Is it Ethical for Climate Journalists to Accept a Paid trip to Israel?

I first learned about the opportunity for climate journalists like me to attend an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists last spring. The 2024 Climate Innovations Israel Fellowship was being promoted by Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, who introduced herself as a Maryland Climate Commissioner and a “relatively new funder in the climate solutions area” in a cold-email sent via the conference app, inviting me and other journalists to visit her booth and attend a breakfast she was hosting. 

According to a flier Laszlo Mizrahi shared, a nonprofit called the Jerusalem Press Club was offering a “unique opportunity” for climate journalists to travel around Israel, learning about Israeli tech businesses’ “breakthrough climate solutions.” The fellowship would include “Airfare, 6 nights’ accommodation & program meals COVERED.” The timing of the trip was unclear, however. Originally scheduled for March, the fellowship had been postponed due to the war.

I had arrived at the April conference wondering how one of the biggest environmental stories in the world — Israel’s war on Gaza — would be addressed in the sessions. A recent investigation published on the Social Science Research Network found that the greenhouse gas emissions generated in the first two months of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza were greater than the annual emissions of 20 nations. Separately, the research agency Forensic Architecture determined that Israeli forces had destroyed “approximately 40 percent of the land in Gaza previously used for food production,” leading experts to assert that Israel’s actions could qualify as ecocide. Israel’s destruction of over half of all housing units in Gaza led to corresponding allegations of domicide. Much of the destruction in Gaza was accomplished, of course, with U.S. bombs.

By that April, official numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry indicated that the Israeli military had killed over 33,000 people in Gaza, in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed over 1,100 people. One had only to look to 9/11 to understand that the chemicals and dust unleashed as most of Gaza’s built environment was blown to bits would continue to take lives for decades to come. After the World Trade Center attack, more first responders ended up dying from health problems related to the pollution than did on the day of the attacks.

Besides a blurb about a panel on war and the environment, Laszlo Mizrahi’s posts about climate solutions were the first mentions I’d seen of Israel at the conference, and they were focused not on Israeli aggressions that had turned Gaza into one of the most extreme environmental hazard zones on the planet — but on Israel’s climate “solutions.”

The Jerusalem Press Club’s first trip for climate journalists took place in the winter of 2023, predating October 7. However the trip’s promotion at the 2024 environmental journalists conference came at a moment when the global climate movement was turning its head toward Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians for the first time. Environmental protesters were increasingly pairing calls to defund the fossil fuel industry with calls to boycott Israel.

I had to wonder if diverting the conversation away from those politics was at least part of the point of this trip.

This kind of travel funding represents an undeniably alluring proposal in an austere media economy where outlets are unable to pay for many international trips, and freelancers like me have even less access to travel. Journalists are not supposed to accept trips from actors aiming to shape their reporting. Yet I suspected that many of the reporters and editors who saw this would ask the same question that came to my mind: Could a climate journalist use the airfare associated with this Jerusalem Press Club fellowship to go report on whatever they wanted? And since this was a “press club,” was it the acceptable kind of gift?

In interviews and email exchanges, the Jerusalem Press Club’s organizers assured me that the fellowship does not include any requirements for reporters to write anything at all and that its purpose is to give journalists the opportunity to access people advancing climate solutions. Two participants in the Club’s first trip for climate journalists in 2023, including independent journalist and Society of Environmental Journalists board member Rocky Kistner, shared warm reviews of the program and said they felt no pressure to convey a pro-Israel message.

However, the backgrounds of the program’s organizers and the longer history of pro-Israel groups funding trips for journalists raise questions about the ethics of participating in the Jerusalem Press Club fellowship.

Sponsoring tours is a foundational nation-building strategy for Israel. Birthright, a free trip to Israel for anyone Jewish between the ages of 18 and 26, is the most famous example, but numerous pro-Israel organizations have for years sent journalists to Israel, periodically drawing scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad. Last November, the Australian publication Crikey began publishing a list of more than 75 journalists who had attended trips to Israel organized by advocacy groups between 2010 and 2023, as well as six who attended trips to occupied Palestinian territories in 2016. Labeled a “who’s who of the fourth estate,” the list was meant to be a corrective to media companies’ inconsistent disclosure policies. In recent months, U.S. reporters also received invitations to attend all expenses paid trips to Israel from an organization called the American Middle East Press Association or AMEPA, founded in 2023. 

