About HaYarden

HaYarden

HaYarden, whose name meant "The Jordan," was a Hebrew newspaper published in Jerusalem, and later in Tel Aviv, between 1934 and 1939. It was the official organ of the Revisionist Zionist movement in Palestine, the movement founded and led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which demanded the immediate establishment of a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River and opposed both the British Mandate authorities and the Labour Zionists who dominated the organised Yishuv. The paper appeared, with interruptions, as a daily and as a weekly, and for several years it served as the principal tribune for Jabotinsky's own articles and essays, carrying the subtitle "with the regular participation of Ze'ev Jabotinsky." Its life was turbulent even by the standards of the Mandate party press: it was banned repeatedly by the British authorities, fined, closed and revived, driven from daily to weekly publication by lack of money, and finally closed in 1939, by which time its successor, HaMashkif, had taken its place as the Revisionist movement's central newspaper.

HaYarden was founded in the shadow of the gravest internal crisis of the Yishuv in the 1930s, the assassination of the Labour leader Hayim Arlosoroff in June 1933 and the trial of Revisionist activists accused of his murder. The paper's first issue appeared on the day the trial opened, and its first public cause was the defence of the accused. Its first editor was the young Benzion Netanyahu, later a noted historian and the father of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and its pages brought together a generation of Revisionist writers, several of whom went on to shape Israeli journalism after 1948.

The Revisionist Search for a Daily

HaYarden was the Revisionist movement's third attempt to sustain an official daily newspaper in Palestine. The movement's first experience had come with Do'ar HaYom, the Jerusalem daily purchased by Jabotinsky in 1928, which followed a Revisionist-oriented editorial policy under his brief editorship for about two years. After the movement failed to persuade Itamar Ben-Avi to turn his paper into its mouthpiece, it founded HaAm, "The People," in 1931, but within months that paper was shut down by the British authorities. A maximalist Revisionist faction led by Abba Ahimeir, Yehoshua Yeivin and Uri Zvi Greenberg published its own paper, Hazit HaAm, in the early 1930s, but Hazit HaAm was a private paper, owned by Wolfgang von Weisl, with a protesting, defiant and sharp line and no clear subordination to the movement's institutions. Attempts to turn Hazit HaAm, which had appeared since 1932, into the movement's official daily failed, and it was then decided in the institutions of the Revisionist party, with Jabotinsky's agreement, to establish a new paper. After a delay of several months, HaYarden appeared in Jerusalem on 24 April 1934 as the movement's mouthpiece.

Founding Amid the Arlosoroff Trial

The immediate occasion of the founding was the trial of members of Brit HaBiryonim, the maximalist Revisionist group, among them Abba Ahimeir and Avraham Stavsky, who had been arrested and charged with the murder of Hayim Arlosoroff, the Labour Zionist leader shot in Tel Aviv in 1933. HaYarden was founded, among other aims, in order to influence public opinion in favour of the innocence of the accused in the Arlosoroff murder, and its first issue appeared on the day the trial opened, the day after the court's first session. The responsible editor named at the paper's founding was Mordechai Avniel. Beyond news and articles on the affairs of the day, the paper filled the role of an ideological and explanatory platform. It published the first voices proclaiming the innocence of the accused and protesting against their prosecution, among them a proclamation by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, on behalf of the accused, messages of congratulation on their acquittal, and the rabbi's appeal to Ahimeir to end his hunger strike. It also carried surveys of the Revisionist movement's ideological conferences, and it continued the campaign against the Haavara, or Transfer, Agreement with Nazi Germany, which on one account had also formed part of the background to the Arlosoroff murder, publishing the details of the agreement publicly.

Name, Symbol and Editorial Line

The paper's name and symbol were the Jordan River on its two banks, designed according to the vision of the Revisionist movement, which refused to accept the division of Mandate Palestine into two parts, eastern Transjordan and western Palestine, by the British Mandate authorities; the emblem resembled that of the Irgun, the National Military Organisation. The leading article of the first issue, written by Eliyahu Ben-Horin, stressed the continuity of the Revisionists' Herzlian political tradition and insisted that the policy of HaYarden was a continuation of that of its predecessors, Do'ar HaYom during the period when it had been under the party's control, and HaAm. The paper defended a Jewish nationalist line hostile to British policy in Mandate Palestine, to the Labour camp and to the Zionist left. It addressed the Revisionist public, but also other currents and publics within the Yishuv, such as the General Zionists, and it competed directly with other papers that supposedly represented the Revisionist movement, above all the privately owned Hazit HaAm. In one article, Benzion Netanyahu wrote that if the Jews willed it and fought for their will, they would merit in their own days a Jewish state in the Land of Israel; following that article, the Arab Higher Committee demanded of the British High Commissioner that the paper be closed.

Jabotinsky's Tribune

As befitted the newspaper of the Revisionist movement, and in accordance with its subtitle promising the regular participation of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, HaYarden published Jabotinsky's articles and essays, and it served as the principal platform for his texts during the second half of the 1930s. The collection of the paper preserved at the National Library of Israel comprises 591 issues and 3,747 pages, a measure of how much of the movement's public argument in those years was conducted in its columns. The Revisionist movement of the 1920s and 1930s maintained newspapers and periodicals in several countries, but HaYarden was its daily voice in Palestine itself, the organ through which the movement addressed the Yishuv in Hebrew while its leader was barred from the country and directed his followers from abroad. When the movement seceded from the World Zionist Organization in 1935 to form the New Zionist Organization, the paper spoke for the secessionist camp in Palestine.

