I am a native of London and have worked as a journalist for decades on dailies and until recently as the editor of oldest Jewish newspaper in the world, the Jewish Chronicle. Twenty years ago, I found myself being booed in a synagogue while appearing on a panel about the biases of the British Broadcasting Corporation. My argument was that it was wrong to suggest, as some of my fellow panelists had done, that the BBC was institutionally anti-Semitic, even though it was clearly hostile to Israel. Cue the boos.
I was wrong and the booers were right. Anyone who has seen the BBC’s coverage of Gaza and Israel since October 7—among them the 1.1 billion people who look at the BBC’s news site every month, making it the most widely read on the planet—will have seen how slanted its reporting is. But the problem began decades before October 7, and it is now difficult—impossible, really—to argue the case I tried to make on that panel. The evidence suggests that the problem with the BBC’s coverage of Israel is far broader and stems from its attitude to Jews themselves. Even Danny Cohen, former controller of BBC One, the corporation’s main broadcast channel, now says the organization is guilty of “systemic problems of antisemitism and bias.”
Whatever the history, it has come to a head in a documentary broadcast by the BBC in February called Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. Though it was ostensibly a piece of independent journalism showing the impact of the Gaza war on its 13-year-old narrator, within hours of its transmission, it emerged that the boy was in fact the son of a minister in Gaza’s Hamas government. Equally egregious examples of the distortions in the program were uncovered subsequently.
The discovery that Abdullah al-Yazouri, the 13-year-old, was the son of Hamas official Ayman al-Yazouri was the work of David Collier, a retired businessman who has turned his attention in recent years to online research. He says it took him less than three hours to find out the boy’s background. The BBC now says it asked the film’s producers, Hoyo Films, whether there were anything of concern about the boy and was told there was nothing. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone at the world’s (self-proclaimed) leading news organization that it should and could check for itself. Not a single one of its 5,500 journalists was asked by managers or editors to take a look at the film to check its bona fides.
That seems unlikely to have been a mere oversight. Rather, it is a byproduct of the mindset that dominates the BBC’s thinking. If your worldview is that Israel is by definition evil and Gazans virtuous, you will always be ready to accept anything that seems to buttress such a view.
But not only did the BBC broadcast a film that was pure Hamas propaganda; it may well have committed a serious criminal offense. Hamas is proscribed in Britain, and it is a crime to fund it. Hoyo Films was paid £400,000 by the BBC for the film1, and while not all of that went into Gaza, some of it did—such as payment to the boy for his contribution. Hoyo said it “paid the boy’s mother, via his sister’s bank account, a limited sum of money for the narration.” The BBC’s defense is that “Hoyo Films have assured us that no payments were made to members of Hamas or its affiliates, either directly, in kind, or as a gift.” This is an absurd claim on its face, as if there would be some kind of financial barrier between a 13-year-old’s father and the rest of his immediate family.
The content of the film featured sly gamesmanship, a staple of the BBC’s coverage of these matters. It has a long history of distorting the meaning of Arabic words used in its reporting in order to whitewash them. On at least five occasions, the words “Yahud” or “Yahudi”—Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews”—were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces,” or even simply removed from the subtitles. One interviewee who was praising former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for “jihad against the Jews” was translated as saying Sinwar had been fighting “Israeli forces.”
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The program has engendered a major crisis for the BBC. But it is merely the latest example of the poison the BBC repeatedly drips into coverage of Israel. Two days before the film was broadcast, for example, one of its regular Middle East reporters, Jon Donnison, posted on X that “the propaganda efforts by both Hamas and Israel over the hostage releases are pretty nauseating.” He thus likened the scenes of joy and deep trauma in Israel when hostages are released to Hamas’s staged propaganda celebrations as the hostages are handed over to the Red Cross. This is the same Jon Donnison who, in a live broadcast on BBC News in October 2023, blamed Israel for an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. He said, “It’s hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes.” The explosion was in fact caused by a misfired rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
That calumny was later repeated by the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen. When questioned afterward about his misreporting, Bowen replied insouciantly: “Oh yeah, well I got that wrong. I don’t feel particularly bad about that. I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout, I didn’t race to judgment.”
A few days before the documentary aired, diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams wrote of the return to Israel of the bodies of Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir: “Once again, there was a stage, flanked by huge posters highlighting the catastrophic consequences of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the Palestinian determination to stay put.” What the posters actually depicted was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire alongside slogans accusing him of being a Nazi war criminal responsible for the deaths of the Israeli hostages.
