The BBC’s “Heart and Soul” programme recently aired two podcasts which intended to look at “Jews and Muslims living side by side” the first set in Hebron and Jerusalem, the second in Morocco. However across both episodes, Jewish history and Arab violence were systematically erased, with Muslims framed as perpetually passive, while Jewish actions are always independent, illegitimate, and without context.
The first episode, titled “Prayers through the checkpoints” opens with a long section on the city of Hebron, and the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Presenter Emily Whither describes:
“a labyrinth of Israeli checkpoints and a complicated network of various barriers”
And Palestinians
“surrounded by razor wire and a dense web of surveillance cameras.”
What she does not discuss however, is the terrorism that led to the establishment of checkpoints in the first place, nor the complex shared governance protocol in place for almost 30 years, which the Palestinian Authority agreed to. Instead, the security system in place in Hebron is framed as collective punishment for October 7th:
Whither: “Palestinian worshippers say visiting their mosques has become much harder since increased Israeli security following October 7th 2023. That day 1200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage by Hamas which is regarded as a terrorist group by many countries. The Israeli military insists extra security is needed to keep their population safe but many Palestinians we spoke to argue the measures amount to collective punishment.”
Once again Palestinian violence, and with it Israeli victimhood, is frozen in time as a one-off occurrence, despite INSS reporting 11569 terrorist attacks in the West Bank since.
The segment on Hebron focuses on the Tomb of the Patriarchs, clearly a site of huge importance to both Jews and Muslims, but subtly frames the Jewish presence there as suspect:
Whither: “For many settlers living in Hebron is a way of claiming a physical connection to biblical history, they see it as the cradle of Jewish presence in the land, and settlers now sit in the heart of the Israeli government. They believe the land was promised to them by God”
No mention at all is made of the 2000 year continuous Jewish presence in Hebron, nor that the Tomb of the Patriarchs is the second most holy site in Judaism and was originally enclosed by Herod in the 1st century BC, some 600 years before the Islamic conquest of the area, or the Jewish population of Hebron having been subject to the massacre of 1929 and subsequently expelled and banned from worship at the site. All a listener is told about the Jewish community of Hebron is that they are settlers, and as the misleading BBC mantra goes, “illegal under international law”. Alongside the framing of Palestinians as “Worshippers” living with “restricted access to key sites including the Ibrahimi mosque.” The overall picture is one of passive devout Muslim worshippers living under an arbitrary and imposed Jewish presence.
Whither continues her look at Muslim worshippers living alongside Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the key fear is stated openly as the possibility that Jews may one day be able to pray at their holiest site:
Whither: “They say they fear Israel will one day replicate the Cave of the Patriarchs model at Temple Mount allowing Jewish prayer and dividing access by physical space or time.”
Once again, no context is provided to either the history of the site, or the reasons behind the security measures, but Muslim worshippers tell human stories about family experiences at Al-Aqsa, while the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount is summed up as:
Whither: “the location of two biblical temples”
Once again, both the ancient Jewish history of Jerusalem and the Arab violence, from the banning of Jewish worship at the western wall prior to 1967 to contemporary terror attacks and groups instigating anti-Jewish violence are completely erased.
In the second episode the story moves from Israel to Morocco, with a new presenter, Mike Lanchin. The pattern, however, remains the same.
Lanchin’s look at the history of the Jewish community in Morocco leans heavily on the often repeated idea that Jews lived happily in Arab countries until the establishment of Israel:
Lanchin: “it was in the years after the defeat of the Nazis that the exodus of Jews began, accelerated by the establishment of the state of Israel and its wars with other Arab nations.”
And this idea is echoed by one of his guests, the son of a mixed Muslim and Jewish marriage:
Abdu: “Whenever there was a war in the middle east it effects the relationship between Jews and Muslims here and it’s made a lot of Jews leave Morocco”
This guest also tells us how the Muslim community felt about the Jews leaving Morocco:
Abdu: “they felt that they were abandoned because they did not let their Muslim friends or Muslim neighbours know that they are leaving so they felt abandoned and they felt sometimes even betrayed that they did not receive a goodbye”
Lanchin however does not feel it necessary to balance this view with any history of anti-Jewish violence. The truth is that the Jewish community of Morocco, while arguably faring better than in many other Arab nations, lived under “Dhimmitude” often euphemised as “protected status”, but more accurately describing a second-class position in society with heavy taxation in return for that protection, and strict laws of allowed behaviour. He also omits that the exodus of Moroccan Jews was preceded by violent pogroms, notably in Fez in 1912, and Oujda and Jerada in 1948, and that Morocco outlawed Jewish emigration to Israel between 1956 and 1961.
The overall impression is again of a passive Arab Muslim population being acted upon by Jews and the state of Israel. When Lanchin reports:
Lanchin: “From around three hundred thousand in the 1940’s Morocco’s Jewish population has fallen to around two to three thousand today. There are almost a million Moroccan Jews or Jews of Moroccan descent now living in Israel.”
The impression that lands with the listener is not of neutral demographic change, and certainly not of a vulnerable community fleeing violence, but of Israel disrupting the harmony of the region, and stealing away Morocco’s happy and integrated Jewish minority.
The BBC’s stated mission is to provide:
“accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world.”
Choosing framing which erases so much history and political agency from both sides of this complex conflict fails in that mission utterly, by reducing Arab Muslims to perpetual victims, and creating a caricature of rootless Jewish power.
