The long fall from grace

AS THE bulging mailbag of many a newspaper attests, there is no subject quite like Israel's conflict with the Palestinians to provoke charges of “bias”. Around the world, Britain's Guardian has in recent years often been accused, most often by Americans, not only of being anti-Zionist but also of being anti-Semitic. Not surprisingly, in a work commissioned and published by Guardian Books, Daphna Baram, a left-wing Israeli journalist, acquits the paper of both charges. But this is no whitewash. Rather, it is a diligent account of a love turned sour, in which many of those who have followed the conflict over the years may find echoes of their own painful shifts of allegiance.