In complete contravention of journalistic standards, CNN continues to advocate for US sanctions on Israel in a televised segment by Katie Polglase that aired on The Amanpour Hour on July 13 and in a nearly 4000-word written article posted online. (“The US held off sanctioning this Israeli army unit despite evidence of abuses. Now its forces are shaping the fight in Gaza,” July 13, 2024. The byline of the written article said that it was “by CNN’s International Investigations team,” but Polglase is listed as the investigative reporter.) Moreover, the segment that aired included a baseless claim that echoes the medieval stereotype of Jewish bloodlust.
The Society for Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states that advocacy and commentary should be labelled. Neither the online article nor the segment that aired are labelled as commentary, and the segment appears to be a news report. Yet, it’s obvious in both that an agenda is being pursued.
The televised segment was ostensibly about Israel, yet it included seven references to supposed U.S. inaction:
Katie Polglase: This is the Netzah Yehuda battalion, an Israeli army unit showcasing their military might in a promotional personal training video. But the unit has a decades-long history of abusing Palestinians in the West Bank. And the Americans know it. A state department investigation found they had committed gross human rights violations but this finding never led to U.S. sanctions. Even media reports of possible sanctions outraged Israel….
Polglase: So despite their track record, the Netzah Yehuda battalion is still receiving American arms and is now operating in Gaza….
Charles Blaha, Former U.S. State Department Official: That is very bad news. That shows first of all, that Israel, that the government of Israel has no intention of holding the Netzah Yehuda battalion accountable.
Polglase: He says the U.S. is not following their own laws by sending them weapons.
Blaha: Of course, we treat Israel differently and that really undermines our human rights advocacy and the rest of the world. The law that Congress passed and our taxpayer-funded assistance is going to Israeli units that have committed gross violations of human rights.
Polglase: This assistance, despite the growing evidence of abuse. CNN exclusively obtained the names of three more Israeli units found by U.S. officials to have committed gross human rights violations prior to October 7th. All are still operating, including the Yamam, seen here in Gaza in an operation that rescued four Israeli hostages, but left nearly 300 Palestinians dead, according to local health authorities. The Israeli military dispute that the toll was so high. As the death and destruction mounts, it is U.S. weaponry supporting these units, begging the question for how much longer will Israel’s greatest ally choose to turn a blind eye.
(Emphasis added.)
The segment seems to be less about Israel and more about U.S. support for Israel. And Polglase does not present anyone advocating the contrary point of view, who might point out, for example, that Israel is fighting a defensive and existential war, one that it did not start and did not want, and it needs the support of its allies now. The segment crosses the line from journalism into advocacy.
But that’s not the only problem with the televised report. Polglase relies on an anonymous source and presents his opinions and speculation with no pushback. The anonymous soldier tells Polglase, “There were some kids throwing rocks in a small village. That normally isn’t a big deal. But the company commander decided, let’s throw them a party. So they took the emergency response team and 20 soldiers. They walk door to door, throwing flash-bangs and gas grenades into people’s homes as a punishment for the kids throwing rocks.”
“Isn’t a big deal,” seems an odd way to describe the large stones frequently thrown at both soldiers and civilians in the West Bank, as they have the potential to be lethal – unlike the stun grenades that the soldier seems to think are, in fact, a big deal.
Polglase then prompts him with a leading question, “Collective punishment?” He obliges her, “Yes. Collective punishment.” This is not the first time we’ve seen Polglase use this type of leading question to elicit a response to condemn Israel. But “collective punishment” is a defined term in international law, and this is not what the term means. Nor does either Polglase or her anonymous source know whether the commander had other reasons for his decision to which the low-level soldier was not privy.
Polglase then admits that CNN has used facial recognition technology to essentially spy on an IDF officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nitai Okashi. She describes an incident that happened under his command in ominous terms, complete with grim background music to set the tone – but on close inspection, she hasn’t revealed anything that Okashi himself did wrong. By Polglase’s own account two Palestinian men were “arrested for assisting the killer of two … Netzah Yehuda soldiers.” The two were beaten by the soldiers on the way to the police station. Obviously this should never have happened, and according Polglase, the soldiers involved received jail time. But she doesn’t even claim that Okashi was present when the incident occurred. Even more disturbingly, in the written article online, Polglase doesn’t even mention the reason the two Palestinian men were arrested.