The people who set up the Jerusalem Press Club climate tech trip are longtime advocates for Israel. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, whose family foundation funds the fellowship program, co-founded the now-defunct organization The Israel Project, which aimed to spread positive views of Israel internationally, including by hosting press tours of the country. In 2007, Laszlo Mizrahi was credited by the Zionist women’s publication Hadassah Magazine with standing on the “frontlines in the media war over Israel” and leading “a revolution in hasbara,” a term that refers to pro-Israel information campaigns. The Jerusalem Press Club’s CEO Talia Dekel-Fleissig also worked for The Israel Project.

The Press Club’s founder Uri Dromi served as a spokesperson for the Israeli government under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in the 1990s. He was also the chief education officer of the Israeli Air Force and the editor-in-chief of the Air Force’s magazine as well as the Israel Defense Forces’ Publishing House. More recently, he’s worked as a contributing columnist for the Miami Herald.

“Essentially he’s a strat-comm person with long contacts with different aspects of the government in Israel,” said Jane Kirtley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. “It is a way to suggest that the motives are not going to be simply let’s give some journalists a chance to do reporting on environmental issues. I would be very skeptical even without that, but it adds to the complications.”

Kirtley, who — full disclosure — was my advisor when I was an undergrad at the University of Minnesota’s journalism school, stressed that free trips require close scrutiny. “Assuming a fully paid trip is going to compromise your independence, you should think very, very long and hard about whether you’re going to accept it or not,” she said. For some journalists, Kirtley said, that may mean a bright-line rule of saying that they don’t accept free trips. For others, it could be that it’s okay as long as the trip imposes no conditions on reporting and the funding is disclosed to readers.

“The question I always ask in ethical issues is who benefits from this? If the answer is not ‘the public’ — or if it’s somebody else and the public — you have to assess whether your job is to be an independent journalism or a public relations representative,” Kirtley said.

Ultimately, “the SPJ code says you shouldn’t do it,” she said, referencing the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. It states, “Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.”

“I don’t feel like we did anything unethical or crossed any lines or were involved with greenwashing,” said Kistner, the freelance journalist who participated in the 2023 trip. He added, “I was never going to cover the Palestinian conflict in Gaza, but I would be interested in covering attempts to develop climate-fighting technologies.”

“The trip was meant to expose ecological journalists to the contributions of Israel to the issues of climate change,” said Dromi, who stepped down as CEO of the Jerusalem Press Club in January 2023.

Dromi underlined that the club was founded without a political agenda and independently of the Israeli government, which he hadn’t worked for in decades. He noted that he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for a two-state solution in his columns. Dekel-Fleissig, the Club's current CEO aded that the organization is a member of the International Association of Press Clubs and the European Federation of Press and has worked with journalists from the New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, the Associated Press and "thousands of other outlets."

Dromi denied that JPC is attempting to distract from Israel's military conflicts. “Yes, Israel is engaged in a bitter fight with its enemies, and fighting against terrorist organizations. But this side of Israel is extensively covered by the world media, usually with a strong criticism of Israel. In no way is JPC trying to deflect from that,” he said. “We see great value in exposing for journalists the various faces of Israel.”

The trip’s funder, Laszlo Mizrahi, said her motivation is to support good solutions journalism. “I did have an agenda in funding the trip, and I have an agenda with all of our climate funding,” she told me in a phone interview, “which is that I want there to be more coverage of solutions that can be replicated.”

