The story
Founded by Gershon Agron on Dec 1, 1932.1
The first attempt to establish an English-language newspaper in Jerusalem was The Jerusalem News, established in 1919 under the auspices of the Christian Science movement, but this had no relationship to The Jerusalem Post.
The Palestine Bulletin, 1925–1932
The direct journalistic ancestry of The Jerusalem Post can be traced to The Palestine Bulletin, which was founded in January 1925 by Jacob Landau of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). It was owned by the Palestine Telegraphic Agency, which was in practice part of the JTA even though it was legally separate.
On 1 November 1931, editorship of the Bulletin was taken over by Gershon Agronsky (later Agron), a Jewish journalist who had immigrated to Palestine from the United States. In March 1932, a dispute arose between Landau and Agronsky, which Agronsky resolved to settle by establishing an independent newspaper. Landau and Agronsky instead came to an agreement to transform the Bulletin into a new, jointly owned newspaper. Accordingly, the Palestine Bulletin published its last issue on 30 November 1932.
The Palestine Post, 1932–1950
The Palestine Post Incorporating The Palestine Bulletin appeared the following day, 1 December 1932. On 25 April 1933, the masthead was reduced to just The Palestine Post although its founding year still appeared as 1925. It appeared on 24 August 1934 but not in the following issue, 26 August, or later.
During its time as The Palestine Post, the publication supported the struggle for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and openly opposed British policy restricting Jewish immigration during the Mandate period. According to one commentator, "Zionist institutions considered the newspaper one of the most effective means of exerting influence on the British authorities".
1948 bombing
On the evening of 1 February 1948, a stolen British police car loaded with half a ton of TNT pulled up in front of the Jerusalem office of the Palestine Post on Solel Street (now Hahavazelet). The driver of a second car arrived a few minutes later, lit the fuse and drove off. The building also contained other newspaper offices, the British press censor, the Jewish settlement police, and a Haganah post with a cache of weapons. Arab leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni claimed responsibility for the bombing, but historian Uri Milstein reported that the bomb had been prepared by the Nazi-trained Fawzi el-Kutub, known as "the engineer", with the involvement of two British army deserters, Cpl. Peter Mersden and Capt. Eddie Brown. Four people were killed in the bombing, including three Post employees. According to the Palestine Post at the time, a newspaper typesetter and two people who lived in a nearby block of flats died. Dozens of others were injured and the printing press was destroyed. The morning paper came out in a reduced format of two pages, printed at a small print shop nearby.
Labor movement, 1950–1989
In 1950, two years after the State of Israel was declared, the paper was renamed The Jerusalem Post. Until 1989, the paper supported the Labor Party.
Black's Hollinger, 1989–2004
In 1989, the paper was purchased by Hollinger Inc., owned by Conrad Black. A number of journalists resigned from the Post after Black's takeover and founded The Jerusalem Report, a weekly magazine eventually sold to the Post. After the acquisition, the Jerusalem Post underwent a noticeable shift to the political right.
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Under editor-in-chief David Makovsky, from 1999 to 2000, the paper took a centrist position on defense, but began to reject socialism. In 2002, Hollinger hired the politically conservative Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal as editor-in-chief. David Horovitz took over as editor-in-chief on 1 October 2004. From 2004 onward, Horovitz moved the paper to the center.
Azur's Mirkaei Tikshoret
On 16 November 2004, Hollinger sold the paper to Mirkaei Tikshoret Limited, a Tel Aviv-based publisher of Israeli newspapers owned by Eli Azur. CanWest Global Communications, Canada's biggest media concern, had announced an agreement to take a 50 percent stake in The Jerusalem Post after Mirkaei bought the property, but the deal soured. The two sides went to arbitration, and CanWest lost.
In 2011, Horovitz was succeeded by the paper's managing editor, Steve Linde, who pledged to provide balanced coverage of the news along with views from across the political spectrum. Linde professed to maintain political moderation. Yaakov Katz, the paper's former military analyst, former adviser to former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, succeeded Linde in April 2016.
In January 2008, the paper announced a new partnership with The Wall Street Journal, including joint marketing and exclusive publication in Israel of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Since 2012, the newspaper has held an annual conference in New York, The Jerusalem Post Conference, with the participation of senior figures in the Israeli government and the Jewish world. The conference was founded by media entrepreneur Ronen Lefler and Linde, and is currently managed by the CEO of the Jerusalem Post Group, Inbar Ashkenazi.
In 2020, the Israeli online newspaper +972 Magazine published 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, including a screening of a documentary produced by the ministry that sought to discredit the BDS movement.
In 2020, Reuters reported that The Jerusalem Post, along with Algemeiner, The Times of Israel and Arutz Sheva, had published op-eds written by non-existent people. In 2020, The Daily Beast identified a network of false personas used to sneak opinion pieces aligned with UAE government policy to media outlets such as The Jerusalem Post. Twitter suspended some of the accounts of these fake persons on its own platform.
In January 2022, The Jerusalem Post's website was hacked by pro-Iranian actors. The JPost.com website homepage was replaced with an image depicting a bullet shot from a red ring on a finger (likely in reference to the ring worn by the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani) and the caption "we are close to you where you do not think about it". The hack occurred on the second anniversary of the Assassination of Qasem Soleimani and is largely seen as a threat towards Israel.
In March 2023, Katz stepped down as editor-in-chief and was replaced by Avi Mayer. Nine months later, Mayer was replaced by Zvika Klein.
In early December 2023, during the Gaza war, The Jerusalem Post published an article falsely claiming that a dead 5-month-old Palestinian baby from Gaza was a doll. The Jerusalem Post later retracted the report with a statement on X, saying, "The article in question did not meet our editorial standards and was thus removed". The false claim was also promoted by others such as Israel's official Twitter account, Ben Shapiro, Hen Mazzig, Yoseph Haddad and StopAntisemitism.
From Wikipedia’s article on The Jerusalem Post, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4