Yuval Abraham's Undisclosed Relationship With Euro-Med Staff Deserves an An

Yuval Abraham has built a career on a single, serious proposition: that people are accountable for the institutions they are attached to, and that looking away is itself a choice. It is the argument of No Other Land. It is the argument of his reporting on Lavender and Where's Daddy. It is the argument he carried onto the stage in Venice this month, where an audience rose to applaud it.

It is a real argument. I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

I would simply like to see him apply it once to himself.

Eitan Fischberger blew open the story yesterday: Abraham's closest Palestinian collaborator is Ahmed Alnaouq. They have worked together since 2019, when they built We Beyond the Fence to bring Palestinian testimony to Hebrew readers. Abraham calls him a friend, a colleague and a political partner, and there is no reason to doubt any of it. Alnaouq is a real writer with a real project, and in October 2023 an Israeli airstrike on his family's home killed twenty-one of his relatives, including his father, two brothers, three sisters, and fourteen nieces and nephews between the ages of one and thirteen. He was in London. Nothing in what follows is a comment on his grief, which is his, or on his right to speak, which is his too.

It is a comment on his employer, and on what Abraham's readers were never told.

Fischberger adds that Alnaouq is listed on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor's own website as its Outreach and Advocacy Officer. Israel banned Euro-Med's predecessor, Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, in 2015 as an unauthorised association, and later designated it under the 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law. Israel names Euro-Med's founder and chairman, Ramy Abdu, as a Hamas operative and issued an administrative seizure order against him in 2020 over his role with iPalestine. Abdu and former board chair Mazen Kahel both appeared on Israel's 2013 list of Hamas's main operatives and institutions in Europe. Both have been photographed with Ismail Haniyeh. In May, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry barred forty Euro-Med personnel from entering the country.

Ready for more?

These are Israeli designations. Euro-Med is registered in Geneva, Richard Falk chairs its board of trustees, and no European government has proscribed it. I state that plainly because I am asking for a standard of disclosure and I intend to meet it myself.

But here is what makes this a journalism question rather than a guilt-by-association question, and it is the part that has gone entirely unexamined.

Euro-Med is not a bystander to the information war. It is one of its principal manufacturers. It produces casualty documentation, files submissions to UN mechanisms, drives legal proceedings in international forums, and generates the atrocity claims that get laundered upward into Western coverage. It supplied the material behind the most grotesque of the recent New York Times allegations against Israel. Its output is the raw feedstock of the case being assembled against this country in courtrooms and editorial pages.

And Yuval Abraham reports on precisely that terrain.

His authority, all of it, rests on a claim of independence. He claims to be 'the Israeli who followed the evidence against his own side'. But --- strip out the independence and the work is just advocacy with a better byline.

So: has Abraham ever disclosed to his readers that his political partner draws a salary from an organisation whose product overlaps with, corroborates, or feeds the claims he reports? Has he disclosed it to +972, to the Guardian, to the festivals, to the juries? Has he told a single audience that the friendship he cites as his moral credential runs through the payroll of an entity his own government designated eleven years ago?

He has not. Nobody has asked him.

If a defence correspondent's closest political partner worked for a defence contractor whose products he covered, the disclosure would be mandatory and its absence would be a resignation matter. Nobody would need to allege corruption. The relationship alone would require the line at the bottom of the piece. That is not a punitive standard. It is the ordinary furniture of the profession, and Abraham has spent years insisting that ordinary standards be applied without exception to Israelis.

This is the asymmetry, and it is not a small one. Abraham's entire project is the argument that an Israeli cannot claim clean hands by pleading that he personally did nothing, because complicity is structural, because institutions implicate the people attached to them, because the honest response to discovering what your side is part of is to say so out loud. He has made that case with more force than almost anyone.

Then he made a political partnership with the staff of a designated organisation and said nothing. He asks Israelis to account for the institutions they are attached to. He has one of his own. He has never accounted for it, and he has never given his readers the information they would need to weigh it for themselves.