Although she left the Israel Project in 2012, and it shut down in 2019, the history of the  organization Laszlo Mizrahi co-founded is useful context for understanding the Jerusalem Press Club trip. Laszlo Mizrahi started The Israel Project in the midst of bad press for Israel during the second intifada in 2002. The project operated in an eco-system that included numerous organizations specifically established to advance a pro-Israel media narrative. But where groups like Honest Reporting and CAMERA focused on painting journalists who criticized Israel as biased or antisemitic, The Israel Project took a softer approach that was more palatable to liberal audiences. Although the group had a clear mission to strengthen international approval of Israel, “Laszlo Mizrahi did not insert TIP into the middle of partisan fights over Middle East policy, and did not attack prominent Democrats who strayed from the pro-Israel line,” wrote journalist Alex Kane in a profile for Jewish Currents. The approach attracted big donors.

Under Laszlo Mizrahi’s leadership, the group set up meetings between journalists and both Israeli and Palestinian officials, broadcast pro-Israel advertisements, operated summer campus training programs, and developed pro-Israel content aimed at India, China, and the Arabic-speaking world. It also commissioned a “Global Language Dictionary,” aimed at establishing talking points for advancing Israeli interests. The dictionary, which was leaked to Newsweek, included a section focused on the most convincing ways to talk to Americans about Israeli settlements on the West Bank, which are illegal.

Among the organization’s initiatives was what The Israel Project called “intellicopter tours.” “We have a two-and-a-half-hour guided tour where they see Israel’s tiny size and its enormous security threats,” Laszlo Mizrahi told Hadassah Magazine. “We have taken more than 300 journalists [on the tour]. Over 100 million people around the world have seen stories and footage that have been shot through these tours.” 

In a phone interview, Laszlo Mizrahi stressed that the Israel Project, though widely recognized as pro-Israel, was also pro-Palestinian. “I don’t think what I was doing was hasbara; I think I was putting facts in front of people, so people could make decisions based on what was really happening there.” She added that she was involved for years in political efforts toward a two-state solution.

She quit that work in 2012 and began focusing on disability rights issues, as Israel was becoming a partisan issue in the U.S., with progressive Democrats becoming increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. TIP moved to the right, costing it funding. In Jewish Currents’ telling, Mizrahi’s departure precipitated the Israel Project’s demise in 2019.

Now Laszlo Mizrahi sits on the Maryland Commission on Climate Change and helps run the Mizrahi Family Charitable Fund, which, she said shifted to funding climate communications two years ago. Grist, Floodlight, and the Society of Environmental Journalists all accepted funds from Mizrahi in 2022 and 2023, and Canary Media took money in 2023, according to the fund’s web site. In July the Society of Environmental Journalists announced that Laszlo Mizrahi would be part of a new Future Council that would provide advice on fundraising.

Floodlight’s founder, Emily Holden, wrote in an email that the climate news site accepted $1,000 in May 2023 and $1,000 in December 2023, for general operating support for climate reporting. “We don't plan to receive further funds from the organization,” she said.

Grist CEO Nikhil Swaminathan declined to share information about individual donations. “Grist accepts gifts from donors with a broad range of political viewpoints,” he said in an email. Neither the Society of Environmental Journalists nor Canary Media replied to requests for comment.

The Mizrahi fund has also provided money to a Jewish National Fund program that gives people with disabilities the opportunity to train with the Israeli military. Dedicated to “turning the desert green,” JNF’s work has included planting pine trees on top of villages and orchards that Palestinians were forced to abandon. Indeed, “greening” efforts are another longstanding nation-building strategy for Israel. As of last year, even Birthright is in the midst of a five-year “greening” process.

Like The Israel Project’s trips, the Jerusalem Press Club’s inaugural climate tech tour in 2023 spotlighted a range of perspectives. Kistner said he and other attendees visited several climate tech companies and a climate tech startup conference. Held at the height of historic protests against right-wing Prime Minister Netanyahu’s judiciary reform, the trip did not avoid criticisms of the Israeli government. At another climate conference at Ben Gurion University, fellows watched as protesters disrupted a speech by Israel’s new environmental minister.

The trip didn’t entirely sidestep discussion of occupation of Palestinian lands, either. Among the people Kistner met on the trip was Tareq Abu Hamed, the Palestinian executive director of the Arava Institute, which aims to use environmental efforts to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians. Ethan Brown, another freelance journalist who attended the trip, later featured Abu Hamed in an episode of his climate podcast the Sweaty Penguin. Kistner ended up writing a piece for The Jerusalem Post about an Israeli startup that is deriving climate-friendly products from dates. The piece as well as Brown’s podcast episode both disclosed support from the Jerusalem Press Club.

