Michaeli slams right-wing, Haredi media for treatment of slain female soldier

Labor party head Merav Michaeli attacks right-wing and religious news media for their treatment of Sgt. Lia Ben Nun, a female soldier killed alongside two male colleagues during a Saturday terror attack.

“On the coalition’s media channels, they see a young man and woman alone at night on guard duty, and all they can think about is sex. Not responsibility, not service, not courage, not comradeship. Just sex,” Michaeli says, opening Labor’s Knesset faction meeting.

A commentator on the right-wing Channel 14 insinuated without any proof that the soldiers from the mixed-gender battalion were behaving inappropriately during guard duty when they were killed.

She also singles out ultra-Orthodox media outlets that showed pictures of Staff Sgt. Ohad Dahan and Staff Sgt. Ori Yitzhak Iluz, but either blurred Ben Nun’s image or featured a photo of an inanimate object, in line with the practice of some Haredi media to not broadcast or display women’s faces.

“As far as Netanyahu’s people are concerned, women are good only to be a womb, on their terms, certainly not to be combat soldiers, members of the Knesset, leaders, or just women in their own right,” Michaeli fumed.

“That is why will not give up until we win the fight for democracy and our country,” she adds, tying her criticism to the larger debate on the coalition’s plans to constrain judicial power.