Next Polglase turns her focus to Lieutenant Colonel Mati Shevach, who, she tells us, was reprimanded for an incident in which a Palestinian-American man, Omar Assad, died. Polglase doesn’t tell television viewers that Assad had a heart attack, although that information appears in her print article, or that the reason he was detained was for refusal to cooperate with a security check searching for weapons. She also fails to tell viewers that a platoon commander and a company commander were removed from their positions and barred from commanding roles for two years, instead saying, “no soldier faced charges” over the incident.
Shevach, Polglase tells us, is “now training Israeli ground troops, preparing to enter Gaza, even featuring in high-profile interviews with American media, boasting of his soldiers’ enthusiasm for war.” (Emphasis added.)
But she cuts to a clip of him in a CBS segment saying, “The major concern for most of the soldiers is we’re going to have to stop.” To describe this concern as “enthusiasm for war” is to totally ignore the context of fifteen years of Hamas attacks against Israel, culminating in the barbaric October 7, 2023 attack in which 1200 Israeli men, women, and children were burned to death, raped, tortured and killed, with another 240 taken hostage to Gaza, including a nine-month old baby. The soldiers’ concern is with stopping before completing the job, leaving the door open for Hamas to fulfill its promise to commit more such attacks in the future. In the full CBS segment, Shevach elaborated that the fear is that the war would end without completing the mission.
For Polglase to describe this concern as “enthusiasm for war” is abhorrent and echoes archetypal antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish bloodlust, as well as more modern ones of Jews as warmongers. And it’s not the first time that CNN has platformed this particular form of libel.
Polglase finally gives away her game when she next attacks the IDF unit responsible for the June 8 rescue of four hostages, including Noa Argamani. The U.S. State department determined that this unit, along with several others, had remediated any problems, information that appears only in CNN’s written article online but not in the segment that aired. But for Polglase this isn’t good enough. After citing “local health authorities” for the death toll on the day of the rescue without mentioning that the local authority is Hamas, she concludes, “as the death and destruction mounts, it is U.S. weaponry supporting these units, begging the question for how much longer will Israel’s greatest ally choose to turn a blind eye.”
The print article provides more insight into the biased sources that helped Polglase construct her narrative. In print, CNN wrote:
CNN has spoken with a former member of the [Netzah Yehuda] unit, who detailed instances of cruel and excessively violent treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The whistleblower said that commanders actively supported vigilante violence and that promoting them into senior IDF positions risked bringing the same culture to other parts of the military.
“A lot of us probably did not see Arabs, Palestinians in particular, as someone with rights – okay, like they’re really the occupier of some of the land and they need to be moved,” he said.
The former soldier, who asked not to be named due to fears about his security, told CNN that the unit was well known for carrying out what he described as the “collective punishment of Palestinians.” He gave an example of the battalion’s forces assaulting a Palestinian village, going door-to-door with stun grenades and gas grenades as retribution for some local children throwing rocks.
While he was in Netzah Yehuda, he said, the battalion’s commanders played a key role in perpetuating a culture of violence, both by standing by as it happened and promoting it.
But much of this is merely the opinion and speculation of one anonymous individual. Moreover, as noted above, the video shows that it was Polglase’s leading question that prompted him to use the phrase “collective punishment.”
In addition, she relies Breaking the Silence, an organization that, according to NGO Monitor, gets more than half of its funding from foreign (i.e., non-Israeli) government sources, and that is “active in promoting ‘war crimes’ charges against Israel …. based on anonymous and unverifiable hearsay ‘testimonies.’” In 2016, a major television news investigation showed that a large percentage of the group’s “testimonies” were either false or exaggerated, including some from BtS staffers. CNN doesn’t tell its readers or viewers any of that, or how controversial the group is within Israel. Although she doesn’t say so, it seems likely that it was Breaking the Silence that connected Polglase with her anonymous source.
In contrast to CNN, a May Times of Israel article about the Netzah Yehuda battalion shows both the controversy that the unit has been involved in and the complexity of the issue without advocating for policy. It describes the complicated issues involved in this unit of mostly Haredi young men, at a time when the debate about subjecting Haredim to the draft is one of the country’s most divisive issues. Unlike Polglase’s single anonymous veteran, the Times of Israel journalist, Canaan Lidor, spoke to three named veterans of the unit willing to go on the record, including Yossi Levi:
According to Yossi Levi, a reserves major and Netzah veteran who heads the Netzah Yehuda Association, which raises donations for the unit and does its public relations work, the unit’s long list of problematic incidents is simply a result of its extended deployment in the West Bank, where it is forced into regular confrontations with Palestinians.
