The Times of Israel: Acts I and II

Three years ago it was my privilege to be accepted by the editorial staff of The Times of Israel to become a member of their contributing blog writers. The Times of Israel is a Jerusalem-based online newspaper that documents developments in Israel, the Middle East, and around the Jewish world. The core staff and contributors include many of Israel’s leading English-language journalists.

I had the nagging notion that I had seen this source mentioned much earlier someplace in the historical archives of United Israel World Union. What I discovered reflected a déjà vu moment.

The story began early April 1968 as United Nations Press Correspondent David Horowitz departed for Israel. It was his 10th visit and his first since the Six-Day War. Among the many items on a busy agenda was a scheduled meeting with leaders of The Israeli World Union for the Propagation of Judaism. There was however another planned meeting on Horowitz’s agenda, one with another fellow journalist with a storied past.

Horowitz had founded United Israel World Union in the mid nineteen-forties as well as the World Union Press to publish regular issues of the United Israel Bulletin. His scheduled appointment was with Stanley Goldfoot, a journalist turned publisher-editor of a projected new Israeli English daily that Goldfoot wanted to call The Times of Israel. He needed Horowitz’s input and advice.

Goldfoot was born in May of 1914 in Johannesburg South Africa to Sarah, a descendant of the Mayor of Liverpool, and Shimon, born in Vilnius and a direct descendant of Rabbi Eliahu, the Gaon of Vilna. Feeling the genetic legacy of Zionism inherited from Rabbi Eliahu, he made aliyah to Palestine illegally in 1933. There he joined Kibbutz Degania Alef.

After two years the British authorities discovered his illegal presence and deported him back to South Africa where he worked in various professions for the next decade. But Goldfoot never relinquished his dream of aliyah. In 1945 he returned to the land of Israel settling in Jerusalem where he worked chiefly as a foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express, Johannesburg Sunday Times, France Soir, and The New York Times.

During this period, Goldfoot joined Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel), a Zionist paramilitary organization founded in 1940 by Avraham Stern in Mandatory Palestine. His many connections with journalism and foreign correspondent sources helped yield precious news, invaluable for the underground movement.

After the UN Decision of November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab States, Goldfoot helped establish a Lehi base at ‘Camp Dror’ Talbiyeh where he participated in the force which attempted a breakthrough of the Old City Walls on July 17,1948. Additionally, he participated in the conquest of Deir-Yassin. Later he established in that neighborhood the ‘Dvar Yerushalayim’ Yeshiva, in memory of his parents.

After the assassination of UN Security Council Arab Israeli mediator Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948 Goldfoot was arrested along with other Lehi members and imprisoned in the Jaffa, Akko, and then Jalameh Prisons. After five months, he was released during the general amnesty and continued his career in journalism, in both Israel and the United States. We are left to wonder if it was then that he first met UN journalist David Horowitz.

By the end of 1968, The Times of Israel was launched by Stanley Goldfoot and co-operator Dr. Yisrael Eldad. It reached a circulation of approximately 50,000 copies in the US and Israel before it folded after seven years of publication.

Fast forward to the year 2012. Social media had come of age in less than a generation. EMarketer, a reliable market research company, predicted there would be a massive 1.43 billion social network users representing a 19 percent increase over 2011 figures. Social media platforms were springing up worldwide and one was a new online newspaper with an old familiar name: The Times of Israel.

The founding editor of this new Israel-based, primarily English language newspaper was another journalist with another familiar name, but with a slightly different spelling. He was none other than David Horovitz who had previously served as editor of The Jerusalem Post and The Jerusalem Report.

This reincarnation of an older news daily has enjoyed steady growth and success. Along with its original English-language site The Times of Israel also publishes Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Persian editions. By late 2023, the paper was reaching 64.2 million in visits and had entered the global top 50 news sites.

Two different news organizations separated by half a century of history, yet the similar names seemed to offer a faint echo of a distant connection, reminding me of William Faulkner’s famous quote in his novel Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”