As Israel’s Seven Front War raged for more than two years in the aftermath of the invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists and thousands of other Gaza residents on October 7, 2023, many Americans of all political backgrounds, shocked and dismayed by the carnage and chaos, were desperate to find English-language Israeli media they could trust to report on the Israeli responses to the horrors and inevitable events. counter-attack on Gaza and, after Hezbollah began its attacks on the Jewish State on October 8, 2023, the counter-attack on the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy army.
There are many English-language media outlets in Israel, but unlike old and well-known American news platforms, the reputations of the various Israeli news outlets are generally not well known in the US. Certainly, there are voices that are just as reliable and objective on Israeli issues and politics as the top reporters and experts you admire in the United States, regardless of your political orientation. But just like American journalism, you have to work a little to find reliable sources.
Israel’s political spectrum is broader than America’s, for starters, so its journalists will be at least as diverse as ours. These are journalists and commentators I follow who can help you understand the landscape in Israel and the rapidly changing Middle East.
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Ambassador Michael Oren tops every list for his long service as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, his extraordinary achievements as a scholar-historian, and his service in an IDF uniform.
Oren has few equivalents in the United States that come to mind, because it is difficult to detect in Oren any ideologically driven bias about issues and personalities in Israel. Perhaps General Jack Keane (US, Ret.), Admiral James Stavridis (USN, Ret.) and other senior retired military contributors on various networks are as close as you can get to Oren’s US equivalents. Like Keane and Stavridis, Oren is a professional, who is confident in his knowledge and very honest in his analyses. Follow him on “X” at @DrMichaelOren.
Besides Oren, how can you find other voices, especially newcomers, in the American media scene?
Thank God for Dan Senor, an American with family and deep ties to the Jewish state. Senor had written great books about Israel before 10/7, and his podcast, “Call Me Back,” became indispensable after 10/7 as Senor routinely interviewed Israeli journalists and vouched for their credibility.
Thanks to ‘Call Me Back’ I started following and reading Haviv Rettig Gur, Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. Each of these has been of unique value to me, and I am sure, to tens of thousands of other Americans.
Haviv is a force of nature. (He is on “X” @havivrettiggur and has his own podcast “Ask Haviv Anything.”) He is a gifted teacher and as eloquent as any speaker on Israeli history and contemporary issues. American national security reporter, analyst and podcaster (‘Breaking History’) Eli Lake described Gur as a ‘Gaon’, which means ‘genius’ in modern Hebrew and also, from the 6th century onwards, a title for the leaders of the great Talmudic academies in Babylonia. Both the new and the old understanding can apply to Gur, who patiently guided the American public through the conflict, always paying careful attention to the real suffering of the innocents in Gaza, and always fiercely rejecting straw-man arguments derived from pseudo-intellectual attempts to portray Israel as a manifestation of colonial oppression.)
Haviv became known to American audiences through Senor, and he was also a frequent guest of Amanda Borschel-Dan on the Times of Israel’s special podcasts, often running almost daily. Times of Israel Editor-in-Chief David Horovitz also became an important voice on that platform, as did his reporters Emanuel Fabian and Lazar Berman (@amanandabdan, @davidhorivitz, @manniefabian and @lazar_berman, respectively.)
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Thanks to Senor, two Israeli political reporters have become regulars on my X-feed and occasionally on my program: Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal (@Nadav_Eyal and @AmitSegal). Nadav is to Israeli political reporting as Dan Balz, the recently retired Washington Post national political reporter, was to American politics until his retirement, while Amit is best understood as very similar to Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute (@continetti) and many other platforms. (Gur is 44, Eyal is 47, and Segal is 43 and like Continetti at 44, he can join you and hopefully give you serious analysis for more than three decades to come.)
If among the many platforms in the Arab world there were an English-language outlet that emerged from a tradition of robust and often unapologetic political reporting and analysis, I would list the names of those I had come to rely on, but there is not yet a tradition of free speech in the Arab countries like there is in the US and Israel, so counterparts are not available.
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But as the new Middle East emerges from the upheavals and battles of the past two years, add these Israeli voices to your media intake, as well as Yossi Klein Halevi (@ykleinhakevi) and Donniel Hartman of the “For Heaven’s Sake” podcast. Including the daily podcast from Commentary magazine and many fantastic offerings from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. These last two suggestions come from the US, but reflect a comprehensive understanding of the problems in the Middle East on a daily basis.
The new Middle East is exponentially more complicated than the red-blue America of 2025. Broaden your lens, but add filters for excellence if you want to understand the ongoing massive realignment of a region that is crucial to the entire world.
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