“We were certainly aware that there was a possibility that something could be spun a certain way or something could be hidden. I didn’t run across any of that,” Kistner said. He said he’d recommend the fellowship.

Brown said that trips he’s taken to Israel have taught him that Israeli environmentalism is distinct. “In the United States when we think of environmentalism we think of very progressive environmentalism that is largely out of an interest in social rights and human rights and progressive causes,” Brown said. “Going to Israel, I learned that environmentalism there is a whole different breed. It’s a more Zionist environmentalism.”

Brown pointed out that Israel was ranked no. 6 in the United Nations’ 2017 Global Cleantech Innovation Index. He said that didn’t happen simply out of concern for the environment. “People saw an opportunity and had skills — often skills they developed while doing mandatory military service — and they saw that we can solve problems.”

Brown clarified that by Zionism he does not mean support for the Israeli government, but, rather, what he sees as the right for Jewish people to live and self determine in what many consider their homeland. "When I say 'Zionist environmentalism,' I mean environmental practices that help Israel build relationships with neighbors and help new Jews migrate," he explained.

In Brown’s assessment, “It’s impossible there to separate environmentalism and patriotism, because that’s often the core motivation of it.”

Brown’s analysis made me reflect on my own motivations as a journalist. So did Laszlo Mizrahi’s followup email asking me whether my newsletter was “activism dressed up as reporting.” She wrote, “As you covered Palestinians crisis, you did not report on the massive environmental damage done by Hamas and other Iran-backed proxies such as the fires Hezbollah caused in Northern Israel, the agricultural damage in the South of Israel, or the fossil fuel spills caused by the Houthis.”

As journalist, I’ve dedicated my work to environmental justice reporting, which, for me, means writing about marginalized and criminalized communities that are disproportionately impacted by environmental crises. I’m especially interested in the criminalization of environmental activism and the environmental outcomes of framing groups of people as criminals or terrorists. As I see it, those guideposts mean that I have a particular responsibility to cover the environmental outcomes for Palestinians, who have long been cast as terrorists.

Laszlo Mizrahi is correct that I don’t write about every ecological harm tied to any group of people. Nor do I adhere to both-sideism in my work. It’s something that all climate journalists should have learned to avoid a generation ago, when confused notions of the journalistic ideal of objectivity compelled reporters to amplify unscientific claims that the climate crisis was not real. Although I believe that environmental injustice hurts all of us and that the unresolved land conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have caused unspeakable tragedy for both sides, I’ve seen no evidence that that the environmental harms wrought by Palestinian militants on Israel are of a similar scale to the mass death by contamination that Palestinians in Gaza now face thanks to the U.S. funded Israeli military’s bombardment. 

Laszlo Mizrahi told me that journalists routinely accept paid trips and the press club trip is no different. To be clear, I don’t believe that it’s never okay to participate in a fellowship that provides resources to better cover an issue area or region. I’ve done so myself. During my fellowship with the International Women’s Media Foundation, I attended conflict reporting training in Mexico City, before traveling to Guatemala City and working with fixers, who helped me and the rest of my cohort report out stories we’d pitched in advance. As an environmental justice journalist, the fellowship fit clearly with what I see as my journalistic responsibility: to shed light on cases where marginalized and criminalized communities are facing disproportionate ecological harm.

The Jerusalem Press Club trip promoted at the 2024 environmental journalism conference seemed to turn that framing on its head: environmental journalists would be flown to a place where some of the most marginalized people in the world are facing some of the most severe ecological harms and asked to absorb messaging framing the nation as a bastion of climate solutions. In contrast, Palestinian environmental officials say Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to land, water, and technologies make it virtually impossible for them to develop or access their own climate solutions. 

If Brown was right, and Israeli climate solutions are being driven by Zionism and mandatory military service, then are such solutions also premised to some degree on displacement and environmental catastrophe for Palestinians? It’s a research question I’d be curious to pursue, and I suppose I could try to use the Jerusalem Press Club fellowship to do it. But the question appears to conflict with the fellowship organizers’ stated purpose of sharing news of Israel’s impressive climate solutions.

