A Rare Opportunity for the BBC to Fix Its Israel Problem

While American Jews are familiar with the hostility and inaccuracy that have plagued reporting on the Jewish state in the New York Times and other major media outlets, in the United Kingdom the issue takes on a different character, as the principle offender is the state-run British Broadcasting Company (BBC), which has a near-monopoly on broadcast news. This summer, the BBC gained a new director, Tim Davie, who has expressed an emphatic commitment to bringing impartiality to reporting. Manfred Gerstenfeld sees at least the potential for change:

The British Jewish lawyer Trevor Asserson, now living in Israel, invested his own money from 2000 to 2004 in four well-documented studies detailing the BBC’s systematic bias against Israel. He concluded that the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East is infected by a widespread antipathy toward the country. This distorted reporting creates an atmosphere in which anti-Semitism can thrive.

Asserson noted that the BBC’s monopoly derives from a legally binding contract with the British government. He defined the BBC’s fifteen legal obligations under its charter and then showed instances in which the BBC breached many to most of the guidelines.

Asserson’s reports had some effect. In November 2003, the BBC created a senior editorial post to advise on its Middle East coverage. A former editor of the BBC’s 9:00 News, Malcolm Balen, was selected for the position. . . . In 2004, Balen undertook an internal inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The report was never released, which led to a series of legal battles. After eight years, the [British] Supreme Court decided that the Balen report is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC had, however, to disclose its legal costs on the matter, which were about half-a-million dollars at the time.

One wonders why, if the inquiry found that its reporting was impartial, the BBC would spend so much to keep it secret.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: BBC, Media, United Kingdom

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

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More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF