Upstart Takes on the Jerusalem Post : L.A. Investors Among Those Backing New English-Language Newspaper

Hesh Kestin listened politely as the young hitchhiker he had picked up complained about everything from the poor state of Israeli roads to the ailing national health service.

Then something inside the native New Yorker--a commitment to his adopted homeland, a journalistic sense of history, or maybe just an inbred optimism--made him take issue with what he heard.

“Look,” Kestin admonished his passenger, a soldier. “You have peace with Egypt. You’ll probably have peace with another Arab country before your son’s bar mitzvah. Things are changing! Why can’t you enjoy it a little?”

Starting early next month, Kestin, 44, hopes to be carrying that message not only to the occasional hitchhiker, but to thousands of readers as well in a new English-language daily newspaper he is launching called the Nation.

“The whole country is a success story,” said the editor, publisher and part owner of the new publication during an interview at its headquarters here. “We sit around and beat our breasts, but look what we’ve done! This is not a ‘Pollyanna’ paper, but some perspective is in order.”

The Nation’s impending debut has created nearly as much of a stir here as the latest royal birth generates in England. Instead of guessing the sex of the “newborn,” speculation here concerns its editorial slant.

In the politically charged atmosphere of a country facing imminent national elections and beset by eight months of Palestinian unrest in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, it is probably inevitable that the pre-publication conventional wisdom puts the Nation firmly in the rightist camp.

No Political Line

Moreover, the publication aims to break the virtual English-language monopoly long enjoyed by the Jerusalem Post, which is affiliated with the center-left Labor Alignment of Shimon Peres, who is foreign minister and alternate prime minister.

However, Kestin and his like-minded financial backers--including a group of five Los Angeles investors headed by Beverly Hills real estate developer David Wilstein--insisted that if anything, the Nation will be characterized by its lack of any political line. The editor pledged that it will be the only Israeli newspaper that does not print editorials, for example.

With Wilstein as chairman, the newspaper’s parent company has as its deputy chairman Amnon Neubach, a former economic adviser to Peres.

Rumors persist here that the company has a secret, big-money backer such as Australian-born press magnate Rupert Murdoch. But Kestin and Neubach both denied it, and the company’s registration statement with the Israeli Ministry of Justice lists Kestin as the largest single stockholder--albeit with less than 5% of the authorized shares, while 89% remain unissued.

Kestin prides himself on keeping his own political views private, and, regarding his staff, he promised, “I will fire the first guy and the second and the third who doesn’t keep his prejudices to himself.”

He maintained that Israel currently is “very poorly served by our politicians and our press,” both of which sometimes seem to go out of their way to exacerbate divisions in the country.

“I refuse to allow this newspaper to be part of making things worse,” Kestin said. “We want to find a way for people to talk to each other.”

But most of all, insisted Kestin--whose professional credentials include jobs at Newsday, the Long Island, N.Y.-based newspaper; Forbes magazine, and the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune--his goal is to produce a newspaper that meets a high standard of journalistic quality and one without any political bias.

For the first month, the Nation is to be published weekly, beginning Sept. 2, and its debut comes at a time of considerable turmoil in the Israeli media.

British press baron Robert Maxwell recently bought a 30% interest in Maariv, a leading Hebrew-language daily here, and he is reportedly considering other investments in Israeli satellite and cable television. The country’s state-controlled television and radio are embroiled in political controversy, which spilled over earlier this month in a public dispute regarding the propriety of reporting on Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories.

Palestinian unrest has also focused the spotlight on the Jerusalem Post, which was recently embarrassed by the well-publicized departure of one of its best-known correspondents, ostensibly in a dispute over its standards.

“I cannot remain associated with a newspaper that has lost all responsibility to its readers, printing stories that are based on unchecked rumor and supposition, damaging Israel’s name and reputation beyond belief,” wrote former defense correspondent Hirsch Goodman in a July 1, 1988, resignation letter.

The letter was published in Kol Hair, a Hebrew-language Jerusalem weekly, which speculated that if the Post sticks to its current “leftist” political line, “it might lose thousands of readers to the Nation.” According to Kol Hair, one large American Jewish organization has already canceled “dozens” of subscriptions to the Post.

“Trivial and irrelevant,” said Post editor Erwin Frankel of the Goodman incident. Privately, some other Post insiders characterize Goodman’s departure as the result of a personality clash with a powerful middle-level editor.

A Different Look

“We’ve been criticized by readers for a long time,” Frankel said of the Post. “We have difficulty with some of our Orthodox readers who find it difficult to accept a newspaper that is fundamentally liberal. . . . We have difficulty with . . . others who also have strong nationalist political views. That’s not new. It’s been exacerbated, no doubt, by the intifada (Palestinian uprising), which has made people more nervous. . . . But fundamentally, as I understand what we’re doing, the Jerusalem Post has not changed during the intifada. The world has shifted a bit.”

Judging from a mock-up, the new paper will be different from the Jerusalem Post and all other Israeli publications, if only in appearance. It features a 24-page tabloid format, modest-sized headlines and light type--a look more reminiscent of Central Europe than the Mediterranean. It has several pages of business news, including daily listings for more than 3,000 stocks from the New York, American, Toronto, London, Johannesburg and Sydney exchanges.

Kestin said he rejects the notion that a newspaper is “a stage from which the publisher lectures the readership and makes them pay for it as well.” That is why there will be no editorials--only summaries of editorials from other Israeli newspapers and two guest opinion columns, usually on opposite sides of an issue, in each edition.

A balding, bespectacled father of five who immigrated in 1970, Kestin is the acknowledged driving force behind the Nation. He has been trying for more than four years to break into an English-language media market here that has already proven to be the Waterloo of several others before him.

“As a businessman, the thought crossed my mind that this might be a very difficult thing to pull off,” conceded Wilstein, the chairman, in a telephone interview. However, he expressed enthusiasm for Kestin’s vision of “a totally independent” national newspaper that would bring an “unbiased” view to readers both in Israel and abroad.

Thanks to computerized newspaper technology, a modest full-time staff and an already existing national newsstand distribution system, the Nation is a relatively low-budget operation. Kestin said the shareholders’ total investment to date is about $600,000 and that there is a chance “this paper at birth may be break-even.”

Neubach, the deputy chairman, said the Nation’s initial circulation target is about 10,000 copies daily, compared to a reported 25,000 for the Jerusalem Post (50,000 for its Friday weekend edition). About 300,000 Israelis are estimated to be of Anglo-Saxon origin, and English is a required subject in the schools from the fourth grade on.

While there are many Anglo-Saxons in Israel, Jerusalem Post editor Frankel said, “people who come here to live in the Jewish state learn Hebrew, and they want to read Hebrew newspapers.” The better their Hebrew, he added, the more likely they are to abandon an English newspaper.

Kestin is banking on a different premise--that the subscribers are there for a good newspaper that does not preach to them.