The Guardian has admitted it made an error in using a photo of an ancient synagogue to illustrate its review of a book discussing the “Israeli suppression” of Palestinian history.
In an article published on April 13, Alex Preston reviewed Raja Shehadeh’s Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials. Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and co-founder of human right organisation Al-Haq, which has previously argued that Israel is committing “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in the West Bank.
Co-authored with Penny Johnson, the book is a “search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine - now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories” to “explore lost connections in a fragmented land”.
Its blurb adds that the authors “grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba - the 1948 catastrophe for Palestinians - but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today”.
And, in his review, Preston wrote: “ Forgotten is a book of resistance – not just political, but existential.
"Shehadeh and Johnson... offer a vision of Palestinian heritage that refuses to be erased, tracing a lineage that stretches back millennia and persists today despite the relentless attempts to efface it.
“History, like the land itself, cannot be so easily obliterated. Even after bulldozers and bombs, flowers bloom, trees reclaim razed earth, red anemones push through rock.”
He went on to describe Shehadeh’s books as “beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression”.
However, one passage in particular drew attention from some readers, discussing how the authors “seek out the ruins of Kafr Bir’im, a Palestinian village in Galilee destroyed by the Israeli army in 1953”. This was coupled with the image at the top of the article, showing the remains of a ruined stone building with the caption: “The ruins of Kafr Bir’im, a Palestinian village in Galilee.” The photo was credited to the Alamy picture agency
But the original caption on Alamy’s website made clear that the ruins were actually those of an ancient synagogue, which it says “attests to the presence of a thriving Jewish 4th century community”.
The Guardian has now swapped the image for one of an early Islamic site on the other side of the country (Image: The Guardian)[Missing Credit]
The synagogue was built during the period that the region was part of the Roman Empire and was not destroyed by Israeli forces in 1953, but in a major earthquake in 1837. Indeed, it was already ruined by the time Edward Robinson wrote his Biblical Researches in Palestine, the first major modern geographical account of the area, in 1852.
The Guardian has since corrected the error, issuing a footnote reading: “This article was amended on 16 April, 2025 to replace the accompanying image.
"The previous image was captioned as showing “the ruins of Kafr Bir’im, a Palestinian village in Galilee”. The archaeological remains are in Kafr Bir’im but are those of an ancient synagogue built during the Talmudic period.”
The picture has now been replaced by an image of Hisham’s Palace, an Islamic site built roughly 500 years after the synagogue in what is now the West Bank – on the other side of the country to Kafr Bir’im.
