Before Oct. 7, Tal Heinrich was busy working as a journalist and news anchor for Israel’s Channel 14 and Trinity Broadcasting Network in the United States. But when she saw that Israel had suffered from a terrorist attack that day, she got on the first available flight and went back home. She had a new assignment: to be a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s office.
For the first 40 days of the war, Heinrich worked from Israel day and night, giving interviews in multiple languages to news stations around the world. Since Oct. 7, she’s done more than 200 interviews, and is splitting her time between New York and Israel.
“We present Israel’s justified case to the world,” Heinrich, who works with other spokespeople like Mark Regev and Ofir Gendelman, said. “We have to keep reminding the world how we got to where we are now. Unfortunately, people tend to forget how we got to a war situation and Gaza and about the atrocities of Oct. 7.”
Heinrich sees her role as “buying time for the soldiers to operate on the ground,” and showing people why Israel must defeat Hamas. “We have to remind everyone that time is running out for our stolen people, the hostages.”
The spokesperson has worked in Israeli and worldwide media for two decades; she was a broadcaster on Sport5 — The Sports Channel in Israel for 11 years, and then took on the role of field and news desk producer for CNN’s Jerusalem bureau during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. She was also an anchor for i24NEWS, where she worked out of the Israeli station’s New York headquarters in Times Square. She is fluent in Hebrew, English, Arabic and German, and gives lectures on the Middle East through FIDF and AIPAC.
With her current assignment, Heinrich is constantly battling the double standards the world sets up for Israel. “It’s something each and every one of us knows,” she said. “We grew up feeling it, seeing it, witnessing it. At the U.N., before Oct. 7 and since then, there is a significant double standard when it comes to Israel.”
When Boko Haram kidnapped almost 300 schoolgirls in 2014, the world rallied, and celebrities from Michelle Obama to Selma Hayek held up “Bring Back Our Girls” signs. “The world united to try to get all of them released,” said Heinrich. “Now, you see people in the streets of major cities in the Western world taking down posters of our hostages. The more I try to analyze this double standard, the more I realize it boils down to thousands-year-old antisemitism.”
As someone who speaks to the media, Heinrich is disappointed in how the war has been covered – often with anti-Israel bias. “I see a lot of lies circulating,” she said. “It’s really unfortunate that some of these major media outlets take Hamas’ claims at face value and use them to pressure Israel. Do they not see they are falling right into the terrorists’ trap? Whenever someone puts pressure on Israel instead of Hamas, they’re playing right into Hamas’ hands.”
“When it gets tough, and I need to keep my composure, I use a trick that Mark Regev taught me, which is to hold onto my chair or press my nails into my fist.”
But what happens if a news anchor is obviously lying? How does Heinrich keep her cool? “When it gets tough, and I need to keep my composure, I use a trick that Mark Regev taught me, which is to hold onto my chair or press my nails into my fist,” she said. “It takes your energy to a different place, and you can concentrate. Unfortunately, [the journalists] are only asking the Israeli side the tough questions.”
What keeps Heinrich going, even when she’s under scrutiny, is the fact that she loves her home country. When she heard about the terror attacks on Oct. 7 from her place in New York, she couldn’t sleep and found it hard to breathe.
“Gradually, as I got closer to landing in Israel, the air started filling my lungs again,” she said. “When I arrived, I saw the whole country was mobilizing in one way or another. Everyone was helping each other. It was remarkable.”
When she returned to New York, she spoke at a United Nations event where victims of sexual assault on Oct. 7 spoke up. She told the U.N., “Today, we will scream their story – for there cannot be silence in the face of such atrocities.” This event, Heinrich said, “raised awareness of the sexual assaults that took place. It changed the rhythm of the news cycle, and it happened two months into the war. It was so outrageously overlooked.”
Heinrich is up against so many lies, so many nefarious parties who are trying to take Israel down. So, how does she stay strong in the face of such hateful distortions? “When you truly know that you speak for what is right, and you speak the truth, it’s not easy for people to own you in an interview,” she said. “Moral clarity and people of good moral conscience are on your side. Interviews can get complicated and difficult, but when you have all those elements on your side, you win.”
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