Here's Why The Guardian, Despite Being Very Pro-Israel, Prints What You Might (Incorrectly) Think Is an Extremely Anti-Israel Article
Never underestimate how sophisticated ruling class propaganda is; it even fools YOU.
A very pro-Israel newspaper published what seems like a very anti-Israel article. Paradox, or sophisticated propaganda?
The Guardian is a pro-Israel newspaper.1 The visible evidence for this (if, and only if, you understand what’s going on) is that it never says that Israel’s Zionist anti-Palestinian violent ethnic cleansing project was never really about making Jews safe whatsoever, as it claimed was its only purpose, but rather was always about enabling a rich Jewish upper class to get rich off of a Jewish working class with a “state of their own.” (Read the facts to back up what I just said here and here and here.)
Please understand that it is NOT paradoxical for the PRO-ISRAEL The Guardian to run articles like this one that SEEM to be very anti-Israel:
Why is it not paradoxical?
It is not paradoxical for this reason. To be pro-Israel in practice requires keeping secret the fact that I expressed in my first paragraph above, namely that the Israeli government’s violence against Palestinians has never had anything whatsoever to do with making ordinary Jews safe, but on the contrary has been for the purpose of making rich billionaire Jews richer at the expense of the great economic suffering of working class Israeli Jews.
As long as one keeps this dirty sordid fact about Zionism secret, then Israeli Mossad is perfectly happy for one to talk about how horrible Israeli violence against Palestinians is.
You see, the Zionists themselves admit their violence against Palestinians is horrible. Necessary, but horrible. Thus Israeli Prime Minister (1969-74) Golda Meir said:
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us." [Source is here.]
Golda Meir may have been better than most Zionists in expressing this Zionist view so pithily, but virtually every Zionist thinks about, and defends, Israeli violence this way, viewing it as, however unfortunately, necessary for self-defense of Jews.
Similarly, the pro-Zionist argument does not deny that Jews and non-Jews are treated differently under the law in Israel; Zionists proudly declare that this is a good thing because it is part of what makes Israel a Jewish state: Israeli prime minister Netanyahu proudly (and falsely2) asserted that Israel is a "Nation-state of the Jewish people and of them alone." The Zionists don't like it when anti-Zionists refer to this as "apartheid," but they don't deny the reality that that word refers to; they insist it is necessary to make Jews safe.
Likewise, the Zionists don't like it when anti-Zionists say Israeli refusal to allow the Palestinian refugees to return is "ethnic cleansing," (Zionists like to insist that it's only "ethnic cleansing" if it kills, rather than only removes, the target people) but they don't deny the fact that Israel will not ever allow the Palestinian refugees to return; they are proud of it, since this supposedly ensures that Israel will remain a Jewish state that can keep Jews safe. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert--who said the long term survival of Israel depended on having a two-state solution--made this very clear. Reuters reported:
“The prime minister never offered to absorb 20,000 refugees in Israel. The prime minister again reiterates that under any future agreement, there will not be any return of Palestinian refugees to Israel in any number,” Olmert’s office said.
Think about the pro-Zionist argument. This argument is NOT refuted one iota by somebody showing that Israeli violence is for ethnic cleansing and that it is cruel and that it is illegal and that it is overwhelmingly greater than any Palestinian violence, and that it enforces apartheid. And yet, showing these facts--true facts, but irrelevant3 to the Zionist argument!--is the ONLY response to the pro-Zionist argument that the anti-Zionist organizations and leaders are making!
