Dan Margalit, a veteran Israeli journalist, television host and political commentator whose career spanned six decades and included both groundbreaking scoops and later controversy, has died at 87.
His daughter, Shira Margalit, announced his death Thursday on social media, saying he died at home in Tel Aviv surrounded by family after an illness. “A family man, lover of people, journalist and man of letters, a Zionist who loved Israel with all his soul,” she wrote.
Margalit was one of Israel’s most prominent journalists, working for major outlets including Haaretz, Maariv, Israel Hayom and state television. He is remembered for exposing in the 1970s the so-called “dollar account affair” — the revelation that then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his wife held a U.S. bank account in violation of Israeli regulations, a scandal that led Rabin to resign.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1938 to a physician father and psychologist mother, Margalit began writing as a teenager and joined Haaretz in the early 1960s. In the 1970s, he served as the paper’s Washington correspondent.
He became a household name in the 1990s as the outspoken host of Popolitika, a fiery political talk show that set the tone for Israel’s combative broadcast style. He also co-hosted Erev Hadash (“New Evening”), a nightly news and current affairs program that ran for decades on Israel’s educational television channel until 2018.
Margalit briefly served as editor of Maariv in the early 1990s, and later became a columnist for Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper seen as politically close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Once identified with Israel’s left, Margalit shifted rightward in later years. He was fired from Israel Hayom in 2017, claiming it was due to his criticism of Netanyahu. That same year, he received the Knight of Quality Government award from a civic watchdog group.
In 2018, Haaretz published an investigation in which five women accused Margalit of sexually harassing them decades earlier. He denied the allegations but announced he was suspending his journalistic activity. In 2020, he returned to broadcasting with a program on the online outlet DemocratTV, and in 2022, he rejoined Israel Hayom.
Margalit was married twice and had three daughters from his first marriage, including Keren Margalit, a television creator known for series such as Yellow Peppers and Wake Up.