The
BBC: Occupation?
What Occupation?!
By Sharif
Hikmat Nashashibi
08 August, 2004
Arab Media Watch
What
prompted me to write this article was an item on the BBC website that
exemplified all that is fundamentally wrong with the corporations
coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The item, entitled
Settlers move into east Jerusalem from March 31 this year,
describes angry demonstrators, clashes between local
Palestinians and police, and angry Palestinians
throwing
stones at the new arrivals. As usual, the BBC reported that security
forces responded with teargas.
The fact that east
Jerusalem is militarily occupied by Israel in contravention of international
law, and that the settlers presence in that part of the city and
other Arab territories violates the Geneva Conventions and several binding
UN Security Council resolutions, would have given vital context to the
Palestinian reaction.
But such context
was totally absent. The article spoke merely of Palestinians wanting
east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state, of an
Arab-dominated area of east Jerusalem, and unauthorised
and illegal outposts in the West Bank (those deemed so by
Israel) whose removal is required under the US-backed Middle East
peace plan.
Instead of reporting
that all Israels settlements are illegal under international law
and must be removed, the BBC treated its readers to five paragraphs
of justification by a settler spokesman, who said they returned
with
the idea of living side-by-side with the Arabs and that they coordinated
with the police to have less antagonism. Contrast this with
just two paragraphs given to a Palestinian man whose house had been
taken away by force to accommodate the settlers.
Members of Arab
Media Watch (AMW), myself included, have monitored the BBC for some
time, and the flaws evident in the above-mentioned article - namely
regarding settlements and the occupation - are, sadly, consistent with
its coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict in general, and prompted me
to study its website's output for the first quarter of 2004.
Settlements
During this period,
just one article regarding Israels settlements, by Kathryn Westcott
on March 31, stated unequivocally their illegality: Jewish settlements,
themselves, contravene international humanitarian law, which prohibits
an occupying power transferring citizens from its own territory to occupied
territory. (This is laid down in the Fourth Geneva Convention, article
49.)
Fewer than one in
10 articles regarding settlements reported that they are considered
illegal, but this choice of verb is inadequate, as if to imply that
the issue is open to debate. Theft is illegal. It is not open to consideration.
So some 90% of relevant
articles failed completely to mention international law. One article
simply reported on February 17 that Israeli housing Minister Effi
Eitam said
he would propose new laws to make it illegal to evacuate
settlers and dismantle their homes! Furthermore, the article contained
more pro-settler sources than anti-settler sources, and the former were
given more space.
This was a predominant
trend, even among articles that referred to the considered
illegality of settlements. Those included an article by James Rodgers
on January 30, which gave more space to the views of Gaza settler spokesman
Eran Sternberg than those of Barjas al-Waheidi, who has been a refugee
since 1948. The headline of another article by Rodgers, dated February
26, said it all: Gaza settlers hoping to stay put. The article
was almost completely from the settlers point of view, with no
Palestinian sources. The caption of one of the pictures read: Dismantling
the settlements will cause massive upheaval for thousands.
There were also
no Palestinian sources in a February 7 article by Matt Prodger about
a settler beauty contest in the West Bank. He gave the Israeli viewpoint
greater space in another article dated March 7.
This was also the
case with an article entitled Sharon orders Gaza pullout plan,
in which there were five Israeli sources (Prime Minister and settler
champion Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Likud member
and pro-settler Yechiel Hazan, settler spokesman Shaul Goldstein and
settler leaders quoted in Israeli newspaper Maariv) compared to just
one Palestinian source who was given far less space.
Of the above-mentioned
articles, half contained pictures of settler babies, children, teenage
girls and mothers. Only one contained a picture which could be deemed
sympathetic to the Palestinians - a woman on a stretcher - though the
caption lacks any context: There has been an increase of violence
recently.
So during the first
quarter of 2004, the BBC website reported the issue of settlements almost
totally without reference to their illegality or to the fact that they
are built on occupied Arab land, and gave the viewpoint of the colonisers
greater space than those of the dispossessed.
Occupation
The occupation in
general fares no better. Fewer than one in five articles referred to
the occupation of the Palestinian territories, but if one counts only
references from the BBC rather than its sources, this figure falls to
less than one in 10 articles. In some instances where the occupation
is mentioned, it is portrayed as a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim perception,
rather than an unquestioned reality.
For example, BBC
News Online world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds wrote in February:
The Palestinians argue that all the land captured by Israel in
the 1967 war is occupied territory
Israel rejects the claim that
the land it captured in 1967 is occupied territory.
