Let me briefly document a couple of distinguished foreign correspondents in Jerusalem who were made examples of, and then provide more recent illustrations of my own run-ins with Western editors.

In the book Publish It Not (1975), Michael Adams, The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent in the late 1960s, sets out his struggles to persuade the paper to believe his accounts of systematic Israeli brutality following its military occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. His editors, like the rest of the media, preferred to believe Israel’s claim that its occupation was “the most enlightened in history.”

When Adams tried to challenge that assumption, by reporting on Israel’s ethnic cleansing of three Palestinian villages under cover of the 1967 war — the villages were destroyed and would later become a green space for Israelis called Canada Park — he was pushed out of the paper. He recounts that his editor told him “he would never again publish anything I wrote about the Middle East.”

Then there was Donald Neff, Time Magazine’s bureau chief in the 1970s. He was eased out after reporting in 1978 on Israeli soldiers savagely beating Palestinian children in Beit Jala, a West Bank community near Bethlehem. It was a very tame story by today’s standards, given that we now have actual footage of Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity, often posted on their own social media. But then such a report had the power to shock.

Neff’s bureau staff — all of them Israeli Jews — responded in open revolt to his story. Official Israeli sources refused to speak to him. The Israel lobby in the U.S. began a public campaign against Neff and Time. His editors were unsupportive, and the story was ignored by other US media. Isolated and exhausted from the attacks, Neff left his post.