Even the Guardian has its Owen Jones

Owen Jones is there to mop up leftwing Labour supporters to persuade them the Guardian is their friend, as he did even while it was helping destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Jonathan Freedland is there to reassure liberal Jews the Guardian is on their side, which he did by playing up evidence-free smears that Labour had an especial antisemitism problem under Corbyn. Hadley Freeman is there, as is Suzanne Moore, ¹ to represent liberal women deeply invested in identity politics and keep them away from class politics. George Monbiot must sell environmental concern from within a newspaper entirely embedded in the economic logic of the neoliberal system destroying the planet.

Jonathan Cook, 9/10/20: George Monbiot’s Excuses for Not Speaking Out Loudly in Defense of Assange ...

What drives a paper like the Guardian or New York Times is not their inner moral values. It is simply that they have a market. In the UK, there is a market called ‘educated liberals’. Educated liberals want to buy a newspaper like the Guardian so an institution arises to fulfil that market.

Julian Assange, in a 2011 interview cited by Jonathan Cook (ibid)

Owen Jones’s bit part in the removal of Jeremy Corbyn to pave the way for Labour to become, in a pattern writ large on the West’s centre-left, fully neoliberal is by no means his only mistake. He was wrong on Fidel Castro and Bashar al-Assad, wrong too on Vladimir Putin. ² Like almost all of the West’s liberal left, he is insufficiently aware of the nature and reach of the US empire, hence of its profound and extraordinary ability to demonise those in the way of its designs.

The crimes of the USA have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few have talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech 2005

But think baby, think bathwater. Owen has been brilliant on Israel’s genocide. No, that doesn’t negate the truth of my opening quotes but, like Mehdi Hasan, with whom I also disagree on key matters, he does what many of his critics – me included – do not. On Gaza he steps repeatedly onto Zionist terrain to engage the genocide apologists, be they Israeli or Western.

Massive respect.

Still less do Owen’s searing interventions on Gazan genocide and West Bank theft negate what the Guardian ultimately represents. But regardless of its motives, and those of corporate media at large doing the same volte-face  as “Israel’s right to defend itself”  no longer cuts it, we who were right about the genocide from Day One should welcome the sea change – better late than never – in mainstream attitudes to the ethno-supremacist state and its horrific crimes.

Over to Owen Jones, writing yesterday, September 17.

If Labour admitted there is a genocide in Gaza, it would have to admit its own hand in it

On Tuesday, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Its conclusion is unsurprising, with few states in history having been so brazen about their intentions. To take just two examples: in May, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”; a week later, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel is “destroying more and more houses [in Gaza, and Palestinians accordingly] have nowhere to return”.

At the beginning of this month, Labour’s deputy prime minister and former foreign secretary, David Lammy, wrote a letter to the chair of the international development committee, Sarah Champion, declaring that “the government has carefully considered the risk of genocide”, and has not concluded that Israel is acting with genocidal intent. How can two bodies come to such different endpoints? The British government has not come to a conclusion on genocide, because if it was to, it would have to face up to its complicity.

At the level of foreign and military policy, the British government works in alignment with the US, Israel’s strongest ally. The UK continues to supply Israel with crucial components for the F-35 jets incinerating Gaza and its people. Israeli planes involved in this bombing have been allowed to land in the UK. The UK government continues to share intelligence with Israel. Britain operates relentless surveillance flights over Gaza. And rather than impose sweeping sanctions, British ministers facilitate trade with Israel worth £6bn a year.

While Israeli president Isaac Herzog – whose genocidal utterances about collective Palestinian guilt were repeated by soldiers on the ground – is awarded the honour of an official visit, hundreds of peaceful protesters holding placards opposing genocide have been arrested as though they are dangerous extremists.

Not in the Guardian piece: Herzog signing bombs for Gaza

Every action taken against Israel has been performative, in order to dampen calls for action from the public. After all, seven in 10 British people think it’s likely Israel has committed war crimes, a majority supports an arms embargo, only a fifth think Israel’s attack on Gaza is justified, and over half support Netanyahu’s arrest for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sanctioning two of the most extreme Israeli ministers – the aforementioned Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – makes no impact on the state’s genocidal war machine, and recognising a Palestinian state amounts to nothing more than a welcome symbolic gesture.

The lives of those living in Gaza are deemed less important than maintaining relations with Israel and, by proxy, the US. At the personal level, on Labour’s doorsteps, this approach plays out in the most callous of ways. Dalloul al-Neder is a Palestinian refugee from Gaza, who was a constituent of the former deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. He got to know her, meeting several times: she visited his takeaway shop in 2019 and posed for pictures, declaring “Palestine must be free”. She took him on a tour of parliament.

Within weeks of the genocide beginning, in October 2023, his mother, brother, sister-in-law and two young nieces were killed by an Israeli airstrike. Desperate to evacuate his wife and four-month-old daughter – who had been buried under rubble three times by Israeli attacks – he emailed Rayner twice to seek help evacuating his family. He says received no response.

In January 2024, he attended a Labour fundraiser in Stockport addressed by Rayner and her colleague, Jonathan Reynolds, and got to his feet, clutching pictures of his dead mother, begging her to support a ceasefire, emotionally declaring “I lost my family in Gaza”. The whole tawdry episode is on camera: he was aggressively ejected from the meeting and on to the street. Rayner did nothing, except to say “thank you, you’ve made your point”. She then unfollowed him on social media. Days later, she was interviewed by Sky News’ Beth Rigby, who framed the incident as an example of the threats politicians face, linking it to the murder of the MPs Jo Cox and David Amess. Since then, so many of Neder’s relatives have been slaughtered by the Israeli state that their names take up three pages of a notebook.

Imagine if an Israeli citizen had been aggressively ejected from the fundraiser of a politician they knew well, after clutching photographs of their slaughtered family and begging for the violence to end. Rather than being framed as an example of the dangerous abuse suffered by politicians, the resulting uproar would be splashed on newspapers and lead news bulletins.

Our government is shirking away from uncomfortable truths. It denies genocide, because admitting it would mean confessing their own complicity. The truth, as they say, will out.

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1. Since Jonathan wrote, Suzanne Moore – who called Julian Assange a ‘massive turd’ even while complaining of receiving ‘vile’ personal abuse – has left the Guardian, on grounds I in part agree with. An exacerbant of the transphobe/TERF charge is widespread failure on both sides of this toxic ‘debate’ to distinguish three separate things: (a) abusing trans persons, as trans persons, is indefensible; (b) insisting sex is binary and biological is not, ipso facto, abusive; (c) whether we see sex as binary or a spectrum, we may reasonably object to “identifying as a woman” being enough to gain access to women-only spaces like refuges, changing rooms and jails, and to competitive sports where men have clear genetic advantage.
2. I don’t claim sainthood for any of these men. (Indeed, I seriously doubt the usefulness of saints to Cuba, pre-Islamist Syria, post-Yeltsin Russia or other nations in empire’s cross-hairs.) Nor do I say my enemy’s enemy is ipso facto my friend. On both counts, though my understanding of imperialism has deepened over the eight years since I wrote Monbiot, Syria and Universalism, I stand by almost every word. As I do my post of four years ago, Isn’t China just as bad?