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ABSTRACT
Upon his arrival in Israel in September 1979, the Jewish-Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman was welcomed as a Jewish hero. The founding editor of the daily La Opinión had been kidnapped in Argentina in April 1977, tortured, and had spent almost two and a half years in illegal detention, and later house arrest, until he was deported to Israel. But the initial enthusiasm quickly gave way to disappointment. The Jewish hero became a persona non grata, among other reasons because of his critical writings against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This article analyzes the changing image of Timerman in the Hebrew press. Israeli society found it difficult to accept such criticism from someone who had come to Israel only a short time earlier and, moreover, with the help of the Israeli government. The hostility toward Timerman also reflected a lack of understanding as to the meaning of Zionism among many Diaspora Jews.
Key words: Jacobo Timerman, Israeli-Argentine relations, diplomacy and human rights, Zionism
On May 25, 1977, a day when Argentina was celebrating the anniversary of the formation of its first native government, the ruling military regime decided to appoint a general as interventor (a government-appointed supervisor) at one of the most influential newspapers in the country, La Opinión. This daily, known as "the Le Monde of Latin America," had been founded six years earlier by the Jewish-Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman (1923-99). From its inception, La Opinión had a revolutionary impact on the Argentine news scene. Like the French daily to which it was compared, it focused on cultural issues, political analysis, and international news, besides chronicling events. When the military junta appointed General José Teófilo Goyret to manage it, the paper's founder and editor was already a prisoner-or, rather, he had been kidnapped on April 15 of that year, and his whereabouts were unknown. One of the most famous journalists of the country was sharing the fate of thousands of young people who had been arrested and were now missing (desaparecidos). Almost all of them were tortured, and many of them were killed.
The coup d'état carried out by the Argentine military officers on March 24, 1976, was the sixth the country had undergone since 1930. However, this latest Argentine dictatorship...