When I learned of Haim Yavin’s death last week at age 93, warm memories flooded over me. Just a few years ago, I sat with Israel’s most renowned 88-year-old television news broadcaster in his home near Herzliya for an interview I was very fortunate to land.
I was preparing a piece for The Jerusalem Post on a new biographical documentary about the incredible life of Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, and needed a firsthand quote from Yavin.
The film’s producer had sent me a link to watch the film in advance of the screening at Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center, and partway through, I was struck by an archival Israel Broadcast news clip of election night 1977 showing Yavin, mid-broadcast when the election results were clear, delivering a single word that would outlast the election it described. That clip was what brought me to his living room.
Sitting with him that afternoon, I asked Yavin to recollect the moment he declared the improbable victory of Menachem Begin’s Likud Party – after nearly 30 years of one-party government since Israel’s founding – as a “mahapach,” Hebrew for “revolution” or “upheaval,” and the title of the Begin biographical film.
With an engaging and uncanny ability to recollect small details, he enthralled me by describing the moment he pulled that word out of his memory and life experience at just the right moment. He also told me he was working on his second memoir, but that it was in Hebrew and would need a translator to reach an English-language readership.
Remembering Yavin beyond the facts of his distinguished career
I remember offering, at least in passing, to help him find one or to do the work myself. I never followed up. I told myself there would be time to go back, ask more questions, and make the offer properly. To my regret, there wasn’t.
After the news of Yavin’s passing broke, I went looking for what had already been written about this pivotal media figure and found thorough eulogies that had run in the days since; respectful, full of the facts of a very distinguished 40-year career. I also took note of a personal Facebook post by longtime Israeli journalist and broadcast news anchor Calev Ben-David, in which he recalled his 2017 interview with Yavin.
His career has already been covered elsewhere. Reading through those accounts after his death, I felt moved to add something only visible from where I was sitting five years ago – not as a journalist but as an essayist, across from a man with a searching interest in why I’d moved to Israel. He kept finding his way to the actual question beneath mine, as though he were guiding the interview as much as participating in it.
Late in our conversation, I mentioned that a friend had suggested that title for his life story. He did not take it well. “I hated this – Mr. Television,” he said, “It’s not right.” What he preferred, he said, was something closer to “Memories from the Screen” – not the box, the screen itself, the images people actually watched.
Election night, 1977
That clip was the moment most people bring up first when they talk about Yavin – watching election results that the political establishment had not believed possible, reaching for a word he half-remembered from the Talmud, and telling the country, on air, that it was living through a mahapach. Begin’s Likud was about to end nearly three decades of unbroken Labor rule.
He described weighing the decision in real time. “I couldn’t sweep it under the rug,” he recalled. “I couldn’t hide the fact that Begin was going to be prime minister. On the other hand, it’s going to be a catastrophe; something nobody thought of.”
The word outlasted the broadcast. “Mahapach” is still used in Hebrew as shorthand for a political earthquake, nearly 50 years later.
Ben-David, who has spent four decades successfully moving between Israeli print and broadcast journalism, offered a comparison when I asked him about that period, when Israel had just one television channel, one national news broadcast anchored each night at 8 p.m. by Yavin.
“It would be like if Walter Cronkite [the iconic CBS News anchor] had no competition,” he said. “That’s why he was such a dominant figure – because he was the first, and he was the only one, for a long time.” There was no second channel, no competing anchor offering a different read on the same returns that night.
For most of his career, Yavin was known for what he did not say on air. Ben-David, who first interviewed him in the 1990s, described a man who “was very calm” and “didn’t want to make specific political statements.” Ben-David used the phrase “authoritatively neutral” – a posture, he said, maintained for decades, aimed at a kind of consensus that could hold across the political spectrum.
Yavin sets aside neutrality in documentary ahead of Gaza disengagement
That Yavin posture was set aside publicly on at least two occasions. The first was in 2005, with Land of the Settlers, a documentary Yavin shot largely alone, with a hand-held camera, traveling through the West Bank and Gaza ahead of Israel’s disengagement from the Strip.
It argued that Israel would need to dismantle the settlements to reach peace. Ben-David drew a comparison to Cronkite’s 1968 broadcast Report from Vietnam, a special analysis concluding that the war was “mired in stalemate.” “It’s very telling that [Yavin’s documentary] happened so late in his career,” Ben-David said. “It shows you the success he’d had in trying to maintain neutrality.”
The second is on the clip Ben-David posted on his Facebook page. In 2017, he interviewed Yavin for i24 News, the night the Israeli government ended Mabat, the broadcast Yavin had anchored for 20 years. “I feel terrible,” Yavin told him. “This has been like demolishing a house.”
'The press, in its very conception, is against the establishment'
Asked whether he saw it as an attempt by the Netanyahu government to control the media, Yavin answered directly: “The press, in its very conception, is against the establishment. It is free. And it is there to report with a critical eye whatever is going on in a society. This is the basis of democracy.”
He described the government’s handling of public broadcasting as “such a balagan, such a disorder,” and said he was “very worried about what is going to become of us as a free nation.”
The interview
Some of what stayed with me from my afternoon at Yavin’s home had less to do with what Yavin said about Israel than with how he conducted himself as a subject. He asked me where I was from, whether I was married, and about my personal journey that led to making aliyah.
He asked more questions than he answered, for stretches of the conversation. I became the subject of an interview. I was powerless to resist.
He also tended not to leave a question in the abstract. Asked about Revisionist Zionism, he moved from a history lesson covering Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion to a specific memory: standing in an empty Knesset late one night, asking a then-sidelined Begin whether he still saw himself as a leader of the people, and Begin telling him that 1977 was his last election campaign if he was unsuccessful.
While talking with Ben-David, I noticed how often his own language for describing journalism – restraint, the idea that credibility is built over years and can be lost in a single editorial choice – resembled the career he was describing to me. Ben-David has spent decades in Israeli print journalism, including as managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, before moving into broadcast journalism, first at i24NEWS and now at ILTV.
In a very sharp observation, Ben-David pointed out one detail near the end of our conversation. Yavin died the same week the Knesset passed a communications bill that critics say gives the government greater influence over public broadcasting, including KAN, the successor to the authority where Yavin spent his career.
“His whole career stood for this sort of independence – trying to obtain an objective stance in the news,” Ben-David said. “And he passes away just as many people are concerned that the government is trying to impact the media. The timing is certainly… it’s definitely ironic.”
Ben-David had heard something close to this from Yavin directly, nine years earlier, on the night Mabat went off the air.
A personal note
For decades, that voice, that measured formality, the dark suit and the unhurried delivery, was how Israel learned what had happened to it – the wars, the peace treaties, the terror attacks, the elections that upended everything. It was a stature built on trust, accumulated broadcast by broadcast over decades, the kind no single news anchor is likely to hold again.
I got to hear about that history directly from the man who sat before the cameras to report most of it, on a quiet afternoon in his retirement. It was an honor few people are given.
That same trust in Israeli public broadcasting is what successive governments, including the current one, have spent years dismantling. He built something that outlasted his own career. Whether it outlasts the current effort to tear it down is a question he does not get to answer, and one the rest of us are left holding.