Haaretz To Boycott Israeli Advertisers

Haaretz’s new policy will take effect on the first day of October to avoid the complications of advertising packages already sold to Israeli companies and organizations.

“Yes, I am a dickhead, and yes, the term refers to both my attitude and my appearance.”

Tel Aviv, September 6 – The editorial board at Israel’s Haaretz daily voted this morning for consistency’s sake to to eschew advertising from Israeli entities, officially adopting BDS as a guiding principle as a reflection of the attitude among an increasing number of the publication’s contributors and executives.

Haaretz’s new policy will take effect on the first day of October to avoid the complications of advertising packages already sold to Israeli companies and organizations. Once the existing contracts have run their course, said Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn, only advertisers from outside Israel and Israeli-controlled territory would be accepted.

“With this decision the editorial board has unanimously decided to put its money where its mouth is,” said Benn. “Our writers and editorial slant have consistently striven to give voice to those who do not see the existence and prosperity of the State of Israel as a positive force in the world, and finally demonstrated the courage of those convictions.”

Benn said the opinions of longtime Haaretz writers Amira Hess and Gidon Levy carried significant weight in the board’s deliberations. “Justice often requires doing the unpopular thing, and that is the path that Haaretz chose long ago,” he explained. “It would be improper of this esteemed publication to profit from the enterprise of Occupation, however indirectly, whether one believes it began in 1967 or 1948 – and our journalistic ethics prevent us from prescribing which of those dates holds greater validity.”

The advertising ban will apply to both the print and online editions of Haaretz. Separate publications under Haaretz’s umbrella, such as the business news magazine The Marker, will continue to accept Israeli advertising for a further eight months. After that time, the board anticipates, there will be no Israeli economy anymore, since the combined pressure of the boycott and the shame Israelis will undoubtedly feel as a result of it will induce total collapse of the system, and little need for any such publication.

No decision has yet been made on how to treat Israeli subscribers or purchasers of the newspaper. “The complex ethical web of considerations around this matter requires further deliberations,” admitted Benn. “It might be easy to say we won’t accept Israeli money of any sort, but our subscribers and readers are by and large the right kind of Israeli – i.e. the ones who agree with us, and are therefore not Israeli in the same way as, for example, Bibi Netanyahu, or anyone who lives a given distance from Schocken Street in Tel Aviv. So there is room for debate here. I expect we’ll have a decision in the coming weeks.”

Benn offered no comment on the publication’s use of Israeli soil on which to run its operations.