Haaretz

• 1. Introduction

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  Haaretz has been printing in Palestine and then Israel since 1918, making it the longest-running newspaper currently in print in the country. It carries the Hebrew name for "the land," though it started as Hadashot Ha'aretz, meaning "News of the Land." From its earliest days it attracted leading Hebrew writers. Today it sits in the paradoxical position of holding the third-largest circulation in Israel while being widely regarded as the country's most influential daily. How does a newspaper remain powerful while remaining relatively small? The answer turns out to say as much about Israel as it does about journalism. What set Haaretz apart was never its size. It was the kind of reader it attracted, and the kind of enemies it made.

• 2. Birth in Palestine

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  The British military government sponsored the newspaper's first edition in 1918, lending Haaretz an unusual origin for a publication that would later become famously critical of state power. By 1919 a group of socialist-oriented Zionists, mainly from Russia, took it over. The philanthropist Isaac Leib Goldberg was among the businessmen who formally established the paper on the 18th of June 1919, at which point it was still called Hadashot Ha'aretz. The literary section drew prominent Hebrew writers almost immediately, a signal of the cultural ambition baked into its founding. The paper launched in Jerusalem, and from 1919 to 1922 passed through a succession of editors, including Leib Yaffe. Financial trouble shut it briefly before it reopened in Tel Aviv at the start of 1923 under Moshe Glickson, who held the editorial post for fifteen years. The Tel Aviv municipality helped keep it alive in those early years by paying in advance for future advertising.

• 3. The Schocken Era

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  Salman Schocken bought the paper in December 1935, having left Germany the previous year after the Nazis came to power. He was active in Brit Shalom, also known as the Jewish-Palestinian Peace Alliance, a group that supported co-existence between Jews and Arabs. That commitment would shape Haaretz's editorial character for generations. His son Gershom Schocken became chief editor in 1939 and held the post until his death in 1990, a tenure of more than fifty years that made him the dominant editorial figure in the paper's history. The Schocken family were the sole owners of the Haaretz Group until August 2006, when they sold a 25% stake to German publisher M. DuMont Schauberg. The deal generated controversy in Israel because Kurt Neven DuMont, the father of the publisher, had been a member of the Nazi Party and his publishing house had promoted Nazi ideology. Former Israeli ambassador to Germany Avi Primor helped negotiate the transaction. On the 12th of June 2011, Russian-Israeli businessman Leonid Nevzlin acquired a 20% stake, buying 15% from the family and 5% from DuMont Schauberg. By December 2019 the Schocken family had bought out DuMont Schauberg's remaining shares entirely, reaching 75% ownership, with Nevzlin holding the other 25%.

• 4. Editorial Identity

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  Haaretz describes itself as holding a broadly liberal outlook on both domestic and international affairs. Critics and admirers have used labels ranging from centre-left to left-wing; one formulation calls it "liberal on security, civil rights and economy, supportive of the Supreme Court, very critical of Netanyahu's government." The paper opposes Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories and supports peace initiatives. Its editorial line has also backed what it calls weaker elements in Israeli society, including sex workers, foreign laborers, Israeli Arabs, Ethiopian immigrants, and Russian immigrants. Writing in The New Yorker, David Remnick described Haaretz as "easily the most liberal newspaper in Israel," with an "insistently oppositional" temperament. J. J. Goldberg, editor of The Jewish Daily Forward, called it "Israel's most vehemently anti-settlement daily paper." A 2003 study in The International Journal of Press/Politics found the paper's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was more favorable to Israelis than to Palestinians, though less so than The New York Times. The range of criticism aimed at Haaretz is itself telling: Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, wrote in 2016 that while he liked people at the paper and many of its positions, he found what he called "cartoonish anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism" in it at times.

• 5. Readership and Reach

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  A 2022 TGI survey placed Haaretz third among Israeli newspapers by readership, with an exposure rate of 4.7%, well behind Israel Hayom at 31% and Yedioth Ahronoth at 23.9%. Yet size has never been the measure of its standing. In 1999, surveys showed that Haaretz readers had above-average education, income, and wealth, and that most were Ashkenazi Jews. By 2008 the paper itself reported paid subscribership of 65,000, daily sales of 72,000 copies, and 100,000 on weekends; the English edition carried a subscriber base of 15,000. Shmuel Rosner, a former U.S. correspondent for the paper, put it plainly to The Nation in 2007: "people who read it are better educated and more sophisticated than most, but the rest of the country doesn't know it exists." The Center for Research Libraries judged it the most influential and respected of Israel's dailies for news coverage and commentary. Some observers have compared its function to that of The New York Times in the United States. In North America the paper publishes as a weekly, combining articles from the Friday edition with a digest of the rest of the week. Its international readership, particularly in the English edition, has long outpaced its domestic circulation.

• 6. Government Pressure and Press Freedom

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  On the 24th of November 2024, the Israeli government ordered a boycott of Haaretz by government officials and by anyone employed by a government-funded body, and banned government advertising with the paper. The sanctions followed remarks by publisher Amos Schocken on the 31st of October 2024 at a Haaretz conference in London, in which he criticised the Netanyahu government and referred to what he called "Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists." Schocken walked back part of the remarks the following day, saying "the use of terrorism is not legitimate." By the 4th of November the paper had received hundreds of subscription cancellations, and several ministries had cut their subscriptions; the Israeli foreign ministry alone cancelled 90. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi advocated extending the boycott to all government bodies and employees. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the sanctions, as did Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim, founders and editors of the South African newspaper Weekly Mail. In a letter to Haaretz, they wrote that the Netanyahu government's sanctions "have brought back vivid memories of our own newspaper's struggle against the apartheid government about four decades ago." Earlier in 2024 the paper had published investigations of alleged wrongdoing and abuses by senior officials and the military, which a report in The Guardian cited as the backdrop to the government's response. An earlier confrontation of a different kind had come in October 2012, when a union strike over planned layoffs shut down Haaretz and its TheMarker business supplement for a single day, the first time since 1965 a newspaper failed to go to press because of a strike.

• 7. The Newspaper Itself

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  Haaretz publishes in the Berliner format, a mid-size page dimension that sits between tabloid and broadsheet. It uses smaller headlines and smaller type than other mass-circulation papers in Israel, and devotes less space to pictures and more to political analysis. Opinion columns run largely by regular commentators rather than guest writers, and editorial pages carry real weight with government leaders. The paper's scope extends beyond politics: it publishes investigative reporting, book reviews, feature articles on social and environmental issues, and political commentary. The digital operation runs two sites, one in Hebrew at Haaretz.co.il and one in English at Haaretz.com. Avi Scharf edits the Hebrew site; Simon Spungin edits the English. Both offer live Q&A sessions with newsmakers from Israel, the Palestinian territories, and beyond. The Haaretz building stands on Schocken Street in south Tel Aviv; the earlier building on Maza Street, built in 1932 and used until 1973, was designed by architect Joseph Berlin and demolished in the early 1990s, with only part of its facade preserved and integrated into the replacement structure. In July 2025, at a high point of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Haaretz's editorial strongly advocated a two-state solution, welcoming a proposal by French President Emmanuel Macron for France to recognise a Palestinian state by September 2025.