The Guardian Revealed Itself in Sacking Columnist for Criticizing US
Military Aid to Israel
February 12, 2021
Jonathan Cook says a long line of journalists, himself included, have run
afoul of the papers unwritten but tightly policed constraints on the
subject of Israel.
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
The revelation that a leftwing journalist, Nathan J. Robinson, has been
sacked as a Guardian U.S. columnist for criticizing 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 afoul of The Guardians 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 Guardians hands over their
coverage of Israel. The thread can opened by clicking on the tweet:
The unspoken Guardian rule we broke was to suggest one of the following:
that there might be inherent contradictions between Israels claim to be a
democracy and its self-definition in exclusivist, chauvinist, ethnic terms;
or that Israels 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 U.S. 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 Guardians 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 furor 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 BTselem 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 with equivocations that contrasted starkly with BTselems
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 BTselem not forced its hand.
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
whats really wrong with Israel as BTselem 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 anti-Semitism. One has to be naïve indeed to believe that
The Guardians treatment of Corbyn its simplistic regurgitation of the
Board of Deputies talking points was done in good faith.
In fact, The Guardians 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 werent 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 program 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
Israels 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 U.K., 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 U.K.s corporate media, which
was highly conservative and often openly anti-Semitic. A culture of critical
but unerring support for Israel was always The Guardians default position.
Anti-Semitism Smears
But to understand why Robinson became the latest victim of The Guardians
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
U.S. corporate medias craven coverage on a wide range of issues.
His sarcastic, but pointed tweet criticizing the billions of dollars the
U.S. 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 anti-Semitism. This was the same kind of
anti-Semitism that Corbyn, Ken Loach and many others on the socialist left
have been accused of indulging.
The tweet, which Robinson deleted under Guardian pressure, was only
anti-Semitic if you choose to see it that way which, of course, is exactly
how Israels apologists would like you to see it. Understandably, the nearer
critics get to the nub of what is wrong with a self-declared Jewish state
ruling over Palestinians, or with the U.S. blank check for that Jewish
state, the more this lobby goes into overdrive.
An email to Robinson from U.S. editor John Mulholland, who I worked under
for a time when he was editing The Observer, The Guardians Sunday sister
paper, included a line below the main body of text complaining about
Robinsons tweet:
Saying that the only Jewish state controls the most powerful country in the
world is clearly anti-Semitic. The myth of Jewish power informs murderous
hatred. Delete this and apologise.
It is unclear who this instruction came from an influential reader,
Mulholland himself or someone even more senior inThe Guardian hierarchy. It
matters little. Mulholland is the very embodiment of what the Japanese call
a salaryman. He has scaled the greasy pole effortlessly by absorbing and
loyally enforcing the corporate values of The Guardian business model.
Silencing Socialist Critiques
But the problem with The Guardians interpretation of Robinsons tweet is
that there is precisely nothing in the tweet to indicate that this was its
meaning. It is pure projection. Robinsons tweet critiqued a relationship in
which the U.S. indisputably pours huge sums of military aid into Israel
money desperately needed at the moment by U.S. citizens hit financially by
the pandemic. That aid is going to a state described by its own human
rights groups as an apartheid regime and one that may soon be investigated
by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. That should not even
count as an opinion. It is a fact.
It is The Guardians own anti-Semitic interpretation of the tweet that
suggests this is because Israel controls the U.S. More likely, Robinson
believes that the U.S. sends the aid because Israel serves the Wests ugly
colonial interests in the Middle East. Israel earns that aid money for
armaments from the U.S. by acting as its regional colonial heavy. (And,
lets note, Egypt originally earned its similarly generous U.S. aid for
ending its state of hostilities with Israel in 1979 by signing a peace
agreement.)
The deeper question in assessing The Guardians sacking of Robinson as
well as its campaign to smear Corbyn is this: what line do we as the left
cross when we critique Israel? Is The Guardian really protecting Israel from
an anti-Semitic tweet, as Mulholland appears to believe? Or is it policing
leftwing speech that highlights the continuing imperialist, colonial nature
of our Western societies and their economic models of exploitation, domestic
and foreign, on which corporate media like The Guardian depend?
