Top Israeli reporter doubles down on ‘not sure I want my kids to stay here’ critique

Channel 2’s veteran military correspondent Roni Daniel made no effort Friday to soothe tempers inflamed by his despairing remark last week that he is no longer sure he wants his children to live in Israel. Instead, he doubled down on his remarks and called for Israel to step away from the “slippery slope” he said it is currently on.

“I do not take back a single word of what I said,” Daniel said Friday, exactly a week after his sudden declaration on live TV, which came as he reflected on the political machinations engineered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“After this week, I’m not sure I want my children to remain here,” he said last week on Channel 2 News’s top-rated Friday night news program, during a debate on the resignation earlier in the day of then-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and his imminent anticipated replacement by Avigdor Liberman.

The comment by the gray-haired, long-time reporter, a former IDF officer who was injured in the 1967 Six Day War before he went to journalism, shocked viewers. He had, Daniel admitted Friday, received “countless” letters after the program.

But he refused to walk back his remarks. “The comment that there are elements of fascism [in Israel] is unfortunately correct,” he said, referring to a controversial speech by Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Yair Golan on Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which Golan that seemed to liken “certain trends” in Israel to pre-Nazi Germany.

“It hurts to see our only country behaving as it is behaving, for example against minorities,” Daniel said. “Instead of condemnation and arguments, perhaps fix it because there is some truth in it.”

Daniel also dismissed a comment by Netanyahu in the wake of the row over his remarks, in which the prime minister said that people should “stop crying.”

“With all due respect to the prime minister, I will not respond in the same manner,” Daniel said, after anchor Danny Kushmaro indicated that Netanyahu’s comment was directed at him.

“I have no other country,” the veteran journalist maintained. “The time has come to listen to principled criticism… Our country is on a slippery slope in every way.”

Pressed last week on why he would say such a thing, Daniel said it was a consequence of what he called “the culture of government” now prevailing in Israel, and then listed the names of four hawkish politicians in the current coalition — Ze’ev Elkin, Yariv Levin and Miri Regev of Likud and Jewish Home’s Bezalel Smotrich — whose actions and views he said symbolized the deterioration. “I’ll stay here,” Daniel said. “My children, I’m not so sure.”

Later in that broadcast, Daniel was asked to repeat his declaration, with a Netanyahu loyalist, Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, now in the studio. “I can’t command my children to stay here. It’s not a pleasant place to be,” Daniel said. “They’ll make up their own minds, but if I had thought in the past that it would be a disaster (if they left), not any more.”