At the end of July, the prolific Anglo-Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer ended his long association with the Jewish Chronicle (JC) to join the Economist. In the scramble to replace Pfeffer, a senior editor at the JC suggested bringing in another Anglo-Israeli writer, Elon Perry. Almost no one in Jewish or indeed Israeli journalism had heard of Perry, but he was vouched for internally and appeared to have impressive bona fides as a veteran of both journalism and the Israel Defence Forces.
Perry soon delivered a series of thrilling scoops, culminating in a “world exclusive” about the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s plans to flee Gaza to Iran by crossing the Philadelphi corridor, on the Egyptian border, and taking some Israeli hostages with him for protection. Conveniently, this story emerged just as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was refusing to give an inch of that very same slice of territory – the Philadelphi corridor, which runs between Egypt and Gaza – in ceasefire negotiations.
The story seemed too good to be true. And it was. After Perry’s reporting was picked up by some right-wing outlets in Israel, a backlash ensued, with intelligence and army sources dismissing it as a “wild fabrication”. Who was Perry? Was he really a veteran journalist as he claimed? He had very little published work to show for it. And had he really been present at the 1976 Entebbe commando raid in Uganda, as his website claimed? He had not.
The paper had been duped, it seemed – and in the process may well have facilitated the spread of disinformation from someone potentially close to Netanyahu. An internal investigation was launched. Within days, Perry was dismissed and his work deleted from the JC’s website. Editor Jake Wallis Simons posted on X: “I take full responsibility for the mistakes that have been made and I will take equal responsibility for the task of making sure nothing like this can happen again.” Three of the paper’s liberal-leaning writers – Jonathan Freedland, Hadley Freeman and David Aaronovitch – subsequently resigned, and David Baddiel also stepped back as a contributor.
Ever since its founding in 1841, the JC has published an idiosyncratic mix of community trivia and weighty geopolitics, but its crown jewel is (or was) its roster of columnists, some of Fleet Street’s finest. The recent resignations are a blow to the paper’s claim to represent the full gamut of mainstream British Jewry.
It has often been said that history rhymes, but Jewish history has a particular capacity to repeat itself with eerie precision. Anyone who has followed the controversy at the Jewish Chronicle will find much that is familiar in the story of its former editor, Ivan Greenberg.
On 24 May 1946, Greenberg was hauled in front of a special meeting of the newspaper’s board. He was fiercely pro-Israel and had worried the board by expressing sympathy with the militant Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement, which was then just weeks away from blowing up King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British Mandate for Palestine. The JC’s board was “strongly dissatisfied” with Greenberg’s support for radicals such as Menachem Begin, who later became prime minister of Israel, and the paper, they told him, “was not maintaining the high standard of journalistic good taste which the board expected”. They complained the “presentation of news was frequently lacking in objectivity” and the paper had “ceased to be an independent forum for the expression of all shades of opinion”.
The circumstances may be different today, but these criticisms could be – and have been – levelled almost verbatim at Wallis Simons, who took over as editor of the JC in 2021. He has taken the paper in a more confrontational, populist direction, with a particular focus on Iran. His tenure, particularly post 7 October, has been marked by fierce hawkishness on Israel, complaints about a lack of objectivity in reporting and thunderous attacks on British institutions and citizens including the BBC and the former defence secretary Ben Wallace.
A key difference between Wallis Simons and Greenberg, however, is that the people who owned the JC in the 1940s were well-known community figures, including the judge Neville Laski and the chair of the Anglo-Jewish association Leonard Stein – figures who intervened when they felt its editorial direction had gone awry. Today, no one knows who runs the JC.
For decades it was owned by the Kessler Foundation, a family holding not unlike the Scott Trust that owns the Guardian. But in 2020, with circulation plummeting amid the pandemic, the paper went into liquidation. It was rescued by a consortium with various prominent names attached, including the life peer John Woodcock, the writer and former Charity Commission chair William Shawcross and Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s Downing Street communications director. But the ultimate source of funding behind the purchase remains a remarkably well-kept secret.
Jonathan Freedland, who has written for the JC since 1998, wrote in his resignation letter, which he shared on X: “Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic… The real problem in this case is that there can be no real accountability because the JC is owned by a person or people who refuse to reveal themselves.” Newspapers are powerful instruments, and most have carefully organised management structures, with proprietors facing reputational consequences for any wrongdoing. While the Independent’s ownership by the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, which has ties to the Saudi royal family, caused concern, no other British newspaper’s ownership is an actual secret. It means the proprietor of the JC is not answerable to its readers – or the public – over the startling lack of due diligence done on Elon Perry.
Until last year, I had written for the paper on and off for my entire career, and from 2020 had a regular column there. I never hewed particularly closely to its editorial line, but it was a broad synagogue and I was proud to write a column in the paper where my bar mitzvah picture had once been printed. However, post-7 October, I recoiled from Wallis Simons’s increasingly belligerent editorial direction and, more importantly, found the idea of being paid by a secret owner increasingly unsettling. In November I decamped to the Jewish News, the JC’s smaller, scrappier rival. Now, a swathe of the JC’s high-profile columnists, all of whom harboured misgivings about the direction of the paper for some time, have also stepped away. Freedland, who is a second-generation JC writer and embodies a long tradition of high-minded liberal Jewish thought, is a particular loss.
The Elon Perry scandal has upset the delicate balance of Anglo-Jewry at a fraught moment. Britain’s Jewish community is one of the country’s oldest and most successful ethnic minorities, and it has flourished, in part, thanks to its strong institutions, including the Board of Deputies, the United Synagogue, and, of course, the Jewish Chronicle. The paper has a critical role to play in what is sure to be a turbulent few years for British Jews. We need it at its best, with firm and transparent management. Without this, the Jewish Chronicle will find itself in another mess all too soon.
Josh Glancy is editor of News Review at the Sunday Times
[See also: What does it mean to be Jewish and on the left today?]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?