By Dave Remnick, The New Yorker, February 28, 2011

In the early days of the uprising in Egypt [in Israel] [......]

The outlet that conveyed the greatest sense of equipoise, even optimism, was Haaretz (“The Land”), a broadsheet daily that is easily the most liberal newspaper in Israel and arguably the most important liberal institution in a country that has moved inexorably to the right in the past decade. The Schocken family, which has owned the paper since 1935, is not commandingly wealthy, yet it invests lavishly in the quality of a paper that is authoritative in its news columns, left-wing in its ideology, and insistently oppositional in its temper. Golda Meir once said that the only government that Haaretz ever supported was the British Mandate, before the birth of the state.

Dov Alfon, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief, tried to keep the tone of the paper’s Egyptian coverage cool, analytical, observant. “This country was submerged in paranoia, as if Iran were invading Egypt, as if the demonstrators in Cairo were Hezbollah,” Alfon, who was born in Tunisia and grew up in Paris, said. “Suddenly, on Sunday morning all the Israeli newspapers were running headlines like ‘A NEW MIDDLE EAST’ and ‘THE END OF MUBARAK.’ I was much more cautious. I was influenced by my childhood in Paris..[....]

The Egyptian uprising posed a reporting challenge to Haaretz, as it did to all Israeli media. There are no Israeli news bureaus in Egypt, or anywhere else in the Arab world. [....]