In 1982, I ran headlong into the Guardian tanks on, of all things, the issue of Israel. I say ‘of all things’ because at that time I had never spoken or written about Israel. Indeed, I had never even been there and never wanted to go. I supported it in a vague kind of way as an unfortunate necessity, a refuge for Jews who were persecuted around the world. But that had nothing to do with me. I was British, a diaspora Jew happily living in the most civilised country on earth, and working for its most civilised newspaper among some of the most civilised people one could hope to meet.
Nevertheless, I became extremely concerned about what seemed to be a vendetta at the Guardian and by the left in general against Israel. Given the current anti-Israel obsession in those quarters, it may be hard now to realise that it was not always thus. Indeed, before the Six-Day War in 1967, the Guardian had been a passionate supporter of Israel. Along with the rest of the left, this attitude began to change in the seventies as the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat, working in cahoots with the Soviet Union, started to develop its wildly successful propaganda strategy. This audaciously set out to rewrite history and, in the eyes of the left, falsely transform the Israelis from socialist pioneers to colonialist aggressors, and the Palestinians from genocidal aggressors into aboriginal victims.
For myself, I only began to notice that something was amiss during 1982. Even though until then I had hardly thought about Israel, I noticed that the way it was now being treated set it apart from any other country. Coverage of Israel had become disproportionate, distorted, and viciously hostile, presenting it falsely as the bully in the region while ignoring or downplaying its victimisation by the Arab world.
In a leader conference one day, I asked why the Guardian appeared to be pursuing a double standard in its coverage of the Middle East. Why did it afford next-to-no coverage of Arab atrocities against other Arabs while devoting acres of space to attacking Israel for defending itself against terrorism?
The answer I received from my colleagues that day stunned me. Of course there was a double standard, they said. How could there not be? The Third World did not subscribe to the same ethical beliefs as the West about the value of human life. The West therefore was not entitled to judge any mass killings in the Third World by its own standards. That would be racist.
However, they said, we regard Israel as being part of the West – so we do judge its actions by our standards. Furthermore, they added for good measure, you Jews tell us you are actually morally superior to the rest of us – so we are surely entitled to judge you by even higher standards.
I was most deeply shocked. The views they had just expressed amounted to pure racism. They were in effect saying that citizens of a Third World country were not entitled to the same assumptions of human rights, life, and liberty as those in the developed world. What’s more, the remarks they had made about Jews and moral superiority were not just wrong – Jews believe they have particular and onerous moral duties in the world, not special status – but prejudiced and spiteful. And ominously, I had also been made to feel as if I was suddenly regarded as no longer one of them, but something different — a Jew — just because I had questioned the double standard over Israel.
But how could this be? This was the Guardian, shrine of anti-racism, custodian of social conscience, embodiment of virtue. How then could they be guilty of racism – and moreover, dress it up as anti-racism?
Of course, this is the core of what we now know today as ‘political correctness’ – where concepts are turned into their polar opposite in order to give miscreants a free pass if they belong to certain groups designated by the left as ‘victims’. They are thus deemed to be incapable of doing anything wrong, while groups designated as ‘oppressors’ can do no right.
According to this double-think it was simply impossible for the Guardian folk to be guilty of racism, since they championed the victims of the Third World against their Western capitalist oppressors. But when those Third World unfortunates became the victims of the Third World tyrants ruling over them, the left remained silent – since to criticise any Third World person was said to be ‘racism’.
This twisted thinking is what now passes for ‘progressive’ thinking in Britain and America. Thus the left actually abandons the oppressed of the world to their fate, all the time weeping crocodile tears for them – while sanctimoniously condemning ‘the right’ for its heartlessness! It is this hijacking of language and thought itself that has done so much to destroy any common understanding of the political ‘centre ground’, the lethal confusion that has so unfortunately polarised political debate into vacuous caricatures that have precious little to do with reality.
The second shoe dropped that summer. In April, Britain had mounted a seaborne military campaign to retake the Falkland Islands from the invading Argentines. The controversy over this enterprise within the Guardian was all-consuming. The issue was uppermost in our minds. On June 7, 1982, forty-eight British troops were killed and 115 wounded when two landing craft were attacked. On June 14, the Argentines surrendered. Eight days earlier, on June 6, Israel had invaded Lebanon. At some point within that eight-day period, with the Falklands campaign reaching its denouement, I ran into the Guardian’s chief leader-writer, Geoffrey Taylor.
Taylor was the quintessential English gentleman. In his mild and tweedy diffidence, he could have stepped straight out of an Alan Bennett play. He was courteous, measured, and thoughtful. He was also the inspired wit who had created much of the wonderful San Serriffe spoof five years earlier. But he was also an Arabist. His default position, expressed in the most benign, gentle, and civilised terms, was to sympathise with the Arabs and assume the worst about the behaviour of Israel.
‘Well, now, Melanie’, he said to me that day in his donnish way, ‘what on earth are we going to say about your war?’
He was not referring to the Falklands. He was referring to Lebanon. ‘My’ war was now a foreign war. I had suddenly become not really British, the outsider, the Jewish ‘other’, all because I had dared protest at the injustice and worse in the paper’s coverage of Israel.
