At 10:45 p.m. on February 1, 1948, a deafening blast ripped through downtown Jerusalem’s Hasolel Street, shattering windows up to a mile away. The wreckage of a stolen British military truck, transformed by Arab terrorists and British army deserters into a five-ton car bomb, lay mangled in the street as the building housing The Palestine Post went up in flames.
Three Post staff members who had been working on putting together the next day’s newspaper – Haim Farber, Nathan Rabinowitz and Moshe Weinberg – were killed, as was a neighbor, Deborah Daniel.
After tending to the wounded, several of the surviving staffers made their way to the legendary Café Atara on nearby Ben Yehuda Street, where they were met by deputy editor Ted Lurie’s wife, Tzila. She hugged them, gave them cups of coffee and then said, “All right, we’re putting out a paper.”
Mordecai Chertoff was a young editor at the Post at the time. In a letter to his family in New York three days after the bombing, he recalled, “There was no decision made to do it, no vote taken. There was just something in the air.”
They lugged typewriters to the coffee shop, set them up on wooden tables and started typing up the newspaper from memory.
As I sat with Mordecai’s son, Danny, and his wife Arlene in their Jerusalem apartment last week, they handed me a laminated copy of the two-page newspaper the exhausted staffers produced that night, printed on yellowed paper so thin it is nearly transparent.
“The truth is louder than TNT and burns brighter than the flames of arson. It will win in the end.”
Palestine Post column headline, February 2, 1948
“The truth is louder than TNT and burns brighter than the flames of arson,” reads the main column. “It will win in the end.”
For 90 years, The Jerusalem Post has been Israel’s English-language newspaper of record. Through wars and crises, periods of deprivation and domestic strife, this paper has brought the reality of life in this country to millions in Israel and across the globe. For many, it is a vital link to a cherished part of the world. To others, it is simply their hometown paper.
The Post has been a part of my family’s life for as long as I can remember. Like so many other English-speaking immigrant families, we relied on the paper for news and commentary about our new country whose language we didn’t quite understand and whose internal dynamics were largely inscrutable to us.
Even after we became more fully integrated into Israeli society, the Post remained a fixture in our home. To this day, Shabbat dinners invariably evolve into a tableau of family members sprawled across the couch reading different parts of the Friday paper.
A leading news outlet in the Jewish world
But the Post has also cemented its position as the leading news outlet in the Jewish world, drawing millions of readers a month and offering a platform for some of the most important debates shaping the future of Israel and the Jewish people.
Being invited into our readers’ homes – or, increasingly, onto their computer monitors and mobile phone screens – is a privilege that we do not take lightly. It is a privilege that must be earned through trust, credibility, quality and an unwavering commitment to the truth.
As I take the helm of this remarkable paper, I would like to take the opportunity to share our values with you. These values will guide our coverage and our content. We will uphold them in how we approach and report the news, in the views reflected on our pages and in the myriad ways we engage you every day.
- We are a Zionist paper. We believe in the Jewish people’s inalienable right to self-determination in its ancestral homeland and we rejoice in Israel’s sovereign existence as the living realization of that fundamental right.
- We are a pro-democracy paper. We believe in the principles of equality and freedom enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and we will stand fast against efforts to undermine those principles.
- We are an antiracist paper. We reject and will actively oppose hate and prejudice against any group, including antisemitism in all its forms and bigotry targeting Israel’s minorities.
- We are a marketplace of ideas. Our writers and contributors represent a vast array of views and opinions from across the political and religious spectrum in Israel and the Jewish world. We will, from time to time, provide a platform for perspectives we find difficult to swallow because we believe they inform and enrich the conversation.
- We will doggedly pursue the truth and we will faithfully report it, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
- We aspire to both accuracy and speed but when the two come into conflict, we will choose to get the story right, even if it means we won’t be the first.
- We will hold our leaders accountable. We will support them when they get it right and we will take them to task when they get it wrong.
- We will hold ourselves accountable. When we get it wrong, we will say so and we will seek to make it right.
- We are a paper of integrity. We will eschew the sensationalist and the lurid to maintain a high standard of decency.
- We are critical and we are skeptical but we are not cynical.
The future of The Jerusalem Post is bright and exciting. Our dedicated team is second to none and together we are working to create the newspaper of tomorrow. We will develop new and innovative ways of getting the news to you while constantly working to improve and optimize our current offerings. We will be both faster and more in-depth than ever before.
We will further establish this paper as the premier platform for the global Jewish conversation, introducing and elevating new voices and fostering a true machloket l’shem shamayim (an argument for the sake of Heaven). We will expand our slate of in-person events to bring the news and those making, reporting and interpreting it to you, wherever you may be.
Seventy-five years ago, the Post was bombed in the midst of a wave of violence that became Israel’s War of Independence. Today, as Israel enters its fourth quarter-century, we are beset by other threats: crippling cyberattacks by groups hostile to Israel – including as recently as this past week – increasingly polarized public discourse and rampant disinformation.
But just as we overcame the challenges of the past, so will we tackle the obstacles that lie ahead, as we fulfill our sacred mission to tell the story of this special part of the world.
We will do so because that is our commitment to you, our readers. And we will do so because the truth about Israel is rich, complex and compelling.
And it will win in the end.