Is our media biased against Israel?

How Westerners view the conflict tells us more about ourselves than about Gaza

Towering columns

In ConservativeHome, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove argues for conservatism to rediscover its roots to meet modern challenges. Conservatism is about more than individualism and markets; it is about family, community, fairness and national resilience.

We must also stand up for British voters in the face of rapid social and cultural change. Respect for the values and experience of all our citizens also means tackling those ideological actors who seek to divide our society. That means upholding pride in the places people love and confidence in our inclusive culture. As conservatives, we know history does not march in one direction only. We have a choice – this is the gift of democracy.

…our nation state does not need to wither before impersonal global market forces, or be out-competed by hostile trading partners and aggressive powers. It is possible to achieve both faster growth and a fairer social contract. Individual freedom can only find its fulfilment in the bonds of community. A state that is active, not absent, need not lead to the stagnation of welfarism. Rather, it can enable the kinds of private sector growth that will lead to better jobs and prosperity across all regions, communities and classes.

We believe conservatism has the intellectual resources and the strategic pragmatism to embrace change and provide new answers. Our well-tested beliefs, applied to new contexts and challenges, will prevail. Prosperity and fairness can co-exist. Individual, community and nation depend upon one another.

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Israel and Gaza has finally put paid to the claim of impartiality:

Yet on a story with implications for the stability of the entire Middle East, if not the world, and for the safety of Jews here in Britain, the corporation became a conduit for terrorist propaganda. Will its journalists go to bed plagued by doubt and introspection? Will anyone be fired? Will any of its policies change?

I have always thought that, despite its flaws, the BBC was ultimately a force for good. But everyone has a moment when their perception flips. The moment I stopped trusting the scientific establishment was when we learnt senior scientists had lied about their views on the Covid lab leak. And this is the moment when I stopped believing in the BBC. Meanwhile, the war is grinding on. I am under no illusions that everything Israel does will be noble or right. But the cause is just and must prevail.

What is clearer than ever is that the governing classes of far too many western institutions want Israel to fail. They want it to fail physically, as they state with increasing brazenness. But just as importantly for their fragile worldview, they want it to fail morally. They need this failure because without it, all their nonsensical, convoluted political theories, all the ridiculous victim hierarchies and weird psychological complexes projected on to the world, make no sense and will be revealed as the worthless, nasty nest of guilt and prejudice they really are.

That is why organisations supposedly devoted to the truth, such as “impartial” media and venerated universities, have instead become allergic to it.

In the New Statesman, former Downing Street policy chief Munira Mirza says Islamism remains a potent and unique force here in the West, yet it somehow defies liberal comprehension.

Islamism remains a powerful force, despite 20 years of efforts to eradicate it. The Western media may have been distracted over the past 15 years by economic crisis and internal domestic strife, but Islamism is still a potent influence in the Middle East and in some Muslim communities in the West. We still experience occasional terrorist incidents, such as the Manchester Arena bombing or the London Bridge attack, both in 2017, but the public is unaware of the multiple foiled plots (including Iranian-backed assassination attempts on UK soil) and ongoing attempts by Islamists to build support in Britain. We see it when mobs of entitled men – and they are almost always men – gather outside schools demanding censorship of reading materials and punishment for teachers who defy them.

The Western liberal mindset struggles to understand this quasi-religiosity and how it can drive people to commit violence. Why, we ask, would any sane person kill himself or others in pursuit of the restoration of the medieval Islamic caliphate? The concept that there are some among us who want to commit genocide against Jews is so beyond our ken that it is easier to believe the excuses about oppression and imperialism. The immense complexity of the situation in the Middle East is reduced to a cartoon formulation of triumphalist Jews and oppressed Arabs who have no choice but to react with terrorism.

