On the moral confusion of the Jewish Chronicle’s Jewish critics

In 2016, The Guardian took down 13 stories from its website after learning that freelance reporter Joseph Mayton fabricated quotes and invented items passed off as facts. The outlet then “resolved to more stringently vet freelancers…and vowed to apply greater scrutiny when sources quoted in articles go unnamed.”

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, David Baddiel and Hadley Freeman didn’t resign from The Guardian after that row.

Yet, all three recently resigned as columnists at the Jewish Chronicle after the outlet cut ties with, and retracted articles by, Israeli freelance journalist named Elon Perry, when it turned out that stories he published containing ‘exclusive’ accounts of IDF operations, based on access to military intelligence material, were likely fabricated. The JC assured readers it would introduce safeguards to assure that greater scrutiny would be applied to such articles.

These reports, which the JC took down, include one alleging a document had been uncovered in Gaza proving that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning to smuggle himself and some of the remaining hostages out of Gaza, via the Philadelphi Corridor, to Iran – a claim previously made by Benjamin Netanyahu. Another one of Perry’s articles published and then pulled by the JC purported to describe, again, in remarkable detail, the IDF’s rescue of Israeli hostage Noa Argamani.

Israeli media outlets had investigated and refuted these claims, which led the JC to conduct its own investigation. Perry also appears to have lied about much of his background.

Freedland, a former Guardian executive editor, and now a columnist and podcaster at the outlet, Baddiel, a Guardian contributor, and Freeman, who worked for the Guardian for over 20 years before leaving to take a job with the Sunday Times, citing the outlet’s coverage of the trans issue, suggested that it wasn’t merely the row over Perry.

As Freedland wrote in his letter to the JC’s editor Jake Wallis Simons, while the current scandal brings “disgrace on the publication”, the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, it’s also, the veteran Guardian journalist complained, illustrative of the fact that the paper has become a “partisan ideological instrument, its judgements political, rather than journalistic“.

A letter with a greater lack of self-awareness would be hard to find.

To observe that the publication he’s been associated with for decades is itself a “partisan ideological instrument” whose “judgements” are “political, rather than journalistic” is a profound understatement.

The Guardian, we’ve demonstrated day after day over the past 15 years, is arguably the most institutionally Israelophobic mainstream English language outlet in the world. The outlet’s malign obsession with Israel, which sometimes includes the promotion of antisemitic tropes, most British Jews believe, fuels antisemitism in the country.

Did any of these journalists consider resigning from The Guardian after, for instance, their cartoonist Steve Bell published antisemitic cartoons – particularly one about ‘Jewish power’ that could have appeared in a modern day Der Sturmer? Did they do any soul searching when the outlet legitimised the toxic libel that Israel steals Palestinian organs? Were they at all uneasy about the fact that their outlet endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in two elections?

Also, how did they feel when the outlet listed, among their worst editorial mistakes over their 200-year history, their early support for the creation of a Jewish state? In other words, even knowing what happened during the Holocaust, and how many more Jews would have been saved had Israel been created earlier than 1948, in retrospect, they would have preferred that the state had never come into existence in the first place!

Finally, did they reconsider their relationship with the Guardian, when, following Oct. 7th, the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, the outlet began cruelly doubling-down on their hatred of Israel, publishing piece after piece that were effectively pro-Hamas? This includes three pieces approved by editors and published at the outlet that evoked the antisemitic Israel-Nazi analogy.

In fact, one of the first opinion pieces at the Guardian on the Hamas massacre, published on Oct. 11th, by Dafna Baram, effectively blamed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for the massacre, and referred to Gaza as a “concentration camp”. The Guardian defended Baram’s use of this antisemitic language in response to our complaint, citing the fact that Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy once used the term in reference to Gaza!

Even we wouldn’t have thought, we wrote on Oct. 24th about the outlet’s early coverage of the war, that the Guardian, when confronted with a modern-day pogrom where Jewish babies were murdered in their cribs, children tortured and killed in front of their parents, the young and old burned alive by antisemitic death squads, some of whom boasted of how many Jews they killed, and who then decapitated and mutilated corpses, would react by publishing content inciting even greater revulsion towards Israel.

So, how do we explain these journalists’ double standards, especially -given that all three are Jewish, are proud of their Jewish identity, and have spoken out about antisemitism?

We believe it relates to their (at best) ambivalent attitudes towards Israel. Baddiel, for instance, who wrote a book about antisemitism called Jews Don’t Count, calls himself a “non-Zionist”, a strange formulation which he defines as not caring anymore about Israel’s existence than the existence of any other country. About Israel, a country, let’s remember, where nearly half of the world’s Jews live, he writes, “meh”.

In our review of Jews Don’t Count, we argued that his unwillingness to explore the connection between hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews qua Jews is a serious failure of imagination and a troubling intellectual and moral abdication.

We believe the decision of Freedland, Freeman -and Baddiel to quit the Jewish Chronicle had more to do with virtue signaling – the desire to maintain their standing within the ‘community of the good’, where Zionism is considered anathema to progressivism – than real ethical or moral concerns. All three have likely been uncomfortable with the JC’s more unapologetic pro-Israel stance in recent years, and uneasy with their association with the JC’s Zionist brand. So, the outlet’s mistake with Elon Perry presented an opportunity to exit the publication while claiming to be motivated by ethical principle.

Make no mistake: When, as a Jew, amidst the largest surge of antisemitism in recent history, most of it motivated by hatred of Israel, you’re more troubled by a mainstream, pro-Israel British Jewish publication – even one putatively right of center – than a global media institution notorious for its pathological hostility to the Jewish state and willingness to trade in anti-Jewish tropes, you’ve, by definition, forfeited the moral high ground.

CAMERA UK Editor’s Note: On X, Freeman responded to our post.