The BBC's subjective view of Israel's occupation should concern us all

Just over a week ago, Israeli armed forces dragged a French diplomat out of an aid vehicle in the occupied West Bank. The international news agency Reuters released subsequent photographs of the woman, Marion Fesneau-Castaing, lying in the dust at the feet of Israeli soldiers, a gun pointed at her face. Fesneau-Castaing and others had been attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the villagers of Khirbet al-Makhul, whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli army four days earlier, on 16 September.

Amena Saleem

The BBC responded with an online story headlined: "Diplomats protest over West Bank clash with Israel troops"

As is the norm with the BBC's coverage of Palestine and Israel, the story was written without context or background. Israel's presence in the West Bank, its military occupation, is illegal under international law. Its demolition of Palestinian houses and the displacement of their inhabitants are in violation of the Geneva Convention. In a feature on the demolition of Khirbet al-Makhul, the Independent quotes Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch as saying, "All the criteria appear to be met for this to be considered forcible transfer, which is a war crime."

None of this was reported by the BBC, whose headline reduced all of the above to "a clash with Israel troops". In the BBC's use of the word "clash" there is an implication that the diplomats were also at fault, that they waged some kind of battle against armed soldiers.

Khirbet al-Makhul is in the fertile Jordan Valley, a key area for Israeli settlement building. To obtain the necessary land for the illegal settlements, Palestinian villages have to be destroyed and the villagers moved on.

BBC Online's story chose to put the process this way: "The homes in Khirbet al-Makhul were knocked down on Monday after Israel's High Court ruled that they had been built without the correct permits."

The fault, then, seems to lie with the Palestinians who appear to be attempting to operate outside the planning system. A planning system, the average reader will assume, is fair, open and transparent, but nothing could be further from the truth. Under the practices of Israel's military occupation, it is a rarity for Palestinians to be granted a building permit, either to build new homes or extend existing ones.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports that the Israeli military refuses to give building permits to Palestinians in 99 per cent of Area C, which is where the Jordan Valley, containing the village of Khirbet al-Makhul, lies.

Oxfam reports: "Israel's planning policy in Area C is used to maintain reserves of land for future development of Israeli settlements. Palestinians are often left with no choice other than to build without a permit, despite the ever present risk of demolition which threatens thousands of buildings and puts thousands of families at risk of forced displacement."

Who, reading the BBC's report, would know that? There was nothing in this report to provide a context for the events of a week of Palestinian house demolitions and the manhandling of European diplomats.

To add insult to injury, the Palestinians, who were presented as infringing Israel's honest planning laws, are then depicted as being too intransigent to comply with the consequences. The article continues: "... the Bedouin villagers of Khirbet al-Makhul have refused to leave the land where they say they have grazed sheep for generations."

The fact that the Palestinians have indeed been on this land for generations is furthermore presented as no more than a claim with the addition of two simple words: "they say". The Palestinians' existence on this land and their dispossession of it is not a fact for the BBC, it is merely a claim.

Why is the way the BBC presents Israel's occupation of Palestinian land an issue? After all, it is not as if much of the mainstream media does any better on the subject.

There are several key reasons. According to the BBC's own figures, BBC News reaches 81 per cent of the UK each week across all platforms (television, news, online). That's a quite staggering percentage of the population consuming the BBC's output, including what it has to say on Palestine and the occupation. No other news organisation can claim to be reaching and influencing the vast majority of the British population in this way.

Even more worrying, the BBC Media Centre reports that, "The BBC remains the news provider that the UK public trusts the most by far." It quotes an Ipsos Mori survey, conducted in February 2013, in which 58 per cent of respondents said that the BBC was the "one source they would most likely turn to for news they trust". This was significantly ahead of the nearest other provider, ITV, on 14 per cent.

So here we have a news organisation with a vast reach, commanding a high level of trust, publicly funded, which is failing to tell its audiences the ugly truth of Israel's occupation.

As demonstrated by the article on Marion Fesneau-Castaing and Khirbet al-Makhoul, the BBC will leave out the facts and the context which, if included, would show Israel to be the rogue state it is. And, wherever possible, it will present its audience with the official Israel line only; in this report, for example, that the Palestinians allegedly had no legal right to build where they did. The Palestinian perspective, indeed the fact that Israel almost never gives planning permission to Palestinians, forcing them to build "illegally" is omitted.

Four days after publishing this article, BBC Online ran another piece, headlined "Israel 'to act' over West Bank diplomats scuffle". This contained a video showing Fesneau-Castaing pushing an Israeli soldier in the face as she was lifted up from the ground and led away. The BBC reports that "...video emerged of her lashing out at an Israeli border policeman."

The video that BBC audiences will not see is that of Israeli forces destroying the tents in which the homeless Palestinian villagers were sheltering, while they were still inside. Once again, the true extent of Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people has been carefully hidden from those receiving their news via the BBC.

Through its massive omissions in reporting, the BBC is keeping its audience, 81 per cent of the British population, in the dark about the reality of Israel's occupation. Where are the BBC's reports on the arbitrary arrests and detention without trial of Palestinian civilians; the dragging of Palestinian children from their beds at night by Israeli soldiers to be thrown into jail; the destruction of Palestinian farmland and olive groves by armed Israeli settlers; the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem in ever-increasing numbers; and the impact of the apartheid wall and the checkpoints which contain Palestinian movement?