Following Israels
assassination in March of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,
security correspondent Frank Gardner wrote: For most Arabs and
Muslims, the Hamas movement was one of national liberation from occupation,
thats how they perceive it, they dont see it as a terrorist
movement in the way that the West does.
Only around 10%
of articles on the Israeli-Syrian conflict mentioned the occupation
of the Golan Heights.
Regarding the Israeli-Lebanese
conflict, some 20% of articles mentioned the 22-year occupation of south
Lebanon, but again this figure is almost halved when only counting references
from the BBC rather than its sources. An article by Reynolds talks of
the Israeli departure from its security or occupation zone in
2000, as if reference to the occupation is merely subjective or
justified on security grounds.
This is nothing
new. The BBC often uses maps of Lebanon describing the area occupied
by Israel as former Israeli security zones. I doubt the
BBC would describe northern Israel as a Lebanese security zone
if the Lebanese army invaded and occupied it.
This reminds me
of an astonishing e-mail AMW deputy chairman Ben Counsell received from
BBC Online last August after complaining about the term security
fence: We feel we are right to use the term security
fence as this is what Israel is calling it!
So on average BBC
Online mentions occupation - a core issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict
- in only one in 10 articles. In addition, AMW director Judith Brown,
who did a thorough study of Today - one of BBC Radio 4s flagship
programmes - covering December 2003 to the end of February 2004, found
that the occupation was not mentioned by any BBC reporter or presenter
during the whole of this period, although it was occasionally mentioned
by British spokesmen who were interviewed.
A letter I received
in January this year by Fraser Steel, the BBCs head of Programme
Complaints, raised my concerns that perhaps the corporations widespread
omission of the o word is no accident. I had complained
about Terror Tourists, a one-hour documentary, shown on
BBC 2 last December, about armed American tourists patrolling
Palestinian streets with armed Israelis, and without a single Palestinian
approached for their opinion, save for a few words from the Palestinian
Authority during the closing seconds of the programme.
Part of my complaint
read: The occupied Arab territories were described more than once
as disputed by (producer Tim) Tate, who allowed those on
the programme to claim without challenge that those lands do not belong
to its rightful, sovereign owners.
This ignores
their internationally recognised status as Arab lands, as well as numerous
binding UN Security Council resolutions describing Israel as an occupying
power whose occupation policies have no legal validity (Resolution
465) and are null and void and without international legal effect
(Resolution 497). Resolutions 471 and 476 reaffirm the overriding
necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied
by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem.
Steel sent me a
four-page defence of the programme, but his following words particularly
alarmed me:
it is not unreasonable to use the word disputed.
This from a senior BBC figure in charge of programme complaints!
Resistance
Naturally, if occupation
is seldom mentioned by the BBC, neither is resistance to it. In the
first quarter of 2004, the corporation's website itself referred to
such resistance only four times - three times regarding the Palestinians
and once regarding Lebanon - all in March. In fact, BBC Online talked
of resistance three times during that period when referring to the removal
of settlers.
So in the vast majority
of cases, the BBCs audience is told only of suicide bombings,
militants, violence and attacks,
without any cause or context.
Context
Contrast the background
information provided after suicide bombings with that of Israels
occupation policies. When a suicide bombing occurs, BBC Online offers
a chronology. I asked last September if such chronologies existed for
Israeli assassinations, house demolitions, settlement construction,
Palestinian civilians killed etc. World editor Steve Hermann admitted:
We do not have a single Palestinian timeline equivalent to the
Israel suicide bomb blasts.
But he attempted
to justify this: We report the things you mention in our news
coverage and focus on them in detail in the feature and background stories
we do. We are not attempting to suggest that the Israel bombings are
more worthy of being reported, it is simply that we do not currently
feel it is justified to reduce all the violence suffered by Palestinians
to a simple list and report the violence in these terms.
I told him I was
unconvinced by his arguments: Your reason for not having timelines
for Palestinian suffering is because you report it in your regular news
coverage. However, you do the same with suicide bombings while also
having a timeline for them. This hardly seems balanced.
As a journalist
like yourself, I recognise the usefulness of having timelines, as they
provide perspective and trends to events and actions that may otherwise
seem fragmented and complicated.
You say that
you dont want to simplify Palestinian suffering by
having timelines, but I would argue that people need such simplification.
Otherwise, they will view Israels assassinations, house demolitions,
settlement activity etc. as being isolated events rather than long-term,
frequent policies. For instance, having looked at the timeline of Israels
suicide bombings, one could refer to similar timelines for Palestinian
suffering to see what happened between each suicide bombing. This is
not to excuse suicide bombings, but
to give a sense of perspective.
