Shocking but not entirely surprising – Former IDF chief of staff briefed senior UK editors at start of Gaza genocide
JVL Introduction
In November 2023 as Israel was cranking up its war machine over Gaza, Israeli General Aviv Kohavi visited London and held private meetings with Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times among other key British media figures, according to material gleaned from an Israeli Freedom of Information request and published by DeclassifiedUK.
The shocking but not altogether surprising revelations show that Kohavi – IDF chief of staff from 2019 to January 2023 who praised the “courage” of soldiers involved in the death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh – was tasked with cultivating support for Israel as it escalated its brutal military offensive in Gaza. The full itinerary for his London visit can be viewed at the foot of the article reproduced below.
Reacting to the investigation by Alex Morris and John McEvoy, Des Freedman a professor of media at Goldsmiths, University of London, told Declassified: “Obviously off the record briefings have a place in journalism. However, meeting secretly with a senior IDF representative in the middle of a genocidal campaign as part of an organised propaganda offensive raises serious questions about integrity and transparency.”
It certainly does.
NWI
This article was originally published by Declassified UK on Thu 27 Feb 2025. Read the original here.
BBC and Guardian editors held private meetings with Israeli General
Exclusive: Former IDF chief of staff met with Britain’s top journalists to promote Israel’s war on Gaza.
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The press of my parents’ generation no longer exists. They took the Daily Herald and the Sunday Citizen [of the 3 *left* papers at the time; the othet being the News Chronicle].
That’s why I now support Craig Murray, Another Angry Voice, The Skwawkbox, Jonathan Cook and Asa Winstanley with a small monthly sub [out of my pension payments] towards that end. JVL just gets my annual supporters sub.
From the 4th Estate, holding Power to Account ~ all we have now is mouthpieces for the ruling strata. I take the *i* ~ after 40 years of The Guardian readership ~ it has less space to distort the *news*.
With all that, though, hasbara has lost out, as folk find other ways to see what is going on in the world. It’s just that there’s no mainstream political party to represent alternative views. The 300,000 that have left the Labour Party, after Corbyn, are politically homeless.
I agree — I take the *i* now (and my parents took the News Chronicle, then the Herald when that closed down , but as we know the Herald then closed too because advertisers would not support it. I can’t make the move to the Morning Star for various long-ago reasons. I rely on JVL to select articles from the other blogs mentioned above.
Have been disgusted by the Guardian for many years. It seems to have taken another wriggle recently and started printing a *few* pro-Palestinian voices …but without reinstating the important writers and cartoonists it sacked during the time when Freedland was orchestrating the Antisemitism Scare. Clearly from this FoI report the underlying pro-Israel scaffolding of the Guardian is even more extensive than we already thought.
Amanda,
Perhaps you can’t make the move to the Morning Star because you don’t want to be patronised by their tabloid writing style that assumes you have as limited a vocabulary/ideology as their journalists.…?
No Tim, the reason I don’t get the Morning Star is because of residual anti-Communist Party feeling , based on my first political experience in 1956 at the age of ten. My father was deeply affected by the Hungarian uprising and its suppression, which meant he was never able visit his home country for the rest of his life. So in my journey leftwards from my parents’ Labour-voting and Liberalism I have wandered along a wide spectrum but never lingered at Communism. This is an idiosyncrasy – there’s a long word – and I expect it’s no longer reasonable. A few times when I’ve read individual articles in the Morning Star they’ve been good, and I’m glad there’s still a space for them to be published on paper. But I don’t think I’ll ever become a subscriber: it’s ‘against my religion’ if you like!