Israel’s oldest newspaper is disturbingly anti-Israel.

How did Haaretz go from the preeminent source for all-things Israel, to an anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish sham?

photo: Wikipedia Creative Commons

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After signing up this week for a free subscription to Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, I clicked through to its homepage. It felt as if I had landed on the website of Al Jazeera, the profusely antisemitic Qatari mouthpiece that masquerades as a reputable media outlet.

The leading Haaretz headline read: “Israeli Forces Rescue Two Hostages From Hamas Captivity in Gaza” — the use of “Israeli forces” to imply Israeli aggression. In comparison, the politically center-left Times of Israel described the same story as “IDF rescues 2 hostages from south Gaza’s Rafah in daring nighttime operation.”

And it got worse. Much worse. Haaretz’s homepage was overflowing with anti-Israel bias:

• “67 killed in Israeli hostage rescue, many trapped under rubble, Gaza health ministry says” — while omitting that the Gaza health ministry is Hamas-run

• “Britain imposes sanctions against four Israelis involved in violence against Palestinians”

• “Dutch court orders government to suspend export of F-35 aircraft parts to Israel”

• “Hostage Rescue Is a Moral Victory for Israel, but Hamas Will Be Quick to Adapt”

• “‘Pollard’ Shows the World Something Israelis Would Prefer to Forget”

• “Dalal Abu Amneh Is a Successful Singer and Neuroscientist. Israel Is Out to Destroy Her Life”

• “If the Israeli Army Invades Rafah” — notice the word invades — “What Will Be of More Than 1.5 Million Palestinians Who Take Shelter There?”

Of the 14 top stories, 11 were implicitly or explicitly contemptuous of Israel, which is weird for a media outfit that fashions itself as covering “every aspect” of the Israel-Hamas war, while providing “essential insight into what has happened, what it means and how its impact will be felt, for Israel, the Palestinians, the wider Middle East and the world.”¹

“Across the media landscape of the Middle East,” their introductory email says, “only Haaretz can offer this scope, depth and commitment to journalistic principles.”

Having earned a journalism degree from a California university, I know a thing or two about “journalistic principles.” Very little of what Haaretz has become, at least its English version, is true to “journalistic principles” form. Judging from the past few decades, Haaretz is now, for all intents and purposes, an anti-Israel and even an anti-Jewish newspaper — and, frankly, a mockery of what should be an esteemed journalism profession.

How did Israel’s oldest newspaper go from the preeminent source for all-things Israel, to an anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish sham?

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Haaretz was first published in 1918 as a newspaper sponsored by the British military government in Palestine. The following year, it was taken over by a group of socialist-oriented Zionists, mainly immigrants from Russia. Initially, it was called “Hadashot Ha’aretz” — Hebrew for “News of the Land of Israel.” The newspaper’s literary section featured leading Hebrew writers of the time.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Haaretz’s liberal viewpoint was to some degree associated with the General Zionist “A” faction, which later helped form the Progressive Party, though it was nonpartisan and careful not to espouse any specific party line. Haaretz was considered the most sophisticated of the Jewish communities’ daily newspapers in British-era Palestine.

Salman Schocken, a Jewish businessman who left Germany in 1934 after the Nazis rose to power, bought the newspaper in 1935. Schocken was active in Brit Shalom, also known as the Jewish-Palestinian Peace Alliance, a body supporting coexistence between Jews and Arabs which was sympathetic to a homeland for both peoples. His son, Gershom Schocken, became the chief editor in 1939 and held that position until his death in 1990.

The Schocken family was the sole owner of the Haaretz Group until 2006, when they sold a 25-percent stake to German publisher M. DuMont Schauberg — a controversial deal because Schauberg’s father was a member of the Nazi Party, and his publishing house promoted Nazi ideology. It seems that, around this time, Haaretz went from politically center-left and even left, to extremely left.

A few years after Schauberg joined Haaretz’s ownership team, for example, the newspaper published a cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flying an airplane, representing the State of Israel, into the Twin Towers in New York City — to apparently draw an analogy between Netanyahu’s behavior in his diplomatic relations with the U.S. and the actions of those responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks.

In 2016, the newspaper’s proprietor Amos Schocken published an op-ed titled “Only International Pressure Will End Israeli Apartheid,” referring to “nearly 50 years of Israeli apartheid” and comparing Israel to the former South African regime.

I suppose Schocken is entitled to his own opinions, even if it means slandering Israel as an illegitimate state under the banner of “an independent daily newspaper with a broadly liberal outlook.” However, Schocken was seemingly hellbent on “weaponizing” his newspaper in order to delegitimize Israel, writing:

“Whoever fears Israel’s insistence on maintaining its apartheid regime and understands that there is no chance of eliminating it from within, should view the EU labeling of settlement products, the pressure FIFA has placed on Israel and Brazil’s refusal to accept Dani Dayan as ambassador as encouraging signs.”

