On June 4th the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Lucy Williamson under the headline ‘Fires in northern Israel fuel demands to tackle escalation with Hezbollah’. The following day – June 5th – the BBC News website published another report by the same journalist on the same topic titled ‘Israelis using gardening tools to fight wildfires sparked by Hezbollah rockets’.
A couple of weeks later, that pattern was repeated. On June 19th the BBC News website published a report by Williamson headlined ‘Israel and Hezbollah play with fire as fears grow of another war’ which was previously discussed here:
NASRALLAH’S CYPRUS THREATS NOT NEWS FOR BBC’S WILLIAMSON
Late on June 22nd, the BBC News website published another report titled ‘Unable to back down, Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out war’ which is credited to “Lucy Williamson, Reporting from the Israel-Lebanon border”.
If one assumed that the reason for the appearance within days of a second report on the same topic by the same journalist was the emergence of new information concerning the situation on Israel’s northern border, one would be wrong. A considerable proportion of Williamson’s second report (which was also translated into Swahili) consists of interviews with people on both sides of the border: Israelis from Kiryat Shmona and Malkiya and two residents of southern Lebanese villages.
Failing to clarify that her interviewee lives in a town described as one of the “bastions of strong Hezbollah support” where a strike against a Hizballah command centre took place in March, Williamson tells her readers that:
“Fatima Belhas lives a few miles (7km) from the Israeli border, near Jbal el Botm.
In the early days, she would shake with fear when Israel bombed the area, she says, but has since come to terms with the bombardments and no longer thinks of leaving.
“Where would I go?” she asked. “[Others] have relatives elsewhere. But how can I impose on someone like that? We have no money.”
“Maybe it is better to die at home with dignity,” she said. “We have grown up resisting. We won’t be driven out of our land like the Palestinians.””
Readers may recall that just days earlier another BBC report from southern Lebanon promoted that same ‘Nakba’ comparison.
Similarly failing to note Hizballah’s presence and infrastructure in Mays al Jbal (also Meiss al Jabal), Williamson continues:
“Hussein Aballan recently left his village of Mays al Jbal, around 6 miles (10km) from Kiryat Shmona, on the Lebanese side of the border.
Life there had become impossible, he said, with erratic communications and electricity, and almost no functioning shops.
The few dozen families left there are mainly older people who refuse to leave their homes and farms, he told the BBC.
But he backed the Hezbollah assault on Israel.
“Everyone in the south [of Lebanon] has lived through years of aggression, but has come out stronger,” he said. “Only through resistance are we strong.””
Williamson fails to remind her readers that Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon twenty-four years ago and that the only “aggression” has been in response to attacks by Hizballah and other terrorist groups, such as the cross-border attack which sparked the war in 2006.
As in her previous report, Williamson portrays the events resulting from Hizballah’s decision to attack Israel on October 8th as “tit-for-tat”:
“But as the tit-for-tat conflict grinds on, and more than 60,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, there are signs that both Israel’s leaders and its citizens are prepared to support military options to push Hezbollah back from the border by force.”
Also as in her own previous reports and in most other BBC content, Williamson fails to explain to her readers that according to UN SC resolution 1701, Hizballah should be nowhere near the border with Israel and that the UN’s ‘peacekeeping force’ in Lebanon has failed to enforce that resolution since it was passed in 2006.
Williamson’s framing of the situation in the north of Israel includes the following: [emphasis added]
“The dangerous stalemate here hinges largely on the war Israel is fighting more than 100 miles (160km) to the south in Gaza.
A ceasefire there would help calm tensions in the north too, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping both conflicts going, mortgaged by his promise to far-right government allies to destroy Hamas before ending the Gaza War.”
And:
“Demands for political change are likely to increase when Israel’s conflicts end.
Many believe Israel’s prime minister is playing for time: caught between growing demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, and growing support for a war in the north.”
In other words, Williamson’s framing ignores the fact that Hamas chose to attack Israel on October 7th and that Hizballah chose to attack Israel on October 8th and almost every day since then. She erases the fact that Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire offers in order to promote a narrative whereby it is Israel’s prime minister alone who is “keeping both conflicts going”.
Moreover, she tells BBC audiences that:
“The problem for Israel is how to stop the rockets and get its people back to the abandoned northern areas of the country.
The problem for Hezbollah is how to stop the rockets when its ally, Hamas, is being pounded by Israeli forces in Gaza.”
Williamson cites a statement made by the UN Secretary General on June 21st:
“Hezbollah is a well-armed, well-trained army, backed by Iran; Israel, a sophisticated military power with the US as an ally.
Full-scale war is likely to be devastating for both sides.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said it would be a “catastrophe that goes […] beyond imagination”.”
Like the UN Secretary General, Williamson has nothing to tell her audiences about the Lebanese state’s decades-long failure to tackle the Islamist terrorist organisation which has repeatedly dragged that country into conflict and has nothing to say about the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions designed to prevent further conflict.
The BBC’s sidelining of UN SC resolution 1701 and its whitewashing of the failures of the UN forces that are supposed to enforce it did not begin in October 2023: that editorial policy has been evident for many years. Now, however, that policy is being used to advance framing of a potential escalation after over eight months of continuous attacks on Israeli communities by Hizballah and other terrorist organisations as something which is the responsibility of Israel alone.
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