of "Hadashot" and "HaOlam HaZeh" had been compared showing the date, it would have been clear that "Hadashot" had published this three weeks later. Nothing helped. I think that even today, if someone were to write about this affair, they would say that "Hadashot" had published the picture first. It is very annoying. What did "Hadashot" do? They announced that the Commission of Enquiry had been set up. The Commission of Enquiry had been secret, but they published it. With all due respect, that is not how this affair was revealed.  We had revealed it.

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