At that moment, the iron entered my soul. Even so, it was to be many years before I would finally arrive at the conclusion which, with hindsight, should have been all too obvious right then. Deny it as I might, I had made myself different from people for whom no difference could be tolerated. Without realising it at the time, I had stepped into a place from where there was never to be a way back.
CHAPTER 5: Traitors: How the Baton Was Snapped
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had created a base for its terrorist activities there, unleashed what was at the time an unprecedented media onslaught upon Israel. I myself did not approve of that war and thought it was misguided, as it seemed to have been embarked upon with no clearly achievable end game in sight. But I was astounded to see that not only was Israel’s victimisation by Palestinian terrorism brushed aside, but Israel was also being painted, preposterously, as the victimiser for seeking to protect its citizens from attack. And I also noticed all around me something all too familiar crawling out, as if that war had opened Pandora’s Box: classic Jew-hating images and concepts, dinner-party talk associating Jews with money, clannishness, and sinister power.
After the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon, this all gradually subsided. But I realised that what had been said to me at the Guardian, along with the wider onslaught of wildly distorted anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish invective, could not be dismissed. Yet I had been brought up with the belief that we Jews should be grateful to the British for having allowed us to settle in the UK, to assimilate and to prosper.
I couldn’t get the images of that awful summer and autumn of 1982 out of my head, this eruption of a malign and vicious resentment through presenting Israelis as latter-day Nazis for seeking to defend themselves against attack. Nor could I sort out in my mind that my progressive Guardian colleagues thought it was anti-racist to den
y the entitlement of human rights to the Third World – and regarded me as not properly British, just because I was a Jew who defended Israel. But I was also hearing something else – that any Jew who protested that the unique singling out of Israel for this kind of double standard carried the unmistakable echoes of ancient Jew-hatred was accused of ‘waving the shroud of the Holocaust’ and crying wolf over antisemitism. Jew-hatred had become the prejudice that dared not speak its name.
I tried to talk about this to my parents. My mother kept her views to herself, but my father was upset by the hostile coverage of Israel. I tried to explain what I thought was happening at the Guardian, that something horrible was taking place on the left where there seemed to be a refusal to accept that poor people could ever do anything wrong, and where anti-Jewish feeling was coming out of the woodwork. This merely made my father more upset. He would not hear a word against his beloved Guardian.
As I continued to brood, I happened to meet Julia Pascal, a playwright and theatre director who felt as deeply about all this as I did. The result of our friendship was that I wrote a play distilling these experiences and dilemmas which Julia put on at a fringe theatre in London, the Drill Hall, in January 1986.
The Drill Hall was a lesbian theatre, which might be thought a somewhat odd choice of venue for such a production. In fact, the theatre’s management clearly empathised with the plight of someone made to feel an outsider in her own society and they were magnificently supportive. I fear I subsequently caused them pain by some of the views I went on to express in later years, but that experience was very special and I will always be grateful for the support they gave me.
The play raised the issues of Jew-hatred in liberal English society, what patriotism meant to a British Jew, and how such a Jew could find personal equilibrium when such loyalty to Britain was publicly called into question by support for Israel.
In an interview about the play in 1986, I said, ‘Israel is becoming a pariah and I think that’s going to continue… Jews aren’t seen as victims or oppressed people at all. Jews are seen as people who victimise and oppress others... It’s endemic, but there is an almost universal reluctance to admit this undercurrent of antiemitism exists, particularly among decent people who are wholly untainted by it. They simply will not accept it. It’s as if one is striking at the very heart of what they believe their society to be about. You can see them almost physically recoil from the suggestion. Good liberals are more prepared to admit the British establishment and institutions are anti-black. But they are not prepared to admit the British establishment is anti-Jew’.
I had stumbled on a phenomenon whose wider ramifications I would not fully grasp until the start of the next millennium. At the time, the Guardian’s theatre critic, Michael Billington, pooh-poohed what he thought was the play’s shaky premise ‘...that a dithery, liberal English magazine would print a palpably inflammatory piece comparing the Israelis to Hitler and Himmler’.
A quarter of a century on, it seems that liberal Britain never stops comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. It was not until the year 2000 that this issue would roar back into my life and all but engulf me. But the experiences of 1982 jolted me at that time in a far broader and profound way. They put me on notice that I had been wrong – wrong to have assumed that prejudice and bigotry were confined to the right, wrong to have assumed that I was just another member of the British liberal gang, wrong to have assumed that the liberal left was on the side of the angels. I now realised that, on the contrary, there was a gaping moral hole at its heart. From that point on, I began to look at the left across the board in a more detached and wary way.
Despite the events of 1982, I lived a charmed life during my first seven years at the Guardian. I was clearly marked out for great things. Preston described me in an article as a ‘corporal with a field-marshal’s baton in her knapsack’. For all that, however, and belied by my over-confident manner, I remained nervous, shy and — contrary to what was generally believed — consumed by self-doubt. Although at the time I had no insight into this, I can now see – in the light of all that subsequently happened — that I always felt myself to be an imposter, that I did not feel entitled to any of the praise or esteem that came my way because, as someone whose very life had caused my mother to be so unwell, I was really not entitled to exist at all.
