It involves some serious mental gymnastics to take a rally in New York attended by some 500 people and pass it off as evidence that American Jewry has turned against Israel.
But alas, it’s The Guardian, where anything in the way of sloppy Israel-related journalism is possible and indeed, sometimes, inevitable.
In the article, ‘“We are winning”: Are US Jews who oppose Israeli settlements finally getting somewhere?‘, Guardian correspondent Chris McGreal invites readers to conclude that there has been a sea change among American Jews (and Americans in general) who no longer support the Jewish state on account of divisive issues such as settlement expansion in the West Bank and the mainstreaming of the apartheid libel.
Citing statistics from a 2021 poll conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute that found 1 in 5 US Jews believe Israel is practicing some form of apartheid, McGreal can’t help editorializing when he surmises that some of this attitude shift has been “driven by social media and the wide circulation of videos such as Israeli assaults on Gaza and the West Bank, the large-scale forced removal of Palestinians from the South Hebron hills, and armed Jewish settlers rampaging through Palestinian towns.”
Where to start with this @guardian story?
🛑 @ChrisMcGreal tries to pass off his interviewees as representative of US Jewry but doesn’t tell readers that one is a local leader of the anti-Zionist JVP org, even going as far as to stress that her “family fled anti-Jewish pogroms… pic.twitter.com/gAbVMjyxCt
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 24, 2023
Among the interviewees at the July 20 anti-settlement protest that McGreal portrays as representative of this supposedly huge collective of anti-Israel Jews is Rosalind Petchesky, a retired City University of New York professor “whose family fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.”
While McGreal takes great care to flesh out her Jewish credentials (The Guardian’s lazy way of giving her credibility), he carefully omits a rather important nugget of information about Petchesksy that readers might have found relevant: she is a longtime activist and chapter leader in Jewish Voice for Peace.
Let us be completely clear, holding up JVP as somehow representative of American Jews is tantamount to journalistic malfeasance given the fact that the organization uses its nominal identity as a Jewish organization to promote the boycott of Israel, tacitly support Palestinian terrorism and whitewash the antisemitism that exists among its political allies.
Read More: Jewish Voice for Peace: Who Are the Radical Jews Opposed to Israel?
Also quoted extensively by McGreal is Mike Levinson who McGreal frames as being singularly concerned about Israel:
Levinson, a Jewish New Yorker, began protesting against Israeli government policies during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s been a long and often lonely road since then as he has sought to get his fellow Americans to pay attention to decades of Israeli occupation, military assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, and the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements.”
What McGreal fails to mention is that Levinson is a radical anti-war protester, who campaigns on all manner of issues, from the abolition of nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen. Indeed, one might even surmise that his purportedly profound concern for Israel is somewhat superficial in light of all the other issues he apparently cares so deeply about.
And the final person interviewed by McGreal at the march isn’t Jewish at all, but an American Muslim civil rights activist.
In fact, it is a mystery as to why McGreal chose to include lawyer Diala Shamas’ banal assertion that challenging pro-Israel viewpoints should be done “from a legal standpoint,” which she ludicrously contends, would force people into saying that “they actually think that it’s OK to aid and abet war crimes.”
A quick scroll of Shamas’ Twitter profile shows she has more than once departed from her own sage advice by lobbing the not-legally-sound apartheid charge at Israel.
While Shamas is described by The Guardian as “a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who joined the demonstration,” it is not revealed that she did not simply join the demonstration but is an employee of one of the organizers behind the demo.
Indeed, one of the most worrying aspects of the entire piece is the lack of transparency behind McGreal’s failure to acknowledge that the Not On Our Dime rally is not some grassroots Jewish event but instead organized by several radical NGOs that are dedicated to completely dismantling the Jewish state.
For example, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, formerly known as the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, is a major mobilizer of pro-BDS campaigns in the United States. According to NGO Monitor, the group is a “fiscal sponsor” of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), whose members include the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, which comprises designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP.
Another of the organizers was the Adalah Justice Project, created by the Adalah organization, which has smeared Israel with the “ethnic cleansing” charge and aligned itself with terrorist-linked Palestinian NGOs.
Given the news outlet’s barely-disguised dislike of the Jewish state, it is hardly surprising that The Guardian has chosen to offer such ample coverage of an event attended by a smattering of fringe anti-Israel activists.
But erroneously presenting these extreme voices as typical among American Jewry is both astonishing and plainly misleading.
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