For many Western observers, the solution is to “address poverty” or “give back land to the Palestinians”, although Israel could argue that each time it has withdrawn from land, that same territory has then been used to launch attacks on Israelis. The Islamist mindset, which uses Palestinians as human shields and forces Iranians to live under totalitarian control, does not act in the best interests of Muslims, but instead seeks a holy war and the total annihilation of its enemies.

In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy says the reality of global civilisational conflict will continue to be played out here in Britain.

We are not only living in an age of imperial power and resurgent nationalism but an age of competing civilisations. As early as the 1990s, Samuel Huntington, the American academic, foresaw the possibility of conflict between the different civilisations of the world. It remains a controversial argument. 

But the state of world affairs today, including confrontation between China and America, vindicates Huntington. The recently warming relations between the Gulf states, Israel and America show that civilisational blocs will form alliances – sometimes transient – that allow them to focus on bigger threats: America on China, Israel and the Gulf states on Iran. Transient is the word, however. The Saudi decision to blame Israel for the Hamas attack has, for now at least, derailed the anti-Iranian coalition. It was motivated by civilisational purpose. The Huntington theory remains persuasive.

Civilisational competition is different to national or imperial competition in that it is based more on ideas and identities, which thanks to modern communication, easy travel and mass migration can cross borders and survive wars more readily than armies and buildings. There is a geopolitical consequence to civilisational conflict, as Huntington explained, but if the world’s rivalries are replicated at home, there will be domestic consequences too.

At UnHerd, Tom McTague says Western commentators seem able to view the conflict in Israel and Gaza only through their own ideological prism.

Today, a simple recounting of events is all but impossible, each story revealing far more about its narrator than the battle between Israel and Hamas. For some on the Left, for example, it is now “racist” to say the mass slaughter of Israelis was in any way antisemitic. Apparently, to do so is to project European values onto the Palestinians — who do not care about ethnicity, only occupation. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a take come so close to genuine insight, only to fall into the mud at the last. Can there be anything more obsessively Western than such an insistence on framing everything through the lens of colonialism and racism?

However absurd the argument might be, it is now the dominant framing through which history is seen in the West. This racist-coloniser logic runs through the Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s claim, for instance, that “settlers are not civilians” (and so, presumably, legitimate military targets for Hamas). And it is there in the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”. In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.

At the heart of all these claims lies the same grim conclusion: that Israel itself is illegitimate, a settler state which should be wiped off the map as if it were some kind of Levantine Rhodesia. This is the logic behind signs reading “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — not a benign call for national liberation, but a demand for the conquest of Israel itself and, at least according to Hamas, death for the Jews who live there. The founding charter of Hamas is unequivocal on this point. Yet instead of taking Hamas at its word, there seems to be an effort in the West to reinterpret its language into something more palatable to our own understanding of the world, filled as it is with ideas of endless progress and liberation. For many of us, national liberation is an axiomatic good, part of the progress of humanity towards an ever more perfect union — the opposite of colonialism.

In the Financial Times, Martin Wolf says perverse incentives have caused pension funds to divest from UK equities, stunting growth.

Why has this happened? The answer starts with the dumping of UK equities by UK pensions and insurance companies. The share of their portfolios invested in UK equities has shrunk from more than 50 per cent to 4 per cent in the past three decades. Companies have also been forced to make £250bn in pension contributions to fill fictitious deficits. Just how fictitious was shown by the £1tn fall in their liabilities after the recent jump in interest rates. The shrinkage of the investor base has dramatically reduced the amount of capital raised by UK corporates.

All this has reduced corporates’ ability to invest and so grow. The resulting decline in the prospects for growth in earnings and so capital gains has then forced higher payouts, which have further reduced cash for investment. The shrinkage of the UK investor base has also increased the claims of non-UK investors. In 2004, 65 per cent of distributions stayed in the UK. By 2022, this was roughly 25 per cent. This, then, is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of corporate self-liquidation.

