About Panet

Panet

Panet is an Arabic-language news website based in Taibe, in central Israel, and one of the most visited Arabic news portals in the country. Published solely in Arabic, it covers Arab community news, national politics, sport and entertainment for Arab citizens of Israel. Panet is the online arm of a small family media enterprise built around Panorama, one of Israel's leading Arabic weekly newspapers, and its history illustrates a paradox of the Israeli internet: a website that ranks among the most heavily used in the entire country while remaining almost invisible to the Hebrew-speaking majority, simply because of the language in which it publishes.

Founding in Taibe in 2003

Panet was founded in 2003 by Bassam Jaber, the owner and chief editor of the Arabic weekly newspaper Panorama. Jaber established the site from his offices in Taibe, an Arab city north of Tel Aviv, with the explicit aim of serving the Arab community of Israel, which numbered about 1.2 million people at the time he described his plans to the French news agency AFP. The timing mattered. In the early 2000s the Arabic press in Israel was still dominated by weekly print newspapers, and a daily online news service in Arabic was a new proposition. By tying the website to an established weekly with its own reporters, distribution and advertiser relationships, Jaber gave the digital venture resources that a stand-alone start-up would have struggled to assemble, while the website in turn gave the weekly's journalism a daily rhythm that print could not match.

Bassam Jaber and Panorama

The man behind Panet is inseparable from the newspaper that preceded it. Bassam Jaber built Panorama into one of the three major privately owned Arabic weeklies in Israel, alongside Assenara and Kul al-Arab. The three papers earned their popularity by hiring professional and independent journalists rather than propagandists, and by covering stories considered taboo in Arab society, including domestic violence, sexual assault and corruption in public institutions. Panorama was already a fixture of Arab reading habits before the website existed: surveys of Arab media consumption in Israel routinely place it among the community's most-read titles, alongside the Communist Party daily Al-Ittihad, published in Haifa. Jaber's dual role as owner and chief editor of both the weekly and the website made Panet, from its first day, an extension of a known editorial brand rather than an anonymous internet venture.

An Arabic-only exception on the Israeli internet

Reporting on Jaber and his website in 2009, AFP described Panet as an exception in the Israeli internet space. With about one million entries per day, the agency reported, the site was one of the most visited in the country, yet the majority of the population ignored it because it is solely in Arabic. That combination, mass usage inside one linguistic community and near-invisibility outside it, is the defining feature of Panet's position in Israeli media. Hebrew-language portals measure their audiences across the whole population; Panet built a comparable intensity of use within a minority of roughly a fifth of the population. The site's experience demonstrates how completely Israel's online public sphere is divided by language: as Elhanan Miller, an Arab affairs reporter who compiled a daily round-up of Arabic media in English, has observed, the Arabic media flies under the radar of most Jewish Israelis, largely as a result of the language barrier, and an opportunity to learn about the culture of Arab citizens is lost with it.

What Panet publishes

Panet's editorial brief is that of a general-interest popular portal for its community. It publishes Arab community news from towns and villages across Israel, national politics as it affects Arab citizens and the wider country, sport, and entertainment. In practice that means municipal affairs and local incidents that Hebrew national media rarely cover, Knesset politics and government decisions of direct concern to Arab readers, football and other sports followed in the Arab sector, and the celebrity and cultural content that drives a popular website's daily traffic. The popular character is deliberate: where some Arabic outlets in Israel define themselves by a party line or an ideological mission, Panet was built as a mass-market service whose first task is to be the place its readers check every day. Its scale, a million entries a day already in 2009, was achieved by matching the breadth of a general portal to a community whose own daily life was otherwise thinly covered.

The audience: Arab citizens between two media worlds

Panet's readers live, as consumers of news, in two media worlds at once. Arab citizens of Israel, most of them fluent in Hebrew, regularly follow Hebrew media as part of daily life, because Israeli political life is conducted and reported in Hebrew. At the same time they turn to Arabic media for what Hebrew outlets cannot give them: sustained coverage of their own towns, institutions and concerns. Kholod Massalha of the I'lam Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel has described the Arab citizen as a viewer and reader who keeps a hand on the remote control at all times, moving between sources because no single source provides everything needed. Within that pattern, different Arabic outlets perform different functions: international satellite channels such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya report the wider Arab world, Hebrew media report the Israeli state, and the Arabic media of Israel, Panet among the largest of them, deal with what happens to the Arab community itself. Panet's national reach made it the digital centre of that third function.

Print roots in the Arabic press of Israel

Panet's print inheritance places it in a long and distinctive press tradition. Before 1948, Arabic daily newspapers were published in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, most with a strong editorial stance against the Zionist movement. After Israel's founding those dailies mostly disappeared from within the state; the exception was Al-Ittihad, the Communist Party's paper in Haifa, which survived. In the decades that followed, Arabic journalism inside Israel rebuilt itself around privately owned weeklies, of which Panorama became one of the most successful, and around party and movement publications. Those weeklies were weekly because print economics allowed nothing more frequent for a minority-language market. The arrival of the internet removed that constraint, and publishers such as Jaber were quick to see it: a website could publish every hour, carry video and photographs at no print cost, and reach readers in every Arab locality at once. Panet, launched in 2003, was among the ventures that converted the weekly press's accumulated trust and reporting networks into a daily digital audience.

Taibe and the Triangle

The site's base in Taibe is significant to its character. Taibe is one of the principal Arab cities of the Triangle, the cluster of Arab towns and villages in central Israel near the Green Line, north of Tel Aviv. A national Arabic portal edited from Taibe rather than from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv is rooted in the everyday life of the community it serves: its local government, schools, businesses and football clubs are the same world its readers inhabit, and its journalists are drawn from that world. At the same time, Taibe's central location, within reach of the Galilee to the north, the mixed cities of the coast and the Arab localities of the south, suits a service whose brief is national. The Panorama group's offices in the city house both the weekly newspaper and the website, a single newsroom producing print and digital journalism for the same audience.

Competition among Arabic portals

Panet does not operate alone in its market. The digital revolution in Israel's Arabic media produced a group of national portals competing for the same readers, among them Bokra, founded in Nazareth after the 2006 war with an explicit civic mission, and Arab48, which covers Israel, Palestine and the Arab world from a Palestinian national perspective. The Arabic audience also divides its attention among the websites of the print weeklies, the Arabic services of the Israeli state broadcaster, and the large pan-Arab sites based outside the country. What distinguished Panet in this field was the combination of its early start in 2003, its foundation in an established commercial weekly rather than a movement or a party, and the sheer intensity of its use, which made it one of the most visited Arabic news portals in Israel and a reference point for the sector's advertising and audience research.

Panet today

Panet continues to publish at panet.co.il as an Arabic-language general news portal from Taibe, covering community news, national politics, sport and entertainment for Arab citizens of Israel. More than two decades after its founding, it remains a leading example of the structure of Israel's divided media market: a website of genuinely national scale, read daily by a large share of a fifth of the population, operating in parallel with a Hebrew internet that mostly does not see it. For its readers, that invisibility has never been the point. Panet exists so that the daily life of Arab Israel, its towns, its politics, its sport and its culture, is reported in Arabic, by Arabic journalists, as news in its own right, and on that foundation Bassam Jaber's portal built one of the largest audiences in Israeli online media.