The Jerusalem Press Club is not just interested in climate journalists. In May, the club set up a tour for reporters of areas of Israel impacted by the war on Gaza, arranging interviews with Israeli military officials and hostage families, as well as startup leaders, Israeli venture capitalists, and, “a visit to local Arab communities.” Another tour focused on Israel’s tech sector and included a visit to “sites brutally targeted by Hamas on October 7th.” The climate trip is still on hiatus for now.

In recent months, the newly established American Middle East Press Association or AMEPA also invited reporters to attend paid trips to Israel. The group’s web site says it is focused on “fostering a deeper understanding of Israel and enhancing comprehensive coverage of Israel.” One of its first press briefing, held in February, focused on “US Arms Transfers to Israel, Participation of UNRWA Employees in October 7 Events.” Among the “key takeaways” AMEPA intended for guests, according to a media advisory, was “Israel’s Need for Decisive Victory” and “the urgent need for reforms and eventual dismantling” of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which serves as the primary support agency for Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes as Israel was established in 1948.

These resources for covering the war from within Israel exist in an atmosphere where covering Palestinian perspectives has become increasingly dangerous. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 111 Palestinian, three Lebanese, and two Israeli journalists and media workers have been killed covering Israel’s war on Gaza, including at least five that the organization says were targeted and murdered by Israeli forces. Israeli forces shut down Al Jazeera’s offices in the country and seized equipment from Associated Press reporters under a new law allowing officials to forcibly close any foreign media outlets classified as a security threat. The Jerusalem-based Foreign Press Association has petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to demand that Israel stop blocking international journalists from entering Gaza to cover the war.

Meanwhile numerous media workers around the world have faced retaliation — from dismissal to assignment restrictions to lost funding — for speech and coverage perceived as critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinians. It’s a labor problem I helped document in a report for the National Writers Union last May.

This summer, the International Women’s Media Foundation — which hosted my old fellowship — rescinded a Courage in Journalism Award to Gazan journalist Maha Hussaini after the conservative Washington Free Beacon unearthed social media posts where she appeared to express support for Palestinian armed resistance and posted cartoons suggesting that Israelis are hiding behind the Holocaust and religion as they imprison and kill Palestinians.

In the U.S., Israeli writers tend to face less scrutiny than Hussaini when they appear to support violence or criticize assertions about genocide. In a December op-ed, Jerusalem Press Club founder Dromi, for example, stated that “a massive devastation to homes and infrastructure” is the “only way” to uproot Hamas, and called the International Court of Justice’s proceedings regarding genocide in Gaza a “farce.”

In an email, Dromi wrote that he stands by his statements. “It is Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields which causes the destruction of houses and infrastructures,” he said, adding that his piece also called for a “Marshall Plan for Gaza” to rebuild once the war is over.

Rebuilding Gaza will come with an estimated carbon cost greater than the annual climate-destabilizing emissions of 135 countries, according to a recent follow-up report published on the Social Science Research Network.

I attended Laszlo Mizrahi’s breakfast panel. She gave a brief introduction at the beginning and encouraged reporters to look into the free trip to Israel, before turning it over to the facilitator, Brown, who, the week before, published a piece titled “The ‘Ecocide’ Smear Targets Israel” for the publication of a think tank founded by Richard Nixon. The panel, titled “Jews and Climate Change,” largely avoided the question of Palestine.

When it came time for audience questions, I asked why it would be important for environmental journalists to travel to Israel and what Brown thought about the criticism that such a trip serves to greenwash human rights violations of Palestinian people by the Israeli state.

Brown replied, “There are some incredible climate solutions and clean tech going on over there. I met some amazing, hard-working people who have come up with ideas that have really helped my reporting in more ways than one,” He added, “This is completely out of the realm of politics. This is just technology and climate solutions.”

“This was not a greenwashing trip,” added Kistner. “What’s going on in Israel, you know, in Gaza, whatnot, that’s a separate issue.”