Usually, the BBC is simply credulous when being fed Hamas propaganda, as with its repetition of the terrorist organization’s claims about casualty figures and repeated references to Palestinian prisoners as hostages, thus equating them with actual hostages seized by Hamas. On the same weekend as the Donnison and Adams contributions to demonizing Israel, for example, the BBC News Channel’s coverage of the release of the hostages was captioned throughout: “Concerns over appearance of hostages on both sides.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke to Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s leading interviewer, that weekend. Within moments of asking about the hostages, she was at it, attacking Herzog over the “strong body of evidence about appalling conditions for Palestinian prisoners, violence, abuse, and humiliation inside Israeli prisons,” asking, “How can you justify that?” As for reporting on the release of the Israelis bodies, the BBC’s headline was: “Hamas says it did ‘everything in its power’ to keep hostages alive”, with an accompanying story that simply regurgitated Hamas’s words without any interrogation of their truth. All these examples came within a few days of each other. There have been so many others over the course of the Gaza war, it is impossible to keep up.
It was par for the course, therefore, when Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell reported on the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and said that Haniyeh had been overseeing peace talks and so “despite his tough rhetoric,” “analysts” saw him as actually “moderate and pragmatic.” Ah yes, the moderate and pragma-tic leader of the organization that butchered 1,200 Jews. Knell called his killing “shocking” for good measure.
A September 2024 analysis by 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists of the four months of BBC output from October 7 onward (across te-levision, radio, online news, podcasts, and social media) found 1,553 breaches of its editorial guidelines for impartiality, fairness, and establishing the truth, with a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against Israel. Led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, the report used artificial intelligence to analyze 9 million words of BBC output and found that Israel was associated with war crimes four times more than Hamas was (127 versus 30), with genocide 14 times more (283 versus 19), and with breaching international law six times more (167 versus 27). It also found that the BBC repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation.
The report showed that Hamas was described as a “proscribed,” “designated,” or “recognised” terrorist organization in only 409 out of 12,459 citations (3.2 percent) over a four-month period.
It also highlighted one of the most grievous issues with the BBC’s coverage: BBC Arabic, which has reporters and contributors who do not hide their views. One regular contributor, Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, called for “death to Israel” and de-fended a journalist who posted, “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.” One of its Lebanese reporters described Israel as a “terrorist apartheid state.” The report cites 11 cases where BBC Arabic’s coverage of the war has been in the hands of reporters who have previously made public statements in support of terrorism and specifically Hamas. BBC Arabic repeatedly interviews Major General Wasef Eriqat, a former PLO official who celebrated October 7 as a “heroic military miracle,” billing him as an independent “military expert.” He is also the father of the BBC’s Ramallah correspondent, Eman Eriqat.
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The BBC’s coverage of Israel is now clearly part of a broader pattern in its coverage of Jews. In 2021, it covered an attack by a gang of Muslim youths on a bus of Jewish children in Oxford Street in London by asserting that one of the Jews had said “dirty Muslims.” The Jewish child was in fact calling for help in Hebrew, but the BBC reported the slur as fact—as if it was desperate to find a way to blame the Jews and excuse the behavior of their Muslim attackers.
At every stage in the coverage of this incident, the BBC behaved as if it regarded those who were angry with its reporting—Jews, that is—with pure contempt. When the boys’ lawyer wrote to the BBC, it demanded he hand over their names as a condition of engaging with the complaint—an astonishing and outrageous attempt to remove the anonymity of the minor victims of an assault. Then when the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit released its findings after a series of complaints, it said merely that “more could have been done” to “acknowledge the differing views…on what was said.” The difference between truth and fiction, that is.
Sometimes the BBC’s attitude is revealed in what it doesn’t say, as in its coverage of the Beth Israel synagogue siege in Texas in 2022, when a rabbi and three other Jews were taken hostage by a British Muslim named Malik Faisal Akram. Not once in the report on its flagship 10 p.m. news bulletin was anti-Sem-itism mentioned. Nor at any point did Ed Thomas, the BBC’s special correspondent, even hint that the gunman might possibly, perhaps, have had an issue of some kind with Jews. Thomas began his report by asking: “What made Malik Faisal Akram leave Blackburn, the place he called home, to travel to Texas, arm himself with a gun, and hold people hostage inside a synagogue?” A real mystery, that.
The entire broadcast was predicated on Malik Faisal Akram’s having mental-health problems, as if he was some kind of tortured soul for whom we should have had pity. Indeed, for the BBC reporter, the real outrage was that Akram was killed, and the report included a friend of Akram’s family attacking the police: “It’s the way he was killed, he was shot—that shouldn’t have happened.” Ed Thomas continued that this raised a series of questions, which he then itemized. Not one was about why Akram hated Jews so much that he flew from Britain to Texas to attack them.
The BBC’s bias against Israel and Jews is not merely clear; it is, it increasingly seems, its raison d’être. Given the huge reach of its coverage, this is a problem not just for the Brits who are forced by law to pay for it. The question that must be addressed, therefore, is what is to be done about it.
1 Most BBC funding comes from the revenue raised by the sale of annual TV licenses. All the proceeds go to the BBC, and it is a criminal offense for anyone who watches TV not to have a license. So the money spent on the film came from ordinary citizens.
Photo: AP Photo/Kin Cheung
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