The Zionists LOVE to hear the anti-Zionists making their inept argument because it makes anti-Zionists a sitting duck for the Zionists to accuse them of being antisemitic IN EFFECT IF NOT INTENT.4
The ONLY way to refute the Zionist Big Lie argument is to show that Israeli government violence against Palestinians is NOT for the purpose of making Jews safe but rather for the purpose of enabling Jewish billionaires in Israel--Israel's actual ruling class--to economically oppress--horribly!--working class Israeli Jews to get fabulously rich at the expense of working class Jews. I prove this in my article, "Israel's Government Attacks Ordinary Jews As Well As Palestinians." (https://www.pdrboston.org/israel-s-government-attacks-jews-to)
Until the anti-Zionist movement directly refutes the Zionist Big Lie (by telling the truth!), virtually everybody will believe that Israeli violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe, and the anti-Zionist movement will only gain the support of the minority of people who will oppose Israeli government violence despite the (supposed!) fact that this violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe. With only the support of a minority of the general public, the anti-Zionist movement will never be able to successfully challenge the power of Zionism.
If the anti-Zionist leaders won't refute the Zionist Big Lie, then we--ordinary people--must be even more determined to do it ourselves. Please share my article that does it.
Read about The Guardian’s pro-Israel history here, which reports:
Criticism of the Guardian was mounting from this increasingly vocal and well-organised pro-Israel right, which saw the paper as overly, even antisemitically, critical of the Jewish state. Baram’s [earlier this article includes “Daphna Baram in her 2005 book Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel”] conclusion was intended as the final word on the matter: not only was the paper not antisemitic, it wasn’t even anti-Zionist.
In fact, showed Baram, the paper had played a decisive role in Israel’s foundation: Guardian founder CP Scott had been the one in 1915 to introduce early Zionist Chaim Weizmann to prime minister Lloyd George, who in turn had suggested a meeting with Arthur Balfour.
Though the love affair may have waned after the six-day war in 1967, when Israel began illegally occupying the West Bank, the Guardian nevertheless “clung … to the doveish tendency of the Israeli Labour party and refused to let go, even years after that tendency had vanished”. If anything, Baram concluded, the paper’s “combination of almost colonial white-man’s-burden commitment and deep-rooted liberal values” made it too soft on Israel.
…
Reflecting on his own censorship by the paper, Dylan Saba suggested that the Guardian’s approach is condemnable, though perhaps unexceptional. “What’s interesting about my experience of working with the Guardian is it’s broadly indicative of the pressures that a lot of institutions are under right now,” he told Novara Media.
“People in positions of power are getting directly lobbied by donors or other powerful people in their networks to water down their scrutiny of Israel, whereas most of the rank and file is willing to speak out.”
Israel is no more a state of (for) ordinary Jews than the United States is a state of (for) ordinary U.S. citizens; both states are oligarchies ruled by a billionaire plutocracy to make the billionaires rich at the expense of the ordinary citizens.
Why is the Zionist argument not refuted when anti-Zionists show that Israeli violence kills Palestinian children, that it is for ethnic cleansing, that it is cruel, that it is illegal and that it is overwhelmingly greater than any Palestinian violence and that it enforces apartheid? Here's why. Because the Zionists ADMIT this fact and assert that this violence is necessary to make Jews safe and therefore it is MORALLY JUSTIFIED violence. If anti-Zionists don't persuasively refute the Zionist claim that Israeli violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe, then the Zionists win the argument in the view of most of the public. And currently anti-Zionists are not refuting this Zionist claim, which is why anti-Zionists have not won over a majority of the public.
It is pathetic when anti-Zionists respond to the accusation that they are antisemitic in effect if not intent by ONLY denying that they are antisemitic in INTENT (for example by saying that they are Jewish or have Jewish friends or by pointing out that there are Jews in the anti-Zionist camp.) The Zionists LOVE this response because it totally ignores (i.e., does not refute) the accusation that anti-Zionism is antisemitic IN EFFECT (because it opposes Israeli violence that is necessary to make Jews safe.) When an anti-Zionist says, "Hey, I'm a Jew so I can't be antisemitic," the Zionists gleefully respond with, "You're a self-hating Jew"; and the Zionist response is indeed very persuasive to anybody who believes that Israeli violence is necessary to make Jews safe. Anti-Zionists seem not to "get it" on this issue, which is pathetic.