"Over the last few weeks I have been told that I am a self-hating Jew. I think I loathe this expression more than anything else."

David Aaronovitch is trying to be honest.

But his opinions on the Middle East are eliciting more than his fair share of hostility from the mainly Jewish audience at the Ner Yisrael Synagogue in The Crest, Hendon.

"I have treated you like family," said Mr Aaronovitch, as the temperature of the debate again began to rise.

"I haven't held out on anyone whatsoever.

"I'm telling you what I believe and some of it is uncomfortable."

In fact Mr Aaronovitch, the principal columnist of The Independent, was just one of four senior journalists from the national broadsheets who took part in a public discussion on Thursday last week entitled, Is the press anti-Semitic, or are we paranoid? It was chaired by Ned Temko, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Chronicle who with panel members Michael Govecrrct, assistant editor of the The Times, and Daniel Johnson, associate editor of the Daily Telegraph, were mostly in line with the sympathies of the 250-strong audience.

Ed Pilkington, foreign editor of the Guardian, and Mr Aaronovitch faced more hostility when trying to defend the press against the charge of anti-Semitism.

One of the few things that the panellists agreed on was that the British press' coverage of the so-called Jenin 'massacre' had been very poor.

Mr Gove said: "It's clear to me that soldiers of the Israeli Defence Force were under tremendous pressure. Some of them made mistakes as the soldiers of many citizen armies would.

"It's not surprising they made mistakes but so many in the Western press declared Jenin a massacre of truly epic proportions.

"Newspapers drew comparisons including my own between Jenin and the Russian raising of Grozny, between Jenin and September 11 and carpet bombing in south-east Asia. All these comparisons, when the reality emerged, were shown to be gratuitously offensive and an insult to truth."

Mr Pilkington said: "Genuinely I think people have got it wrong over Jenin. In this case I don't think we got it wrong we were quite unusual in this regard.

"On that day someone said 'Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stained the Star of David with blood'. That was Gerald Kaufman who is Jewish. We included the counter-arguments. I think this is a case of shooting the messenger."

The European press was generally seen as even more biased than in Britain. But the BBC was also singled out for criticism.

Mr Johnson, of the Daily Telegraph, said: "All the criticism is directed at Israel. No-one is interested in the inequalities in the Arab world. It strikes me every day, particularly the BBC."

Mr Aaronovitch added: "We have got to take the commentary out of news reporting. Grandstanding in reporting on the BBC puts themselves in the centre of the action, rather than giving the facts, then letting people come up with their own position. I think this is deplorable."

Mr Pilkington outlined The Guardian's editorial standpoint: "Anti-Semitic? No," he said. "Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? No. Sharon government? No. State of Israel? Yes. Israeli peace movement? Yes."

Mr Gove urged caution before accusing people of being anti-Semitic.

"We shouldn't be too casual in the way we choose to deploy it," he said. "Labelling any negative comment about Israel as anti-Semitic has often been a way of fending off legitimate criticism. Israel is open to criticism like any other nation state is."

Mr Johnson said that some of the press' anti-Semitism was not always explicit.

"It takes the form of 'of course Israel has the right to exist, but...' only on conditions which in practice would make Israel's survival at least problematic if not impossible."

Mr Aaronovitch told the audience that the Palestinians had a story to tell as well, and to ignore it leads to 'obliterationism' where Jews and Palestinians begrudge the other's right to exist.

He then said: "I think you could make out a case to say that saying there should not be a state of Israel is not anti-Semitic."

Comments such as these led to audience members shouting out and Mr Temko trying to diffuse the crowd's hostility.

"This is much better than Question Time," Mr Gove interjected.

When Mr Temko called the evening to a close after two-and-a-half hours of debate, the audience seemed to agree with a collective suppressed groan proceedings had been brought to such a premature end.

July 10, 2002 17:30