Jerusalem Post Dispute Mirrors Israeli Split : Media: The newspaper is rocked by the resignations of several key writers. They say the new publisher is betraying its liberal, hard-hitting roots.

At 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Yehuda Litani, editor of the Jerusalem Post’s Middle East page, and about a dozen other senior editorial employees received a letter from the publisher telling them to vacate the building. They had resigned the day before in a dispute with management, giving 30 days’ notice, and the boss saw no reason to let them stay on.

By 7:30, just in case Litani had not gotten the message, his access to the paper’s computer was cut off, and the notes and stories he had stored in the computer system were destroyed.

But this dispute at Israel’s best-known newspaper goes beyond the newsroom, mirroring conflict within Israel itself: the publisher, Yehuda Levy, a former army officer who believes in marketing and thinks that maybe the paper is too hard on the government, versus a dissident staff that speaks of old--some say outdated--Labor Zionist values of equality and of tough, critical reporting.

“This is like the struggle of Israel today,” Litani, who has been at the Post for 4 1/2 years, said Tuesday, “so it’s not surprising. Disturbing, but not surprising.”

Until last summer, the Post was owned by a conglomerate associated with the Labor Party. But the government, a shaky coalition of Labor and the rightist Likud Party, decided to sell off most government holdings in industry. The Post was bought by Hollinger Inc., a Canadian firm that owns more than 200 newspapers, including London’s Daily Telegraph.

The price seemed unusually high: $17 million for a paper that had lost money in recent years. But commentators agreed that the paper’s worth was in its influence, not its numbers. The small domestic circulation--25,000--belies the Post’s importance in Israel and among world Jewry.

The Post was founded 57 years ago, 16 years before the founding of the State of Israel, and it has long been associated with the liberal values that drove the country in its early years. A weekly international edition is a trusted source of Israeli news among influential Jews abroad.

When Levy was appointed publisher about six months ago, the staff worried that the paper’s character would change. They prided themselves on hard-hitting coverage; the Arab uprising was a daily staple. Other papers had taken to placing reports of deaths and repression inside, but at the Post, they still made Page 1.

Levy, a veteran of 25 years in the army but with no newspaper experience, promised that he would not interfere. “But I told them,” he said Tuesday in an interview, “that I was not here just to sign their paychecks.”

In the months since, tension has developed. The staff was ordered to punch a time clock--an unusual request, given the irregular hours reporters keep. The employees ridiculed Levy’s decision to build himself a covered parking space and to use his army rank, lieutenant colonel, on memos.

Beyond the trivial, there was a clash over editorial policy.

In early December, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in a meeting of his Likud Party, attacked the Post for reporting the cool coverage he received on a trip to the United States. Editor Erwin Frenkel responded in a sharply worded editorial, saying that Shamir “equates dissent with disunity.”

“Stigmatizing the press has, therefore, become a favorite political sport, relished by, though not restricted to, the prime minister’s party,” the editorial said. “For, claiming a monopoly in patriotism, they would discredit dissent.”

Levy ordered the editorial withheld from the international edition. “I questioned the principle of making political statements in an editorial,” he said Tuesday.

Soon afterward, Levy applied to join the Editors Committee, a group of top Israeli editors and reporters who receive secret information from the government with the understanding that it will not be published. In his application, Levy said he intended “to be very involved in the work of the editorial staff.” Frenkel saw the letter and resigned, and on Monday, senior staff members decided to follow his lead.

“We have our dignity,” Shlomo Maoz, the paper’s economics editor, said. “This is difficult for our families, but we have to live by our ideals. They paid a lot of money for this paper. They bought a reputation, and they are destroying it.”

Levy said the dissenters are a minority of the staff and that 80 others are staying on.

“They try to stick a rightist label on me, and it’s (not true),” he said. “I am not Shamir’s man or anyone else’s. I want to be more aware and involved, and that includes the editorials.”

Levy said he plans to make improvements that will make the newspaper profitable. “I am introducing the world of marketing, like color in our weekend magazine,” he said.