Among the BBC News website’s extensive coverage of the US president’s 20-point plan and the ceasefire that came into effect on October 10th, audiences found a filmed report by Bernd Debusmann Jr titled “The US presidents who claimed Middle East breakthroughs before Trump”.
Published on October 15th, that report was obviously conceived and planned in advance, meaning that inaccuracies cannot not be ‘explained’ using the standard excuse of live reporting. Nevertheless, the synopsis to that report promotes false equivalence between Israeli hostages kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip – alive or dead – by terrorists on October 7th 2023 and Palestinian security prisoners convicted of acts of terror or detained as unlawful combatants. [emphasis added]
“In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s push for a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal between Hamas and Israel, the BBC’s Bernd Debusmann Jr takes us through decades of American diplomacy, tracing how five US presidents tried to broker peace in one of the world’s most volatile regions.”
The BBC’s Washington-based White House reporter opens his ‘history lesson’ as follows:
Debusmann Jr: “Peace in the Middle East: a phrase that has echoed through decades of US diplomacy. Here’s how five American presidents have tried to broker a lasting peace.”
The first example used is President Jimmy Carter and the 1978 Camp David Accords signed between Israel and Egypt. The second is portrayed as the “Reagan Middle East peace plan 1982”, with viewers told that:
Debusmann Jr: “After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, President Ronald Reagan offered his own peace plan but it was rejected by Israel and dismissed by the Arab states.”
BBC audiences are not informed that Reagan’s September 1982 plan had been drawn up without any consultation with Israel – or indeed why Israel had “invaded Lebanon in 1982”.
Debusmann Jr then moves on to the year 1993:
Debusmann Jr: “Bill Clinton helped seal the Oslo Accords, bringing the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and to a historic handshake. But the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was a major blow to the peace plan and the accords fell apart.”
Notably, Debusmann Jr has nothing to tell BBC audiences about the fact that just eleven days after that “historic handshake”, Palestinian terrorist organisations opposed to the Oslo Accords embarked on a campaign of terrorism which, after five years, had resulted in more Israelis being murdered than in the fifteen years before the Oslo Accords were signed.
Debusmann Jr also completely ignores the topic of negotiations and agreements signed after Rabin’s murder in November 1995, such as the 1997 Hebron Protocol and the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, as well as the dramatic rise in Palestinian terrorism during the second Intifada, before going on to present George Bush’s 2003 ‘Roadmap for Peace’.
As long-time readers may be aware, Debusmann Jr’s portrayal of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin as the reason why the Oslo Accords “fell apart” is not a new feature in BBC content. The corporation’s now international editor Jeremy Bowen has been pushing that narrative for almost a decade and the same claim has also been promoted in other BBC content.
BBC ‘WORLD VIEW’ OF ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN NEGOTIATIONS LAID OUT BY JEREMY BOWEN
BBC ME EDITOR RECYCLES HIS ‘ISRAELI RIGHT KILLED THE PEACE PROCESS’ THEORY
BBC WS RADIO’S ‘THE EXPLANATION’ FLOPS ON PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT – PART TWO
No doubt the BBC’s funding public would have found it rather refreshing to get a ‘history lesson’ that does not erase the relevant issue of decades of Palestinian terrorism and refusals of peace offers from reporting supposedly intended to inform them why “lasting peace” has yet to be achieved – but Bernd Debusmann Jr did not manage to deliver.
It is the PLO /PA /HAMAS that killed the Israeli “left” by killing Oslo with bus bombs.
Given Koran 9.30 which enjoins Moslems – all Moslems – to bully the rest of the World till everybody turns Moslem one of the purposes behind the 7th October raid was to ruin any trust or optimism tha twould allow for peace making so tha the war may continue till a Moslem victory. Of course as in the Arab rebellions against the British the UN 181 partiton and the 1967 Six Day War the verdict of the battlefield might not be so Seventh Century as expected.
We may get some peace when the Arab World instead of judging others by the Koran’s inciteful sermons starts to look at non-Moslems with some empathy, equality and rational observation instead of dogmatic bigotry.