None of this matters in fantasy financial economics, in which national borders are irrelevant, investment can be funded from anywhere in the world and markets are rational and far-sighted. But, in reality, US companies benefit hugely from favoured access to American capital markets, just as US investors benefit from superior connections to American corporates. Location matters. As UK businesses come to be increasingly owned by foreigners, the interests of the UK will come second.

Wonky thinking

The Institute for Fiscal Studies published its Green Budget 2023, which anticipates the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement. The authors paint a bleak fiscal picture, saying Jeremy Hunt has no room for either tax cuts or significantly more spending.

One problem is that debt interest spending is so high and is expected to settle at its highest sustained level since the mid 1980s, around £30 billion above levels to which we have become accustomed. That’s £30 billion each year that can’t be put to better use. In addition, the growth outlook is poor. Debt as a fraction of national income is set to rise to, and then settle not far below 100% of GDP. 

Into the medium term, we face huge fiscal pressures – from spending on health and state pensions in particular. The NHS workforce plan alone – to which the Conservative government and the Labour opposition have signed up – will raise spending by 2% of national income by the mid 2030s. Cutting defence spending is no longer on the cards. We live in a demonstrably risky political and economic environment which could require a big spike in borrowing at any moment. More economic growth on a sustained basis would help, but this is not something that policymakers or politicians can simply will into existence, and even the best-designed policies would take time to bear fruit. Now is not the time to plan for debt to rise further in the medium term.

The Chancellor’s specific target is that debt should be falling as a fraction of national income between the fourth and fifth years of the forecast period. This is a badly designed target. It may well be that the Chancellor will be able to meet the letter of this target, helped by the fact that the forecast ‘rolls forward’ by a year each autumn and so will apply to 2028–29 rather than 2027–28. But any ‘headroom’ against this poorly-designed target would not indicate space for tax cuts – especially if a certain and immediate tax cut is ‘paid for’ by future tax rises and/or unspecified spending cuts that may never happen. 

While borrowing is likely to be around £20 billion lower this year than the OBR expected in March, it is still likely to come in at around £112 billion which, at 4.2% of GDP, is much higher than its long-run average, over £60 billion more than was forecast in March 2022 in Rishi Sunak’s final Budget as Chancellor. Jeremy Hunt should not do as so many of his predecessors have done: accept higher borrowing when the figures get worse from one forecast to another but then spend any apparent windfall when forecasts improve. That would mean borrowing and debt always ending up higher than forecast.

Into the medium term, we expect the OBR to be forecasting higher deficits than it did back in March. It may well reduce its growth forecast and will surely assume much higher debt interest payments going forward. It will not be providing Mr Hunt with additional room for manoeuvre.

For the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Louise Perry, Fiona Mackenzie and Ellen Pasternack argue in Who Cares? The Real Cost of Childcare that the UK needs to look to international examples of more flexible childcare support to reflect the proper societal value of family and parenting.

It is no longer part of mainstream Western culture to celebrate and support women at this time of intense need. New mothers cannot practically expect to be tended to by loved ones in the first month or two of their newborn’s life. People live far from their friends and relatives, and are likely to be unable to take the necessary time off work to travel to visit them at short notice when necessary. Instead, many women are isolated and expected to absorb all this need for care (their own and their baby’s) by themselves. High rates of postnatal depression should not be understood purely as a medical matter, but also partially as a product of this profoundly unnatural and unkind expectation placed on new mothers. Low levels of social support before and immediately following childbirth have been directly identified as a risk factor for developing postnatal depression.

However, other developed countries have created more supportive care systems in the modern context. A positive model for postpartum care that could be adopted more widely is the Dutch kraamzorg system. After women give birth in the Netherlands, they are visited at home daily for eight to ten days by a specially trained maternity helper. These helpers support women to care for their newborns and perform light household tasks for them. This service is usually either fully or partially covered by health insurance,14 reflecting the understanding that some form of help and kindly presence after childbirth is a necessity.

