About HaKol HaYehudi

HaKol HaYehudi

HaKol HaYehudi, which translates as "The Jewish Voice", is a Hebrew-language Israeli news website owned by the association Independent Jewish Press and published at hakolhayehudi.co.il from Yitzhar, a settlement in the northern West Bank. It was founded in 2009 as a weekly newsletter by residents of Yitzhar, with the encouragement of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, and later became a website, carrying the slogan "What is important for you to know". The site is identified with Israel's far right. It reflects Rabbi Ginsburgh's approach on spiritual subjects and toward Arabs, advocates a policy of employing Jews only, publishes sympathetic reports on "price tag" actions, and publishes support for the transfer of Arabs. Israel's Shin Bet security service has regarded it as a factor encouraging youths to carry out price-tag actions against the Palestinian population. Its history is therefore double: it is a working news organisation whose investigations have repeatedly produced documented effects — prisoners moved to isolation, a council budget frozen, a parliamentary aide suspended — and it is an outlet whose editor and one of its best-known columnists have been convicted of incitement offences over its publications. Both records are documented in court reporting and in the Israeli press, and this profile presents both.

Founded in Yitzhar as a weekly newsletter

HaKol HaYehudi was founded as a weekly newsletter in 2009 by residents of the settlement of Yitzhar, with the encouragement of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, under the original slogan "News for happy Jews". The newsletter later became an internet site. Its owning body is the association whose Hebrew name translates as Independent Jewish Press, and the site's own "About" page is the source for that ownership. Yitzhar is not an incidental address: the settlement, in the hills south of Nablus, is home to the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva associated with Rabbi Ginsburgh and Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, and the site grew out of that community's wish for a news voice of its own. The slogan that the site carries in its mature form, "What is important for you to know", expresses the same founding idea in news language — that its readers are not being told, by the general Israeli media, the things that matter to them. From a printed weekly handed out in one settlement, the publication became a website read and quoted across the Israeli right, while keeping its editorial home, and its original community, in Yitzhar.

Ideology as documented by its critics and the courts

The site's outlook is documented in unusual detail because much of it has been tested in court. Hebrew Wikipedia, drawing on Haaretz reporting, records that the site reflects Ginsburgh's approach in relation to spiritual subjects and in relation to Arabs, that it is identified with the far right in Israel, that it is considered by the Shin Bet to be a factor that encourages youths to carry out price-tag actions against the Palestinian population, that it advocates a policy of Jewish-only employment, that it contains sympathetic reports on price-tag actions, and that it publishes support for the transfer of Arabs — including, in February 2025, items presenting transfer as a present programme and applying President Trump's Gaza proposal as, in one rabbi's formulation on the site, a Torah solution for all Arabs of Israel. These characterisations are attributed here to the sources that made them; they are also consistent with the findings in the incitement convictions described below, in which courts examined the site's own publications and found in them systematic expressions of praise, sympathy, encouragement, support and identification with acts of violence against Arabs. A profile that omitted this record would not be describing the outlet that Israeli courts, security bodies and newspapers have actually dealt with.

The 2011 document exposure and the police raid

The site's first national impact came in June 2011, when it exposed a document signed by Brigadier General Nitzan Alon that called for religious soldiers and settlers not to be shared in planned information about an evacuation. The exposure struck at the settlement movement's deepest sensitivity — the fear that the army planned evacuations in secret from its own religious soldiers — and the state's response made the story bigger. In response, police raided the editorial offices in Yitzhar, confiscated equipment and arrested three of the site's people, on suspicion of violating the Shin Bet law and incitement to racism. Haaretz reported the arrests under the headline that operators of a site encouraging price-tag activity had been arrested, and the raid was reported across the Israeli media, including by the Kipa site. The episode established the pattern of the site's public life: an exposure embarrassing to the security establishment, followed by enforcement action against the newsroom, followed by the site's presentation of itself as a persecuted voice telling truths the establishment preferred to suppress. Whatever view a reader takes of the site's ideology, the 2011 sequence is a documented case of a very small settlement newsroom obtaining and publishing a signed senior officer's document, and of the state answering a publication with a raid.

Exposures with documented effects, 2013 to 2020

In January 2013 the site exposed a video documenting an engagement celebration held by Palestinian security prisoners in Eshel Prison. Following the exposure, the Israel Prison Service transferred 27 prisoners to isolation, an outcome reported by the NRG site. An investigation published on the site in October 2019 exposed Welfare Ministry data on the high number of minor girls who had absented themselves from the ministry's youth-protection institutions; the site's own headline gave the figure that 60 percent of the minors in youth custody had run away or gone missing. In October 2020 the site exposed that signs posted across Judea and Samaria warning Israeli residents against entering ostensible Area A under Palestinian control, and forbidding travel on roads leading to those areas, in fact referred in part to Area B under Israeli security control — villages it named included Umm Safa, Na'alin, Bidya, Deir al-Hatab and Ein Sinya — and sometimes even to Area C under full Israeli control, such as the Sebastia national park. The site brought the response of the IDF Spokesperson, according to which this misleading of the public was done intentionally, "in accordance with the assessment of the situation in the field, analysis of the threats and in accordance with the IDF's presence in those places". A small ideological site had thus documented, with the army's own confirmation, a deliberate official mislabelling of territory on public road signs.

