The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews

The fact that radical NGOs, international bodies and, eventually, mainstream media outlets began giving their fantastical October 7 revisionism credibility, without being subject to critical scrutiny, meant that their libel that Israel represented a cosmic evil spread throughout the Western world.

It also gave radical anti-Israel activists wind in their sails – a confidence that they could extend their demonisation of Israel to Jews abroad, at least to those who didn't pass their moral litmus test requiring them to not only denounce, without qualification, the Jewish state, but to completely disassociate themselves from their ancestral homeland.

The target placed on the back of those diaspora Jews not pre-approved by antizionist ideological enforcers has resulted in a dramatic rise in antisemitism in the US, UK and other Western countries over the past 32 months.

It's also meant that, in the arts and culture sphere, Israelis and diaspora Jews have often been the object of de facto boycott campaigns – often guided by the charge that their insufficient loyalty to the antizionist cause means that they condone genocide or are even complicit in the crime.

In other words, the antizionist movement has had a sort of mission creep – no longer merely content with ridding the world of the only Jewish state, they now seek to anathematise the overwhelming majority of the world's Jews.

The American Oscar-winning Jewish actress Gwyneth Paltrow refused to obey the pro-Palestinian protocols, and, naturally, drew an online backlash for appearing in a television commercial for 51 Park, a luxury residential development in Herzliya, Israel.

Despite the fact that Herzliya, a city within Israel's 1949 boundaries, was founded by Jews in 1924, and was demarcated as part of the the soon to be established Jewish state in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, the radicalised anti-Jewish mob on social media accused her of complicity in genocide.

Hateful comments have been flooding her recent Instagram posts – though she didn't post the commercial herself, as some commenters called her “Genocide Queen" and others piled on by contorting her first name to "Gwynocide".

Such hateful slurs imputing collective Jewish guilt for a non-existent crime are reminiscent of a time when Jews were routinely called "Christ Killers".

Enter The Guardian, where antizionist columnist Arwa Mahdawi – who began accusing Israel of of genocide in early November 2023, engaged in October 7 revisionism of the “it didn't take place in a vacuum” variety, and, despite describing herself as a feminist, never used her column to condemn Hamas' systematic rape of Israeli women, girls and men – published a piece excoriating Paltrow. 

It ran under the headline: “From Goop to ‘Gwynocide’: why is Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a luxury Israeli real estate ad?”
Beneath it appeared the following summary: “Paltrow went viral this week for her commercial for 51 Park – a building just miles from where Palestinians are being killed and displaced.”

Mahdawi's accusation of Paltrow's putative complicity in a (non-existent) genocide is based entirely on the fact that the commercial is for a building located "just miles" from where Palestinians are being killed:

“While the situation in the West Bank is terrible, it’s even worse in Gaza – which is only 50 or so miles away from the luxury pilates room at 51 Park,” she writes.

So, the logic would suggest, not only are all Israelis, even those living within pre-67 boundaries, guilty or complicit in genocide, but diaspora Jews – and, presumably, non-Jews – who visit, invest, or in any way associate with the state, within any borders, are genocidaire-adjacent.

Then, the Guardian columnist places an even large target on Israelis and Jews by evoking the Nazi analogy:

"Newborn babies are being gnawed on by rats in filthy camps in Gaza, while Paltrow shows off the wine rooms of a luxury tower development down the road,” Mahdawi writes. “It is some real The Zone of Interest stuff.”

The Zone of Interest is a film focusing on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who lived with their children in a home in the "Zone of Interest" next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

So, for at least the fifth time since October 7, 2023, Guardian editors have promoted one of the most morally grotesque and cruel forms of antisemitism – the attempted “Nazification” of Jews.

"There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide", wrote Howard Jacobson, "as though those making it feel they have their man at last". The sadism, he added, "resides, specifically, in attacking Jews where their memories of pain are keenest...by making them now the torturer and not the tortured, their assailants wrest their anguish from them, not only stealing their past but trampling on it."

Of course, the only party in the war that is guilty of genocide is Hamas, whose desire to rid the world of the Jewish state is codified in its founding charter, and who live-streamed to the world on October 7 what barbarism inspired by Nazi-like hatred of Jews looks like.

Turning again to Jacobson, who wrote that "morality changed on 7 October. Black became white, evil good, ugliness, beauty, the victim the culprit" and that "it was Hamas’s genius to have seen something to its advantage in the declining status of the Jews in the conscience of the west.” It realised, he added, "how the drip, drip, drip of unremitting revilement in the western media and on western campuses had worn away their humanity".

It is undoubtedly true that, both before and after October 7, no mainstream British outlet has done more to inspire the "revilement" of Jews than the Guardian.

Adam Levick is UK Media Research Manager at CAMERA