The Guardian Rules: Israel’s Capital is Tel Aviv, Not Yerushalayim

It’s not only Arabic newspapers that refer to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital, or dateline their stories from “The Zionist Entity” or “Occupied Jerusalem.”

The British paper The Guardian does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state either, and, rather incredibly, has decided to anoint Tel Aviv as the capital of the State of Israel.

While most governments do not accept Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and do not house their embassies there — preferring not to prejudice final-status negotiations with the Palestinians — The Guardian’s classification of Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital has come under fire from some observers.

On Thursday, April 19, the newspaper’s website ran a photo of Israelis on the Jerusalem light rail, with the caption saying that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel.

Apparently in the Friday, April 20 print edition, on page 24, a fuller version of the caption also correctly termed Jerusalem the Israeli capital.

However, in its “Corrections and Clarifications” section on Sunday, April 22, the newspaper published the following “correction”:

“The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: ‘Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is’ (Eyewitness, 20 April, page 24).”

Under the newspaper’s style guide section on “Jerusalem” is the following entry:

“Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is (a mistake we have made more than once).”

Under “Zionist”, the newspaper’s style guide writes: “Zionist refers to someone who believes in the right for a Jewish national home to exist within historic Palestine; someone who wants the borders of that entity to be expanded is not an “ultra-Zionist” but might be described as a hardliner, hawk or right winger.”

According to the style guide, “Settlers should be confined to those Israeli Jews living in settlements across the 1967 Green Line, i.e., in the occupied territories.”

The CiF Watch website, which describes itself as dedicated to monitoring anti-Semitism and combating the assault on Israel’s legitimacy in the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free blog, had the following to say regarding The Guardian’s “correction”:

“Is there any other country in the world for which the Guardian’s style guide defines the capital as being other than the city that country has selected as its capital? If any newspaper’s “style guide” decreed that London is not the capital of England, would that not be ludicrous? Is the next step for the Guardian style guide to decide that Israel is not a country but Palestine is, even though exactly the opposite is true? More than anything else this absurd refusal to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital demonstrates the utter perversity of the Guardian’s reporting about Israel. It shows in their own words, in print, the Guardian’s cringing acceptance of Arab propaganda that is rewriting the history of Jerusalem, the attempts to write the Jewish history out of the history of Jerusalem, and the Guardian’s attempts to delegitimize Israel and deny its right to exist. If they had any shame, the people running the Guardian should be ashamed of their style guide and this ridiculous ‘correction’ of a truthful statement.”

{Israel Hayom/Matzav.com Newscenter}