Netanyahu’s Media Poison Machine | The New Yorker

Magal dismisses the notion of an orchestrated campaign. Instead, he described a “battle” being waged between Netanyahu’s camp and everyone else. “I see my role as deciding the battle and insuring that we will win,” he told me. “I collect people. I influence people. I make people small, I make people weak.”

As we spoke, his phone kept lighting up. “Want to see?” he asked. He scrolled through dozens of messages: “The greatest media personality we’ve ever had here.” “You’re the man.” “The charisma . . .” “Thank you for making us stop apologizing.”

“It’s infinite! A thousand a day,” he said. Often, he selects his favorite messages and forwards them to his mother. “True,” she responds. “Very true!”

Magal calls himself a dos, a derogatory Hebrew term for the religiously observant. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. During my visit, he wore a clingy gray T-shirt and jeans, with no kippah; he has a buzz cut, which evokes his days in an élite special-forces unit called Sayeret Matkal. Netanyahu also served in Sayeret Matkal, and the two men’s biographies contain striking similarities. Both spent most of their childhood in Jerusalem, with secular Ashkenazi parents. Both followed an admired older brother to Sayeret Matkal, and both became commanding officers. Both saw themselves as outsiders in a hostile environment. Magal’s father, a career military man, voted for the Labor Party but told his sons, “You’re Jews first and foremost. You’re closer to the Haredi man in Brooklyn than you are to the Druze soldier fighting alongside you.”

In the military, Magal was doggedly ambitious, according to a former soldier from Sayeret Matkal. He rankled his subordinates by volunteering them for extra navigation sessions. As a leader, though, he was introverted and tentative. The former soldier recalled that during field exercises team members “would ask him on the military radio, ‘Yinon, left or right?,’ and he would dawdle and say, ‘I’m still thinking.’ He was the exact opposite of who he is today.” Later, his unit mates started a WhatsApp group but excluded Magal. “The team is supposed to be like brothers, but no one is in touch with him,” the former soldier said. “He was never liked.”

In 1995, Magal was twenty-six, out of the Army, and feeling aimless. “My wheels were spinning in the air,” he told me. It was an anxious time in Israel. The government of Yitzhak Rabin had negotiated a historic peace accord with Palestinian leaders, but hard-liners on both sides felt betrayed. Suicide bombers struck repeatedly inside Israel, and right-wing demonstrations grew violent. Though Magal was skeptical of the peace agreement, he didn’t get involved in the political dispute. Instead, he travelled to India—“the cliché of the Israeli who goes searching for himself”—and spent a year trekking, riding motorcycles, and taking drugs.

One night in Dharamkot, a destination for Israeli seekers, a friend invited him to join a predawn meditation ritual, which led to an unexpected epiphany. At the end of the session, Magal recalls, he opened his eyes and saw his friend bowing to a statue of the Buddha—a grave violation of Jewish law. “It rocked me,” he said. He began to frequent Chabad centers in India, and he returned home with a newfound piety and a deepened commitment to right-wing ideas.

He got a job at Army Radio, a popular station run by the military, and worked his way up from stringer to reporter. In 1999, he asked to become the correspondent in the West Bank, which was then a source of stories about the excesses of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. He had a clear goal—“I wanted to change the coverage of the settlers”—but he did not announce his politics. Nadav Eyal, a columnist and author who worked at the station at the time, recalled, “He wore shalwars from India and wasn’t ideologically affiliated. He was a good guy. Journalism was different then. We didn’t know anything about his opinions.”

Israel is a media-obsessed place; the first Hebrew-language newspapers appeared before the founding of the country. Yet for decades there was only one television channel, a PBS-style public network, and three-quarters of the population tuned in to its evening news broadcast. Barely a decade after Magal secured his first media job, he became the network’s top anchor, and soon he was famous enough that fans stopped him on the street. Still, he felt scorned by his peers. He told me that he was compelled to keep his views “mostly in the closet,” and has compared being a right-leaning journalist in a liberal environment to undergoing a forced conversion.

