“Zionist sympathisers are nothing more than devil worshippers, they like to suck your blood dry”, stated a posting on the Guardian’s new blog site on Wednesday 15th March 2006. The posting was removed after I contacted a journalist on the paper and asked how much more “shit” the Guardian would facilitate. I had already emailed the “report this comment” blog moderator to no avail, perhaps because I’d already sent two “report this comment” emails about comments further up the blog thread stating that Zionism and Nazism were indistinguishable. The thread was sparked by a bland article by George Galloway criticising Israel’s Jericho raid, and appeared on only the site’s 2nd day .

David Clark is to be warmly thanked for the constructive sincerity of his explanation of his Guardian article: but his paper’s blog illustrates how embedded the problem has become in Farringdon, as well as nearby Islington. The Guardian does not simply “criticise” Israel, rather it facilitates, and part shares, an increasingly hateful mythology against “Zionism” that is now endemic in far left and Islamist circles. When Yvonne Ridley recently promised that Zionists in the Respect Party would be “hunted down and kicked out”, she was articulating the natural conclusion of this hatred.

George Galloway is the common denominator in both Ridley’s case, and that of the bloggers. His article on the blog was critical of Israel’s actions and was not in any way inciteful, but the bloggers felt that his article at the Guardian was an environment in which they could express such opinions and they were proved right. Ridley no doubt took a similar cue: emboldened by Respect’s fusion of far Left and Islamist extreme anti-Zionism.

The Guardian’s identification with the Palestinian underdog is no doubt entirely genuine, but Israelis will gladly accept hatred from the Guardian as the price for immediate physical security in a neighbourhood that destroys unwanted underdogs. This does not mean that Israelis should seek the role of occupier, but it also does not mean that the Guardian should betray its reputation by overstepping the boundaries of reasonable “criticism”.

David Clark’s suggestions of what may constitute anti-Semitic comment, or deliberately offensive comment, are very similar to those shared by the vast majority of Engage supporters. Why then is there such a gulf between the two parties?

A series of international events has led the Guardian to adopt an overwhelmingly critical attitude to Israel. As Clark states, the critical attitudes kicked in as the Oslo Peace Accords failed, and they have intensified with every subsequent event, notably Sharon’s election; the start of the 2nd Intifada, symbolised by the shooting of a Palestinian child, Mohammed al-Durra; the cycle of suicide bombings; Jenin; “targeted killings”; the building of the security wall; and the election of Hamas.

The Guardian’s criticisms of Israel have deepened after each of these events, but they been given the most malicious of spins in a Comments Section that often panders to the evocative notion that a Zionist conspiracy is driving US foreign policy. The charge is given global urgency by 9/11; the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; and the looming military actions or nuclear stand off with Iran.

This takes the Guardian beyond criticism of Israel, a nation state, and into an anti-Zionist mythology premised upon many traditional anti-Semitic themes codified within the notorious Tsarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. This alleges that a global Jewish conspiracy secretly controls the destiny of the world by manufacturing wars and revolutions, in order to divide and rule, and gain further riches and empowerment. The conspiracy is orchestrated via compliant politicians; and the populace is dumbed into accepting it by controlled media.

This is same mythology that veteran Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, invoked when he stated that a “cabal of Jewish advisors” was driving the charge to war in Iraq. Clark’s Guardian article glibly stated that Dalyell was “deservedly condemned”, but this was not the case at the Guardian, where the late late, and revered, Paul Foot, wrote in his column,
“obviously he is wrong to complain about Jewish pressure on Blair and Bush when he means Zionist pressure. But that's a mistake that is constantly encouraged by the Zionists. The most honourable and principled Jews, here, in Israel and everywhere else, are those who oppose the imperialist and racist policies of successive Israeli governments.”

Reading Foot’s words we can see how his paradigms have shaped much of the Guardian’s Comment and Foreign pages in recent years:

• Swapping “Zionist” for “Jew” makes you kosher

• “Zionist pressure” on the global superpower has the same mechanism and importance as that implied by Jewish conspiracy power motifs – it is global, hidden, manipulative and effective.

• Zionists lay traps around the charge of anti-Semitism.