They are not there in the BBC's world; they are non-existent. Instead we have offerings from BBC Online such as, "West Bank: Why do some UK Jews settle in Israeli occupied land?"

The article begins: "Every year hundreds of British Jews make the life-changing decision to emigrate to Israel. A small number of these decide to join settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank." What follows is a 1,000 word paean to Israeli settlers. They are not an obstacle to peace, they tell BBC reporter, Samantha Dalton, they are in the West Bank to "contribute to civil society" and are simply misunderstood.

This cosy little article, given to us by a news organisation funded by our licence-fees, somehow seems oblivious to the fact that the settlers' very presence in the occupied West Bank contravenes international law. It is not bothered by the fact that UN Resolution 446 says settlements "constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East." From that point of view alone, this feature on the "life-changing" experiences of those who would be settlers is incredibly irresponsible.

And where is the Palestinian perspective? Again, as so often with the BBC, there is none. Not a single Palestinian is interviewed about the impact of settlers and settlements on Palestinians in the West Bank. There is nothing about the land theft necessary for the creation of settlements; nothing about the violent extremism of settlers in Hebron and elsewhere; and nothing about the allocation of 70 times more water to illegal Israeli settlers than to Palestinians.

For the BBC to include that kind of balanced information would be to inform its huge audience of the Palestinian experience of occupation and to expose too clearly the horrors of Israel's apartheid system. As we've seen, it's not the kind of information that the BBC is in the habit of giving out. That the BBC chooses to withhold important information which is vital for its audience to understand what is happening in Palestine and Israel is something that should concern us all. More

Amena Saleem is a journalist and activist, working closely with Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK. She has twice driven on convoys to Gaza with PSC. More information on PSC's solidarity work is available at www.palestinecampaign.org

 

Senior BBC official insists that all of Jerusalem is an “Israeli” city

The BBC has provided evidence this week that it prefers to use the territorial claims of the Israeli government to the whole of Jerusalem as a framework for its reporting, rather than acknowledging international law.

International law considers only West Jerusalem, conquered in 1948 — amid the expulsion by Zionist militias of tens of thousands of Palestinians — to be under de facto Israeli control, while East Jerusalem, conquered in 1967 is occupied territory. This is reflected in the UK government’s position, which, since 1950, has recognized Israeli de facto authority in West Jerusalem, but not sovereignty, and considers East Jerusalem to be under military occupation.

However, in a 15 May email sent to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), the BBC’s Senior Editorial Strategy Advisor, Leanne Buckle, has confirmed that the BBC is happy to refer to the whole of Jerusalem as an “Israeli” city. It sees no need for its journalists to make the facts of international law, or even UK government policy, clear to its audiences.

As part of ongoing correspondence between the BBC and the PSC on the subject of Jerusalem, Buckle writes: “a passing reference to Jerusalem as an Israeli city would not [give] listeners a misleading impression of the city’s status under international law.”

The failure to make a distinction between East and West Jerusalem, or to note that Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem — East or West — has not been recognized, plays straight into the hands of Israel’s propagandists whose aim has long been to establish Jerusalem as the “undivided capital of Israel” in the minds of Western journalists, so that they can, in turn, convey this lie to their audiences.

And it is a failure that occurs across the BBC’s output, including on its permanent webpage, “Israel profile”, part of its “country profiles” section. On the page for Israel, the BBC writes: “seat of government: Jerusalem, though most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.” However, no country recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

East Jerusalem, as any informed person knows, is occupied Palestinian territory which has been illegally annexed by Israel. There is no “united Jerusalem,” as Israel asserts, and the status of the city is a controversial and sensitive issue; its final status supposedly to be decided by “peace talks.” As such, all reporting on it should be subject to the highest standards of accuracy by responsible news organisations.

Inexplicable

The BBC, however, operates by its own inexplicable standards. Buckle’s email to the PSC was in response to ongoing correspondence over a report on Radio 4’s Todayprogram in October. During the course of the report, which was about the establishment of a university in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, the BBC’s correspondent, Kevin Connolly, referred to, “Israeli cities with better established academic institutions, like Jerusalem.”

The PSC wrote to the Today programme to point out that Jerusalem is not an Israeli city, and should not be referred to as such.

Initially, the BBC wrote back to say: “It would not be possible to explore or describe the full complexity of [Jerusalem’s] status in every such reference – such a practice would simply fall outside the scope of daily journalism.”

How the simple insertion of one word — “West” — for instance, would be beyond the scope of the BBC’s daily journalism was not explained. Rather, as the PSC pointed out, its inclusion would remove the need to “explore or describe the full complexity of [Jerusalem’s] status” in any reference to the city. Moreover, how difficult would it be to add the word “occupied” before references to “East Jerusalem”?

Unfortunately, providing accurate and clear information to its audiences does not seem to be the BBC’s main concern when reporting on Israel. Ensuring that its journalists report on Palestine and Israel in a manner which reflects Israel’s agenda would appear to be the priority for this taxpayer-funded broadcaster. More