A kosher conspiracy?
By Dennis Sewell
New Statesman, 14 January 2002
Dennis Sewell investigates the Zionist lobby and
finds that, despite a sometimes virulent tone, it owes more to Woody
Allen than to Alastair Campbell
In his plutocratic prime, Shlomo Zabludowicz could easily have
stepped out of one novel by Graham Greene and straight into another
by Ian Fleming. The freebooting Scandinavian arms billionaire could
count among his cronies the Shah of Iran, Indira Gandhi and the
mysterious Dr Goh, then Singapore's defence minister. Mortars were
Shlomo's stock-in-trade. He sold them all around the world: to the
Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Iranians, the Americans and oddly
(for he was a Holocaust survivor) even to the Germans.
After his release from Auschwitz at the age of 30, Shlomo settled
first in Sweden and later in Finland, going on to found the weapons
conglomerate Soltam, one of the pillars of Tel Aviv's
military-industrial complex. But for Zabludowicz's Finnish passport
and his knack for skirting arms embargoes, the Israeli army would
probably never have developed into the unbeatable fighting force it
became by Yom Kippur in 1973.
But eventually, as the cold war waned, and perhaps anticipating a
quieter life for his beloved Israel, Zabludowicz began to diversify,
if not into ploughshares exactly, then at least into saucepans. By
the time of his death in 1994, he was one of Scandinavia's premier
exporters of cooking utensils. He had also built up a worldwide
portfolio of real estate to keep him in his retirement. Land for
peace, you might say.
Today, the family fortune is managed by Shlomo's son Poju, who has
kept a finger in the arms pie through the munitions manufacturer
Pocal. Like his father before him, Poju remains wired into the US
national-security apparatus. At one time, the Zabludowiczes even had
Richard Perle, the former US assistant secretary of defence, on their
payroll.
Poju's main interest, however, lies in his London-based business,
Ivory Gate. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to call a property
investment company by that name. Either that, or a tin ear for
classical allusions. Maybe its founder was misled by Rudyard
Kipling's description of the Taj Mahal as "the Ivory Gate through
which all good dreams come . . . the embodiment of all things pure".
Unfortunately, the old imperialist got it wrong. According to Plato
and Virgil, true dreams enter via the Gate of Horn, while the Ivory
Gate ushers in only lies and delusions. The irony becomes all the
more delicious when one learns that the boss of Ivory Gate is also
the Mr Moneybags behind Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and
Research Centre), the semi-public face of Britain's Zionist lobby,
charged with spinning Israel's case to the media.
That there is a Zionist lobby and that it is rich, potent and
effective goes largely unquestioned on the left. Big Jewry, like big
tobacco, is seen as one of life's givens. According to this view,
Israel has the British media pretty well sewn up. Wealthy Jewish
business leaders, acting in concert with establishment types and
co-ordinated by the Israeli embassy, have supposedly nobbled
newspaper editors and proprietors, and ensured that the
pro-Palestinian position is marginalised both in news reporting and
on the comment pages. As one well-known foreign affairs specialist
puts it: "The sheer scale of the activity is awesome. It operates at
every level. By comparison, the disparate, underfunded and shambolic
pro-Palestinian organisations don't stand a chance." He insists that
these words remain unattributable because, he claims, "the fact is
that journalists put their careers in jeopardy by speaking up for the
Palestinians. That's ultimately the Zionist lobby's most powerful
weapon."
Nevertheless, many journalists have spoken out against the Zionist
lobby over the past 12 months. Last spring, there was a spat in the
Spectator between Lord Black of Crossharbour, the magazine's
proprietor, and three well-known contributors to his newspapers.
William Dalrymple, A N Wilson and Piers Paul Read wrote a letter
complaining that "under Black's proprietorship, serious, critical
reporting of Israel is no longer tolerated in the Telegraph Group".
Conrad Black (who also owns the Jerusalem Post and is married to
Barbara Amiel, the enthusiastic Zionist columnist) promptly returned
fire. The troublesome trio, he alleged, illustrated "the depths of
the problem of anti-Semitism in the British media".
A few months later, Sam Kiley, a foreign correspondent for the
Times, resigned after a row with his editors. Kiley had succeeded in
tracking down and interviewing the Israeli soldiers who had shot dead
Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy who had become, posthumously,
an icon of the intifada. Middle managers at Wapping, Kiley claims,
know that Rupert Murdoch has business interests in Israel and would
"fly into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group
wrote in with a quibble". The instruction Kiley received to file his
piece "without mentioning the dead kid" was the last straw.
Just before Christmas, Deborah Orr, who writes a column for the
Independent, complained that she was "fed up with being called an
anti-Semite". A tendency to equate anti-Zionism - indeed, any
criticism of Israel - with anti-Semitism is a persistent vice of
Zionist campaigners. Time was when the worst a commentator could
expect if he or she had written critically about Israel was a
telephone call from the publisher Lord Weidenfeld, registering his
anguish and disappointment. Weidenfeld, at one time chef de cabinet
to Israel's founding president, Chaim Weizmann, was and remains a
serious operator at the level of government, editors and media
proprietors. His name figures in ministerial diaries published by the
Foreign Office (breakfast 8am with Peter Hain and so on), but his
media interventions have always been discreet. Today, however,
critics of Israeli policy are guaranteed to receive thousands of
vituperative letters and e-mails. These correspondents take their cue
from organisations such as the Zionist Federation's Media Response
Unit, run by the former Labour MP for Basildon Eric Moonman; or from
the web-based HonestReporting.com, set up by two students at the
University of London who felt that Israel was getting a bum deal in
the press.