The 2017 incitement convictions

In June 2017 one of the site's editors, Avraham Binyamin, was convicted of offences of incitement to violence and incitement to racism, and Yehoshua Hess, who headed an association connected to the site, was convicted of offences of aiding incitement to violence and aiding incitement to racism, over publications on the site and in printed newsletters. As summarised in the Hebrew Wikipedia account of the verdicts, their various publications systematically included expressions of praise, sympathy, encouragement, support and identification concerning the carrying out of "beating", "violence", "throwing stones", "spraying tear gas", "splitting a head", "throwing glass bottles" and the like against Arabs as such, and also included content amounting to incitement to anti-Arab racism. The convictions were reported by Channel 7 and other outlets. They are a central fact of the site's record: the line between its journalism and criminal incitement was not merely alleged by critics but found, in these cases, by a court, on the basis of the publications themselves. Binyamin is a documented public figure of the settlement movement beyond the site — a Yitzhar teacher quoted internationally as long ago as 2010 expressing the view that the land is a Jewish biblical birthright that must never be relinquished — and his editorship connects the newsroom directly to that milieu.

Rabbi Yosef Elitzur and the price-tag articles

A second conviction followed from the site's opinion pages. Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, a rabbi of the Yitzhar yeshiva and a co-author of the book Torat HaMelech, published columns on HaKol HaYehudi in May 2013, after the murder of Evyatar Borovsky, supporting price-tag actions: one column was titled "Do not despair — only grow", and a second, "How to 'catch' the price-tag perpetrators", expressed support for what he called acts of self-defence by Jews in the Land of Israel and attacked the values of containment and tolerance. An earlier 2009 article attributed to him had stated that if Jews have no quiet, Arabs will have no quiet, and that if Arabs win through violence against Jews, Jews too will win through violence against Arabs; the Attorney General considered indicting him for that article and ultimately decided not to. For the 2013 site columns, after police raided his Yitzhar home in April 2014 and confiscated his computer, an indictment was filed in June 2017. Elitzur argued in court that he was not a columnist of the site, that the articles were published by its editors and not by him, and that he had not written a word appearing in them; the Magistrate's Court rejected that account, convicted him in February 2021 of incitement through publication of words of praise, sympathy or encouragement for an act of violence, and sentenced him to a suspended prison term and a fine of 3,000 shekels. On appeal, the Central District Court dismissed both his appeal and, in part, accepted the prosecution's appeal on leniency in principle: it held that the fitting sentence should have been actual imprisonment, imposed only because of the long time that had passed it was not, and it extended the suspended term from four to seven months. In November 2022 the Supreme Court rejected his request to appeal further, and a Makor Rishon report of the ruling summarised its principle: support for price-tag perpetrators also counts as incitement.

Building an investigations desk by crowdfunding

In July 2018 the site turned to its readers to professionalise. It launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Giveback platform in order to establish an investigations desk, and raised about 350,000 shekels. The campaign's very existence documents the site's model: owned by a nonprofit association, without a tycoon or a large parent newspaper, it finances expansion by appealing to the community it serves, much as Israel's independent left-wing outlets finance themselves — a structural similarity across the political divide that students of Israeli media have noted in the sector generally. The investigations desk the campaign funded is the unit behind the site's subsequent long-form work, including the 2019 welfare data investigation, the 2020 road-signs investigation and the multi-part investigations of Palestinian Authority land activity that followed. The crowdfunding also marks the site's transition in self-image: from a newsletter and news feed of a single settlement toward an investigative outlet claiming a national brief on Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian Authority and the security establishment's treatment of the settlement movement.

