What armed struggle?

Current media coverage of the Israel / Palestinian conflict roughly boils down to whose word is trusted and believed. Who said what. “One side said this; the other said that.”

Not that I count this blog as actual ‘media coverage’, but I’m aware that the principle ‘whose word do I trust”  applies to me too, but I might boast that I try to look below the surface where many others appear not to bother

In the absence of objective historical research combined with a lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of BBC bosses, we’ve ended up with a BBC consensus that has opted, on some sort of emotional basis, to plump for whatever the Palestinians say. They find the ‘Palestinian narrative’ (so-called) more truthful, more credible, and are more emotionally connected to it than they are to any contrary narrative espoused by Jewish Israelis and historians.

That means the BBC presents the entire situation through a fanciful Palestinian / Arab prism, a panorama stretching from the Balfour declaration to Abbas’s latest shenanigans at the ICC. It means the BBC is inclined to place the words of Israel’s enemies above the words of Israelis, or at the very least, treat what Israelis say with suspicion. For example during the recent war with Hamas, the BBC has taken Palestinian/UN-sourced civilian casualty figures at face value, and is still promoting them despite Israel’s carefully collated name-by-name statistics; known combatants v civilians, with verifiable conclusions the BBC has chosen to disdain. 

No-one can explain antisemitism. No-one even seems to know what the ultimate definition of it is. However, let’s call it varying degrees of hostility to Jews. It’s simple racism, not a phobia; but it is irrational, unlike the inaptly named Islamophobia.  

I suppose that’s why antisemites prefer to define themselves as anti-Zionists, which they see as rational and justifiable because of “What Israel is doing to the Palestinians”, which must seem reasonable to persons whose emotional response had been sparked off by misinformation relayed by the BBC, Al Jazeera or Channel Four.)

There is little doubt that the BBC is, if not openly ‘anti-Zionist’, effectively ‘not Zionist’.

The habitual omission of significant facts from its reporting is like getting the wrong change, where the ‘mistake’ is always, uncannily, to the customer’s disadvantage.

Here’s an example of wrong reporting.

Today R 4. The New Years Eve edition. About 20 minutes before seven a.m.-ish. Naughtie introduces three senior BBC correspondents’ summaries of last year’s news. (John Sopel, Carrie Gracie and Jeremy Bowen.)

Naughtie: 

“Jeremy, let’s go back to what quite often during these beginning of the year discussions or end of year discussions used to be known as the elephant in the room. The Israeli question.”

Jeremy Bowen: 

“The issues have remained the same, and they’ve continued to fester. The Palestinians are trying to adopt a different approach, I’m talking about the mainstream Palestinians, they’ve talked about giving up the armed struggle, which they’ve done some years ago, and now  giving up bilateral negotiations and instead trying to internationalise it. The thing is though it’s become more complicated, the conflict there, because as well what was for many many years, decades, a conflict essentially about land - grafted onto that increasingly is a holy war between people who believe they have a direct line to god and that makes agreement, compromise, negotiation really very difficult.”

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What does Naughtie mean by ‘The Israeli Question?’ Let’s assume he means the Israel - Palestine conflict rather than, à la Adolf Hitler, “The Jewish Question”  with its Hitleresque connotations.

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“The issues have remained the same, and they’ve continued to fester.” says Bowen.

‘Fester’ is the word frequently applied to the Palestinian refugee “question”.  It describes the fruits of a cynical policy of deliberately keeping Palestinians in camps, displaced, stateless and resentful rather than absorbing them into the countries to which they fled in 1948, by e.g. granting them citizenship and the usual rights that go with that.  That’s ‘fester.’ The intentional exploitation of human frustration for religious/political ends.

Does ‘fester’ apply to the issues around “the Israeli question?” I think not.

Now Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s chief Middle East editor or whatever his title is, is telling us that mainstream Palestinians gave up the armed struggle some years ago. James Naughtie must surely know, as a purveyor of ‘news’ that the evidence does not support this pronouncement in any way shape or form. But he stays silent. 

Bowen’s contention is that Abbas intends to internationalise the unarmed struggle by  ‘giving up bilateral agreements’ (‘giving up’ as in contravening) and leapfrogging over former agreements with Israel and America with his doomed unilateral bids for statehood, (and now trying to join the ICC.)

The most remarkable thing for a senior editor to come out with is the statement  that the conflict was “essentially about land”  but (now) with the ‘holy war’ grafted onto it!

Does Bowen and anyone else at the BBC truly believe that the “Arabs” fundamental opposition to “Jewish” presence in “Muslim Land” has nothing to do with religion? Well, if they sincerely believe Isis has nothing to do with Islam, I suppose they’d believe anything.  If it’s not about religion, it must be about race, and we can’t have that because it would be racist.

BBC Watch tackles this issue today. 

“Over the past few weeks a developing theme seen in BBC reporting relating to the recent violence and terror attacks in Israel has been that of a purported shift from a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over land to a ‘religious war’ sparked by the issue of equal prayer rights for non-Muslims at Temple Mount and Palestinian claims that the status quo at that site is in danger.”

The Muslim Arabs’ objection to the Jewish state couldn’t be clearer. Hamas official Mahmoud al Zahar:

“…more than anything else we believe in the concept of an Islamic Ummah including all nationalities and different branches of the Muslim Ummah from east to west.”

Hamas and, really, Abbas and Fatah share the aspirations of Isis. An Islamic State from east to west, something the BBC as well as our senior politicians, will not admit.

Islamic Jew-hatred is the root of the Muslim Arabs’ original objection to the Jewish state. It’s religious and always was. That’s what the struggle is about. It’s resistance  against ‘Jewish presence’ in the Islamic Ummah. ‘End of.’ As people with whom “negotiation, compromise  or agreement is really very difficult” are apt to say.

The nursery style, dumbed down, Bowenesque interpretation of the situation, the stock in trade of your average pro Gaza activist, is perpetuated and amplified by the infantile, partial and superficial reporting that is only credible if viewed in a ‘their word against ours‘ fashion.   It occurs when people are too lazy to look any further, because they have a romanticised anthropomorphic view of Hamas. They identify with, and attribute humanitarian and Christian morals to Hamas courtesy of Orla Geurin, Jon Donnison and Lyse Doucet. 

“ People who believe they have a direct line to God” Who does Bowen mean? Mohammedans who believe they have access to the direct word of God? ‘The chosen people’? Secular Israelis? Lefty Jews who all but self-flagellate in their efforts to empathise with the enemy?

Who knows?  No-one.  Innuendo will have to suffice, as it usually does.