The Guardian and Israel in Context

Here is a recent exchange of correspondence, of a kind familiar to all journalists involved in coverage of the Middle East. It dates from about a month ago: "This morning's Palestinian attack on an Israeli [nursery] school is not even mentioned on the Guardian's website. Had a Palestinian child been killed while Israel went after a terrorist leader it would have been the Guardian's lead story. Your anti-semitic stance is thinly masked by your claims of liberalism."

I replied: "Dear T, What are you talking about? The story you refer to ran at the top of a page in our international news section in all editions of today's Guardian. It is a long dispatch from Chris McGreal in Jerusalem. The headline said, 'Gaza braced for revenge after Hamas kills boy, 3'. The same story with the same headline has been on the website all day." I complained to him of his "loose way with charges of anti-semitism".

He came back: "Ian, The Guardian's reporting about Israel has been consistently and hugely disproportionate. If the Israelis fired missiles at a Palestinian [nursery] school or shot a pregnant woman and her three daughters in the head at point blank range, it would be a big story featured prominently on the Guardian's website for days ...

"I spend half my time in the UK and understand that thinly veiled anti-semitism is a common cultural phenomenon, but that is no excuse. It is time for the Guardian to hold Islamic countries to the same standards of conduct as you hold Israel, the US and the UK."

At the end of May I wrote a column responding to an email from Endre Mozes of Haifa in Israel, who runs a website and lobby group called Take-a-Pen. He complained of a headline, "Hungary foils 'Jewish' terror plot", which had been published in the international edition of the Guardian. What the Hungarian police had foiled, in fact, was a suspected plan to attack a Jewish museum in Budapest. I concluded it was a justified complaint about an indefensible headline.

This made me friends in some places but not in others. Mr Mozes has a page on his website called "The Guardian Watch & Dialogue". On it he acknowledges our "friendly discussion" and explains that "as a result of [my] positive intervention we have renamed this section not only a 'Watch' but also a 'Dialogue'."

I received this email, dispatched at breakfast time on the Saturday the column appeared: "Your grovelling apology to the Jewish lobby is pathetically embarrassing. If it had been a video you would most certainly have been prostrate on the floor. And then to cap it off, you advertise a virulently anti-Palestinian website. It was only an inappropriate headline for God's sake. They happen all the time. I find it inconceivable that you would give such an abject apology to Palestinian people under any circumstances."

At the end of her recent book, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel (details below), Daphna Baram - who is an Israeli journalist, a fellow of the Reuters Foundation and a senior associate member of St Antony's, Oxford - says: "I was stunned by the amount of time, energy and thinking which everybody involved in Israel's coverage in the Guardian put into the task of getting it right."

I wish I could place a copy of her book in the hands of everyone engaged or provoked by the Guardian's coverage (it would have a large circulation). Baram is excellent on the historical context, including the crucial friendship between the Guardian editor CP Scott and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann - a friendship that led to the Balfour Declaration, which opened the way to the foundation of Israel.

An Israeli government official to whom the Guardian's involvement in the Balfour Declaration appeared to come as a surprise said to the paper's diplomatic editor recently: "Ah, so that's why the Guardian dislikes Israel so much - guilt over its part in the Balfour Declaration."

Baram says in the preface to her book: "Some readers may expect [me] to clarify the question of whether the Guardian is an anti-semitic newspaper. I can unburden you from any further reading by saying straightaway: it is not. The allegation is offensive and lacks any basis.

"A more interesting question is whether it is an anti-Zionist newspaper, and again, and somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that it is most certainly not."