Jewish Chronicle scandal: Why was there no uproar over its long record of pro-Israel fake news?
20 September 2024The paper’s disinformation is making waves only now, after it printed claims based on forged Hamas documents. But the JC has been peddling falsehoods for years
Middle East Eye – 20 September 2024
Britain’s best-known Jewish newspaper has found itself thrust into the centre of an embarrassing and long-overdue storm over its involvement with the shadowy manoeuvrings of the pro-Israel lobby.
It raises questions about the degree to which parts of the British media are – inadvertently or otherwise – colluding in Israeli disinformation.
The 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it is now known, lost four of its big-name columnists on Sunday, after it was revealed that the paper had published a story based on a forged document concerning Israel’s war on Gaza. Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Hadley Freeman and David Baddiel swiftly quit the paper.
The Chronicle, it emerged, had apparently failed to make the most rudimentary checks on Elon Perry, a mysterious British-based Israeli freelance journalist who has written nine stories for the paper since Israel’s war on Gaza began nearly a year ago. All have now been excised from its website.
Investigations by the Israeli media revealed that Perry’s CV, which included claims that he had been a professor at Tel Aviv University, a former elite Israeli commando and a longtime journalist, was a tissue of all-too-obvious lies. His only journalism appears to be the nine stories he published in the JC.
The Chronicle similarly failed to check before publication the veracity of his most recent article, which cited a Hamas document supposedly in the possession of Israeli intelligence. But the Israeli military says it has never seen such a document.
The forgery did, however, neatly bolster a narrative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been desperate to build – one that allows him to avoid engaging in negotiations with Hamas that could end the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, has ruled Israel’s actions there to be a “plausible” genocide.
Netanyahu is under huge pressure – both from his own generals and from large sections of the Israeli public – to negotiate a ceasefire so that dozens of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza can be released. Their families have been leading ever-larger protests in Israel against the government.
‘Wild fabrication’
According to Perry’s report for the Chronicle, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning, under cover of negotiations, to smuggle himself, other Hamas leaders and Israeli hostages out of Gaza through its border with Egypt. They would then have been spirited away to Iran.
Happily for Netanyahu, the report closely echoed his own claims about Hamas’s intentions.
A few days after the JC’s article was published, his wife, Sara, reportedly met with the families of the hostages, citing the story as confirmation that Netanyahu could not compromise on his tough stance on negotiations.
But the credibility of the Chronicle’s story fell apart the moment it was subjected to the simplest scrutiny.
According to the Israeli media, Israeli intelligence and military sources described the story as a “wild fabrication” and “100 percent lies”. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s spokesperson, also discounted the story as baseless.
As has been noted in these pages before, Israeli officials, including Hagari, are no stranger to falsehoods and deceptions themselves, especially during Israel’s nearly year-long war on Gaza.
The reason this particular deception has come unstuck so quickly, it seems, is only because Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass have been feuding for weeks over the prime minister’s refusal to negotiate the hostages’ release and reach a ceasefire.
The generals are reported to be increasingly incensed by Netanyahu’s intransigence, and his determination to widen the war on Gaza into a dangerous regional confrontation to save his own skin.
They believe he is putting his own narrow, selfish interests – keeping his ultra-rightwing coalition together and himself in power, thereby delaying his corruption trial – before national security.
The likelihood of a regional war increased dramatically this week when ordinary electronic devices exploded across Lebanon, killing more than 30 people and wounding thousands more. Israel has not admitted responsibility, but no one is in any doubt it was behind the attack.
The Israeli military might have seen a chance to settle scores and embarrass Netanyahu by exposing the Chronicle’s report as fake news.
Israeli disinformation
Military sources have also derided another, earlier report by Perry, calling it “bullshit”. That story claimed many of the surviving hostages were being used as human shields to protect Sinwar.
And it is not just the JC peddling Israeli disinformation. The Israeli military criticised a report on Hamas published this month by Germany’s Bild newspaper, which alleged that another “Hamas document” – this one supposedly found on Sinwar’s computer – showed the group was negotiating in bad faith and “manipulating the international community”.
Again, usefully for Netanyahu, this fabricated story suggested that any effort to secure the hostages’ release through negotiations was futile.
The JC’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, has responded to the spate of resignations at his publication by blaming Perry: “Obviously it’s every newspaper editor’s worst nightmare to be deceived by a journalist.”
The issue, however, is not that Perry perpetrated a sophisticated deception on the JC. Rather, the paper apparently failed to make even the most cursory checks that his “exclusives” were grounded in fact.
At the very least, a routine call to the Israeli military spokesperson’s office should have sufficed to discount Perry’s last two articles.
It looks suspiciously like the Chronicle, which over the past two decades has been growing ever-more hawkish on matters relating to Israel, had no interest in checking the truth of the story, because it fitted its own preferred narrative.
But potentially, the JC’s failings were worse. There is more than a suspicion that Netanyahu’s office was behind the forgeries, using them as part of an influence campaign.
