The Jewish Chronicle's pro-Israel extremism preceded the Elon Perry scandal

If you’d told me 20 years ago that the Jewish Chronicle would one day be at the centre of a minor diplomatic scandal I would’ve spat out my Corn Flakes.

At that age I read the paper at the breakfast table, skipping to the centrefold to see which of my friends’ bat mitzvah photos had made the cut.

These days I read it to find out which of my friends has had a hit piece done on them — a special interfaith rite of passage the paper has created exclusively for leftwing Jews and Muslims.

The oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the UK (it was founded in 1841), the JC’s self-description as “the organ of Anglo-Jewry” was always a bit of a joke among Jewish communities.

Until relatively recently, the Jewish Chronicle was mostly Tatler for Jewish pre-teens and a parish noticeboard for the alte kakes. The JC enjoyed its own parochialism; the first rule of journalism, and Judaism, is don’t become the story. Under its most recent two editors-in-chief, the gammonish Stephen Pollard and his oily successor Jake Wallis Simons, the paper has broken this rule with abandon.

The recent furore over the Jewish Chronicle’s fabrication of Israeli propaganda during an ongoing genocide marked the logical endpoint of the paper’s long and painful transformation from a beloved communal newspaper, then to a fanatical campaigning outlet ("For the past 4 and a half years," wrote its ex-editor Stephen Pollard "I've spent most of my waking hours thinking about Labour antisemitism and Jeremy Corbyn”), and now, a loudspeaker for genocidaires.

Last month, it emerged that the JC had been regularly publishing the news reports of a British Israeli journalist who had fabricated his CV and, it appears, his reportage.

Elon Perry had appeared in the Jewish Chronicle no fewer than nine times when, in early September, he made a claim so outlandish that even Israel’s heavily right-skewed media establishment queried it.

Perry reported that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar intended to smuggle the remaining Israeli hostages to Iran via the Philadelphi Corridor within the Gaza strip — the implication being that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was therefore justified in insisting on maintaining an Israeli army presence in the corridor, something Hamas has resisted in ceasefire talks.

Perry’s claim was decisively refuted by Israeli intelligence sources, who described it to Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 and news website Ynet as a “wild fabrication” — though not before being reiterated by Netanyahu’s son and wife, as well as the German tabloid Bild. The JC ran an internal investigation, confirmed Perry was a charlatan, removed his articles from its website and put out a practically tweet-length apology.

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These 100 words were insufficient to satisfy four of the paper’s best-known columnists. Two days later, David Aaronovitch, Hadley Freeman, David Baddiel and Jonathan Freedland collectively quit the paper.

The foursome appeared to have chosen this particular incident as their Rubicon largely because of its PR blowback – morally, it was far from the most egregious thing to come out of the paper or its editors in the last year.

“Onwards to victory!” This was how Wallis Simons captioned a video he shared in December of a 2,000-pound bomb detonating in Gaza City. Wallis Simons has since deleted the tweet (without apology, of course) – though you wonder why, given it was virtually indistinguishable from what the Jewish Chronicle publishes each week.

In November, for example, Wallis Simons published an op-ed by a Texan lawyer contorting himself into various pretzel shapes to justify “civilian harm” in Gaza: “collective impact and collective punishment are not the same,” wrote Geoffrey Corn, arguing that the term “war crime” had lost its meaning through overuse.

The same month, the paper published an op-ed by the non-Jewish far-right pseudo-intellectual Douglas Murray favourably comparing the Nazis to Hamas: “Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work,” Murray wrote in a piece of Holocaust revisionism that remains live on the JC website.

Meanwhile on his personal X/Twitter account, Wallis Simons continued publishing, denying – despite mountains of evidence – that Israel had deliberately killed journalists in Gaza, claiming falsely that Israel is selling abundant aid to the strip, and repeating on primetime television the Israeli claim – to this day, unevidenced – that Hamas beheaded babies on October 7.

When evidence subsequently became available, he stuck fiercely to the Israeli line, neither retracting nor apologising for his statements.

Elon Perry tested the lengths to which Wallis Simons would go to support Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and found there were none. If pushed, the paper would abandon – repeatedly – all journalistic standards to wave through fake reportage in the name of supporting Israel. Perry’s bogus reporting had a demonstrable impact on the genocide, his “intelligence” snatched up by the Netanyahus to feed the war machine, if only for a few days.

Does the Jewish Chronicle really matter, though? Nobody reads it anymore – it circulates just under 16,000 print copies, distributing around half of them for free – hence its near-death experience in 2020.

The community the JC purports to represent has tired of it: “Your campaign in regard to Jew hatred in the Labour party [...] has been irreproachable,” wrote Barry Hyman in a letter to the paper shortly before the 2019 general election. “I wonder though [...] should we perhaps take our communal foot off the pedal?” The thing is, the Jewish Chronicle stopped being a paper for Jews years ago.

The Elon Perry fiasco showed the real use of the Jewish Chronicle: having a rabidly rightwing outlet you can defer to as “the voice of British Jewry” is immensely helpful if you want to dress up your defence of apartheid, now genocide, as a moral crusade.

With the ear of everyone from the Israeli first family to the British Foreign Office, its editor regularly appearing on every major broadcaster, the JC is a small but sturdy vehicle for reactionary politics, and it knows it.

Why else would a non-Jewish BBC executive and former Downing Street comms chief want to direct it? Why else would its ownership be such a closely guarded secret? 

As the editors of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines discovered in the Rwanda trials of 1994, genocide does not have to involve spilling blood – it can simply involve creating a thirst for it – or, in the Jewish Chronicle’s case, literally providing Israeli politicians with excuses to commit it.

Sitting comfortably in his office thousands of miles away from the zone of interest, Jake Wallis Simons probably assumes this will all blow over in a few months and he will get back to plugging his book, an awkwardly-timed screed published on September 7 last year about how unfairly treated Israel is. He may soon discover his service has not gone unnoticed.

Rivkah Brown is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media

Follow her on X: @rivkahbrown

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.