What we have here, disguised as a defense of Jews, is a gradual outlawing of
socialist critiques of Western states and their crimes. This is happening as
those critiques gain ever greater visibility and purchase, assisted by
social media and its brief democratization (for good and bad) of public
discourse.
Consistent Worldview
Socialists like Robinson, Corbyn and Loach have a worldview. It is their way
of analyzing societies and geopolitics that makes sense of how state power
operates, and how elites maintain and expand their control of resources to
the detriment of others and the planet. Socialism demands change. It
requires the reordering of society to ensure much more equal relations
between individuals and states to end pervasive poverty and suffering.
We cannot therefore believe both that the U.S. is an imperial, colonial
power sponsoring Arab dictators, religious extremism and war crimes in the
Middle East to control access to the regions oil reserves and also
believe that Israel, which assists some of those dictators and attacks
others, cultivates its own forms of religious extremism, commits its own war
crimes, and is heavily subsidized by the U.S., has nothing to do with any of
that.
Socialists see Israel as integral to how Western states, especially the sole
global military superpower headquartered in Washington, continue to project
their power into the Middle East. They see Israel as a proxy for a Western
colonial project that never went away. Thinking that doesnt make socialists
anti-Semitic. It makes them consistent, it means their worldview makes sense
of all those seemingly disparate events going on around the globe
disparate only because that is the way corporate media presents its
narratives to prevent readers from joining up the dots.
Passive Media Consumption
This kind of analysis may well look anti-Semitic to those liberals and
conservatives who have no worldview, no values beyond the dog-eat-dog,
social Darwinism our Western societies have cultivated in them through years
of passive media consumption. Robinsons tweet doubtless looked anti-Semitic
to Mulholland, to Guardian editor Kath Viner, to senior columnist Jonathan
Freedland, the papers resident anti-Semitism witch-finder general. But that
is because none of them are socialists.
They can read Robinsons tweet only through the limited perspective of their
own entrenched liberalism. If they were socialists, they would never have
been allowed anywhere near the senior editorial positions they hold at The
Guardian. And the tiny number of Guardian journalists who claim to be
leftwing working under them figures like Owen Jones and George Monbiot
have learnt where the invisible trip-wires are that they must avoid not to
lose their employment and their platforms. Which is why you will not see any
solidarity from Guardian staff either over Robinsons mistreatment or over
the threat his sacking poses to the speech rights of the left.
This has long been the beauty of the free press model for the corporate
media. It has allowed journalists to say anything they want so long as the
corporate media decides whether they are given a platform from which to say
it. And 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 todays neoliberal orthodoxy at home and neoconservative orthodoxy
abroad.
Illusion of Freedom
Socialism has begun to revive if often only as a growing disillusionment
with late-stage, planet-destroying capitalism because for the first time
there have been large platforms from which socialists can speak.
Paradoxically, those new platforms, like Twitter, have been corporate-run
too.
Our plutocratic governments, run in the interests of a corporate elite, and
the media, owned by a corporate elite, are battling hard to end that right.
They would prefer to maintain the illusion of western freedom. And so they
have been trying to silence socialists in ways that make it look like they
have the publics consent. They are recruiting us to silence ourselves. They
are, as ever, manufacturing consent for our expulsion from the public
square.
We must fight back. We need to understand that old corporate media like The
Guardian are not an ally to the left, they are the enemy. And that the new
social media platforms to which we have briefly been given access will soon
be snatched away from us unless we fight tooth and nail to keep them.
The battle itself is our weapon. Because if we allow ourselves to be swept
from the public square without a struggle, if our story is written for us,
not by us, none of the onlookers the wider public will ever grasp what
was really at stake. They will remain blissfully unaware not only of what
socialism might have achieved, but certain that we are all far better off
now that those anti-Semites will never again be allowed a voice.
Jonathan Cook is a former Guardian journalist (1994-2001) and winner of the
Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is a freelance journalist
based in Nazareth. If you appreciate his articles, please consider