The closing months of 2005 saw the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, a long-standing object of suspicion to Israeli politicians, being reassigned to South Africa. The BBC also upheld an Israeli complaint against its reporter, Barbara Plett, over her heartfelt reaction to the death of Yasser Arafat. To top it all, BBC Director General Mark Thompson flew to Israel for a meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, leaving the impression that avoiding causing offense to Israel was his highest priority.
None of this would have come as a surprise to the late Michael Adams (who died last year) and the late Christopher Mayhew (who died in 1998). Adams, a British writer and journalist with a special interest in the Middle East, and Mayhew, who for many years was a leading Labour MP, spent their lives deploring the pro-Zionist leanings of much of the British establishment including the media. Thirty years ago, they collaborated on an impassioned polemic, “Publish it Not: the Middle East Cover-Up”, vividly evoking the history of British indulgence of Israel.
Adams and Mayhew had the foresight to realize that the Balfour Declaration of 1917, with its promise of a homeland for Jews in Palestine, had the potential to destabilize not just the Middle East but also the wider world. It is a tribute to the enduring potency of Adams and Mayhew’s indictment of the Zionist project that their book has just appeared in Britain for the third time. The new edition comes with a voluminous introduction by the sometime BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn, a British journalist who has likewise paid for his candor on the subject of Israel. Llewellyn stresses that the Middle East cover-up against which Adams and Mayhew protested continues unabated.
Adams and Mayhew were among the most eloquent Western champions of the Palestinian point of view. This was at a time when the few who dared to dispute the Israeli view of things were instantly exposed to the orchestrated fury of the Zionist lobby — as the Irish journalist Erskine Childers found when in a Spectator article of 1961 he wrote that Israel had been founded on an act of ethnic cleansing.
In some ways, “Publish it Not” was an outpouring of British liberal guilt. If one thing united them above all, it was distaste for the institutionalized Israeli tendency to view Arabs as Untermenschen. Founding members of the lobbying body, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, they wanted to expose the dishonorable part Britain had played in giving European colonialism a new lease of life in the Middle East by underwriting the ideology of Zionism. To some this was shameless anti-Semitism.
Made up of essays which Adams and Mayhew wrote separately, “Publish it Not” is a highly emotional book that was also the result of much hard thinking. Its central charge was that it had been wrong “to permit Jewish pressure for the creation of a national home to override the vital interests of the Palestinian Arabs”. Equally, the book argued, it had been wrong for the West to acquiesce in further Israeli occupation and oppression in Palestine after the 1967 war. Unequivocal in their denunciation of Palestinian terrorism, Adams and Mayhew nevertheless insisted that it would never have emerged in the first place if Palestine had not been handed over to alien domination.
At the time when Adams and Mayhew were writing the prevailing view of Israel was of an idealistic young nation menaced by its Arab neighbors. Even for the Guardian and the New Statesman, the essential nobility of the Zionist cause had long been an article of faith. Some years before he co-wrote “Publish it Not”, Michael Adams had in fact served as the Guardian’s Middle East correspondent — only to discover that when it came to reporting on Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, there were strict limits to the Guardian’s open-mindedness.
In her study, “The Guardian and Israel” (2004), Israeli journalist Daphna Baram has described how, following the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, editor Alistair Hetherington declined to publish a report from Adams on the destruction of the Palestinian (and biblical) village of Emmaus by Israeli soldiers. The episode supplied no small part of Adams’ motivation for writing “Publish it Not”. It also made him all the more eager to join with a number of other pro-Palestinian establishment figures in setting up the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding and the subsequent launching of the council’s house magazine, Middle East International — of which he was to become founding editor.
Adams had played his part in saving the world from Nazi domination and the annihilation of the Jews such domination would have entailed. Still he had to put up with untold vilification at the hands of Zionists. The same fate befell his friend and coadjutor, Christopher Mayhew.
Mayhew was first exposed to Zionism in the House of Commons in the late 1940s. In “Publish it Not”, he drew on his parliamentary experience to write about the penetration of the British political life in general and the Labour Party in particular by Zionist influence. He had much to say about the remarkably indulgent attitude toward the Jewish state of Britain’s Labour prime minister during the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Wilson. Wilson even refused to meet a delegation from the British business community that wanted to lobby him against his stance because they thought it was undermining British commerce in the Middle East. After the 1967 Six Day War, he declared that to talk of Israel withdrawing from the occupied territories was “unreal.”
Mayhew wanted to know why a Labour Party that had proclaimed its revulsion against the exploitation of man by man seemed only too ready to waive this rule when it came to Israel and its systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.
Mayhew’s incredulity at the Labour Party’s pervasive Zionism was matched by Adams’ incomprehension about the tendency of the media to privilege the Israeli stance to the detriment of the Arab Palestinian point of view. At the time when he was writing, the BBC’s Israel correspondent was Michael Elkins, a known Zionist.
Adams refers to an attempt by the Arab League’s London office to publish a supplement on Palestine in the Times. But it could only be published in the form of a paid advertisement (with the word “advertisement” printed in bold capitals at the top of each page). Worse still, the Times even ran a leader that described the supplement as “extremely partisan”!
Much has changed of course since then. In Britain, the Arab point of view is nothing like as ill represented as it once was. In the British Parliament, cross-party support for Israel remains strong but now there is also cross-party support for the Palestinian cause. Moreover, some sections of the British media have become increasingly hospitable to the Palestinian viewpoint. There is even a small but growing body of Jews on both sides of the Atlantic who are much troubled by the way Israel conducts itself and who strive to raise Jewish consciousness of the cruel price that has been paid by Palestinians for Israel’s existence.
But as a new report on the BBC’s coverage of Arab-Israeli conflict acknowledges, a more even-handed approach to the conflict remains elusive. After all Tony Blair chose as his “Middle East Envoy” Lord Levy, a Jewish businessman who raised funds on behalf of a former Israeli prime minister, and who owns a house in Tel Aviv.
And consider the dismissive official response to the 52 British ambassadors who in May 2002 published an open letter to the British government regarding the Middle East peace process. The ambassadors said the British government was endorsing US/Israeli policies that flouted international law and long-established UN resolutions. The government of Tony Blair briefed that it was typical of the “camel corps”, the Arabist faction associated with the British Foreign Office that has sought to build bridges with the Arab world. In common with Foreign office Arabists, Adams and Mayhew were temperamentally at odds with the exclusive Judaeo-Christian worldview that still informs Anglo-American attitudes toward the Middle East and which received epoch-making expression in the Balfour Declaration. Part of the abiding importance of “Publish it Not” resides in the cogency with which it lays bare the underlying Zionist sympathies of the British establishment.
Even allowing that there is greater regard for the Arab point of view than at the time when Adams and Mayhew were writing, perceptions of the Arab world in Britain and the US remain disastrously mired in ethnocentric assumptions. Such views have become even more entrenched since Sept. 11, 2001 and the subsequent terrorist attacks in Madrid and London — events which have led to the wholesale demonizing of Arabs and Muslims without any corresponding acknowledgement of the part played by Zionism in making the world an ever more divided, ever more dangerous, place.
— Neil Berry is a freelance journalist living in London. In 2002, he published a book, Articles of Faith: the Story of British Intellectual Journalism. He is working on a book about British Arabists and British Zionists.