That is a conclusion reached by several senior Israeli analysts.
One, Shlomi Eldar, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It was clear to me this was a leak from the Israeli prime minister’s office, which is using deception to manipulate the foreign press into further tearing apart Israel’s divided society and saving Netanyahu from the intensifying protests.”
Lack of scrutiny
The question is: had the Chronicle grown so used to publishing as news what amounted to undeclared press releases from Netanyahu’s office that it had become largely indifferent as to whether the information it received was actually true?
Given the lack of scrutiny from other British media outlets about the veracity of the JC’s stories, had it grown complacent, certain it could regurgitate Israeli government disinformation with no danger of being exposed?
It is unlikely we will ever know. But the implications were certainly troubling enough that four of its leading columnists felt that remaining with the paper would damage their reputations.
Freedland, who is also a columnist at the Guardian, wrote an open letter to Wallis Simons on social media, in which he observed: “Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.”
One such example was a tweet (since deleted) from Wallis Simons last December, when Israel had already killed thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Over a video of a huge explosion killing untold numbers of Palestinians in Gaza City, the JC’s editor wrote: “Onwards to victory.”
Freedland is certainly right that the Chronicle has long promoted a highly partisan, hardline, pro-Israel agenda – one that has helped stoke a climate of fear among British Jews and readied them to be more indulgent of Israel’s genocidal policies.
Collapse of journalism
So why did Freedland find no reason to resign until now, if the Chronicle’s partisan journalism began long before the latest scandal?
I and others have been noting for some time scandalous breaches of both the law and media ethics by the JC.
Over the past six years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the feeble “regulator” created and financed by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has repeatedly found the paper guilty of breaching its code of practice.
According to the research of journalist and academic Brian Cathcart, in the five years to 2023, the paper broke the code an astonishing 41 times. The Chronicle has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases.
Writing about these failings, Cathcart called the large number of violations “off the scale” for a small weekly publication. He further noted that the spate of serious findings by IPSO against the JC should be seen in the context of the media regulator’s dismal record in upholding complaints – 99 percent are dismissed.
Notably, despite the JC’s unprecedented violations of the code, IPSO has refused to launch an investigation or exercise its powers to fine the paper.
The Chronicle subsequently went on the offensive against those it had defamed: “In a climate of rising antisemitism, we will never be cowed by attempts to bully us into silence.”
A spokesperson for IPSO told MEE it was “carefully reviewing developments at the Jewish Chronicle”, adding: “We have no further comment to share at this time.”
Chief attack dog
There are reasons for the great latitude IPSO has shown the Chronicle.
As Cathcart has noted, were the press “regulator” to investigate the JC for its journalistic failings, it would be hard to stop there. Other outlets, such as Rupert Murdoch’s titles, would have to be investigated too.
Critics contend that the whole purpose of IPSO, established a decade ago, was to stop meaningful media regulation in the wake of the Leveson Inquiryinto abuses such as the phone-hacking scandal.
But there is another reason for IPSO’s endless indulgence. The Chronicle played a critical role in advancing one of the British establishment’s most important recent disinformation campaigns: making former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn unelectable by smearing him and his supporters as antisemites.
Notably, many of the JC’s press-code violations and libel settlements related to its false allegations against either Palestinian solidarity organisations or members of the Labour left. The Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and his allies, stoking fears among prominent sections of the Jewish community. It began that campaign early on, when Corbyn first emerged as a candidate for the leadership.
Those fears were then cited by the rest of the corporate media as evidence that Labour was riding roughshod over the Jewish community’s “sensitivities”. And in turn, the Labour left’s supposed indifference to Jewish sensitivities could be ascribed to its rampant antisemitism.
The more the left denied it was antisemitic, the more its denials were cited as proof that it was.
The four columnists who quit the JC on the weekend all actively contributed to fomenting a political climate in which Corbyn’s leadership could be depicted as an existential threat to British Jews.
In 2019, Stephen Pollard, Wallis Simons’s predecessor as editor of the JC, was open about his paper’s crucial role against Corbyn: “There’s certainly been a huge need for the journalism that the JC does in especially looking at the antisemitism in the Labour Party and elsewhere.”
A year later, as he stepped down as the paper’s chairman, Alan Jacobs made the same point. Wealthy donors who had been bailing the paper out financially “can be proud that their combined generosity allowed the JC to survive long enough to help to see off Jeremy Corbyn and friends”, he noted.
Israeli meddling
There is already plenty of evidence that, during Corbyn’s time as Labour leader, Israeli officials were actively meddling in British politics to stop him from reaching power.
Corbyn, as a longtime and vocal critic of Israel’s illegal occupation and an advocate of Palestinian rights, was seen as too much of a threat.
Shai Masot, a spy operating out of Israel’s London embassy, was secretly filmed by an undercover Al Jazeera reporter orchestrating a smear campaign against Corbyn, using pro-Israel lobby groups inside the Labour Party.
