Israel takes no shit.
(Times of Israel) — Israel reacted with unusually sharp criticism to a British newspaper’s designation of Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital, calling it a “blatant lie” that insults people’s intelligence.
On Sunday, the London-based Guardian newspaper ran a correction of a photo caption it had run two days earlier that described Jews in Jerusalem as being in Israel’s capital.
“The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital,” the correction read. “The Guardian style guide states: ‘Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is.’”
Indeed, the newspaper’s style guide includes the above entry, adding that designating Jerusalem as capital is “a mistake we have made more than once.”
Foreign Ministry deputy spokesperson Ilana Stein told The Times of Israel: “Actually, it’s the Guardian who owes an explanation to its readers for publishing something that cannot be described but as a blatant lie. When a claim is so factually wrong as to insult intelligence, then unfortunately the word ‘lie’ is not too harsh, and one cannot but wonder about the motivation of such a conceit.”