The Jerusalem Post

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jerusalem Post began its life not as itself but as something else entirely. On the 1st of December 1932, a newspaper called The Palestine Post Incorporating The Palestine Bulletin appeared on the streets of Jerusalem for the first time. Its founder was Gershon Agronsky, a Jewish journalist who had come to Palestine from the United States just a year earlier. What he built would outlast empires, survive a bombing, change its politics more than once, and still be publishing nearly a century later.

  How did a scrappy English-language paper under British colonial rule become one of the most-read Israeli news outlets in the world? What forces pulled it left, then right, then back toward the center? And what does it mean when a newspaper becomes a target, not just a chronicle, of history?

• 2. Palestine Bulletin Origins

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  Jacob Landau of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency founded The Palestine Bulletin in January 1925, making it the direct ancestor of what would eventually become The Jerusalem Post. The Bulletin was owned by the Palestine Telegraphic Agency, which in practice operated as part of the JTA even though the two were legally separate.

  On the 1st of November 1931, Gershon Agronsky took over as editor. Within months, a dispute with Landau pushed him to consider launching a rival paper entirely. Instead of splitting, the two men struck a deal: they would transform the Bulletin into a jointly owned newspaper. The Bulletin published its last issue on the 30th of November 1932, and the Palestine Post appeared the very next morning.

  The masthead settled on its final form, The Palestine Post, on the 25th of April 1933, though the paper still listed 1925 as its founding year, honoring its Bulletin ancestry.

• 3. A Bombing and Its Aftermath

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  On the evening of the 1st of February 1948, a stolen British police car pulled up outside the Jerusalem offices of the Palestine Post on Solel Street, now called Hahavazelet. The car was loaded with half a ton of TNT. A driver from a second car arrived minutes later, lit the fuse, and drove away.

  The building housed not just the newspaper but the British press censor, the Jewish settlement police, and a Haganah post with a weapons cache. Four people died, including three Post employees. Dozens more were injured. The printing press was destroyed entirely.

  Arab leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni claimed responsibility, but historian Uri Milstein reported that the bomb had been prepared by Fawzi el-Kutub, a Nazi-trained operative known as "the engineer", with help from two British army deserters named Cpl. Peter Mersden and Capt. Eddie Brown. The next morning's paper still came out, reduced to two pages, printed at a small nearby shop. Two years later, with the State of Israel newly declared, the paper renamed itself The Jerusalem Post.

• 4. Shifting Political Ground

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  For nearly four decades, The Jerusalem Post aligned itself with the Israeli Labor Party. That changed in 1989, when Conrad Black's Hollinger Inc. acquired the paper. Several journalists resigned immediately after the takeover and founded The Jerusalem Report, a weekly magazine that was eventually sold back to the Post itself.

  Under editor-in-chief David Makovsky, who served from 1999 to 2000, the paper adopted a centrist position on defense while pulling away from socialist politics. In 2002, Hollinger brought in Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal as editor-in-chief, a choice that signaled a more conservative direction.

  On the 16th of November 2004, Hollinger sold the paper to Mirkaei Tikshoret Limited, a Tel Aviv-based publisher owned by Eli Azur. Canadian media company CanWest Global Communications had announced a plan to take a 50 percent stake in the Post after the Mirkaei purchase, but the deal collapsed. The two sides went to arbitration, and CanWest lost. David Horovitz, who took over as editor-in-chief on the 1st of October 2004, then steered the paper back toward the center.

• 5. Controversies and Credibility

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  In 2020, the Israeli online newspaper +972 Magazine published the results of a three-year investigation, revealing that the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs had paid large sums to The Jerusalem Post to publish content against human rights movements. The payments included a screening of a ministry-produced documentary aimed at discrediting the BDS movement.

  Also in 2020, Reuters reported that the Post was among several outlets that had published op-eds written by people who did not exist. The Daily Beast identified a network of false personas used to place opinion pieces aligned with UAE government policy into publications including the Post. Twitter suspended the accounts of some of these invented figures.

  In January 2022, pro-Iranian actors hacked the JPost.com website. The homepage was replaced with an image depicting a bullet fired from a ring on a finger, a reference widely read as an allusion to the ring worn by Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The caption read "we are close to you where you do not think about it". The attack fell on the second anniversary of Soleimani's assassination.

  In early December 2023, during the Gaza war, the Post published an article that falsely described a dead five-month-old Palestinian baby as a doll. The paper later retracted the article and acknowledged in a statement on X that the article did not meet its editorial standards.

• 6. Products and Reach

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  JPost.com launched in December 1996 and has grown into a separate entity from the print newspaper. Its staff is based in Tel Aviv, while the newspaper offices remain in Jerusalem. The site includes archives going back to 1989, with full articles available through the ProQuest-powered search system. A pay-wall area called the "Premium Zone" holds additional content and special features. The site received a visual overhaul in September 2014.

  The Jerusalem Post Lite is a weekly easy-English newspaper for learners of English as a second language, founded on the 16th of July 2009 by Jerusalem Post Group CEO Ronit Hassin Hochman. Its weekly readership numbers in the tens of thousands. The publication runs 32 pages, three of which carry advertising, and ranks every article by reading difficulty using a one-, two-, or three-star system. A dictionary on each page translates specific words into Hebrew by context, not literally.

  Since 2010, the Post has published an annual list of the world's fifty most influential Jews, released each year on Rosh Hashanah. In 2023, the paper announced a congress to accompany the list, including an awards ceremony for the honorees. The Post also publishes IVRIT, a monthly magazine edited by Sarit Yalov, aimed at readers learning the Hebrew language.

• 7. The Agron Family Thread

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  Gershon Agron founded the newspaper and served as its editor until he moved into public service, a tenure that stretched from 1932 to 1955. One of his earliest reporters was his nephew Martin Agronsky, who went on to become a well-known American political journalist. Agronsky left the paper after only a year, troubled by the sense that he had been hired through nepotism and unwilling to build a career that way.

  Agron's son Dani Agron worked at the paper in a different capacity, serving as its business manager during the 1970s, while Dani's wife Ethel wrote for Hadassah Magazine. The family's journalism legacy extended into the next generation as well: Martin Agronsky's son Jonathan Agronsky became a journalist in the United States. By 2012, the paper Gershon Agron built was hosting an annual conference in New York, The Jerusalem Post Conference, drawing senior Israeli government figures and leaders of the Jewish world, a long reach from the two-page emergency edition printed in a neighborhood shop the morning after the 1948 bombing.