A fateful, devastating year; a little about ToI’s work; a thank you to ToI Community
As the High Holidays and first anniversary of October 7 approach, ToI’s editor looks back and ahead, and discusses how ToI goes about its journalism
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
An earlier version of this Editor’s Note was sent out to members of the Times of Israel Community and readers of our Daily Edition newsletter. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
As we approach the High Holidays and the first anniversary of October 7, the worst catastrophe in the history of modern Israel, we barely have time to look back, internalize the scale of the disaster, and mourn the dead.
A year later, Hamas is militarily a shadow of the 24-battalion terrorist-army Israel had allowed it to become, but it remains a guerrilla threat, its leader Yahya Sinwar is still believed to be pulling its strings from his Gaza underworld, and it is still holding 101 hostages — dozens of whom are dead and the rest of whom are in daily life-threatening peril.
At the same time, Sinwar, if he is still alive, may feel he has reason to believe that his ultimate goal — to see his invasion and slaughter in southern Israel escalate into a multifront onslaught and the eradication of our country — is advancing toward realization.
The far more potent Iranian proxy across our northern border, Hezbollah, is firing rockets and now missiles ever-deeper into Israel, and tens of thousands of Israelis have been forced from their homes for the past year. We’re being attacked by missiles and drones from Iraq, Syria and Yemen. And Iran, relentlessly arming, funding and inciting against Israel, carried out a major direct attack in April and is quietly advancing toward the nuclear weapons capability it hopes will constitute the death blow.
But Israel, though devastated by October 7 and divided about how best to restore security and save the hostages, is fighting back.
In contrast to the complacency and fatally flawed assessments and policies that enabled Hamas to breach our southern border, and that left the IDF frantically drawing up its plans for the subsequent war on Hamas in a matter of days and with gaping holes in its intelligence, the security establishment would appear to have been extremely well-prepared for what became the unavoidable resort to force against Hezbollah.
It’s not clear why last week’s spectacular operation that detonated thousands of Hezbollah’s pagers on their owners was only implemented 11 months after Hassan Nasrallah opened a second war front against Israel — or even whether it was only the feared discovery of the explosive-laced pagers that prompted the implementation of that plan and Israel’s subsequent series of powerful airstrikes.
But in the few days since, the IDF has taken out almost all of Nasrallah’s key military chiefs, and most of the leadership of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force, many of whom were killed as they met in Beirut, we are told, to advance Hezbollah’s long-planned invasion of the Galilee. Such an attack, rather than echoing Hamas’s October 7 massacre, would potentially have dwarfed it.
In an Israeli Channel 12 report broadcast on Saturday night, delving into the specifics of the pager detonations within the constraints of Israeli military censorship, an unnamed “foreign security source” was quoted as saying that while Israel had unconscionably underestimated Hamas, it has spent years preparing extensive strategic capabilities for use against both Hezbollah and its patron Iran.
Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser until two years ago after a 23-year career in the Mossad, including as head of its technological branch, then echoed that assertion in an interview in the TV studio.
Israel has “many more capabilities” that have not yet been used, stressed Hulata. It was important for the Israeli public to know this, he said, since its faith in the security establishment, he acknowledged, had collapsed because of the October 7 catastrophe. The people whose job it is to keep Israel safe, he insisted, are capable of restoring Israelis’ fundamental capacity and right to live, sleep and breathe safely in our country.
Local council heads in northern Israel, for the first time in a year, have been allowing themselves just a little bit of optimism these past few days — praising the IDF for going on the offensive against Hezbollah, and daring to hope that their tens of thousands of displaced residents will be able to return home sooner rather than later.
May it be so.
**
I want to turn, if I may, to the work we do here at The Times of Israel.
Our writers and editors have worked harder than ever this past year — and we worked extremely hard before — to keep what has become a vast global readership accurately and promptly informed about what is happening, and to help make sense of it.
Those basic journalistic challenges are becoming increasingly complex — in part because of the age-old fog of war, but also because of the deluge of misinformation, disinformation and misrepresentation.
From my vantage point, it has often seemed this past year as though many of the best-resourced global media outlets have failed in their basic journalistic obligations to check facts and apply intellectual rigor and honesty when reporting. A year on, leading outlets continue to report Hamas claims regarding events in Gaza as credible even though it has been demonstrably obvious since October 7 that Hamas — a mass-murdering terrorist organization avowedly intent on killing Jews everywhere and destroying Israel — has no regard for the truth.
