The Jewish Chronicle has long served as a vehicle for Zionist propaganda
Sep 21, 2024
A British publication that takes pride in its status as the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world has lately faced enormous embarrassment after highlighting an “exclusive” investigative report that was dismissed as a fabrication by Israeli media as well as military and intelligence spokesmen.
The contention in The Jewish Chronicle, more or less continuously published since 1841, revolved around “evidence” that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned to escape to Iran via the Philadelphi corridor, taking with him the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. It was published, conveniently, on the day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spun a similar yarn to explain why Israeli control of the corridor could not be relinquished under any circumstances.
His insistence on that score is among the biggest hurdles to the ceasefire that the US purports to be pursuing – often mainly for domestic consumption in an election year when much of the electorate is inclined towards some kind of peace deal, amid steadily mounting evidence of “ethnic cleansing” by Israel that is hard to distinguish from a genocide or a holocaust.
The offending article was credited to Elon Perry, who claimed to be a journalist of 25 years’ standing as well as an Israeli and international academic, and an Israel Defence Forces veteran who had participated in the 1976 Entebbe raid in Uganda that rescued most of the Israeli hostages from a hijacked Air France flight. (The only Israeli fatality was Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan.)
This was Perry’s ninth article for The JC (as the Chronicle styles itself) in recent months, and the weekly had either never sought to corroborate his credentials, or simply ignored his largely fictitious CV. When confronted with the inconsistencies by a reporter for Hazinor from Israel’s Channel 13, Perry promptly denied his purported past, declaring: “I don’t go on my website. I didn’t check it.”
Ben Reiff at Israel’s +972 Magazine sees Perry’s article, alongside an almost simultaneous “exclusive” in the German daily Bild that claimed knowledge of content from Sinwar’s personal computer that tallied with the nightmares Netanyahu routinely conjures up, as part of “a pro-Bibi influence campaign” in European media outlets, intended to deflect growing criticism of the prime minister.
Exclusively targeting the Netanyahu administration’s violent obduracy has become part of the “soft” Zionist narrative since last October, in an effort to avoid any discussion of Israeli political trends since 1948 – and Zionist aspirations since the 19th century.
This tendency is reflected in the resignation statements of four of The JC’s most prominent contributors – Jonathan Freedland (columnist at The Guardian), Hadley Freeman (columnist at The Sunday Times, and previously at The Guardian), David Aaronovitch (columnist for The Times – and a Communist-affiliated president of the National Union of Students while I was at university in Britain in the early 1980s), and comedian David Baddiel.
One of the aspects of The JC’s recent past that has escaped attention in any of the current coverage of its woes is its frontline role in the aggressive and ultimately successful effort to topple Jeremy Corbyn (a fellow JC) as Labour Party leader by falsely labelling him as antisemitic. The claim that the party had become more antisemitic under his leadership was equally absurd.
The truth is that Israel and its acolytes simply could not countenance the idea of a British prime minister who sincerely stood for Palestinian national rights, and they doubled down once the 2017 general election seemed to narrow the distance between Corbyn and 10 Downing Street. Much of the media, from The Guardian to Israel’s relatively respectable Haaretz, were complicit in this disgraceful campaign.
It is not particularly far-fetched to assume that Netanyahu adviser and spokesman Mark Regev (born Mark Freiburg in Melbourne) was appointed ambassador to London (2016-20) chiefly to coordinate this crusade. Coincidentally or otherwise, Regev was mentor to Freedland during the gap year he spent at an Israeli kibbutz; and Freedland spewed some of the vilest anti-Corbyn bile in his Guardian columns.
He wasn’t alone, of course, but his moral outrage over the Chronicle’s failures and directions rings hollow in the light of his own fakely balanced predilections. He proudly claims that the Freedland byline has appeared in The JC for 71 years (his father was a columnist before him, and infant Jonathan’s birth was announced in the paper), and he hopes to return to it once the publication irons out its issues.
These issues include the Chronicle’s opaque ownership structure since 2020, when it was rescued after supposedly COVID-inspired insolvency by a mysterious white knight (or knights) via a consortium led by Sir Robbie Gibb, once a spin doctor for former Conservative prime minister Theresa May (who was unexpectedly thrust into minority government after the 2017 election) and currently a government-appointed BBC director. In the latter role, Gibb presumably subscribes to the BBC’s rules of impartiality (which have never been uniformly applied, and tend to go out of the window whenever Israel crops up), yet studiously ignores Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons’ ridiculous complaints about the BBC’s “Israelophobia” in its Gaza reportage and comments.
Former long-time Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has raised pertinent (and as yet unanswered) queries about The JC’s ownership in his Prospect magazine, lately updated in The Independent. No one, though, appears to have contemplated the possibility that it might, directly or otherwise, be a proxy for the abominable Netanyahu regime, and a vehicle for the toxic hasbara that contaminates discourse about Israel’s Nazi-like aspirations to Lebensraum across much of the West and particularly in the Anglosphere. It’s worth remembering that as far back as 1968, The JC’s claim of antisemitism about anti-Zionist Labour MP Christopher Mayhew led to a public apology from the Chronicle, and it has lost several libel suits since then.
Expecting Western media to adjust its moral compass in the Zionist context might be futile, but the Chronicle saga demands exploration that goes beyond the “one bad apple” trope. Mind you, holding your breath on that score might prove detrimental to your well-being.
Mahir Ali
Mahir Ali has worked as a journalist in Pakistan, the UAE and Australia across four decades.
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