One of the costs of political blogging is that there are times when you're tempted, or feel obliged, to engage with obnoxious material, and it leaves you feeling mucky. It's much more pleasant to write on enjoyable subjects. If one is a Jewish political blogger and cares about these things, then there's the constant appearance of anti-Semitic tropes in the public domain - now almost on a daily basis. I could leave it alone, and often I do. But if someone doesn't try to rebut some of this stuff, it goes unanswered. So, it ain't a great choice, but I'll discolour my day yet once more and illustrate what I mean with discussion of a piece at Comment is Free by Greg Philo.
Now, Philo has form on the issue, and it would be foolish to expect any better of him. Yet he writes as research director of the Glasgow University Media Unit, which might suggest to some people that he strives for scholarly objectivity; and he is given room by a major liberal newspaper to write as he does on their website, thereby suggesting, once again, that his views are unproblematic so far as their being provided with a platform is concerned.
Philo's claim is that in the propaganda battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the official Israeli view dominates the media, and this is due to the PR effort made on behalf of Israel to influence how the issues are presented. I don't believe the claim to be true, but I will not try to challenge it here, since nothing I could say in a short space will suffice to sway anyone. For what it's worth, my impression is that the Palestinian case gets a lot of airtime, and that there are many media outlets, including - no, especially - the Guardian, that are prejudiced against Israel, no more and no less.
Look, however, at how the research director of the Glasgow University Media Unit writes of the PR effort on behalf of Israel:
Since then [2004] we have been contacted by many journalists, especially from the BBC, and told of the intense pressures they are under that limit criticism of Israel. They asked us to raise the issue in public because they can't. They speak of "waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis" (meaning the embassy or higher), of the BBC's Jerusalem bureau having been "leant on by the Americans", of being "guilty of self-censorship" and of "urgently needing an external arbiter". Yet the public response of the BBC is to avoid reporting our latest findings. Those in control have the power to say what is not going to be the news.
As you can see, it's not so much a PR effort on behalf of Israel, as some shadowy power behind the scenes controlling what gets reported. The journalists wait 'in fear', you see. How so? Does the Israeli 'embassy or higher' have a hit squad dealing with journalists who say the wrong thing? Are the journalists personally threatened by the process of 'leaning on' which the Americans carry out on Israel's behalf?
That Israel makes a propaganda effort is hardly surprising, since the governments of all countries do. But somehow in this case, the effort is illicit - and it includes measures of a kind implied to be extremely dodgy, as if there were a sinister force at work. The kinship between this and age-old anti-Semitic themes is too obvious to need any emphasis. Except that it isn't. This kind of stuff is now everywhere and nobody even turns a hair. The Jewish lobby? What else is new? As if lobbying is quite all right, but lobbying to put Israel's case isn't, though we all know about its illegitimacy already. The Guardian won't feel any need to justify giving room to the theme, because it's now more or less mainstream, and only a crazed Zionist could be bothered by it.
Maybe I'm being too severe, though, and Philo is merely pointing out - objectively - that while all governments, as well as others speaking for countries, make a case for the countries in question, the Israelis and those speaking for Israel are more successful at doing this than are others. What's anti-Semitic about saying that? I do not concede for one minute that this claim is actually true. But suppose it were. So, now, that's to be deplored is it, that someone trying to make a case does it better than someone else?
Discussing Israel's invasion of Gaza that took place in late 2008, the research director of the Glasgow University Media Unit complains that Israel's justification for the invasion (Palestinian rockets against Israeli civilian centres) got plenty of media coverage while '[t]he underlying reasons for the conflict were absent, such as [the Palestinians] being driven from their homes and land when Israel was created'. Philo's 'underlying reasons' are exclusively on one side of the dispute; they do not include the non-recognition of Israel's right to exist, from Palestinian organizations even to this day, or the threat to its existence by countries in the region. That's scholarly objectivity and balance for you.
In any event, were you to utter some other stereotypical racist trope than an anti-Jewish one today in more or less any liberal company, you'd be for the high jump, as the saying is. Jews pulling secret strings to wield power over media or government, however, this is simply part of the air we now breathe. The moral and ideological stink is so pervasive that there are a lot of people who don't even notice it.