Ever since its inception, the British Broadcasting Corporation has aspired to the public service ideal of balanced reporting. Seldom, though, has that aspiration looked more like mission impossible than it does over coverage of the current Middle East crisis. For how do you maintain balance when much of the world is united in believing that Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s provocation has been monstrously disproportionate and that it is guilty of precipitating a humanitarian catastrophe?
It might be considered only natural for any sentient human being to express outrage at Israel’s excesses. Yet outrage is precisely what BBC journalists are obliged to make a professional point of avoiding. It follows that they have a tough job and that their Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, whose role is to provide judicial summaries of events, has an especially tough one. It is not surprising if Bowen cuts an embattled figure as he endeavors — in the face of overwhelming photographic evidence that the Israel is raping Lebanon — to appear scrupulously even-handed. If nothing else, Bowen strikes the right tone; he comes over as a humane and cogent commentator, something that can scarcely be said of his brash counterparts on Fox news and CNN whose fundamental loyalty to the US/Israeli world view is all too apparent. Nevertheless, it has been hard to escape the impression that in bulk the BBC’s coverage of the conflict is unduly tilted toward Israel. Certainly, in the early phases of the war, the corporation’s emphasis often seemed to be less on the reign of terror to which Lebanon was being subjected than on the fear that Israelis were experiencing. British viewers have perhaps been better served by Channel 4, which has seemed less inhibited about portraying the devastation wrought by the Israeli Defense Forces.
As it happens, the BBC is meant to be making a special effort to improve its coverage of the Middle East crisis. A recent independent report concluded that among other things the BBC was failing to provide a proper understanding of its historical context. The reason for employing the seasoned Bowen was to try to meet that criticism. The verdict must be that the BBC is still not trying hard enough. What BBC television, with its enormous resources and vast global reach, is uniquely equipped to do is not just to provide insightful news coverage but at the same time to commission documentaries which address the larger issues and allow alternative voices to be heard. But there are few signs that the BBC is ready to embrace that challenge. Last week, the BBC’s current affairs program, Panorama, concerned itself not with the background to the present crisis but with claims that the London-based Islamic charity, Interpal, has been funding Palestinian charities that channel money to Hamas; in other words, the program’s presenter John Ware alleged, Interpal is bankrolling a recognized terrorist organization which specializes in training suicide bombers. Ware’s charges may be justified but his narrowly focused program seemed calculated to reinforce Western prejudices about the Muslim world. Though it may have been an accident of scheduling that the program went out on the day that news of the Qana massacre was coming in, its timing was to say the least unfortunate.
If there is an explanation for the shortcomings of its Middle East coverage, it lies in the intimidating pressure the BBC has long been under to say nothing that will offend Zionist opinion. There remains a sense that the corporation feels bound to mollify Jews who find no coverage of Israel tolerable that does not acknowledge its status as a special case, a country that deserves preferential treatment. Not that any broadcasting organization could ever do enough to appease the sensitivities of the Jewish establishment. The British weekly newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, carries a column on the media by the veteran correspondent, Alex Brummer, a Zionist with an unsleeping eye for anti-Israel bias. He is typical of Zionists who seem pathologically incapable of conceding that Israel could ever be guilty of any form of delinquency.
Of course, in an age of ever-diversifying media, the BBC has nothing like the unrivalled dominance and authority it once enjoyed.
The Internet has revolutionized communications and Western alternative voices on the subject of the Middle East are finding expression to a greater degree than ever before in online magazines; not least, however, are they finding expression in an epoch-making outpouring of books about the Arab and Muslim worlds: There is scarcely sufficient shelf space in American and European book shops to accommodate the endless spate of new titles on the Middle East, many of them highly critical of Israel.
That there is a veritable explosion of alternative comment says much about the mainstream media’s resistance to accommodating challenging new perspectives, its abiding complicity with the Western power structure in sustaining the myth that Israel is an exemplary modern democracy. Growing numbers of writers and activists are arguing that Israel is an inherently racist state, which has condemned Palestinians in the occupied territories, as indeed in Israel itself, to a system of informal apartheid. But it is not often they get the chance to expound their case in mainstream contexts.
Jonathan Cook is a British journalist with an alternative view of Israel who has settled in Nazareth. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, focuses on Arabs resident in Israel itself in the belief that the “historic and current treatment of Israel’s Palestinian citizens is a key to understanding the obstacles that lie in the way of a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
Cook argues that if Israel cannot democratize, it is, in short, because to do so would require it to “embark on the path of atonement” for its mass expulsion of Palestinian people in 1948. And that in turn would mean “opening the historical record to proper inspection”.
Susan Nathan’s book, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide carries a similar message. The work of a British Jew who went to live in the Israeli Arab village of Tamra, this remarkable book insists that, for all its pretensions to being a modern free society, Israel is not a state of all its citizens but one which sets a special value on the lives of Jews wherever they may live while treating its native Arab citizens as Untermenschen. During the current conflict, it is worth noting, in heavily Arab-populated northern Israel, official advice on what to do in the event of a rocket attack has been distributed in Hebrew only. What more telling proof could there be of Zionist indifference to Arab lives?