If one were
being cynical, one would view this as a lack of balance or even lazy
journalism, as these injustices far outnumber suicide bombings and would
thus take more time to compile. This
is all the more reason why
they should be compiled in such a way.
His response seemed
to acknowledge the far more numerous injustices inflicted on the Palestinians,
but he would not budge. To create and maintain a timeline of casualties
overall would be an almost insurmountable task and would also lack a
clear editorial focus, he said. Suicide bombings are a shocking
if sadly familiar part of the Middle East conflict and they tend to
make headline news when they happen. Since the BBC decides what
makes headline news, is he implying that the corporation simply deems
suicide bombings more newsworthy?
Refugees
Judging from BBC
Onlines output in the first quarter of 2004, the refugee issue
does not seem to be newsworthy. Out of almost 40 relevant articles,
most involving Israeli attacks against refugee camps, not a single one
explained why those refugees were dispossessed or where they had originally
come from.
The furthest one
article goes is to state that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
were displaced, but the reasons and perpetrator - Israels
ethnic cleansing to establish a Jewish state - are absent. Only one
article mentions the refugees right to return to their homes,
only one indicates how long they have been dispossessed, and only three
refer to their dire living conditions.
Only one of these
three articles is specifically about such conditions. Entitled UN
warns of Palestinian despair, it is about the UN Relief Agency
for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) warning of growing hopelessness,
cynicism and despair among refugees, that unless they were
given some reason to hope for an improvement in their lives, they would
be unlikely to have faith in the Middle East peace process, and
appealing for greater commitment from the international community.
On the face of it,
this article is praiseworthy in highlighting refugees living conditions,
but it still fails completely to explain the root causes of their plight.
The same is true of an article by Gaza correspondent James Rodgers on
Palestinians displaced by Israels house demolitions - no mention
of the policies behind the demolitions or their illegality, and no mention
that they are taking place on occupied land. And this, during three
months, was as good as it got from BBC Online concerning refugees, another
core issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Why the pitfalls
in coverage?
This is a vast topic
with various, equally valid theories which could fill an entire book.
As such, I will not delve into it, but instead direct readers to a chapter
entitled "Why the BBC Ducks the Palestinian Story" by Tim
Llewellyn, a patron of AMW and former BBC Middle East correspondent.
The chapter is available on the internet and contained in an excellent
book published in January this year entitled "Tell Me Lies: Propaganda
and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq", which is available
at a 20% discount on the AMW website.
What I can say for
certain, however, is that the BBC cannot claim it has not been told.
AMW members - including Llewellyn - have been highlighting their concerns
to the corporation for years, and since last October we have had several
meetings with senior BBC officials and sent them periodic summaries
of trends in the corporations coverage, which highlighted the
same problems illustrated in this article.
However, at one
such meeting Richard Sambrook, then head of news and now director of
the World Service and global news division, stressed the importance
of both sides maintaining open channels of dialogue, and then failed
to reply to several of my subsequent e-mails and monitoring summaries.
BBC chairman Michael
Grade replied in May to a letter by AMW director Judith Brown that "since
the views of your organisation are well known to BBC News, I hope you
will understand that it would be inappropriate for me to fulfil your
request for a meeting." We have yet to understand.
Greg Philo &
"Bad News From Israel"
Our findings echo
those of a major three-year study by Professor Greg Philo, research
director of the Glasgow University Media Group, into British peoples
understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the output of
the UKs broadcasters, including the BBC. His findings, contained
in his book "Bad News from Israel", published on June 22 this
year and available on the AMW website at a 30% discount, are shocking:
Only 9% of people knew that the Israelis were the occupiers and settlers
- 11% believed it was the Palestinians! Only 30% knew that the Palestinians
had suffered more fatalities than the Israelis, and 80% did not know
where the Palestinian refugees had come from or how they had become
dispossessed.
One of the book's
major findings was that "there is a preponderance of official 'Israeli
perspectives', particularly on BBC 1, where Israelis were interviewed
over twice as much as Palestinians. On top of this, US politicians who
support Israel were very strongly featured. They appeared more than
politicians from any other country and twice as much as those from Britain."
Another major finding
was that "there was a strong emphasis on Israeli casualties on
the news, relative to Palestinians (even though Palestinians had around
2-3 times the number of deaths as Israelis). In one week in March 02
which the BBC reported as having the most Palestinian casualties since
the start of the intifada, there was actually more coverage on the news
of Israeli deaths. There were also differences in the language used
by journalists for Israelis and Palestinians words such as 'atrocity',
'brutal murder', 'mass murder', 'savage cold blooded killing', 'lynching'
and 'slaughter' were used about Israeli deaths but not Palestinian.