Editors and Staff

Responsibility for editing the paper was first entrusted to Benzion Netanyahu, who had previously co-edited Betar, the Revisionist monthly edited with Joseph Klausner in 1933 and 1934, and who acted as the paper's editor for several months; after him, Professor Joseph Klausner was appointed responsible editor, and as early as June 1934 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency presented HaYarden as a Revisionist daily headed by Klausner. Netanyahu, one of the paper's founders, left its editorship in 1935, after the death of his father. The directors of the company that managed the paper were Nahum Levin, Yosef Katzenelson, Benzion Netanyahu, Mordechai Avniel, Avraham Winshal, Dr Moshe Cohen and S. Meirovitz. Members of the editorial staff and activists of the paper over the course of its existence included Yonatan Ratosh, then known as Uriel Heilperin, Kalman Katzenelson, Yosef Or, Eliyahu Ben-Horin, Yehoshua Yeivin, who had also edited Hazit HaAm, and Shalom Rosenfeld. The paper was first printed at Yehiel Werker's press in Jerusalem and afterwards at the HaSolel press, which belonged to Itamar Ben-Avi and Zalman White, and its issues were distributed by young people, among them members of the Betar youth movement. It was supported by the organisations of the Revisionist movement, the Revisionist party and the New Zionist Organization, and by private supporters of the movement who advertised in it.

Bans, Fines and Financial Strain

HaYarden was banned from publication several times by the British authorities. In June 1934 the Labour daily Davar reported, under the headline "HaYarden closed for a month," one such suspension, within weeks of the paper's founding. In February 1935 the Palestine Post reported that the directors of the newspaper company had been fined. The bans combined with chronic financial difficulties to wear the paper down: unlike its competitor Davar, the Histadrut's daily, which had a solid economic backing behind it, HaYarden depended on a movement that was itself short of funds and on the advertisements of private sympathisers. The strain decided its publishers, who resolved to close the paper on 24 May 1935, little more than a year after it had appeared.

Closure, Revival and the Weekly Years

The closure of May 1935 was not the end. Two months later, on 25 July 1935, HaYarden began to appear again, this time under an editorial board seated in Tel Aviv, with Eliyahu Ben-Horin as editor-in-chief. Financial difficulties continued to overshadow its publication, and it closed again on 16 December 1935. From 24 January 1936 it was decided to bring the paper out as a weekly, and the task was assigned to the lawyer Avraham Winshal, who a decade earlier had owned a paper of Revisionist outlook, HaTzafon, in Haifa. Reference accounts summarised the same trajectory: the daily HaYarden existed in Jerusalem for several years in the mid-1930s, but for lack of funds became a weekly and was transferred to Tel Aviv in 1935. The weekly, too, was sometimes closed by the authorities and suffered from money troubles. Its publishers printed some issues under other names, a device common among Zionist papers of the Mandate period for evading closure orders, or even as a paper of advertisements only, and its writers wrote under pen names, but the many difficulties prevented its regular publication. In 1937 Uriel Heilperin, later known as the poet Yonatan Ratosh, was appointed editor, but this too did not succeed. The National Library's catalogue described the paper as a weekly, while Jewish Telegraphic Agency dispatches of 1934 and 1935 called it a daily, a discrepancy that reflects the variable periodicity of its existence.

Final Closure and Successor

At the end of 1938 a new Revisionist daily, HaMashkif, "The Observer," began to appear, and it became the central newspaper of the Revisionist movement, publishing regularly from January 1939; HaMashkif itself regarded the earlier Revisionist papers, Hazit HaAm and HaYarden, as its predecessors. HaYarden was finally closed in 1939. The archive of its editorial office was preserved at the archive of the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, and the scholarly history of the movement's press, notably Mina Graur's study of the relations between the Revisionist party and its newspapers, treated HaYarden as a central source for the movement's life in the 1930s. The paper's run, from April 1934 to 1939, spanned the years in which Revisionist Zionism broke with the World Zionist Organization, built its own institutions, and fought its bitterest battles with the Labour movement, and HaYarden was the arena in which much of that fight was conducted in print.

The 1985 Revival Attempt

Nearly half a century after the paper's final closure, an attempt was made to revive it. In 1985 HaYarden was relaunched in Jerusalem as a weekly by Gush Emunim, the religious settler movement, financed by a new immigrant investor from the United States. The editor of the revived paper was Uriel Ben-Ami, his deputy was Meir Ben-Gur, and its editorial board included Israel Eldad, Ezra Zohar, Elyakim Haetzni, Yosef Nedava and Aharon Papo, figures associated with the Israeli nationalist right. After fourteen issues had been published, the revived newspaper closed, having run into funding difficulties, the same cause that had defeated the original paper in the 1930s. The episode closed the history of HaYarden: a name that had first appeared as the embattled daily of a movement fighting a murder trial and a Mandate censor ended, fifty years on, as a short-lived weekly of a different generation of the Israeli right.