This is why the BBC’s pro-Israel bias is worrying

The BBC has been forced to apologise yet again for its biased coverage of the decades-long conflict in Israel and Palestine. And by taking a position of blatant support for the Israeli state, the corporation has shown once more that it cannot be trusted to put Palestinian lives on a par with Israeli’s.

Why has the BBC apologised?

The BBC’s Today programme aims to set “the agenda for the nation’s news every day”, according to James Harding, the BBC’s Director of News. Listeners sympathetic to the Palestinian cause were, therefore, particularly disturbed when a Today broadcast on 19 October saw John Humphrys and Middle East correspondent Kevin Connolly imply that all of those who had been killed in that month’s violence had been Israeli – a suggestion that was untrue. According to Amena Saleem at The Electronic Intifada, this performance once again showed the BBC’s

tendency to convey only Israeli fears and perceptions.

In fact, she says:

the BBC’s own internal findings suggest an ingrained unwillingness at the program to challenge Israel’s spokespeople, even when they are telling blatant untruths, or to acknowledge Palestinian fatalities and their suffering under occupation.

This pattern of behaviour is precisely what led to the complaints that forced the apology from the BBC.

Why should we be so worried about the BBC’s pro-Israel bias?

There are countless reasons why the BBC’s failure to present an objective picture of the Israel-Palestine conflict is of concern. Here are just a few:

1. Human rights group B’Tselem has condemned the Israeli state for transforming police officers and armed civilians “into judges and executioners” by allowing them to kill Palestinians suspected of armed attacks without trial. One victim of such extrajudicial executions, a 17-year-old girl called Dania, was murdered by Israeli forces on 25 October in a case that Amnesty International later said was “absolutely unjustified”. Amnesty has called for Israel to bring its “pattern of unlawful killings” to an end.
2. Israel has allegedly been buying oil from Daesh (Isis). In fact, one industry official told al-Araby al-Jadeed that the country had “in one way or another become the main marketer of Daesh oil”.
3. Over 100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces between October and December, while 19 Israelis were killed in the same period by Palestinians.
4. Palestinian families have claimed Israel has been killing people “in cold blood” in recent weeks. The number of Palestinian children placed in Israeli prisons during this period, meanwhile, has doubled. All of this in a territory where UNICEF has previously spoken of “widespread, systematic and institutionalised” abuse of youths who have been arrested by Israeli security forces.
5. Israeli police beat Palestinian journalists.
6. Israel plants stone throwers among Palestinian protesters.
7. Stabbings are sometimes invented by Israeli forces as cover for murder.

Considering these points, it is no wonder that even Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, has now claimed that the country is on the “path to becoming [a] failed state” and that the word apartheid correctly describes the current situation. And these comments brought the paper in line with the likes of renowned Jewish scholar Noam Chomsky, who has said that Israeli actions in Palestine are in fact “much worse than apartheid” was in South Africa.

But in the UK, mainstream news sources like the BBC are slow to catch on. Palestinian acts of violence are covered outside of the apartheid context which has given birth to them. According to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian youths “feel desperate” because they “see no solution ahead of them”, but that type of evaluation is seldom seen on the BBC. Only the likes of Al Jazeera have sought to get into the mindset of these youngsters, speaking as it has about “the pressures of a life under occupation” which have driven them to violence.

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