The word 'terrorist' was used to describe Palestinians by journalists
but when an Israeli group was reported as trying to bomb a Palestinian
school, they were referred to as 'extremists' or 'vigilantes' (BBC 1
lunch time news and ITV main news (5/03/02)."
Tim Llewellyn, in
an article published on June 20 this year in the Observer, gave another
example that "is a template for hundreds: when Israeli police killed
13 Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin in October 2000, inside Israel,
soon after the armed uprising in the occupied territories began, BBC
and ITN coverage was a fifth of that given to the Palestinians who stormed
a police station in Ramallah a day later and murdered two captured Israeli
soldiers. These Palestinians were 'a frenzied [lynch] mob
baying
for blood'. No such lurid prose was used to describe the Israeli killing
of their own citizen Arabs."
And while Philo's
book came out in June 2004, his findings were first published in the
Guardian on April 16, 2002. In that article, he said: "There were
many examples of the Israeli viewpoint being adopted by journalists.
Palestinian bombings were frequently presented as 'starting' a sequence
of events which involved an Israeli 'response'. On Radio 4 it was reported
that 'Five Palestinians have been killed when the Israeli army launched
new attacks on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for recent acts of terrorism'.
He continued: "In
another exchange on BBC Radio 4, David Wiltshire MP was asked 'What
can the Egyptians do to stop the suicide bombers because that
in the end is what is cranking up the violence at present?' He replies,
'Well that is one view, the Israeli view
'."
In a letter published
in the Guardian in September 25, 2002, Philo stated: "BBC coverage
has often used words such as 'terrorist', 'murder' and 'atrocity' to
describe Palestinian actions. Its coverage of Jenin was restrained compared
with other channels and its main bulletins reported the statements of
both sides without endorsing them, noting the Palestinians called it
a 'massacre' while the Israelis called it a 'legitimate military operation'.
A suicide bomber who killed six Israelis was referred to as a 'mass
murderer'."
On April 1 this
year, Philo was quoted by the Guardian as saying: "One of the complaints
made about the BBC was that it endorsed Palestinian views. In fact it
was Israeli views that were more likely to be endorsed and that was
very clear on the BBC. Overall the BBC didn't come across at all as
being anti-Israeli there's a good deal of evidence which would
show that the imbalance is against the Palestinians."
And on July 14 this
year, he wrote in the Guardian: "Between October and December 2001
on
BBC1 and ITV news, Israelis were said to be responding to what had been
done to them about six times as often as the Palestinians. This pattern
of reporting clearly influenced how some viewers understood the conflict."
So Philo's findings
have been in the public domain for over two years, ample time for the
BBC to rectify the problems highlighted in his research. However, it
seems the corporation has not only failed to do this, but has sounded
worryingly dismissive of the findings.
The BBC's "Middle
East tsar", Malcolm Balen, was quoted in June 2004 by the Jewish
Chronicle as saying: "I have never been someone who thinks one
can detect bias simply by counting up the number of interviews on TV.
There could be 100 interviews with Israeli government spokesmen but
they could be quite critical and hard interviews. Equally you could
say that if there are fewer Palestinian interviews, it's a sign that
the BBC isn't asking enough hard questions of the Palestinians."
So presumably his
answer to Israeli predominance on the BBC is to be harder on the Palestinians!
Judging from Philo's extensive research and that of AMW, Balen seems
unaware of the qualitative inequality in how both sides are interviewed.
Conclusion
The BBC should view
this article as an outreached hand rather than a clenched fist, but
in reaching out once again, we ask merely that our views and findings
be dealt with promptly and genuinely. No more generic e-mails from the
BBC claiming its efforts at objectivity, in response to messages whose
specific points and grievances are not addressed. No more factual errors
that are corrected when pointed out, only to reappear weeks later. No
more falling back on the argument that "well, we also receive complaints
from the pro-Israel lobby", when those complaints are often sweeping
and unsubstantiated. And no more meetings without follow-up.
Let there now be
a sincere effort by the BBC to engage with those seeking nothing more
controversial than fair, contextual reporting and justice for an occupied
people, not least for the benefit, accuracy and reputation of the corporation
itself.
And to those reading
this article, this is a time for renewed perseverance, a time when Palestinian
suffering is at a peak, and the facts and figures regarding BBC coverage
are ample. As British citizens, it is our right as licence payers to
make our voices heard. As advocates of human rights and objective media
coverage, it is our duty.
Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi
is the chairman of Arab Media Watch and he can be contacted at [email protected]