Zavit Acheret

~ the last words ~

Zavit Acheret means "Another Angle", and in Arabic the site called itself زاوية أخرى, the same phrase. It was founded in 2005 by students in the Middle Eastern and African history department at Tel Aviv University, on a specific complaint: that the Arab world reached Israeli readers one-dimensionally, and that a serious program of translation could narrow the gap. So they translated. Articles by liberal Arab intellectuals and journalists, rendered into Hebrew in full.

The editorial rule was the whole product. Translations ran complete and unabridged, with the original-language text supplied alongside and a direct link to the site it had been taken from, or a scanned copy when there was no link. No censorship and no omissions, which meant the site doubled as a working tool for Israelis studying Arabic, who could hold the Hebrew against the original line by line. For several years it was close to the only place an Israeli reader, including in the universities and the press, could get this material at all.

It was never a business. The whole operation ran on roughly twenty volunteer translators and editors who were not paid, and it took money from no political body or organization. Uri Katzir's Aplaton blog named it one of its 25 selected blogs for 2007. In June 2011 the site was relaunched with a visual overhaul and started commissioning original pieces alongside the translations, on subjects like Islamic economics and the problems of translation itself.

~ the record ~

~ the thematic projects ~

Rather than running as a feed, the site gathered its translations into standing projects, and the list is a decent index of what the region did between 2005 and 2012. There was a Sadat project for the thirtieth anniversary of his visit to Israel in November 2007, and one on the Arab satellite channels. "Arab Liberalism, Whence and Whither" examined where that current had come from and where it might go.

Then the news caught up with the format. A project on the Gaza campaign collected liberal Arab reactions to Operation Cast Lead. "Iran in Turmoil" gathered responses to the protests after the falsified June 2009 election. Two more followed Egypt, one warning of the social and economic conditions that could produce a revolution and a second analyzing the country after January 2011 actually produced one.

~ 2009, and Turkish ~

The language list grew twice after the Arabic: Persian translations started in 2008, and Turkish translations started in 2009.

That second date is the one I keep looking at. January 2009 is Davos, Erdogan walking off the panel after the exchange with Peres, and the beginning of the stretch where Turkey and Israel stopped being quiet allies in public. The Mavi Marmara was still sixteen months away. In exactly that window, a volunteer site in Tel Aviv decided that Israeli readers needed to be able to read what Turkish writers were actually saying, in full, with the Turkish original attached.

The article does not say why they added Turkish and I am not going to invent a reason. What I can say from the other side of it is that the traffic almost never ran this direction. I grew up reading the Turkish press, and the Middle East it described was assembled out of wire copy and editorial position. The idea of a small group translating it accurately for an Israeli audience, unpaid, while the two governments were falling out, is a better use of the internet than most things that were better funded.

~ how it actually ended ~

It closed in May 2012 because the people running it could not keep meeting what the site demanded of them. There was no scandal and no acquisition. The archive shows the decline plainly enough: zavita.co.il served a full homepage of around 12.6 KB every month into February 2012, then fell to about 4 KB in March and April, and never came back up.

The domain has since been recycled, so there is nowhere to send you. Zavita.co.il now sits behind Cloudflare serving escort advertising, and a completely unrelated site at a near-identical address has taken the name for an opinion portal. What survives intact is the logo, designed by Amitai Sandy: a square blue mark reading Zavit Acheret above the line "on the Middle East", with zavita.co.il printed underneath it in Latin script, which is how the real address can still be read off the artwork.

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