In the Liberal Tradition: "Ha'aretz" / בין שני עורכים — דרכו הליברלית של "הארץ"

Ha'aretz, Israel's respected daily, was first published in 1918 as Hadashot Meha'aretz Hakedoshah ("News from the Holy Land"), an organ of the British army in Palestine. As such, its origins lie, indirectly, in the tradition of the London Times, as it was first edited by Lt.-Col. Harry Pirie-Gordon, who in civilian life was an editor of the Times. Bought out in 1919 by a group of liberal, anti-socialist General Zionists who had been closely associated with the Hebrew press in Russia, Ha'aretz was molded by editor Moshe Gluecksohn (1922-37) and by its loyal financial backer, I. L. Goldberg. From the start, the paper was informally identified with the leadership of the Zionist Organization, and particularly with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, and followed a moderate pro-British, as well as an anti-Histadrut (General Federation of Labor) line. At the same time, it maintained an independent, unaffiliated identity and was committed to qualitative reportage, critical, anti-populist commentary and a pro-civil rights anti-clerical stance. Gluecksohn, a religious Jew from Poland who had been educated at the Universities of Marburg and Berne, combined activism in the left-Progressive wing of the General Zionists with an admiration for Maimonides' golden rule — the acceptance of the condition of conflicting views and the ability to navigate between them. He imbued Ha'aretz with a spirit of "regulative scepticism," self-criticism and the "courage of the middle road" at a time when the press in the yishuv was largely politically sponsored and had built-in readerships. Summing up the paper's credo on its tenth anniversary in 1928, Gluecksohn wrote of the difficulty of "taking a stand without having a platform" and without a "rebbe and followers," pointing out that a public person who didn't "shelter himself in the shade" of one of the two major political camps (the left and the right) was liable to become the "target of the arrows of both." Ha'aretz, he wrote, "seeks to fill the needs of the public, but not to do its bidding." Rather, he believed, it should serve as a bridge between the various sectors of society. Only though cooperative national endeavor and solidarity, he stressed, would Israel's salvation come to pass, and when that time came, he wrote, he hoped that the paper would be remembered as devoted to planting the seeds for it day after day. Outspokenly critical of the public, Gluecksohn portrayed it as small-minded, mean-spirited and strangulating. Putting out a paper