What's behind "Haaretz's" obsession with "Zehut"? Why did Haaretz go berserk (literally) during the elections specifically around Zehut's platform, of all topics, dedicating disproportionate coverage lacking basic fairness, which even pales in comparison to its anti-Bibi stance, and which it would never allow itself against any other candidate or agenda? Why does Feiglin bother Haaretz more than Bibi, Bennett, Shaked, Otzma Yehudit, and Lieberman - combined, and also turns out to be more substantial to it than them? A coverage of Haaretz's election coverage - and of De Marker's Yom Kippur
What "Haaretz" failed to do for years - inject a single new idea into the bloodstream of Israeli current affairs - the Zehut party managed to do abundantly within a month before the elections. And why didn't "Haaretz" succeed? Perhaps because it didn't really try, but instead repeated, recycled, preached, and dripped the same predictable opinions into its readers' heads - until the flood of Zehut came, with a platform unseen here for years (a platform! ideological!), and exposed it in its nakedness. Because even a half-intelligent and quarter-intellectual platform is more intelligent and intellectual than what "Haaretz" has to offer. It turns out there's no ideological vacuum. The moment the left has no message - the message will come from the right. It also turns out that unconventional ideas, reasoned and using data (God forbid) - and even, alas, longer than 700 words - can actually sweep the masses in public opinion, and bring decent traffic. So where was "Haaretz"?
In the opinion pages of the De Marker supplement, for a decade they've been proving every week how everything that happens is proof that they're right, and feeling full of audacity - and then one Feiglin cock-a-doodle-doo brings a decade's investment to naught and changes the economic discourse in the country, sowing ideas (that will yet sprout) in broad layers. The repetitiveness of opinions in Haaretz makes readers loathe them, causing "thinking people" to recoil from the clichéd and narrow-minded discourse that characterizes the newspaper. In Haaretz, even nonconformism is conformist and lazy, in Ziffer's primitive method of "raw to the eye". They don't think of a new, third, original direction, but simply write in the opposite direction. Yes, an article supporting "Kahane Lives" in Haaretz would attract a lot of traffic. The article itself would of course be uninteresting, but what would be interesting is that it was "published in Haaretz". That's how you bring reputation to ruin.
At Haaretz, they think intellectual courage is identical to criticism, which is almost the opposite of creativity. Surprisingly, creativity is related to lowering inhibition, not increasing it. Criticism digests every good part in the left, because it's easy, condescending, and releases from the need for new thinking about the thing itself - and settles for thinking about the "discourse". Listen listen, I have something important to say about the "discourse"!
It's no coincidence that Haaretz picked on Zehut specifically. Haaretz treats its young readers as stupid, shallow, and hedonistic children, throws them low culture (see Galeria), doesn't give them any standard of high culture to aspire to (see Ziffer), and then wonders about the drift in young Israeli intelligence towards the right, and then writes an opinion piece about it, repeating the same correct opinion, reassuring itself - here I'm right because it's written in Haaretz, continues a bit further, discovers that reality has also moved on, complains-criticizes reality, offers zero dreams, and then wonders that on this platform grows the Zehut platform.
And all this without getting into the content, although the issue here is the content. And what's the content? Well - Zehut is closer to the academic consensus (relative) that exists in economic science than the geniuses of "Haaretz" who invented a new economic theory (and remarkably one-dimensional, in such a complex science), and as is customary in journalism in Israel - often their economic level is embarrassing (except for Strasser, who sometimes knows how to hit the issue right on the nose in a stamp-sized paragraph - and his miniature style that goes from the particular to the general is a model of journalistic writing, and well demonstrates the difference between agenda and preaching. Another exception is Uri Katz's blog - which is a model for popularizing economic science). There's no other academic field where Haaretz feels its intellectual stature is so high that it's able to systematically disagree with global research in the field, and ignore its central conclusions (because unfortunately they turned out to be too close to the right, what can you do, and much worse - require mathematical thinking on such a humane subject. Even in poverty research, it's becoming clear that the left wasn't right - nor was the right. Wow, it turns out that poverty is not an economic phenomenon!). Zehut exposed the wider public in Israel - whose economic ignorance is frightening - to ideas that Haaretz was afraid to expose them to. Suddenly people on the street are starting to talk about alternatives to the existing economic order. So there's no doubt that this is a frightening matter. And indeed, it turns out, they are a-f-r-a-i-d.
Zehut is De Marker's Yom Kippur. Haaretz presented its economic platform to its readers at the level of "fake news" - that is, with intellectual dishonesty and unfairness. Yes, it's not a masterpiece of economic thought, but as an Israeli platform it's unique in its seriousness. The platform contains a wide range of iconoclastic ideas that most of its readers learned about for the first time, precisely because of the flat one-sidedness of the economic discourse of the "intelligentsia" - and of course Haaretz didn't find even one of them worthy of fertilizing thought. In recent years, the opinion pages of De Marker have concentrated a long line of obsessive preachers of one thing, while the level of quality economic discourse on social networks has been rising (and surpassing them). So what's really the attraction of the Zehut platform for Haaretz readers? The power of ideas. That's what really hurts Haaretz. If the discourse in it was at a reasonable level - Zehut would have returned to its natural dimensions, and not become a phenomenon of nature. As long as the intellectual discourse in Haaretz (and in the left in general) continues to deteriorate - we'll see more Feiglins, and the center of discourse of the Israeli intelligentsia will move to the other side, and one day we might discover a right-wing "Haaretz". And that will be the end of the story of the degeneration of Haaretz.
Of course, Haaretz also has zero ability to understand the Kabbalistic-mystical aspect of Feiglin's thought (who comes from a Chabad background), and due to the lack of human diversity in the editorial board, Haaretz has no familiarity with the religious discourse from which Feiglin operates. Therefore, it sees contradictions in places where a Chabadnik sees completion at a higher level (say, in their upper roots, or at the end of a redemptive process), and doesn't understand the gap between end-of-days visions and practical engagement in the voucher method (a gap that is the Chabad praxis, unparalleled in containing the tension between messianism and pragmatism). But here we really didn't expect. The epistemological abyss is unbridgeable. Haaretz will never understand that cock-a-doodle-doo can succeed in reality where a leftist will fail. Therefore, the cognitive dissonance between the success of cock-a-doodle-doo among the younger generation and the failure of the left drives it out of its mind. Feiglin would call it: breaking of the vessels (paradigm shift for you).
Two recommended posts as examples by Uri Katz (currently the most interesting economic writer in Haaretz, who leaves all the others in the dust):
The History of Technological CreativityKarl Marx's Fatal Mistake and the Future of Inequality