(This was submitted as a Letter to the Editor to The Independent, which did not see fit to publish it.)
Johann Hari says he knows the real reasons behind Israel’s incursions into Gaza these past few weeks (“The real reason why Israel is using such violence against the Palestinians in Gaza”, The Independent, 10 July 2006).
He does not tell us how he has discovered this secret — but he assures us that, Israeli government assertions to the contrary, all this has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit, or the endless shelling of Sderot and now Ashkelon. He knows for sure the real reason: it’s all part of the Israeli government’s secret plan to prevent
peace from coming about.
In the course of revealing these secrets, Hari makes at least one ill-informed remark, tells one outright lie, and write one utterly obscene passage.

He asserts that Palestinian voters did not vote for Hamas because of their platform, which none of them apparently agreed with. Instead, they voted for Hamas because they don’t like its corrupt opponents, and they are going to hold Hamas to the Palestinians’ commitment to peace. How he knows what was going on in the minds of Palestinian voters will have to remain a mystery — as will his knowledge of the secrets of Israeli government decision making.
The lie he tells is that Hamas “made clear signals that they would accept peace with Israel after all.” That’s not what the BBC reported. According to a report (27 June) on their website, “Hamas negotiators have denied earlier reports that the deal meant the militants would implicitly recognise Israel.”
It is the offensive part that I want to draw your attention to here. Hari writes that “in the week we were grieving for the slaughtered of 7/7, the same number of Palestinians have been blown up, many of them women and children in their own homes.” This is first of all, factually incorrect. But it is more than incorrect — it is obscene.
Many — one hopes, most — of the Palestinians killed were terrorists, the same people firing hundreds of Qassam rockets at Israeli civilian centres.
But not a single one of the 52 civilians killed in the London bombings was a terrorist. Not one of them.
Shame on Johann Hari for making the comparison.
Hari is full of “real reasons” for things — so let me try to guess at the real reason he writes such offensive, ill-informed nonsense. Once upon a time, he bravely took on majority public opinion in this country and defended the Iraq war. That probably didn’t make him many friends. So he changed his mind, and apologized for his sins. And ever since, he seems to be bending over backwards to prove his “leftist” credentials.