“This is a crucial beginning of global action against an illegitimate situation that Israel insists on maintaining, but will be forced to give up. The government will predictably take ‘appropriate Zionist responses’ to this pressure and pass anti-democratic initiatives to suppress and silence Israelis who, understanding that only external pressure will bring change, draw world attention to displays of Israeli apartheid.”

Then, in May 2023, Haaretz published an op-ed in which writer Yossi Klein grotesquely charged that Israeli society rejoices in and rallies behind the so-called deliberate killing of Palestinian children. The Haaretz headline said: “Killing Children Brings Israelis Together.”

Klein, who previously provoked an uproar when he demonized national religious Jewish Israelis as “worse than Hezbollah,” wrote:

“There’s nothing like killing children for bringing together hearts and minds. For the past 18 weeks, Israelis have been fighting each other, unable to find anything to bring us closer together. Then came the killing of the children in the Gaza Strip and proved that we’re brothers after all.”

To add insult to injury, multiple neo-Nazi websites and internet forums reference Haaretz articles, and even include direct links to the newspaper’s site. On one neo-Nazi platform, Stormfront (the web’s first major racial hate site), there are some 1,400 Haaretz references.²

Why right-wing antisemitic extremists would want to cite an increasingly radical leftist Israeli newspaper should not be so surprising, though; harmony between the far-right and far-left is not new. But in this case, it is because Haaretz is obsessed with cynically finding and manipulating the flaws in anything Israeli or Jewish.

Ironically, when Elon Musk visited Israel last November, touring the Israeli communities that were ransacked by Palestinian terrorists on October 7th, Haaretz English’s editor-in-chief Esther Solomon blasted his visit, calling the tech billionaire a “blatant antisemite and publisher of antisemitism” who “should be persona non grata in Israel.”³ Perhaps the same can be said about Solomon and many of her Haaretz colleagues.

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Oftentimes, Haaretz publishes different versions in Hebrew and English. Its Hebrew paper is relatively reasonable, while its English website is far from it.

This way, it has at least a halfway decent reputation inside Israel, whereas outside of the country, Haaretz pompously presumes that, because it is written from Israel, by mostly Israelis and Jews, everything they write must be true, since few folks abroad know the actual situation in Israel at any given time.

Besides, Haaretz has a habit of trying to manufacture the news in Israel, instead of simply reporting it. Their staff and freelancers are made up of many self-hating Jews on the over-zealous extreme Left, whose unhinged idealism could make for nice children’s books, and should have no place in journalism.

Of course, Haaretz positions itself as a higher-quality publication, a sort of Israeli New York Times or The Atlantic. At best, it is comparable to USA Today or The Guardian, and even that is a stretch, but don’t take my word for it.

A recent TGI consumer survey found that Haaretz has an exposure rate of less than five percent in Israel, far below Israel Hayom’s rate of 31 percent and Yedioth Ahronoth’s 24 percent.

Perhaps sensing a need for change, members of the Schocken family bought all of the Haaretz stock belonging to M. DuMont Schauberg in 2019. The deal saw the Schocken family reach 75 percent ownership, with the other 25 percent owned by Russian oligarch Leonid Nevzlin.

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I play basketball in Tel Aviv at a public park, the kind of place that dozens of random guys anywhere from ages 16 to 60 show up every evening to get a sweat in and superficially socialize.

There is one Israeli gentleman, probably in his late 30s, who is a regular there. He is always pleasant and unassuming. When I asked him one time what he does for a living, he modestly told me that he works as a reporter for Haaretz, so I decided to pry and wondered aloud why the newspaper is so anti-Israel.

The way he described the organization, Haaretz is in the “gotcha journalism” line of business — a premeditated approach to covering Israel with the goal of damaging and discrediting the Jewish state’s cause, character, integrity, and reputation. The way Haaretz sees it, Israel’s government and the IDF are essentially rogue entities that must be questioned relentlessly and found out.

There are other Israeli media outlets, such as Israel Hayom or ISRAEL21c, which were set up to do the exact opposite: pretend like the sun shines out of Israel’s you-know-what. To be sure, their type of journalism is also suspect, but is Haaretz’s job to simply “balance out” the more pro-Israel media outlets, and thus to encourage more anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish converts?

Or is it to be as fair and balanced as possible, right down the middle, like the most respectable of journalism outfits? Haaretz claims that it “plays an important role in the shaping of public opinion and is read with care in government and decision-making circles,” but what kind of care do its journalists and columnists offer in providing objective, holistic reporting?

It is incumbent, therefore, that the world sees Haaretz not as a trusted news source, but as a grossly biased, politically obsessed entity that plays a leading role in the unwarranted, self-defeating demonization of Israel.

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1. Haaretz free subscriber email

2. “Why do neo-Nazis love ‘Haaretz’?” JNS.

3. Esther Solomon on X