The Guardian's piece by Jonathan Liew – "A corner of north London where food has become a battleground in the Israel-Gaza war" (published 14 March 2026) – is straight-up disgusting propaganda disguised as commentary.
It takes a new branch of Gail's Bakery (founded in the 1990s by an Israeli baker) opening 20 metres from a Palestinian-owned cafe in Archway and calls its mere existence an "act of heavy-handed high-street aggression". It sneers at the chain's success, drags in its private-equity owner Bain Capital's investments in Israeli security tech, and then shrugs off the actual violence: the shop was daubed in red paint the night before opening, then had all its windows smashed with graffiti screaming "reject corporate Zionism" and "fuck Bain Capital". No arrests. The Board of Deputies rightly called it part of a pattern to drive Jews out of civil society. Liew's response? Frame the bakery as the aggressor in a "battleground" and the smashed windows as "petty symbolism" in the Israel-Gaza war. The Palestinian cafe owner gets a sympathetic quote about "legal" competition and cheaper coffee. Classic.
This is Kristallnacht with a Guardian byline. In 1938 the Nazis smashed Jewish shop windows, painted hateful slogans, and called it "retaliation" while the real victims were blamed for existing. Here in 2026 London we have exactly the same tactic: target a Jewish-founded business, vandalise it with antisemitic/anti-Zionist slurs, then have a prestige paper publish a column that essentially says "well, it was a bit provocative to open a successful bakery near a Palestinian cafe, wasn't it?" The Palestine Solidarity Campaign distanced itself (smart), but the rhetoric and the broken glass are the same. The Guardian is normalising pogrom-lite and dressing it up as "food as resistance".
And spare us the gentrification guff or Bain Capital diversions. Gail's is a British business with no direct Israeli government ties, as it has repeatedly stated. The real story is a Jewish-founded success story being punished for existing in the same postcode as someone else's cafe. That's not "asymmetric conflict". That's bullying.
Britain is full of thriving Jewish-founded businesses that everyone happily shops at without calling their existence "aggression". Examples:
- Marks & Spencer (M&S) – founded by Jewish immigrant Michael Marks from Belarus in 1884 on a Leeds market stall. Icon of British retail.
- Tesco – founded by Jack Cohen, son of Jewish immigrants, from a stall at Spitalfields Market.
- Burton (menswear giant) – founded by Montague Burton (born Meshe David Osinsky, Jewish) who built it into a household name.
- Moss Bros – expanded into a major chain by the Jewish Moss family.
These aren't "corporate Zionism". They're part of the fabric of UK high streets, employing tens of thousands and beloved by millions. No Guardian columnist is writing columns about their "heavy-handed" presence squeezing out corner shops. The double standard is grotesque.
To the prick who wrote it – Jonathan Liew – a quick reality check before you hit "publish" again: some of the technology you used to type, save, and publish this garbage was invented or massively advanced by Israelis. The USB flash drive (the Disk-on-Key) was invented by Dov Moran at Israel's M-Systems – the thing every journalist still uses to back up drafts or transfer files. The microprocessors powering the laptop or desktop you wrote it on owe huge debts to Intel's Israel R&D centres, which designed key generations of Pentium and Core chips that run the entire modern computing world. Even the cybersecurity protecting The Guardian's systems and your online publishing pipeline draws from Israeli innovations like Check Point firewalls. You might want to boycott those next time you rage against "Zionist" bakeries.
And yes, you're a coward. Your X/Twitter account (@jonathanliew) is locked down – protected tweets, invisible to the public. But you post freely and publicly on Bluesky (@jonathanliew.bsky.social), a platform infested with antisemites who get to spew their bile without pushback. Bold enough to smear a Jewish-founded business in a national paper, too spineless to face open scrutiny on the world's biggest open platform. Classic.
The Guardian has form. This isn't journalism; it's blood libel with croissants. The vandalism of Gail's wasn't "resistance" – it was thuggery. The article excusing the context around it is worse. British Jews and anyone with a spine should call this out for what it is: the same old antisemitic trope, updated for 2026 and wrapped in Guardian font. Kristallnacht didn't start with gas chambers. It started with broken windows and columns blaming the Jews for existing. Never again means never again – even when the target is just a bakery.
The Guardian's "journalists" are afraid of both Jewish people and croissants.
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