Despite its devastating revelations airing in 2017, Al Jazeera’s four-part documentary was mostly ignored by an establishment media that was actively helping to propagate such smears.
The JC played a critical role in all this. It led the pressure on British institutions, including the Labour Party, to adopt a new definition of antisemitism that conflated criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. Israel was the original driving force behind this new definition.
Faced with a barrage of criticism from the JC and the wider establishment media, as well as from pro-Israel lobby groups inside his own party, Corbyn walked into the trap set for him.
The new definition adopted by Labour made it impossible to engage in meaningful support for the Palestinian people without violating one of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s examples of antisemitism related to criticism of Israel.
Despite this new skewed definition, the JC still felt the need to push further in advancing its smear campaign – the main reason it has been found by IPSO to have broken its code of practice so frequently, and been forced to settle libel cases in recent years.
The JC had not responded to a request from MEE for comment by the time of publication.
Huge losses
The Chronicle was incurring huge losses even before it had to pay out large sums in legal bills. In 2020, the Kessler Foundation finally put it into liquidation.
Since then, it has been unclear who owns the paper. Whoever it is, they appear to have very deep pockets.
The consortium that acted as a front for the real buyer included a who’s who of public figures deeply opposed to Corbyn.
The head of the consortium was Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative spin doctor who now sits on the BBC Board, overseeing editorial standards.
Many observers are now, belatedly, pointing out Gibb’s deep conflict of interest. He is closely associated with the JC and its highly partisan, pro-Netanyahu agenda, while also holding a key position in guiding the BBC’s supposedly impartial editorial standards on Israel and Gaza.
Gibb had not replied to a request for comment from MEE by the time of publication.
‘Wrong sort of Jew’
Freedland and the other JC columnists who resigned last weekend expressed no public concerns earlier about the systematic editorial failings at the JC over many years because, it looks to me like those failings sat just fine with them – as they did with the British establishment.
Getting rid of Corbyn was a goal shared across the narrow political spectrum of the two main establishment tribes in the Conservative and Labour parties. The means – any means, it seems – justified that end.
Freedland had not replied to a request for comment from MEE by the time of publication.
On Monday, after resigning from the JC, columnist Hadley Freeman expressed concern that the paper had become a vehicle for Netanyahu’s agenda and was now failing to represent much of the British Jewish community.
“I strongly want there to be a mainstream Jewish national newspaper in this country that represents the plurality of views of Jews in this country,” she told BBC Radio 4. She went on to note: “That’s not why I joined a British Jewish newspaper, to represent the views of Netanyahu.”
And yet, she and other JC columnists spent years denying that very same “pluralism” to the substantial number of left-wing Jews who supported Corbyn, including the group Jewish Voice for Labour. Their voices were either ignored, or dismissed because they were considered the “wrong sort of Jew”.
Under Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, left-wing Jewish members of Labour have been almost five times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism by the party than non-Jewish members.
None of the JC’s columnists appear to have raised concerns about this pattern of discrimination, or the party’s institutional attacks on the rights of its Jewish members to express their political views.
Over the past year, that trend has continued. The “wrong sort of Jews” have once again found themselves ignored by the establishment media when taking part by their thousands in marches against the genocide in Gaza, or helping to lead protests on British and US campuses.
In an article published by the Times of Israel in June, Freeman asserted that “the progressive left hates the Jews”. She forgot to mention that the many Jews attending the Gaza protests and student encampments also belong to that progressive left.
Siding with the generals
The JC’s demonisation of fellow Jews in the Labour Party was not a red line for its celebrated columnists – nor was the paper’s cheering on of what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
In fact, it was precisely the relentless bullying and silencing of voices critical of Israel through the Corbyn years that helped pave the way for Israel’s current slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.
With almost any criticism of Israel denounced as antisemitism, Netanyahu’s ultra-right government was given a free hand to indiscriminately pulverise the enclave.
It could rely on western politicians like Starmer, now Britain’s prime minister, to rewrite international law and defend as a “right” Israel’s decision to starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants through a blockade on food, water and power.
So why have the JC’s four columnists suddenly found a backbone and decided to quit? The answer appears to be far less principled than they would have us believe.
The JC is finally in crisis, beset by scandal, only because the Israeli establishment is deeply split on negotiating a ceasefire and bringing home the hostages.
Israel’s parade of lies as it carried out a genocide in Gaza disturbed no one in power; it passed without comment, prompting no significant investigations by the western media.
The lies have registered on this occasion because Israel’s generals have decided that this one time, the truth matters – and only because the top brass have a score to settle with Netanyahu.
Are the JC’s columnists really taking a belated stand for journalistic integrity? Or have they simply been forced to choose a side as the rift within the Israeli establishment deepens – on one side, the generals who carried out the slaughter of Gaza’s civilians, and on the other, a far-right prime minister who wants that slaughter to continue indefinitely?
The columnists might have changed camps, but both camps are led by monsters.
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