Arutz Sheva, Israel National News

In October 1988, Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed helped launch a radio station with no legal broadcasting license, transmitting from the ship MV Eretz HaTzvi anchored in international waters off the Israeli coast. The station took its name, Arutz Sheva, meaning Channel Seven, and its founding purpose was explicit: to counter what its founders saw as the one sided, pacifistic voice of the existing pirate station Voice of Peace, and to give religious Zionism and the movement to settle Judea and Samaria a broadcast voice the Israeli state media of the era was not providing.

Broadcasting from a ship kept Arutz Sheva technically outside Israeli jurisdiction, a workaround other pirate stations had used for years, but it did not keep the station out of Israeli politics or Israeli courts. In February 1999 the Knesset moved to grant Arutz Sheva a broadcasting license, an attempt to bring the operation into legal compliance after more than a decade on the air. Israel's Supreme Court nullified that license in March 2002, and in October 2003 ten station employees were convicted of illegal broadcasting covering the years 1995 to 1998, receiving fines and community service. Arutz Sheva's radio broadcasts ended in 2003, closing a fifteen year run that had made it one of the most recognized pirate broadcasters in Israeli history.

Losing its radio license in 2003 did not end Arutz Sheva. The organization had already begun building a second life years earlier: in 1995, while still broadcasting illegally from the Mediterranean, it launched an internet news service, making it one of the earliest live streaming internet radio operations anywhere in the world, years before online radio was a mainstream idea. When the ship broadcasts finally had to stop, that groundwork let Arutz Sheva pivot rather than disappear.

Today the organization operates as Israel National News, publishing at israelnationalnews.com in Hebrew, English and Russian, with round the clock text news, video and free podcasts, alongside an internet based English language service called Israel National Radio that carries the Arutz Sheva name into audio without needing a broadcast license at all. It also publishes B'Sheva, a weekly print newspaper that has built the third largest weekend circulation of any newspaper in Israel, a substantial reach for an outlet that began as an unlicensed ship broadcaster.

Arutz Sheva is headquartered in Beit El, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and is owned by HolyLand Holdings Ltd, whose parent organization is the Beit El yeshiva Rabbi Melamed helped found. The organization still describes itself as the voice of the Israeli settlement movement and continues to identify explicitly with religious Zionism, the same editorial mission that sent a station to sea in 1988 rather than wait for a license that might never come.