How the BBC Keeps Getting Israel Wrong

On Tuesday, the IDF killed three high-ranking Palestinian Islamic Jihad commanders, after the terrorist group last week launched 102 rockets into Israel. Islamic Jihad responded yesterday with an even heavier barrage. Stephen Daisley comments on how the BBC, Britain’s state-sponsored media company, covered the story:

If you get your news on the Middle East from the BBC, every so often Israel appears to go mad and begins lustily bombing Palestinian civilians. No rhyme or reason. Jerusalem is simply pummeling Gaza for the hell of it.

This impression is often created by the BBC’s approach to reporting on Israel and terrorism. The story invariably begins when Israel responds to attacks, with those original attacks deemed insufficiently newsworthy until then or reported as a retaliation to some provocation. Then, once Israel engages, the inciting incidents are quietly smuggled into the coverage but framed as just another round in the cycle of violence. Thus self-defense is cast as aggression, and aggression as tit-for-tat.

The BBC’s approach is certainly not the result of a conspiracy, as some Israelis and their sympathizers around the world assume. Yes, the BBC has its ideologues in news and current affairs and it seems to apply lower corporate and journalistic standards in its coverage of Israel. This is, after all, the organization that hired someone who declared “Hitler was right” as the “Palestine specialist” at BBC Monitoring. But the BBC’s bias against Israel reflects institutional culture, the political attitudes of the sort of people who work in news and current affairs, and patterns and assumptions so long embedded that even veteran BBC staff would struggle to account adequately for the uniquely malign frame the corporation applies to Israel. That may not be much comfort—but cultures, groupthink, and frames can all be changed.

Read more at Spectator

More about: BBC, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society