In 1984, I became the Guardian’s news editor. This meant I was now in charge of my former colleagues, the news reporters, and the daily operation to obtain and write the news stories that would go into the following day’s paper. It was a very big promotion. The news desk was the nerve centre of the paper. The pressure would be intense and unrelenting.
By this stage I also had a second child: my daughter Abigail was born in 1982. To take on such a job with two very young children might be thought reckless. Somehow I managed every morning to fit in reading all the papers, listening to the news and getting the children up, washed, and breakfasted before the nanny arrived; later I even managed to fit in the school run. It was a military operation that left some male colleagues shaking their heads. I thought I had it licked.
The reporters, however, were bemused by my appointment; some were openly incredulous. I had been one of them — even as a leader-writer I had chosen not to move upstairs to the leader-room but remained at my desk in the newsroom — and I had no managerial experience whatsoever. I would now be under intense scrutiny, the focus of the gossip, backbiting, and sniping that were standard fare at the Guardian’s offices in Farringdon Road.
I was deeply dubious about the move. It meant I would have to forge a close working relationship with the senior sub-editors known collectively as the ‘backbench’. Literally close: we all sat at the same table.
The backbench sub-editors were the production part of the editorial process, preparing the reporters’ copy for publication. But the reporters regarded the backbench with deep suspicion and hostility, because they re-wrote the reporters’ copy and often unilaterally altered the previously decided position of the stories in the paper.
The actual process of getting the copy from the reporters’ typewriters into the paper was, to put it mildly, arcane. In those days before computers, reporters physically took their story, typed with two carbon copies, to the news desk and dropped it into wire baskets, from where copies of each story were read and edited by the news desk staff and thence passed on, via the night news editor, to the back-bench under the night editor — whose team often proceeded to undo all the editing work that had just been done.
I thought all this was completely bonkers. So, it seemed, did Peter Preston. I was urged to reform the system. I was also given the green light to tackle what Preston regarded as the endemic problem of the newsroom — the need to get rid of the dead wood among the reporters who he thought were taking the paper for a ride, and to sharpen and improve the reporting.
I told him I was nervous that, with this promotion, I would finally hit the limits of my own competence. ‘Not at all’, he said cheerfully, puffing on his pipe, ‘it will be a terrific success.’
In those days, I was an enormous fan of Peter Preston. I thought (and still do think) he was a journalistic genius. Despite his carefully cultivated opacity, I thought his professional instincts and insights were generally spot-on. I was always hearing people spitting tacks over his perceived duplicity, manipulation, and heartlessness. I just couldn’t understand them. But then I was his golden girl.
Before I actually took over as news editor, I had a month’s ‘induction’ shadowing the then holder of that post. On the very first day of my induction, I collapsed onto the floor. As I lay there, dizzy and in pain, I heard the inevitable whispered speculation: ‘Do you think she’s pregnant?’ Ill as I was, I ground my teeth that at the Guardian, of all places, you couldn’t be ill without also falling victim to an anti-feminist stereotype.
In fact, it turned out to be a chronic stomach condition almost certainly brought on by stress. And I hadn’t even started in my new post. Litt
le did I know it at the time, but it was to prove an augury of the ill-health that would continuously plague me on the news desk.
I never thought I was cut out for that particular job; subsequent events proved that I was right. I didn’t do it well and made many mistakes. Rapidly, I realised I was out of my depth, but instead of shouting for rescue, I slowly and silently drowned.
The worst mistake I made was to ignore the advice given right at the start by my predecessor, Peter Cole, who had been a brilliant success in the job. ‘Stick to what is possible’, he said. ‘Keep everything ticking along, and whatever you do, don’t try to bend the system to what you want it to do. Don’t forget that Preston has never run a news desk; he hasn’t got a clue what it involves.’
I ignored that advice. Instead I decided that I would reform the desk structure and improve the standard of the journalism. This was a terrible misjudgment.
The first shock was to discover, as soon as I looked at the reporters’ copy, how few of them could actually write. The quality of the writing on this ‘writers’ newspaper’ was often the outcome of the efforts of both the news desk and the reviled sub-editors.
Foolishly, I took it upon myself to try to remedy this situation. I thought if I could help the reporters improve their stories, I would short-circuit the sub-editors and everyone would be happy. Instead, I found myself resembling a British soldier on the Falls Road in Northern Ireland trying to keep the peace between Catholics and Protestants.
The reporters believed that every word they wrote was a gem. They resented any changes to their copy as desecration by philistines. The sub-editors held the reporters in almost total contempt as over-educated prima donnas; and, as often as not, they would blue-pencil their priceless prose and shoehorn into the story copy supplied by news agencies which they said was far superior in quality. The reporters looked to me to protect their every word from the predations of the sub-editors. The sub-editors looked to me to do one thing only – to keep the copy flowing in their direction regardless of what was in it. When I tried to preserve what was valuable in the reporters’ copy, the subs treated me with contempt. When I tried to suggest ways in which their copy might be improved, the reporters treated me with contempt.
Guardian Angel Page 5
