I didn’t think anything about the post-October 7 explosion of antisemitism could shock me anymore. Then I read Jonathan Liew’s recent screed in The Guardian.
Liew, a football and opinion writer on the paper and a regular on podcasts and TV, decided his attentions should turn not to the plight of Iran’s female footballers, preparations for the World Cup or even the latest miscarriages of justice inflicted by VAR. No, he went to Archway and Palestinian Café Metro there, one that just so happens to be opposite a regularly vandalised new Gail’s.
Now a chain, Gail’s was founded by an Israeli some three decades ago and currently has an investor with links to Israeli defence firms. That means protestors regard daubing it in paint as a perfectly rational reaction. Obviously. I’m personally more offended by the limited number of gluten free options it offers.
The stomach-churning descriptions of what is almost certainly delicious food in Café Metro make Liew’s column a “honking piece of restaurant writing,” as Giles Coren put it on Twitter. More sinister is the way Liew compares this small, independent establishment to the Gail’s across the road.
I won’t inflict too much of the column on Jewish Chronicle readers, but there are a few passages that need flagging.
“Somehow these two north London cafés, from two entirely separate worlds, with what we have to assume are two almost entirely separate clienteles, have found themselves on the frontline of a war,” says Liew. “A deeply asymmetric war, defined by gross imbalances in power and resources and platforms, but a war nonetheless, and one that simultaneously feels more distant and more local than ever.”
Get it? You can actually see the smug smile on his face as you read it back.
The Guardian, facing a backlash for this despicable piece of work, published a correction. It removed a reference to the Gail’s opening feeling like “an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression”. The note said this was to avoid any confusion as to what Liew might be talking about, which was, of course, “the described fears about the chain’s impact on small traders.” It also said that “a comment contrasting activism that is capable of influencing global events with ‘small acts of petty symbolism’, which was not intended to minimise local vandalism but rather to suggest its misdirected futility, has been removed to avoid misunderstanding."
This treats readers as fools. We all know what the writer was alluding to, or what he thinks he was alluding to. Liew does not mention Hamas’s atrocities once, but finds a way to talk of “the Palestinian identity that Israel’s bombs and snipers are so intent on erasing.”
The whole thing highlights how the left has become totally consumed by Palestinianism. How a far-off war that in reality many of them know little about, has become an obsession. It also demonstrates how it has become part of an omnicause. The discussion cannot be about coffee or even independent premises vs chains, whatever that correction claims. It has to be about that faraway war.
We know people hold the appalling opinions expressed in the piece. It remains staggering that a national newspaper, one that is read around the world, thought it appropriate to publish such bile. How did an editor not flag passages like:
“You can’t lay a glove on the US-Israeli military-industrial complex, and you can’t get your local council to boycott Israeli goods, and you couldn’t stand with Palestine Action and the protest march on Sunday has been banned by the Metropolitan police. So some people then direct their ire at the bakery with distant links to Israeli security funding.”
Liew says that Café Metro has also been the subject of vandalism. Apparently pro-Israeli protests “descend on it to slap stickers on its windows”. Descend. Slap.
Liew, who did not respond when approached by the JC for comment, has form. For instance, back in 2022 he accused Israel of sports-washing, following the launch of the Israeli Premier Tech cycling team.
Such work ultimately leads to things like one in five students saying they would be “reluctant” to live with a Jewish student, per a recent survey conducted for UJS. That same survey found that 39 per cent of students who regularly see Israel-Palestine protests on campus said that intimidation and harassment of Jewish students happens “very” or “fairly” often.
A Guardian spokesperson told the JC:
“Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance.”
The readers’ editor will, at some point, give their verdict on Liew’s piece.
I don’t like to call for fellow hacks to lose their jobs. The industry is tough enough as it is. But in this instance Jonathan Liew and whoever commissioned and approved his revolting rant should immediately be handed their P45s.
Failure to do so will tell us everything we need to know about the Guardian and the left-wing middle classes who read it.
Charlotte Henry is a journalist and author
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