"The corporate media has only given a platform to those journalists who have demonstrated that they can be trusted not to stray too far from what is today’s neoliberal orthodoxy at home and neoconservative orthodoxy abroad."
Published on
Friday, February 12, 2021
byCommon Dreams
The Guardian Reveals Its True Face by Sacking Progressive Columnist Nathan Robinson for Criticizing US Military Aid To Israel
We need to understand that old corporate media like the Guardian are not an ally to the left, they are the enemy.byJonathan Cook
www.commondreams.org/views/2021/02/12/guardian-reveals-its-true-face-sacking-progressive-columnist-nathan-robinsonThe revelation that a leftwing journalist, Nathan J Robinson, has been sacked as a Guardian US columnist for criticising Israel on Twitter – and that he was pressured to keep quiet about it by Guardian editors – should come as no surprise. He is only the latest in a long line of journalists, myself included, who have run foul of the Guardian’s unwritten but tightly policed constraints on what can be said about Israel.
In the tweet below, I have listed a few of the more prominent – and public – examples of journalists who have suffered at the Guardian’s hands over their coverage of Israel. The thread can opened by clicking on the tweet:
The Guardian sacks a columnist – and indicates he should keep quiet – after he comments on US aid to Israel. Nathan J Robinson is surprised by his treatment, but others - myself included - were similarly forced out into the cold after criticising Israel
t.co/7KXoB6l3OB— Jonathan Cook (@jonathan_K_Cook) February 10, 2021
The unspoken Guardian rule we broke was to suggest one of the following: that there might be inherent contradictions between Israel’s claim to be a democracy and its self-definition in exclusivist, chauvinist, ethnic terms; or that Israel’s self-declared status as a militaristic, ethnic, rather than civic, state might be connected to its continuing abuses and crimes against Palestinians; or that, because Israel wishes to conceal its ugly, anachronistic ethnic project, it and its defenders might act in bad faith; or that the US might be actively complicit in this ethnically inspired, colonial project to dispossess Palestinians.
Equivocating editorial
Paradoxically, the Guardian is widely seen as the “mainstream” English-language publication most critical of Israel. It has long shored up its reputation with the left by publishing seemingly forthright, uncompromising material on Israeli-Palestinian issues.
Part of that is a historic credit it earnt. There was a time, long ago, when the Guardian’s pages were, for example, the only place in the mainstream to host – if rarely – the late, great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. The paper even once allowed its former South Africa correspondent, who had transferred to Israel, to compare in detail the two countries’ systems of apartheid. It caused a furore – much of it instigated by the Israeli embassy in London – that made the paper even more shy of taking on the Israel lobby.
That is reflected in the perverse fact that today Israeli human rights groups are far more courageous in speaking plainly about Israel than the Guardian. When B’Tselem recently published a report stating that Israel operated an apartheid system oppressing Palestinians not just in the occupied territories but in the whole area under its rule – including inside Israel where officials falsely claim 1.8 million Palestinian citizens have equal rights with Jewish citizens – the paper published a mealy-mouthed editorial whose equivocations contrasted starkly with B’Tselem’s passionate and clear critique of a racist system of separate rights.
Even then, the Guardian would never have conceded what it reluctantly did in the editorial had B’Tselem not forced its hand.
Decades late, and after much agonised handwringing, a Guardian editorial appears to concede that B'Tselem might have a point in arguing Israel is an apartheid state. One can feel Jonathan Freedland wincing at the very thought
t.co/Pf0rlcjvyS— Jonathan Cook (@jonathan_K_Cook) January 18, 2021
Low bar on Israel
The other reason why the Guardian looks so good on Israel and Palestine is that the rest of the corporate media is far, far worse. The bar is so low that the Guardian has to do very little to impress. Its unwavering support for Israel – and we will get to the reasons for that in a moment – only becomes clear when someone prominent steps forward to speak as clearly about what’s really wrong with Israel as B’Tselem recently did.
That invisible line on Israel was crossed by Jeremy Corbyn too, of course – one of the many aspects of his socialist-lite platform the corporate Guardian could not abide. That was why the Guardian was only too ready to join – and often lead – the campaign of smears against him and the Labour party under his leadership that conflated trenchant criticism of Israel (anti-Zonism) with antisemitism. One has to be naïve indeed to believe that the Guardian’s treatment of Corbyn – its simplistic regurgitation of the Board of Deputies’ talking points – was done in good faith.
My latest: The Guardian is still posturing as a helpless bystander in the bitter feuds dividing the Labour party, when in reality it was an active participant in sabotaging Corbyn's efforts to make British politics more honest and accountable
t.co/CLCxPzERO9— Jonathan Cook (@jonathan_K_Cook) August 10, 2020
In fact, the Guardian’s relations with Israel and Zionism date back to the founding editor of the modern paper, C P Scott. A staunch Zionist, Scott was critically important in liaising between the British government and the Zionist movement in the drafting of the 1917 Balfour Declaration – the colonial document that effectively committed Britain to dispossessing the native Palestinians, who weren’t even named in it, of their homeland.
The Guardian acted effectively as midwife both to the self-declared Jewish state of Israel and to the Nakba – the mass programme of ethnic cleansing – that was necessarily required to create a Jewish state on the Palestinians’ homeland. And, as documented in the book Disenchantment, the Guardian has indulged Israel ever since, much as a parent would a wayward child. It can be critical, even sharply sometimes, but it is resolutely protective of Israel’s image and the interests Israel has defined for itself as a Jewish state.
And for that reason, the Guardian historically developed close ties to the liberal Jewish community in the UK, much of it in London and Manchester. Many liberal Jewish journalists found the paper a natural home and an ideological fit in contrast to the rest of the UK’s corporate media, which was highly conservative and often openly antisemitic. A culture of critical but unerring support for Israel was always the Guardian’s default position.
Antisemitism smears
But to understand why Robinson became the latest victim of the Guardian’s tough policing of speech around Israel, we need to dig a little deeper.
Robinson is also editor of a small, independent, socialist magazine called Current Affairs. As such, the issues he highlights invariably break with the US corporate media’s craven coverage on a wide range of issues.
His sarcastic, but pointed tweet criticising the billions of dollars the US is sending to Israel so it can buy more weapons to kill Palestinians – and during a pandemic in which Americans are being denied the full promised $2,000 checks – was treated by the Israel lobby, as most criticism of Israel is nowadays, as evidence of “antisemitism”. This was the same kind of antisemitism that Corbyn, Ken Loach and many others on the socialist left have been accused of indulging.