BBC audiences are all too used to the “churnalism” style of reporting in which a press release or a report by a third party is amplified without any independent research or fact checking having been done and with no relevant context provided.
Another example of such reporting appeared on the BBC News website on January 7th under the headline “UN rights chief says Israeli policy in West Bank ‘resembles apartheid system’”. That 617-word article is credited to the BBC’s Tokyo correspondent Shaimaa Khalil and UK-based David Gritten.
The overwhelming majority of that article – 77.8% of its word-count – promotes, quotes and links to an uncredited “thematic report” put out on the same day by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Nevertheless, BBC audiences are not provided with any context concerning that UN official’s record on Israel or the UN Human Rights Council’s systemic anti-Israel bias.
Israel’s response to that “thematic report” gets just 85 words of coverage, mostly quoting a linked social media post.
The BBC’s report opens by telling readers that:
“The UN human rights office has issued a report detailing what it calls Israel’s “systemic discrimination” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and said the situation has “drastically deteriorated” over the past three years.
Israeli laws, policies and practices were having an “asphyxiating impact” on every aspect of daily life for Palestinians and violated an international convention against racial discrimination, it said.
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before,” High Commissioner Volker Türk warned.”
Notably, Khalil and Gritten have nothing whatsoever to tell BBC audiences about the context of the significant rise in Palestinian terrorism originating from Judea and Samaria that began in early 2022. Neither do they have anything to say about the Jordanian invasion of Israel in 1948 or the repeated refusals of peace offers by Palestinian leaders before invoking the BBC’s standard but partial mantra on “settlements” and “international law”:
“Israel has built about 160 settlements housing 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for a hoped-for future state – during the 1967 Middle East war. An estimated 3.3 million Palestinians live alongside them.
The settlements are illegal under international law.”
Ignoring previous promotions of the ‘apartheid’ smear by rapporteurs associated with the UNHRC and other UN officials, Khalil and Gritten go on to tell BBC audiences that:
“This is the first time a UN human rights chief has explicitly compared Israeli policies in the West Bank to apartheid – the policy of racial segregation and discrimination that was enforced by the white minority government in South Africa against the country’s black majority from 1948 until 1991.”
They however fail to explain that “Israeli policies” have nothing to do with race or that the vast majority of Palestinians in the area that the BBC chooses to call “the West Bank” (as it was renamed by the occupying Jordanian authorities) live under Palestinian Authority rule, before promoting the following quote:
“”Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives – every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices” Türk said in a statement.”
They go on to cite the UN report’s claim that:
“…Israeli authorities treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in the West Bank under two distinct bodies of law and policies, which it says results in unequal treatment on a range of critical issues.
“Palestinians continue to be subjected to large-scale confiscation of land and deprivation of access to resources. This has had the effect of dispossessing them of their lands and homes, alongside other forms of systemic discrimination, including criminal prosecution in military courts during which their due process and fair trial rights are systematically violated,” it finds.”
Khalil and Gritten refrain from explaining that different legal systems exist in Judea and Samaria because Israel has not annexed the territory. They fail to clarify that the Palestinian Authority – which since the Oslo Accords has civil control over Areas A and B in which most Palestinians live – has its own legal system.
They make no attempt to explain that the legal structure in Area C is composed of systems that existed before 1967 – Ottoman law, Mandatory law and Jordanian law – as well as the post-1967 Israeli administrative law (which can also be applied to Israeli citizens) or that military courts exist because the administrative authorities in the area are the military commander and the civil administration. Neither are readers told that Palestinians can – and do – take cases to Israel’s Supreme Court.
Once again we see that, as has been the case for well over a decade, the BBC is only too willing to uncritically promote and mainstream the ‘apartheid’ smear – which is of course one of the core libels (along with ‘colonialism’ and ‘genocide’) used to delegitimise Israel’s existence – under the guise of “accurate and impartial” journalism.
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THE LATEST CHAPTER IN A CAMPAIGN UNCRITICALLY AMPLIFIED BY THE BBC
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