• Don’t believe what you hear about antisemitism.

• Israel is an imperialist and racist state.

• All Jews around the world are to be judged by their attitude to Israel. The best Jews are those who actively oppose the rest of mainstream Jewry.

The warning about where such attitudes can end up was sounded by Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski, in their International Herald Tribune article “Israel in the British press: Crossing the line from criticism to bigotry.” This was, ironically, prompted by events at Guardian stable-mate, the Observer, where Richard Ingrams had stated that he usually ignored letters from Jews about Israel. Kosmin and Iganski termed this as “institutional Judeophobia” and stated:

“It is important to be clear: Judeophobia is not the old Nazi style antisemitism. It is an institutional process in which the Jewish community suffers discrimination because of editorial misjudgement, omission and oversight..."

"Institutional Judeophobia does not mean that every Observer journalist or even a majority of them is hostile toward Jews. Nor does it signal an active anti-Jewish conspiracy. It does mean, however, that the outcome of editorial decisions is nevertheless damaging and hurtful to Jews. It is a systematic bias that runs through other liberal media..."

"It is equally important to point out that criticism of Israel’s defence policy per se is not Judeophobia...”.

I admire and warmly welcome David Clark’s willingness to explain his original article. His attitude shows a meaningful desire to avoid Kosmin and Iganski’s “institutional Judeophobia”, even if it is all a case of far too little, far too late, given the impact of headlines such as that which accompanied his original piece, “Accusations of anti-semitic chic are poisonous intellectual thuggery”.

I strongly disagree with many of Clark’s assertions in both his articles, but it is his repeated misuse of the word “criticism” that is especially worrying, because it exemplifies the widely held falsehood that all criticism of Israel is condemned as anti-Semitism. Yes, an extreme fringe of Jews characterise anti-Israel criticism as anti-Semitism, but this must not be confused with the far more refined and representative statements of Jewish journalists, bloggers, leftists, academics, communal leaders and spokespeople - all of whom repeatedly state that criticism per se is entirely legitimate. Their statements, however, are routinely ignored in Guardian articles that wrongly depict a small, email facilitated paranoid fringe as representing the mainstream position. The longer this continues, and is condemned as “poisonous intellectual thuggery” the more it smells like “institutional Judeophobia”.

Fears of both the Jewish left, and the mainstream Jewish community, have accelerated since 2000 / 2001 as the Guardian’s rhetoric around Israel, Zionists and Jews became fevered and more pervasive throughout the newspaper. The situation is worsened by most Guardian articles on anti-Semitism sharing the left’s general ambivalence to heightened levels of anti-Semitic incidents; suicide bombings by pro-Al Qaeda elements against Jewish diaspora communities; and the true meaning of narratives against Jews and Zionism that are told by the politically Islamist groups.

One of the first impacts of the Oslo Peace Accords on the UK Jewish establishment was the closure of the organisation, that had led communal responses to anti-Israel media (BIPAC). The optimistic belief was that anti-Israel criticism would now be within ‘normal’ limits. Perhaps, as Clark says, the criticism was ‘normal’ in the 90s: but the scale, content, emotion, and mythology in this so-called “criticism” is certainly not ‘normal’ any more.

The horrifyingly quick and extreme reactions to Galloway’s posting on the Guardian’s own blog presents the problem in a hyper-accelerated form. Clark highlights some examples of where he regards criticism to have become excessive, such as the usage of Nazi imagery, but his absolutist defences of both Ken Livingstone and Chris McGreal show that he still needs to join the dots. Oliver Finegold told Livingstone that his words were offensive because he was Jewish, not because he was employed by the Standard. No doubt some Standard employees died in World War 2, but I am not aware of them and their families being exterminated en masse. McGreal’s giant Israel=Apartheid feature ended with a quote that was used out of context to justify this shocking conclusion: “perhaps the conflict will evolve into something worse; something that will produce parallels even more shocking than that with apartheid.”

Still, at least David Clark has stopped hiding behind piles of rude emails and has engaged in what I hope will continue to be a constructive dialogue. The question is, will the Guardian follow suit, or would they rather end up like the Respect Party?

Mark Gardner