Unlike other units, which regularly shift to various frontiers, Netzah Yehuda was exclusively deployed to the West Bank from its founding in 1999 — as Nahal Haredi — until late 2022, when it was moved to the Golan Heights. Like most IDF combat units, Netzah troops have also been deployed in Gaza and along the Gaza border following October 7.
“Examined proportionately, there’s nothing unusual in the number of problematic incidents involving Netzah Yehuda. Every unit is going to have such failures. We’re no better or worse,” said Levi, calling the allegations against the unit “unfair.”
While the Times of Israel discussed the issues of US sanctions, it gave multiple perspectives on the unit as well as on the sanctions issue. TOI described commentary from another one of its named, on the record sources: veteran Raphael Bublil “said that Netzah has been consistently the subject of oversight and disciplinary measures when deemed necessary by army authorities. Even so, he said, they deal firmly with Palestinian violence, including by stone throwers ‘who need to meet the most severe means available because a stone can kill you.’”
The Times of Israel article was published two months before Polglase’s reports, so she easily could have had access to this information. Although Polglase does include an IDF response, it doesn’t carry the same weight as quotes from individuals. CNN’s readers, therefore, are led towards a specific conclusion – presumably the one Polglase wants them to reach.
CNN’s print article also discusses alleged abuses by other IDF units, including “the alleged rape of a 15-year-old boy by an interrogator from the Israeli Internal Security Forces at the Russian Compound (Moscobiyya detention center) in Jerusalem in January 2021.” But the original reporting of the alleged incident, by DCI-Palestine, a group with ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is based solely on the account of the boy, who was arrested for throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, and who had already been arrested on a previous occasion a year prior for reasons that aren’t made clear by the NGO. DCIP does not claim that there were any physical signs or other witnesses to corroborate the boy’s allegations, even though they claim the boy met with his lawyer about fifteen minutes after the alleged incident.
But CNN seems to be of the opinion that the U.S. government should impose sanctions on an ally based on uncorroborated, anonymous allegations by a single individual, filtered through an NGO affiliated with a terrorist group.
To promote this policy position, CNN turns to Josh Paul, described as a “a former director in the State Department’s political-military affairs bureau [who] spent more than 11 years working on US defense diplomacy, security and weapons assistance before resigning in October 2023 over the transfer of arms to Israel.” CNN does not disclose that Paul, as noted by NGO Monitor, is a Senior Advisor from DAWN, an NGO that is “devoted to campaigning for sanctions against the IDF.” In a Google search of Paul, the top result is Paul’s Linked-In page, which lists his DAWN affiliation right at the top.
In addition, as CAMERA has previously documented, Paul has appeared on Joy Reid’s MSNBC program, where he made demonstrably false claims about Israel and called for IDF soldiers to be put in prison. As a result of his resignation from the State Department, he was also the subject of a lengthy and flattering piece in the New Yorker, in which he admitted that he began drafting that resignation prior to actually working on any post-10/7 weapons transfers to Israel.
It’s fine, of course, for Paul to push for policy ramifications based on the DCIP report. But a news report should be balanced, and this one is not. While Polglase does include the kind of bland statements from the State Department that you would expect a government agency to provide, she doesn’t seem to have interviewed anyone who effectively advocates the position contrary to Paul’s. Again, Polglase is leading readers towards a specific conclusion.
Of course, the print article also includes the de rigueur claim that “nine months since Hamas militants killed around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 250 people, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities.” As in the televised piece, and for the second time in the written piece, Polglase refers to “local health authorities” without explaining that these authorities are part of Hamas. Nor does she explain that Hamas does not distinguish militants from civilians.
Polglase concludes the print article by returning to her anonymous veteran of Netzah Yehuda. The source makes the claim that soldiers get rewarded with two weeks off if they kill a terrorist, which, Polglase admits, the IDF flatly denied. If it were true, this seems like something that would be easy enough to verify with a second source, yet Polglase does not seem to have one. Not only that, but even this single source only claims to have “heard” it, and doesn’t even seem to have first-hand information. In other words, Polglase has printed an unsubstantiated rumor as news.
By the same token, the anonymous source’s statement that “Most of the commanders couldn’t care less (about abuses), as long as it didn’t end up on video,” is unsubstantiated speculation, again printed as though it were news.
Polglase’s article, as well as the segment that aired on Christiane Amanpour’s show, is a case study in how to string together speculation and anonymous, uncorroborated allegations, legitimized by a network of biased NGOs, to push an agenda under a thin pretense of journalism.