Misrepresentation writ large

Here is the author Sharen Green working as a human rights monitor in the Wesst Bank. She is pictured with Abu Azzam, a well-known farmer from Jayyous who represents the Land Defense Committee in the Qalqiliya district. For 30 years he has fought against Israeli land confiscation and resisted the construction of the Annexation Wall.

FORTY headless babies and the mass rape of Israeli women. Fighters slicing off a woman’s breast and playing with it. What dreadful atrocities Hamas committed on October 7.

Except they didn’t - see reports in Le Monde and Yesmagazine.

Jo Biden said: I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.

He didn’t because there were no such pictures and the White House was forced to retract.

All these stories issued by the Israeli government, their army or specialist reporters have long since been debunked. But they were plastered all over our mainstream media and continue to circulate. As ever, the initial story makes far more impact than any subsequent corrections.

In several alleged cases of sexual violence the accusations were unfounded. Others were found to be inaccurate or unreliable and many others were unverifiable - see this analysis in Mondoweiss.

Don’t get me wrong. Hamas killed civilians and took hostages - both are war crimes. And I’m not claiming there were no rapes. There may well have been – there usually are in war. But not a shred of evidence has been found for the Israeli claim that Hamas fighters were ordered to use rape systematically as a weapon of war.

Another highly successful Israeli ploy was to claim that 12 employees of UNWRA were involved in the October 7 breakout from Gaza.

UNWRA provides education, healthcare and aid to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It employs 13,000 staff in Gaza alone and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has described it as the backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza.

Immediately the accusation was made, 16 nations stopped all funding to the body and ten staff were sacked. So far Israel has provided no proof to the investigation of their claim and ten of the states have started donating again. The UK, to its shame, has not (note: HMG restored funding two days after this blog was published).

The whole point about Israeli reports is not to tell the truth but to further Israeli policy which is to gain the whole of historic Palestine and to get rid of the Palestinians – or at the very least to herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves.

Compare how our media treats reports from Palestinian sources. Figures from Gaza are issued by that well-known terrorist organisation Hamas – the subtext being they can’t be trusted. Both the UN and the ICRC say that figures from the Gazan authorities have proved pretty accurate in the past.

Historically evidence from Palestinian sources have proved far more trustworthy than that which has suffered Israeli spin – often called hasbara.

My biggest criticism, however, is in the lack of context. This is not a struggle between equals although our media usually treats stories as if they were. Israel has the fourth biggest army in the world equipped with fighter aircraft, helicopter gunships, war ships and cutting-edge drone technology (many such manufactured in the UK) – nuclear weapons even.

Palestine is not allowed an army. Where I worked in the northern West Bank the illegal separation barrier took up the equivalent of the length of two football fields behind the fence and had a tank trap in front of it for which even more precious olive trees had been grubbed up. Palestine doesn’t even have one single tank.

We never get the whole story here because reporters in our mainstream media are hog-tied.

BBC journalists were found crying in the loos over the pro-Israeli bias in the way October 7 was being reported. Freelancers weren’t coming to work because they were so upset (see this article in the Times article of October 25th, 2023).

But the bias has been going on for a long time.

A friend complimented a senior BBC Middle East journalist on one of his reports back in the day. He asked her to ring up the newsroom because there’s a barrage of complaints if anything remotely critical of Israel goes out, he said.

The recently departed and much-lamented Greg Philo from the Glasgow University Media Group tells a shocking story during an address to SOAS in 2011. When his book, Bad News from Israel, came out in 2004 a BBC editor told him that when anything negative about Israel was broadcast, they waited in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis! And another reporter said: You must raise the issue of the pressure we’re under…….. I can’t go there but you have to get it into your response.

Philo emphasises that there are many good people in newsrooms, many of whom are troubled. One said that what was missing from the analysis was the notion that this is an occupied people trying to throw off a military occupation.

Here is another video clip where Greg Philo discusses the fear at the heart of the BBC.

We believe we live in a democracy and that we enjoy free speech and a free press. The BBC is revered across the world as reliable source of news but somehow the Bad News from Israel comes to us skewed, however hard good journalists try to inform us.

So, in conclusion - why is our country, our government, our media and even our established Church[i] in thrall to Israel?

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[i] CAMPAIN has contacted 95 serving Church of England bishops but none has called out apartheid in Israel or ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

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Brief bio of the author, Sharen Green: I fell over the issue of Palestine aged 22 when I went to teach at the University of Jordan. All but two of my students were refugees from the West Bank following the 1967 Six-Day War. Instead of writing essays on My Home Town or What I did in the Holidays every single one wrote about what had happened to their lives when Israel was created.

So they were always on my mind during the next decades when I trained as a nurse, became a camp follower, a mother and finally a journalist. Since retirement, I have served two terms as an Ecumenical Accompanier (i.e. a human rights monitor) in the West Bank. Something that fascinated me is how consecutive Israeli regimes have used – and still use – Ottoman, British Mandate and even Jordanian law to justify their land thefts. The laws of long-dead empires are sacrosanct (when it suits) but International Law? Nah! Sharen is also a member of CAMPAIN's executive committee and coordinates its Lambeth Witness Group (LWG).