The Daily Mail caption referring to Israel’s “apartheid” wall. Photo: UK Media Watch.

A good illustration of how anti-Zionist agitprop seeps into mainstream news reports can be found in the photo caption at the left from a June 6 Daily Mail article about the “radical” British graffiti artist (and anti-Israel propagandist) known as Bansky:

Characterizing Israel’s security fence — erected in response to Palestinian suicide bombings during the Second Intifada that originated from West Bank cities such as Bethlehem — as an “apartheid wall” is an egregious distortion of the truth, and parrots the incendiary rhetoric of extremist anti-Israel activists.

Suggesting that Israel engages in racial segregation (or “apartheid”) by erecting such a fence fails the most obvious tests of logic and common sense. First, Palestinian Arabs who live in the West Bank — and are on the other side of the fence — are not citizens of Israel.  The fence is based on national differences, not racial ones. Claiming that Israel’s barrier represents “apartheid” is as absurd as claiming that fences separating the US and Mexico, the “peace wall” dividing Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast, or any of the dozens of other examples of countries erecting fences to protect their citizens represent “apartheid.”

We contacted Daily Mail editors asking for a correction to this extremely biased caption, and shortly after, they replied to notify us that they corrected the caption. The word “apartheid” has been removed.