Guardian complains that Israel isn't demonised enough

“What struck me most,” wrote Andrew Fox about his participation at two events in the Netherlands in front of anti-Zionist audiences, “was not just the hostility,” but “the epistemic closure”. These people, he explained, “operate within a sealed universe of alternative facts…[where they] have absorbed two and a half years of propaganda via social media, activist networks, campus politics, and the Hamas narrative laundered through supposedly respectable institutions”.

One of the supposedly “respectable institutions” that has taken this pro-Hamas propaganda laundering to the most extreme level is the Guardian – an outlet that has spread libel after libel about the Jewish state and – by extension – Jews qua Jews, thus contributing to the antisemitism epidemic in the UK.

Showing an appalling lack of self-awareness about the impact of their coverage on British Jews, a mere week after their anodyne editorial condemning antisemitism in the aftermath of the Golders Green attacks, they ran another editorial lamenting the putative dearth of “outrage” towards Israel (“The Guardian view on ceasefires that aren’t: Israel never stopped killing in Gaza – allies must reject any escalation”, May 7).

The piece repeats the genocide libel they’ve been promoting since Oct. 14, 2023 – that’s right, a mere week after the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, and 12 days before the IDF’s invasion of Gaza.

It also includes another libel, accusing Israel of using water as a weapon of war, and “collective punishment”, in Gaza. It also falsely suggests that insufficient humanitarian aid is entering the territory – all while characteristically ignoring Hamas’ role in perpetuating Palestinian misery, particularly the terror group’s refusal to abide by the US-brokered ceasefire’s demand that they disarm.

Two days later, on May 9, the Guardian published a review, by anti-Zionist British academic Avi Shlaim, of Omer Bartov’s book, “Israel: What Went Wrong?” which – surprising nobody – argues that, if anything, Bartov’s book accusing Israel of genocide didn’t go far enough, by failing “to explore the roots of Israeli racism”.

Shlaim, it should be noted, is extreme even by radical academic standards.

In his own book, “Genocide in Gaza”, according to a review by historian Benny Morris, he describes Hamas as motivated by “freedom and self-determination for the Palestinian people,” risibly claims they support a two-state solution, and characterises their invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 as “in part a response to the Israeli infringements of Muslim prerogatives in the Old City of Jerusalem.”

To the degree that Hamas committed real atrocities on Oct. 7, Shlaim blames Israel and the West for “blocking the path to peaceful political change”, leaving them no alternative.

Shlaim’s Guardian review immediately descends into academic anti-Zionist and anti-Western agitprop, describing Israel as an “outpost of western imperialism in the Middle East”. He also refers to the Jewish state – drawing from Soviet-inspired propaganda casting Jewish peoplehood and indigeneity (their historical rootedness in the Land of Israel) as a colonial fabrication and a “racist ideology” inspired by “biblical chauvinism” – a “settler-colonial state”.

In other words, Shlaim, turning history on its head, libels Israel – a state founded by Jews returning to their historic homeland after escaping pogroms, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Europe and the Middle East – as invading interlopers intent on expelling the land’s native “Palestinian” inhabitants.

As Benny Morris explained, “in the typical settler-colonial scenario, an imperial mother country conquers a Third World land and sends its sons to settle it, exploiting its natural and human resources and eventually destroying its native population. The mother country derives strategic and economic benefits from the resulting colony”. The Zionist experience between 1882 and 1948, he adds, has no resemblance to that settler-colonial model whatsoever.

Later in his piece, Shlaim, in order to reinforce the libel, which has been leveraged by anti-Semites to cast Jews as aligned with an intrinsically “genocidal” state, claims that Israeli “genocide” has its origins in 1948, not 2023, while naturally erasing the attempted Arab genocide of Jews in their invasion of the nascent Jewish state in May, 1948.

He describes 1948 narrowly as the year that “Palestine” – a state which didn’t exist, but which would have if the Arab and Palestinian leadership hadn’t rejected the UN Partition Plan – was “wiped off the map”, due to what he describes as the intrinsic “viciousness of Zionism”.

As Shany Mor has aptly observed, Western activists and academics for Palestinians are “dedicated to two theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome”.

The Guardian’s coverage of Oct. 7 and its aftermath has been informed by these precepts, operating within a “sealed universe of alternative facts” to divert attention away from the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.