“P.D.”, a British woman living in the Netherlands, spoke to the authors of this report about her experience of the kraamzorg system after giving birth to her son two years ago. She said: “My kraamzorg […] was brilliant—looking after me and my son, advocating for me to get strong iron tablets as I’d developed mild anaemia that the hospital missed. She cooked for me to help me get my strength up– making enough that it lasted all week. She also helped with housework—made sure I had no long-term injuries and overall couldn’t have been better. I couldn’t have asked for better help.” Korea has also adapted its traditional custom of sanhujori to the modern era. This practice typically dictates how women should spend their time in the month following childbirth, with a focus on eating nutritious foods, partaking in gentle exercise, staying warm, and avoiding the outdoors. Some women attend specialised residential sanhujori clinics after giving birth, enabling them to rest and have their needs taken care of during this time.

However, an advantage of care by home visitors (as in the Netherlands) is that it is much more affordable either for state providers, insurance, or individuals to pay out of pocket, as well as the benefit of being in a familiar home environment. Systems like these are relatively cheap to include as part of the health system, since the period during which care is required is extremely brief. A Cochrane review found that even care by helpers simply providing emotional support in childbirth is associated with many positive outcomes in both women and babies, and found no evidence for potential harms.16 These findings highlight that providing support to new mothers can be an extremely effective low-cost intervention.

In addition, formal models of caring can be invaluable in communicating that care is important, that mothers are valued in their role as caregivers and that they will be cared for in turn. We ask whether partners, families, and friends also could be enabled to provide this much needed care, for example by via reinvigorating caring norms and formal, funded caring leave from employment.

Book of the week

We recommend The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor. The author traces the origins of debt interest through history, arguing that whenever money becomes too easily accessible financial markets become unstable.

Whether interest rates are linked to economy growth is likewise open to question. The historical record suggests a weak statistical relationship between the pace of economic development and the cost of borrowing. The relationship between demographics and interest is also contested. Conventional wisdom today holds that a decline in population growth explains why interest rates have fallen. Japan’s experience in recent decades is cited in support of this argument. But some economists maintain that Japan is a special case and that interest rates can be expected to climb as the world’s population ages.

Mainstream economists, who believe that the level of interest is determined by the supply and demand for savings, refer to what they call the ‘natural rate’ of interest. This idea was championed by John Locke in the seventeenth century. In the 1930s, however, John Maynard Keynes and his followers rejected the concept of the natural rate that balanced the economy at full employment. Since the natural rate cannot be observed directly, this argument is difficult to settle. Yet if the rate of interest is linked to profitability, as most economists have believed since the time of Adam Smith, then interest rates and the pace of economic growth (i.e. the rate of return for the whole economy) must also be connected. Thus, the trend level of economic growth can be taken as a reasonable proxy for the natural rate.

…The most important question addressed in this book is whether a capitalist economy can function properly without market-determined interest. Those, like Proudhon, who argue that interest is fundamentally unjust don’t believe in its necessity. To modern monetary policymakers, interest is viewed primarily as a level to control the level of consumer prices. From this perspective, there’s no problem in taking interest rates below zero to ward off the evil of deflation. But influencing the level of inflation is just one of several functions of interest, and possibly the least important.

The argument of this book is that interest is required to direct the allocation of capital, and that without interest it becomes impossible to value investments. As a ‘reward for abstinence’ interest incentivizes saving. Interest is also the cost of leverage and the price of risk. When it comes to regulating financial markets, the existence of interest discourages bankers and investors from taking excessive risks. On the foreign exchanges, interest rates equilibrate the flow of capital between nations. Interest also influences the distribution of income and wealth. As Bastiat understood, a very low rate of interest may benefit the rich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.

Quick links

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Jeremy Corbyn jumped to blame the Al-Ahli hospital bombing on Israel…

…yet remains more popular than either major party leader.

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Health Secretary Steve Barclay has told the NHS to waste less money on equality and diversity staff.