Major newspapers routinely give as much credibility to Hamas’s accounts of death and destruction in Gaza as they do official Israel’s, and often more so. They frequently attribute these accounts, most drastically in headlines, to Gaza health authorities, thus obscuring the fact that Hamas is behind them. Sometimes, Hamas claims are even presented without any attribution — headlined as ostensible facts. A similarly credulous approach has also been playing out of late where Hezbollah is concerned.
The Times of Israel is anything but perfect, but we are trying to get to the truth, and trying not to take and report the claims of terrorist organizations at face value.
We are also trying to keep a wary eyebrow raised about Hebrew media claims — and to clarify for our readers when we know or have compelling reasons to believe that a significant story or claim widely reported in Israel, and spreading overseas, is inaccurate or unreliably sourced.
To take a very recent example, widespread reports in Israel over the past two days asserted, variously, that the IDF had destroyed 50 percent of Hezbollah’s precision-guided missiles and/or 50 percent of its rocket capabilities. At least one TV station repeated such claims hour after hour on Tuesday. I don’t doubt that somebody somewhere, in an ostensible position to have the information, made this improbable assertion in the earshot of one or more reporters, but the IDF, which would actually know if anyone does, has not.
Furthermore, we are all now grappling with the advancing capacity and use of AI to generate what is presented online as journalism. Take, for example, this huge article about Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono — the elusive CEO of a company called BAC Consulting, an apparent central player in the extraordinary saga of the allegedly Israeli-manufactured Hezbollah pagers — that appeared online the day after the devices were detonated across Lebanon.
Maybe its author “Sven Marin” truly has an encyclopedic familiarity with Bársony-Arcidiacono, and was able to pen a vast, all-encompassing article about her with stunning rapidity. But then “Marin” also appears to boast expertise in all manner of other entirely unrelated fields, from hair transplants to Trump’s would-be assassin to soccer scandals, and to be capable of writing reams about them all with almost inhuman velocity. His work just might not be entirely reliable; indeed, it may not be his work at all; and there may not even be a he. (I’d be only too pleased to hear from Sven if I’m mistaken.)
None of that is overly hard to detect at this point, but as the technology improves, the challenge of distinguishing the diminishing proportion of reliable information from AI “articles,” which are themselves manufactured from an increasingly AI-dominated internet “media” landscape, will only grow.
**
Our team has been working literally around the clock since October 7, motivated by a sense of mission and obligation to try to chronicle and explain this fateful period in Israel’s history.
My colleagues do their jobs amid all the atypical, relentless pressure of life in Israel this past year — including, in some cases, the deaths of people close to them, military reserve duties, kids in the army, connections to the hostages, and more. And while it is unquestionably healthy for people to switch off from the news at least some of the time, take some time out, breathe in the air, journalists are professionally required to be, if not plugged in at all times, then back up to speed pretty quickly.
We know and see that our work is unprecedentedly resonant and appreciated. In October and November, according to data compiled from Similarweb, The Times of Israel was the fastest-growing English-language news site in the world; when Israel was at its lowest point, people came to us for the hard information and interpretation. And tens of millions of those people continue to rely on us as their “first read” site — including politicians, journalists and others whose own work resonates far and wide — so that the reality we do our best to describe frames a great deal of the other English-language international coverage of Israel and the ongoing debate.
We currently have eight to 10 million unique visitors (people) per month, 30-35 million monthly sessions, and 60-80 million monthly page views. Our Daily Edition newsletter is now delivered to 230,000 people every day.
We have also devoted a great deal of effort to our podcasts this year, and we know how widely they are appreciated. The Daily Briefing podcast now has over 30,000 listeners per day and is downloaded nearly a million times per month. Our ToI Original Videos, another expanding project aimed at enabling ToI readers and viewers to get closer to the realities of Israel, have included embedding with reservists in Gaza, covering citizen responses to October 7, showing the evolving hostage-deal protests, and much more.
Membership in The Times of Israel’s Community has more than doubled in the past year. Your support is now a significant portion of our revenue, thus giving us both practical and, yes, moral support.
While all our journalism remains free, we now provide more special content exclusively to the Community, like our Docu Nation series of Israeli documentary films, with some important October 7 material coming very soon.
To those of you reading this who have not yet joined the ToI Community, please consider doing so here. To those of you who are Community members, our heartfelt appreciation.
And wishing everybody a better, safer, life-affirming year ahead.
