The Double-Standards of Israel’s Critics

The Observer, the sister newspaper to The Guardian, has recently published an article that attacks Israel journalists for, of all things, promoting Israeli’s victory in its war on Hamas.

In an article titled “‘Journalists see their role as helping to win’: how Israeli TV is covering Gaza war,” Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum complain how Israel’s Media is highly patriotic in its reporting of the war and places the following slogan on the screen for popular news and talk show programmes: ‘united we will win’. Their quarrel with the Israeli Media is that they rarely feature the suffering of Gazan citizens who have indeed suffered greatly during the Israeli Defence Force’s (IDF) invasion of Gaza.

Not to be outdone by The Observer in its criticism of Israel, the BBC’s security correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, has censured Israeli news channels for spending too much time on the trauma of the 7 October pogrom rather than on Palestinian distress and pain.

The problem with Bowen, Graham-Harrison and Kierszenbaum’s position is that they are holding Israel’s Media to a higher moral standard than that of their enemies and indeed of any other nation that has faced an existential battle for survival. Since when has any nation’s Media shown compassion for the suffering of the combatants and civilians of a nation that is threatening its existence?

When Britain was fighting for its independence during the Second World War, its Media celebrated enemy casualties. When the RAF, in concert with the USAAF, began carpet bombing German cities, the press and radio praised these feats of gargantuan destruction and death as hastening the end of the War. There was no compassion for an enemy that had flattened the East End and Coventry. In fact, expressions of concern for the enemy would not have been permitted by the censorship that the Government had imposed on the Media.

What Bowen et al fail to acknowledge is the absence from the Palestinian Media of consideration of Jewish suffering. Their reporting is focused on the death and injury that has been inflicted on them by the IDF and who can blame them? But if Israeli news outlets are to be admonished for failing to consider the plight of Gazans, why are the Palestinian Media not receiving the same censure for failing to show compassion for the victims of 7 October?

This double-standard needs explaining. It might be said that it is a manifestation of anti-Semitism, and that may be correct, but it is more nuanced than that. It has its origins in a condescension that infects the world of the liberal-left. Melanie Phillips, the British Jewish journalist, found this out while working for The Guardian. When she asked why her colleagues were so quick to censure Israel and not terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, she was told that as Israel is a democratic Western-like nation that enjoys economic and technological success, it ought to be judged by higher moral standards than the poor, oppressed and dispossessed Palestinians whose terrorism is a desperate cry for help. In other words, the Palestinians are not civilised enough to appreciate the difference between right and wrong to the degree of the so-called superior Jews. This argument ignores the fact that most Palestinians are not involved in terrorism, and many deplore Hamas and Hezbollah. It also ignores the fact that Palestinian people have as much potential to know right from wrong as their Jewish neighbours, despite having a lower standard of living and living under the repressive regime of Hamas. It is high time the liberal-left ceased to patronise brown and black people as moral infants.

The article ends with Graham-Harrison and Kierszenbaum bemoaning the fact that there are no Israeli journalists in Ramallah or Gaza who would be eyewitnesses of the travails of the Palestinian people and be able to report on them convincingly. This is the most imbecilic thing they say. After having witnessed the barbarism of Hamas on 7 October, do they really think that Israeli journalists would take such a risk? If Graham-Harrison and Kierszenbaum are so cut up about this, perhaps they might like to leave their relatively safe place in Jerusalem and report from the Strip themselves.

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).

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