Investigations of the 2020s: aides, charters and land

In October 2021 the site published that the assistant of Knesset member Ram Ben Barak, then chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, had participated in a course in which some of the lecturers were Islamists who had been suspected or convicted of incitement or support for terrorism, and had been photographed with them. Following the exposure Ben Barak suspended the assistant pending clarification; he later returned her to her position and declared that he trusted her, as Haaretz reported. In August 2022 the site published an investigation titled "Organised Takeover", exposing details of the activity of the Palestinian Authority's Committee Against Walls and Settlements, which it said operated through violence and terrorism for the illegal takeover of lands in Judea and Samaria, including Area C, presenting the central activists with details of their support for the murder of Jews, their prior convictions, and the posing of some of them as local farmers repeatedly caught up in disturbances — planned events, the site argued, designed to blacken the IDF's name and prepare illegal land takeover through daily provocations. In September 2022 it published for the first time Hebrew translated excerpts from the charter of the Islamic Movement's southern branch, containing a demand for the right of return, and argued that Mansour Abbas had led the writing and approval of the charter as a foundation for his entry into politics, contrary to his later Hebrew statements to Israeli media distancing himself from it. In February 2023, following the 2022 book by former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, the site carried journalist Kalman Liebeskind's finding that Ayalon's recorded conversations with Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira had been distorted, with many quotations attributed to the rabbi never said, and published an interview with Rabbi Shapira responding. In June 2023 it exposed that the official site of the Ein Mahil council in the Galilee defined the village as a Palestinian village alongside extreme nationalist content; following the exposure the Interior Ministry froze the council's budget.

The war period: the Huwara pizzeria and a cyberattack

During the Iron Swords war the site was involved in one of the war's most debated home-front episodes. A pizzeria in Huwara used, for advertising, a photograph of one of the women supposedly kidnapped to Gaza; it later became clear that the woman in the photograph had not been kidnapped. After the advertisement was located online by HaKol HaYehudi journalist Elhanan Gruner, journalist Amit Segal tweeted and published the picture, and following that many young people from the nearby settlements went down to the village demanding the shop's destruction. Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan demanded of the Central Command chief and the Samaria Brigade commander that the place be destroyed, and a lawyer from the Honenu organisation sent a legal demand to the Central Command chief to act under Regulation 119 of the Defence Regulations and destroy the building urgently. A few hours later an army bulldozer destroyed the building and prepared it for sealing; Segal later noted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been involved in handling the case. The sequence — a site journalist's online find, a national journalist's amplification, a council head's demand and a military demolition within hours — is documented step by step in the Hebrew record and shows the site's wartime role as a detection and pressure node in the settlement movement's information network. The site was itself a target in the same period: during the war it underwent a cyberattack and was disabled for several days.

Podcasts and the 2024 Pakistan investigation

The site has expanded into audio. In March 2023 it produced a podcast series named "The Military Coup", reviewing and analysing military articles. Its podcast catalogue on streaming services includes "Medabrim BeHar" — Talking on the Mountain — hosted by journalist Elhanan Gruner with Menachem Ben-Shahar, and "Hoshevim BaKol", Thinking Aloud, whose conversations with settlement activists and commentators extend the site's editorial line into long-form discussion of Judea and Samaria, the security establishment and Jewish-Arab relations. Gruner, the journalist of the Huwara episode, is the site's best-known reporting voice in this period and co-author, with Meir Ettinger, of work on Gaza policy discussed on other podcasts. In May 2024 the site published, with the "Fight for Every Dunam" forum, an investigation exposing cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and Pakistan under which Palestinian police and youths stay in Pakistan for extended periods and undergo military training in preparation for establishing a "Palestine army" — training including armour and artillery, firing shoulder missiles and heavy machine guns, sniping and parachuting, with others taking dedicated courses of several months including at Pakistan's naval academy, wearing Pakistani army uniforms usually bearing "Palestine Army" tags. Channel 7 republished the investigation's findings. A Makor Rishon feature in July 2018, headlined "Talking from the field: the caravan that wants to compete with the Neve Ilan studios", had already framed the site's ambition in broadcast terms: a field-based alternative newsroom of the settlement movement.

Place in Israeli media

HaKol HaYehudi's place in Israeli media is defined by the tension its record documents. It is listed among Israel's religious and right-wing news sites, is quoted and republished by larger right-wing outlets such as Channel 7, and has produced a consistent run of exposures with verifiable consequences: a senior officer's document published in 2011, 27 prisoners isolated in 2013, a Knesset committee chairman's aide suspended in 2021, a municipal budget frozen in 2023, a building demolished in Huwara in 2023 and an army spokesman's admission on road signs in 2020. It raised about 350,000 shekels from readers to build an investigations desk, built a podcast operation, and survived a wartime cyberattack. At the same time it is the outlet whose editor Avraham Binyamin was convicted in 2017 of incitement to violence and racism, whose associated association head Yehoshua Hess was convicted of aiding incitement, and whose columnist Rabbi Yosef Elitzur was convicted in 2021 of incitement over articles published on it, a conviction the Supreme Court left standing in 2022. It was raided by police in 2011 and is described by the Shin Bet, in the reporting summarised by Hebrew Wikipedia, as encouraging price-tag violence. No honest directory entry can choose between these records: the site is both a functioning investigative outlet of the far-right settlement movement and a repeated subject of incitement enforcement, and it is precisely that combination that makes it a significant, and singular, case in the study of Israel's partisan digital press.