About Al-Anba

Al-Anba

Al-Anba, also transliterated al-Anbaa and meaning "The News," was an Arabic-language daily newspaper published in Jerusalem from 1968 to 1985. It was the only official Israeli newspaper in Arabic, launched in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967 with government support, in partnership with the Jerusalem Post and the Histadrut, and distributed among Palestinians in Israel and in the territories captured in 1967. The paper was created as an instrument of Israeli public diplomacy toward its Arab audience, but its history was shaped by a permanent tension between that purpose and the wish to be read: a newspaper that was merely a government mouthpiece attracted few Arab readers, while a newspaper open enough to attract them alarmed the establishment that paid for it. In the years 1971 to 1974 Al-Anba adopted a quasi-liberal line that allowed dissenting and non-establishment voices to be heard in its pages and briefly won a real readership; in mid-1974 it was forced back into line as a pure government mouthpiece and rapidly lost its impact. It survived, on a shrinking circulation largely sustained by subsidy, until 1985, when it was closed by decision of the minister Ezer Weizman.

The detailed record of the paper, reconstructed from the contemporary Hebrew press and from a scholarly study based on Israeli archival documents, charts its circulation with unusual precision for a paper of its kind: a hoped-for 9,000 copies at its launch, a stubborn 3,000, a marketed peak of 15,000 at the end of 1971, 6,000 on weekdays and 9,000 at weekends by early 1975, and about 3,000 a day at its closure, of which roughly a third were forced subscriptions. Its editors, Yitzhak Bar-Moshe, Yaakov Hazma and Ovadia Danon, successively embodied the paper's changing fortunes.

Origins: The Failure of Al-Yom

Al-Anba was the replacement for an earlier official Arabic daily. From 1948 to 1968 the adviser to the prime minister on Arab affairs and the Histadrut together published the newspaper Al-Yom, "The Day," which had been founded in Jaffa in October 1948, in the offices of the newspaper Palestine, under the editorship of Michael Assaf of Davar, and which carried material from the ruling party to the Arab minority, including material translated from Davar. Al-Yom never succeeded in acquiring a significant readership, and it accumulated large deficits. In May 1968 the Hebrew press reported that Al-Yom would cease publication on 1 June, and it was decided to close it. In its place it was decided to bring out a new newspaper in partnership with the Jerusalem Post, which would receive the support that had until then been given to Al-Yom. The new paper was thus conceived from the outset as a subsidised government venture rather than a commercial one, and it inherited both the mission and the structural problem of its predecessor: it existed to convey the state's case to Arab readers who had little reason to seek it out.

Launch in October 1968

For editor of the new paper, Yitzhak Bar-Moshe was chosen; he received unpaid leave from the Broadcasting Authority, where he worked for the radio, in order to take the post. The hope was that the paper would reach a circulation of 9,000 copies, of them 3,000 in Israel and another 6,000 in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, the territories that had come under Israeli control the previous year. Accordingly a line of Arab reporters was recruited, and an editorial line was fixed that would allow freer expression, in contrast to the government-mouthpiece line that had been customary at Al-Yom. The reporting staff included ten journalists from the territories, who were recruited despite counter-pressure on Arab journalists in the West Bank not to cooperate with the Israeli newspaper. The paper began to appear on 24 October 1968. Its name, Al-Anba, was the Arabic plural of "news," a neutral title that announced its ambition to be taken as a newspaper rather than as a bulletin.

The First Editorial Experiment

The early Al-Anba attempted to practise the relative openness on which it had been founded. Articles by Eliyahu Sasson, the minister of police, appeared in it, but articles by Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, the editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram and the confidant of President Nasser, were also copied into it, an extraordinary presence in an official Israeli publication. The Hebrew daily Maariv, reporting on the paper in November 1968, described it as "a free Arab newspaper." The experiment's limits were nonetheless structural: the paper was published together with the Jerusalem Post, with the support of the Israeli government and the Histadrut, and it was sold mainly to the Arab population under Israeli rule, a fact its intended readers knew. In April 1970 Bar-Moshe returned to Kol Israel, the radio service, and Yaakov Hazma was appointed editor in his place. Despite the efforts invested in it, the paper remained at a circulation of only about 3,000 copies, the same order of magnitude that had doomed Al-Yom.

Marketing and the Rise of 1971

The paper's one period of genuine success began with a change of management. In April 1971 Shlomo Hanan was appointed manager of the paper. He placed the emphasis on marketing Al-Anba, and he brought its circulation by the end of 1971 to 15,000 copies. The Labour daily Davar followed the rise with reports headlined "A rise in the circulation of Al-Anba" and "A success story of an Arab newspaper." The content matched the commercial push: in these years the paper allowed dissenting and non-establishment voices to appear in its pages, including Palestinian writers addressing the Palestinian question; a review of the paper's publications on that question in the archival record noted a series of articles by the Palestinian writer Abu Shilbaya that appeared on 15, 17, 20 and 22 December 1971. A seven-page issue of March 1977 preserved in the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive illustrated the paper's established range in its later years, with articles and news on politics, culture and the arts, economics and sport, and on Arab, regional and world affairs, presented from the Israeli point of view.