Robert Fisk, Orr's colleague at the Independent, complains that he
has been the victim of an anonymous smear campaign seeking to link
him with the notoriously anti-Semitic historian David Irving. Another
frequent target is Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian, who was named
Journalist of the Year at Granada's What the Papers Say Awards last
month for her "dedication to truthful reporting". She has been
bombarded with insulting mail, some of it denouncing her as a
"self-hating Jew".
But however vile these letter-writing campaigns may be for the
journalists concerned, is there the slightest evidence that they
affect what appears in the press? When one looks at the array of
pro-Israel organisations in Britain, one is struck not by their
cohesion so much as their fragmentation. Few (including Bicom) are
much more than a two-men-and-a-dog operation located above a shop, or
out in cyberspace. The only Jewish stereotype they reinforce is the
one portrayed in Woody Allen films, where a dozen members of a family
sit around the dinner table, all shouting different things at the
same time. Some clearly believe that Ariel Sharon can do no wrong,
others that he can do no good. In this, they reflect the pluralist
cast of Israel's polity. And that Israel is the only fully
functioning democracy in the Middle East is something they constantly
invite the rest of us to remember.
Bicom deals directly with the press, arranging visits and
"interview opportunities". It does not, it says, directly pressurise
individual journalists even when it believes they write untruths.
Recently, the organisation tried to hire Tim Luckhurst, a former
editor of the Scotsman, to sharpen its techniques. Luckhurst, a
non-Jew who is broadly sympathetic to Israel's dilemmas, was tempted,
but eventually turned the organisation down, preferring to continue
the struggle under his own byline.
The task of making formal complaints about supposed media
misrepresentations increasingly falls to the Board of Deputies of
British Jews, a solemn, rather bureaucratic organisation. Its
remonstrations are hardly strong-arm stuff, their register always
more in sorrow than in anger. The board has turned to another non-Jew
to put its case, the Scottish National Party activist Fiona Macaulay,
recruited in July from the Scottish Parliament.
A steelier edge to perception management is provided by the
Israeli embassy in the form of its press attache, David "DJ"
Schneeweiss. The pro-Palestinian camp credits DJ, an Australian who
emigrated to Israel 15 years ago, with almost supernatural powers.
Allegedly, he can be on the phone to every news editor at once, while
simultaneously schmoozing their proprietors. His opponents accuse him
of peddling the "big lies" of Israeli propaganda, such as the line
that the Palestinians deliberately put their children up front to
draw Israeli sniper fire, hoping a few infant deaths will help the
cause. But most journalists who have been fed that line source it
from Jerusalem. DJ is more of a close textual analyst, pointing out
that when Hamas uses the phrase "end the occupation" in a communique,
it does not mean, as the PLO does, the occupation of parts of the
West Bank and Gaza; it means the end of the existence of Israel.
The campaign against Goldenberg nicely illustrates the perils of
crude lobbying. Last June, after months of being pestered by Zionist
organisations, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, travelled
to Israel and the occupied territories to judge the situation for
himself. Shortly afterwards, he sent his foreign editor on a similar
fact-finding mission. The result has been that Israeli policies have
been brought into sharper critical focus in the Guardian than ever
before. Hardly the outcome the Zionist lobby desired. Nor has Simon
Kelner, the editor of the Independent, muzzled Robert Fisk, despite
an attempt by the Israeli embassy to persuade him to do so. In fact,
given that Black and Murdoch need no nobbling, it is hard to find an
instance where any senior figure in the media has been successfully
nobbled in recent years.
Read the liberal press almost any day of the week, and you will
find that Israel comes off worst. Many younger correspondents appear
to have forgotten that the UN was instrumental in bringing Israel
into existence; that the Israelis have had to fight off three
invasions from neighbouring Arab states; and that UN Resolution 242
is a more nuanced document than the reflexive attachment of the
epithet "illegal" to the occupation of the West Bank suggests.
Palestinian acceptance of Israel's right to exist behind secure
borders is often reported uncritically, sometimes implying that this
position is shared by Hamas. And a creeping cultural and moral
relativism holds Israel to account for every action and reaction,
while excusing Palestinian excesses on the grounds of poverty and a
general victim status.
I could go on, but only at the risk of being thought to have been
nobbled myself. The truth is that the "Zionist lobby" does exist, but
is a clueless bunch. After all, how media-savvy can such lobbyists
really be if they allow their operations to be greased by the profits
made from Shlomo Zabludowicz's mortars and bombs? Could any funding
arrangement be better contrived to confirm left-liberal prejudices
about Israel?