Netanyahu made similar complaints, but at greater volume. He once griped that the media and the left were “trying to carry out a governmental coup.” After a failed campaign in 1999, he blamed negative coverage, telling associates, “I need my own media.” Magal was not yet ready to provide it. Although he supported Likud, he criticized those who exhibited a cultish devotion to Netanyahu. As he puts it now, he was still a “values voter.”

The popular sketch-comedy show “It’s a Wonderful Country,” on Channel 12, has a recurrent Magal character: a derisive, pearl-clutching blowhard whose tagline is “Oy, oy, oy!” (As in: “Oy, oy, oy! They took away our democracy!”) In November, the show aired a fierce takedown of “The Patriots.” The subject was the hostages—“Who, I remind you, weren’t democratically elected,” the Magal character announces—and the panel credulously parsed a series of outrageous conspiracies. “I’m not so sure that when we look at what happened we won’t find that those kibbutzniks kidnapped themselves to topple Netanyahu,” the Fleischmann character muses. “If true, then it’s crazy!” Magal responds.

People who worked with Magal a decade ago remember a more centrist figure. In 2012, he left his television job and joined the online news site Walla. Its politics did not align with his. “The news desk was very leftist, very Tel Avivian, very gay-friendly,” Dan Magen, a former colleague there, said. But Magal was warmly received; he was a star in media circles, and a low-grade heartthrob in Tel Aviv. Magen recalled “a lot of excitement among female producers.”

The next year, Magal was promoted to editor-in-chief, and launched a section called Walla Judaism. In 2014, during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, he came up with a slogan—“First of all, Israeli!”—that the site used in a national advertising campaign. But his tenure was not without conflict. Walla journalists regularly complained that Netanyahu and Sara sought to influence coverage of them, and by all accounts Magal repeatedly backed his employees. (The Netanyahus deny the allegations.) When the site ran a story about the Netanyahus’ inflated expenses, which included more than a thousand dollars’ worth of scented candles, the C.E.O. texted Magal to remove the article from the home page. Thirty minutes later, he wrote again: “Lose the goddam candles already.” Magal assented, but told his boss, “By the way, I went to that house once and felt like I was at a séance.”

Finally, Magal was ordered to kill the article altogether, and he grew furious. “This goes beyond any ethical boundary,” he wrote back. “With all due respect, we can’t make stories about the Prime Minister disappear.” These days, Magal argues that many politicians tried to influence coverage. But, when we spoke, he allowed that the Netanyahus’ interference was particularly onerous. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “I just wanted to escape.”

In 2014, Magal was offered an appealing way out. Naftali Bennett was rebuilding his party, Jewish Home, in preparation for a forthcoming election. He and Magal had served together in Sayeret Matkal, and they remained on good terms. Did Magal want to join? Magal soon got a seat in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, where he revealed a swaggering, cantankerous side. He addressed Arab lawmakers in Arabic, telling them from the lectern, “There will be no Palestinian state from the river to the sea!” Chaim Levinson, a journalist for the liberal newspaper Haaretz, recalled joining a staid panel on the role of the press in which “Yinon suddenly started screaming at me, ‘You! The media! Tried to shut me up!’ ”

Magal’s fans are so devoted that they have to be dissuaded from charging the stage to take selfies with him during commercial breaks.

Magal savored the performative aspect of politics. “I was a meteor,” he says. Yet his career didn’t last long. That November, a Walla writer named Racheli Rottner accused him of harassing her during his farewell party, at a bar in Tel Aviv. Rottner wrote on social media that she had always liked Magal, defending him whenever colleagues “dismissed him out of what felt to me like blind, automatic leftism.” So she was surprised when he leaned in close at the bar and told her, “The entire time we were working together I was horny for you. I would look at you and think about your tits and ass.”