Please Don’t Confuse My Racism Of Low Expectations For Arabs With My Outright Hate For Jews

by Jeremy Pine, BBC Middle East correspondent

Jerusalem, August 31 – I feel like my audience makes certain erroneous assumptions about my prejudices, and will now attempt to clarify for you the biases that govern my reporting so that you can avoid misunderstanding my work: the fact that I consider Palestinians, for example, constitutionally incapable of moral agency does not preclude the possibility that no specific animus for Jews animates me, and that painting Israel as in the wrong occurs merely as a function of the encounter between those with and those without agency. Quite the contrary.

One could infer, based on a cursory viewing of my journalistic oeuvre, that when I assign implicit responsibility to Jewish Israelis for violence from Palestinians, I do so only because my racism toward Arabs prevents me from expecting them to eschew violence, as any civilized, moral person strives to do, and thus, by default, the only party to the interactions that has the capacity to make genuine moral choices becomes the Israelis – and of course they have made the wrong choices. This could, under that erroneous inference, serve as adequate explanation for waiting until Israel retaliates for Gaza rockets, for example, to report on such incidents, framing it as Israel attacking Palestinians who simply cannot help but try to kill people with indiscriminate rocket fire.

However, that simplicity stumbles into simplistic reasoning, because indeed, I hate Jews regardless of Arab moral capacity, or lack thereof. Civilized mores prevent me and my colleagues from explicit invocation of our antisemitism, but that does not mean I cannot color the entire context of my reporting with antisemitic overtones perfectly at home in Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany. Please do not take my treating Arabs as moral children, or as NPCs, as any indication that I do not sincerely despise Jews. Both hold true. Hence, when I discuss IDF actions against Palestinians in the West Bank, I divorce it from the larger context of Arab violence toward Jews that the IDF actions seek to neutralize. Granted, the absence of Palestinian capacity for volition translates into not mentioning the context, but it’s the underlying antisemitism in my – and my organization’s – ethos that transforms a simple tale of mere Israeli overreaction into one of Jewish moral turpitude that requires universal censure, perhaps even bloodshed.

The “soft” bigotry of low expectations has long characterized British attitudes toward non-European peoples (and quite a few Europeans). But never let that fact obscure the even-more-profound reality of my antisemitism, some of it naturally British and the remainder a proud product of my independent cultivation. Please keep that straight. Thank you.

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