Canadian Jewish News criticizes This Magazine article as "imbalanced"

The Canadian Jewish News has written a longish article that takes issue with This Magazine's cover story about Israel as an apartheid state. The cover shows an image of the Israeli flag and the headline "The New Apartheid".

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf, a staff reporter, gathered views from a number of sources about perceived shortcomings and "imbalance" in the various stories in the cover package. He said a call to This Magazine editor Jessica Johnston was not returned before his deadline.

He quoted Johnston's editor's note which says: “It’s impossible to sum up one of the world’s most complicated and contentious challenges in 15 or 20 pages.” But he referred to it as " a brief nod toward the imbalance of the issue’s content".

Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Canada-Israel Committee, was quoted saying he wasn’t surprised by the magazine's approach.

“It doesn’t represent any kind of new phenomenon,” Fogel told The CJN. “It’s a hard-left-oriented magazine that is targeted to and reflects a particular radical left orientation to pretty much all things. Why would it come as a surprise to anyone that they would adopt a position that is hostile to Israel?”

Fogel added that the magazine didn’t intend to provide balanced coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“It wasn’t a serious inquiry into [Israel]. It didn’t evaluate the question, offensive as it is, about whether Israel is an apartheid state in any kind of objective way,” Fogel said. “It was seeking to promote, in the guise of some kind of investigative journalism, a particular perspective that seeks to perpetuate the narrative of Israel as the ‘villain’ and to demonize the Jewish state.”