The Liberal Opening and Its Meaning

Scholarly study of the paper, based on official documents drawn from Israeli archives, identified the years 1971 to 1974 as the brief period in which Al-Anba adopted a quasi-liberal line, allowing dissenting and non-establishment voices to be heard from its pages. The editor of those years identified this ostensible pluralism as a kind of psychological warfare against the Arabs and was proud of the newspaper's success: openness was itself the technique by which an official paper could hope to persuade. The study set the episode within the longer history of official Israeli media policy toward the Arab minority, of which Al-Anba was one of the very few examined examples, drawing on documentation from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. For a few years the paper was therefore both things at once, an instrument of state messaging and the nearest thing to an open Arabic forum that official Israel had produced, and its circulation figures showed that Arab readers responded to the second of those identities rather than the first.

The Establishment Pushback, 1974–75

The opening did not survive its success. The perceived liberalism of Al-Anba caused a rebuke from the establishment, and in mid-1974 the paper was forced to change its line, becoming a pure government mouthpiece, which rapidly lost its impact on the Arab public. The mechanism of the rebuke was visible in the record: at the end of 1974, following an article in the paper that mocked the Israeli lira, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin asked that the paper's editorial policy be examined, and a committee was appointed to investigate it, composed of Shmuel Toledano, the adviser on Arab affairs, David Farhi of the Information Ministry and Arnon Gafni, the commissioner of budgets in the Finance Ministry. A committee on the future of the paper was at work by January and February 1975. The circulation figures registered the result: the high levels were not maintained, and at the beginning of 1975 they stood at 6,000 copies on weekdays and about 9,000 at weekends, roughly half the peak of 1971. The scholarly verdict was that the government's decision to abandon the relatively effective approach of employing pluralism to convey its views to the Palestinians reflected not only a continuing paternalistic attitude toward the Arabs but, more basically, an unwillingness to engage in meaningful dialogue with the Palestinians on both sides of the 1967 border.

Format Change, Resignation and Cuts, 1977–79

The paper's later years were a managed decline. From the beginning of January 1977 the format of Al-Anba was changed so that it would resemble the format customary in the Arab countries, a presentational concession to the readership it was losing. In February 1978 the editor, Yaakov Hazma, resigned in protest against the interference of the prime minister's adviser on Arab affairs, Dr Moshe Sharon, in the contents of the paper. At the same time thirteen journalists were dismissed in order to reduce the paper's deficits; the sports writer, Naim Zilka, was restored to his job after about two months in the face of many protests against his dismissal. In July 1979 Ovadia Danon was appointed editor of the paper, the third and last of its editors. The succession of rows over interference, dismissals and deficits showed a paper that had settled into its final condition: officially sustained, editorially supervised, and no longer expected to win the audience for which it had been created.

Final Years and Closure in 1985

In the 1980s most of the paper's budget came from government support, a dependence that was itself the subject of parliamentary scrutiny when the Knesset member Tawfiq Toubi raised the budget of Al-Anba in a question in the Knesset in July 1983. In 1985 the minister Ezer Weizman decided to close the paper. At that time its circulation stood at about 3,000 copies a day, of which about a third were forced subscriptions, copies taken by institutions rather than chosen by readers, and several hundred more were distributed in Israel's prisons. Contemporary commentary marked the end of the official publication in Arabic as a distinct event in Israel's media history. The paper's lifespan is generally given as 1968 to 1985, though some surveys of the party and official press, reckoning its last full year, listed it as 1968 to 1984. With its closure, the experiment that had begun with Al-Yom in 1948, an Arabic daily newspaper published by the Israeli state for its Arab readers, came to an end after thirty-seven years in its two incarnations.

Legacy

Al-Anba was remembered less as a newspaper in its own right than as a case study in the predicament of official propaganda directed at an unwilling audience. Its archive, preserved in collections such as the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive's series of dated issues from 1977, documents the Israeli narrative of the period as it was presented, in Arabic, to Palestinian readers. Its scholarly afterlife, in the study of its rise and fall based on the state's own archives, turned the paper into evidence in a larger argument: that the one period in which the official Arabic press won readers was the period in which it was allowed to print voices the state opposed, and that the decision to end that openness, taken in 1974, guaranteed the irrelevance that followed. In the history of the Arabic press in Israel, Al-Anba stood as the last and largest of the government-sponsored dailies, the successor of Al-Yom and the final attempt by the state itself to speak to Arab citizens and to the Palestinians of the territories through a newspaper of its own.