The actual reality behind the Guardian’s fantasy about root causes of Palestinian suffering - by Adam Levick

Though economic problems facing Gaza and the West Bank are different, the editorial’s reflexive dismissal of the US plan and myopic diagnosis of the territories’ challenges have one common – and characteristically Guardian – thread: the failure to hold Palestinians even minimally responsible for their fate.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
26 June '19..

In an official editorial (“The Guardian view on Trump and Israel-Palestine: the reality behind Kushner’s fantasy”) published on June 25, the Guardian predictably lambasted the new US peace plan, particularly its economy-first approach of promoting Palestinian prosperity as a path to a permanent resolution.

Whilst there was little in the editorial that was uprising, one sentence in particular caught our eye, because it says so much about how little the Guardian understands the root causes of Palestinian economic woes.

Many of these initiatives have been proposed before – in some cases, more than a decade ago – and are unachievable under current conditions. The report advocates them nonetheless because it simply refuses to recognise that the biggest obstacle to economic development is the West Bank’s occupation and the blockade of Gaza.

On the same day, the Guardian published another analysis by Mid-East correspondent Martin Chulov which similarly opined that “a central factor in the slow growth of the Palestinian economy has been the Israeli occupation”.

First, the suggestion that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is the biggest obstacle to the territory’s economic development grossly misunderstands the basic causality.  The blockade is not a cause, but the natural result of Hamas’s decision to prioritise terror, and their goal of annihilating Israel, over the well-being of their citizens.  No country in the world would allow the unimpeded flow of weapons to a territory on its border ruled by a government that has launched thousands of rockets at its civilians.  If there wasn’t a fanatical, Islamist terror group controlling Gaza, there would be no blockade. 

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Adam Levick has served as Managing Editor of UK Media Watch – a CAMERA affiliate – since 2010. Previously he worked as a researcher at NGO Monitor and, prior to that, worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Anti-Defamation League. Adam has published detailed reports on progressive antisemitism for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.