There’s an unwritten rule followed by Guardian reporters that once a city in the Land of Israel has been cleansed of its Jewish residents, Jews should never reside there again. This explains why even Jews in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest city, are often referred to as illegal “settlers” occupying Palestinian land.
Yet, east Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter, was ethnically cleansed of its Jews by Jordanian forces in the 1948-49 war, an occupation that ended as the result of the Six Day War in 1967. So, Jews are called “occupiers” despite the fact that, other than that nineteen year period, they’ve had a continuous presence in the city for over 3,000 years.
This Guardian dictum also isn’t tempered or in any way questioned by reporters and editors even in light of the fact that, during the last serious two-state negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in 2008, Palestinians accepted in principle continued Israeli control of the Jewish Quarter, within the context of a Palestinian capital in most of east Jerusalem.
The same Guardian moral formulation usually holds true in their coverage of Hebron, the second holiest of Judaism’s four holy cities (Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias), and the site of the world’s oldest Jewish community. Jews have prayed in Hebron since biblical times, and with a few interruptions have lived there continuously.
Yet, those who read a recent Guardian piece (“UK charity funding school at heart of illegal Israeli settlement expansion“, July 6) would believe that Hebron’s Jews are – as with Jewish residents of east Jerusalem – similarly interlopers trespassing on Palestinian land.
First, the entire premise, that Yeshivat Shavei Hevron, the Jewish school in Hebron the article focuses on, is at the “heart of illegal Israeli settlement expansion”, is completely inaccurate. The Yeshiva is located in the part of Hebron known as H-2, which is the Israeli-controlled section of Hebron per the Hebron Protocol, signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders in 1997.
So, that existing school (constructed by Jews in 1876), has nothing whatsoever to do with settlement “expansion“, a libel that’s repeated in both the headline and the opening sentence:
A British charity is funding a religious school at the heart of expansion plans for the illegal Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron.
In fact, the article contradicts itself, and the desired narrative, when, twenty paragraphs down, they acknowledge that the “yeshiva building and the expansion are both at the edge of the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron“.
The article, written by Emma Graham-Harrison and Haroon Siddique warns British taxpayers that Friends of Yeshivat Shavei Hevron sent nearly £200,000 to the school between 2019 and 2024.
Readers are told that “construction of a new dormitory for the school was approved in June”, expansion, the Guardian warns, that will “increase the population of one of the most extreme Israeli communities in the occupied West Bank”, “and the only one built in the heart of a Palestinian city”.
In addition to falsely claiming that the entire territory in Hebron is “Palestinian”, it’s telling that the co-authors felt comfortable generalising the Jewish community of around 1,000 as “extreme”, a word they would ever use when discussing extremist Palestinian areas, such as the West Bank city of Jenin, which has long been a bastion of terrorism. Nor are Palestinians in Gaza described as “extremists”, despite the fact that 41 percent (a plurality of the population) still support Hamas.
Moreover, Hebron itself has long been a hub of Palestinian terror and extremism. In fact, the mayor of Hebron, Tayseer Abu Sneineh, took part in an attack in a 1980 terror attack on Israelis returning home from Friday night Shabbat prayers in the city, killing six. (He was later released in a prisoner swap.)
Later, the Guardian grossly misleads readers with the following rhetoric.
Israel has built extensive systems of militarised separation to isolate several hundred settlers inside Hebron from the city they moved into. Palestinians are barred entirely from some streets, and walls and gates divide Palestinians who live in areas under Israeli military control from most of the 230,000 population.
It’s as if the journalists went out of their way to obfuscate the reality that the overwhelming majority of Hebron’s 230,000 Palestinians live in H-1, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority, and where Jews are prohibited from living.
In contrast, with the exception of a small number of streets closed to Palestinians for security reasons, tens of thousands of Palestinians live in the ‘Jewish’ H-2 section of the city, which is administered by Israel.
While a quote by a spokesperson from Peace Now – uncritically amplified in the article – claims that the Jewish area of the city, H-2, represents “apartheid”, the journalists fail to acknowledge that, by such standards, the prohibition against Jews in the exclusively Palestinian section is a much more clear and egregious example of “apartheid”?
Indeed, the Guardian’s take on Hebron has little if any resemblance to professional journalism, which demands a rigorous commitment to fact-based reporting, the inclusion of vital historical context, and a refusal to allow an article to be tainted by a reporter’s personal ideological biases.
The Guardian’s coverage of Israel more broadly is, as we’ve demonstrated over the years, more akin to the agitprop found at Electronic Intifada or the Qatari regime mouthpiece, Al Jazeera, than reporting you’d expect from a putatively serious Western news outlet.
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