Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: problemi per Haaretz

Newspaper Without a Country
By Christoph Schult
Its lonely fight against the occupation of the West Bank made Israeli
newspaper Haaretz internationally famous. At home, the paper is
fighting for survival.
The irreverence of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz is visible from
the first moment a visitor enters the paper's editorial headquarters.
There in the foyer hangs an open pig's carcass, looking just as it
would in a slaughterhouse. This one, however, is reproduced in pieces
of candy -- red ones for the muscles, and yellow for the innards. The
building's doorman is on hand to help interpret this installation. The
sculpture, he says, is like the land of Israel itself: "Beautiful on
the outside, rotten on the inside."
"The land" is also the translation of the name Haaretz, and the
newspaper's problems are indeed linked with those of the country. What
the paper offers in abundance -- a willingness to compromise with the
Palestinians -- has once again become a fairly unpopular stance in
Israeli society.
One floor down from the foyer is the conference room. It's a
windowless space and looks a bit like the nerve center of a war
cabinet. This afternoon, Defense Minister Ehud Barak is here to visit
the newspaper. What follows is a vigorous exchange of views. On one
side is the country's most critical editorial department; on the
other, the politician who has shifted the traditionally left-wing
Labor Party to the right, to the point where Barak's opinions
sometimes seem to hardly differ from those of nationalist Benjamin
Netanyahu, leader of the center-right Likud Party.
Barak, a retired general, presents himself as a hardliner and quickly
wears the journalists down. The louder he speaks, the more the editors
lose any desire to ask him questions. The minister bellows. He pounds
his right fist on the table. Even the croissant he casually stuffs
into his mouth can't stop the flow of his words. In the end, the
editor-in-chief observes with some bewilderment "that just now we
didn't interrupt you for 20 minutes."
Struggle for Survival
And so the contemplative Left has again lost to the noisy mainstream.
It's a symbol for the newspaper's struggle to survive in its ever-more-
lonely position as a well-respected daily. Abroad, Haaretz is known
for its strong position against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories. Its English-language Web site registers a million users
each month. At home, however, only 66,000 Israelis buy the paper.
Founded in 1919, the paper was acquired in 1935 by Salman Schocken, a
businessman who had fled Nazi Germany, where he had owned a department
store chain and a publishing company. From 1939 on, Schocken's son
Gustav shaped the paper's liberal, left-wing bent. Schocken's grandson
Amos has been chief executive of the Haaretz group since 1990.
His father, says Amos Schocken, 64, was still able to take more
interest in the editorial aspects than in the finances of the paper.
But times have changed, the founder's grandson says: "The paper has to
make money." And that's not easy. In 2006 the family sold 25 percent
of its shares in the newspaper to Cologne-based publisher Alfred Neven
DuMont. At the time of the sale, Schocken handed the new investor a
sheet of paper outlining the newspaper's editorial principles. The
German publisher read the list and then pointed to the last item:
"'Haaretz supports efforts to achieve peace with Israel's Arab
neighbors." That, DuMont said, is especially important.
The only problem is that actively advocating peace negotiations is a
fairly unpopular position in Israel at the moment. Shortly after the
end of the Six Day War in 1967, Haaretz was already promoting the
return of the occupied territories in exchange for peace. With the
1994 Oslo Accords, majority Israeli opinion also began to swing in
this direction. But the happy marriage between the newspaper and
prevailing public opinion didn't last long. With the beginning of the
second Palestinian intifada in 2000 and the accompanying suicide
attacks in Israeli cities, the land and "The Land" once again went
their separate ways.
Subscribers began to abandon the paper in droves. The most common
reason given by readers who canceled their subscriptions was one
journalist, Gideon Levy, the country's most radical commentator. Once
a week in his "Twilight Zone" column, Levy writes about the fate of
Palestinians. He writes about taxi drivers whose vehicles were
destroyed by Israeli soldiers or about a man whose wife was delayed at
a checkpoint while having an acute heart attack for so long that she
died. "If we change this newspaper's DNA," Levy warns, "we won't
survive."
Editorial Changes
But the paper is already changing. Distinguished left-wing journalists
have been pushed out, and new writers have joined Haaretz in their
place. "The younger generation of journalists is less political," Levy
says. Or they write pieces that are strikingly sympathetic to the
Jewish settlers, as Levy's colleague Nadav Schragai did. For example,
in his commentary on the eviction of a house occupied by settlers in
Hebron, Schragai wrote: "Our government is developing its own
fanaticism, in which the goal -- evicting Jews from Hebron --
justifies almost any means."
That's an unusual tone for Haaretz. Dov Alfon, 47, who became editor-
in-chief this spring, offers this in his newspaper's defense: "We've
always allowed a great diversity of opinion." Since Alfon took over,
the paper has been experimenting a lot. Lately, stories about crimes
have sometimes replaced politics as the lead headlines on the front
page.
The editor-in-chief and the company's executives have identified the
paper's format to be the largest obstacle to its commercial success.
Up until now, Haaretz has been published in broadsheet format. This is
the newspaper format with the largest dimensions and is shared, for
example, by Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Meanwhile,
Israel's largest daily newspapers Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv resemble
British tabloids in size and design. Now there are plans to convert
Haaretz to the tabloid format as well.
There are no plans, however, to change the paper's basic political
line, says Alfon. The majority of Israelis, he says, support a two-
state solution and the return of almost the entire West Bank.
And unlike in Europe or the United States, he points out, politics
still sells in Israel. Nowhere else do people spend so many hours
watching TV news programs as they do in Israel. "Politics," Alfon
says, "is the Israeli version of pornography."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-599005,00.html
----
"Ashkelon è più sicura" (Luca Logi / rodewalder / Golda Meir, febbraio
2008)
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2009/01/certo-che-i-qassam-sono-pericolosi_05.html

 state solution and the return of almost the entire West Bank.
visto che supportano anche lo sterminio di centinaia di gazani,
sarebbe da chiedere loro se pensano che nell'altro stato ci dovrebbero
essere dei cittadini o dei fantasmi