Since the antisemitic terror attack on Bondi Beach last week, there has been a large amount of discussion on BBC radio and broadcast channels about the situation which led to this atrocity. Several BBC journalists questioned members of the Jewish community on whether Israel was to blame for the attack, giving credibility to the idea that anger about the war in Gaza could reasonably result in attacks on Jewish civilians around the world, and reinforcing a sense of Jewish collective responsibility never applied elsewhere.
On the Radio 4 Today programme on the 15th of December Nick Robinson interviewed a Jewish family attending a Hanukkah candle lighting in North London, named only as Paul and Leslie. After asking them about their fears of a similar attack happening in their community, Nick Robinson turns the conversation to Gaza:
Robinson: “I want to ask you a difficult question. There’ll be some people looking in and they’ll go, look at what happened in Gaza and of course something was coming, what would you say to them?”
Paul: “We can’t be held accountable for Israel’s actions. We’re in the UK, we’re a community within the Uk and we’re making sure that our community…” (at this point Paul trails off, apparently upset)
Robinson: “It’s tough isn’t it sir, this is tough, it’s emotional, can I wish you a happy Hannukah anyway?”
That same morning on BBC Radio Scotland, John Beattie raised the question with three separate Jewish guests, firstly Australian born Noa Hoffman whose home community was victim of the attack:
Beattie: “you don’t think Israel’s overstepping?”
Hoffman: “I mean like, I don’t really understand how that is relevant to the fact that there are dead people being murdered in Sydney that but so I don’t really understand why you would ask me that. But yeah, of course, of course. You can criticize Government. I do that all the time, but that does not mean that you can go and go on a March and call for dead Jews everywhere.
Beattie then went on to ask Timothy Lovat, chair of the Jewish Council of Scotland, if a listener who texted in was correct that:
Beattie: “the Jewish community in Australia and in Scotland and elsewhere, and here’s the point that he’s making Timothy, should do more to distance themselves from the actions of Israel and Netanyahu.”
After then pressing Mr Lovat on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide, and if it was possible to “just wipe away” what Israel was doing, Beattie went on to ask his third guest Professor Joe Goldblatt, chair of the Edinburgh Interfaith Association:
Beattie: “Joe. Can I go back to my earlier point and maybe you don’t want to come there with me, but again to be to be clear, you cannot, nobody ever would condone senseless killing of people. But can there be any sense that if you do something terrible as a country, then somebody gets incredibly angry and takes it out on a tangential group of people? You get where I’m coming from.”
These questions were far from isolated. On World Service Newshour on the 15th December Paul Henley asked the chief minister of the central synagogue in Sydney if he had:
“the feeling that many people in Australia were confusing what the Israeli Government was doing with what Jewish people in the wider World were responsible for?”
and on the Radio Four Six O’Clock News the same day James Landale reported the X posts by entrepreneur and UK labour party donor Dale Vince in which:
“Mr. Vince insisted that, on any rational analysis, the biggest single cause of rising antisemitism was what he called the genocide in Palestine”
The framing of these questions makes it appear that anger at Israel can reasonably be expected to manifest as violence against Jewish diaspora communities, and by asking them of Jewish community figures these journalists are asking those people to answer for violence committed against them, in a way that would never happen to other groups, as Dave Rich from the Community Security Trust pointed out to Nick Robinson on the Today programme:
Dave Rich: “yeah I think the idea that this is just misguided anger about Israel completely misses the point you only have to look at what Russia has done in Ukraine over the last three years and you don’t get people gunning down random Russians on a beach in Australia or smashing their car into the gates of a Russian orthodox church in Manchester it just doesn’t happen”
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism makes it clear that holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel is antisemitic. At no point when asking these questions of Jewish community figures did any of these journalists include that context, leaving listeners with the impression that this is a valid and reasonable line of questioning. While the BBC, unlike most other British institutions, has not adopted the IHRA definition formally, they still have a duty to fairly point out context around collective responsibility framing.
Further missing context to these conversations was the October 7th massacre itself. Surely, if asking Jews if an antisemitic terror attack was caused by the war in Gaza, it would be crucial context to point out that the war in Gaza was itself caused by an antisemitic terror attack.
The BBC failed to include crucial context to an incredibly sensitive line of questioning, failing in their duty to provide fair and neutral coverage of the atrocities in Bondi and subtly reinforcing an unfair and dangerous trope of collective responsibility.
BBC have always found dissidentents within the Jewish fold to hold up as shining lights to bash Israel and Zionism – this is yet one more example. These dissident voices are a small vocal minority who if one drills down finds they are associated with anti Israel movements like Yahad etc and not the mainstream