A real photo of settler abuse got called “antisemitic” — and that tells you far more about Israel’s panic than L’Espresso’s cover. Right, so Italian news magazine L’Espresso has published it’s latest weekly edition and being a news magazine it put a real photograph on its cover as you might imagine it would, hardly unusual is it? And yet that simple act has been enough in and of itself to have Israel wailing antisemitism yet again. Israel’s ambassador to Italy Jonathan Peled has called that cover manipulative and hateful and I would argue it could well be construed that way, though not in the way Peled means. The photograph itself shows an armed Israeli settler grinning inanely while filming a distressed Palestinian woman near Hebron during the olive harvest. That’s it. That is the row. Not a cartoon, not an artist’s impression, not some feverish bit of anti-Israel fan fiction, but a real image taken by Pietro Masturzo, printed under the title L’Abuso – The Abuse – and then denounced as antisemitic once it landed in public on te L’Espresso front cover. Enrico Bellavia, L’Espresso’s deputy editor, has not folded over this either, by now a British mainstream outlet would have prostrated itself, but not in Italy, not at L’Espresso, Bellavia has not done the usual apologetic little dance, and has instead said the image is backed by context, backed by reporting, backed by other photographs from the same scene and best of all, backed by video. So the first thing fixed on the record here is very simple. A real act of domination has been shown, the official complaint has gone after the showing rather than the act, which shows where Israel’s priorities lie, not with the abuse, but with the exposure and the magazine has answered with more proof. A handy little video clip. Now Jonathan Peled of course is not some random bloke with a social media account and too much free time on his hands. And don’t look at me like that either. He is Israel’s ambassador to Italy, which is why his intervention lands heavier than it might otherwise do, because when an ambassador says a magazine cover is manipulative, stereotyped and hateful, that is not personal offence, that is a state representative trying to push a boundary around what may be shown and how it may be described. Peled did not say the man in the image was invented, because of course he is real. He did not say the woman was invented, she is very real as is her distress.