Wages of war

Charles Moore reportedly remarked that the revelations about excessive BBC salaries that were supposed to shame the BBC into curbing them have morphed into squabbles about the gender gap, and will inevitably have the opposite effect. (Levelled up.)

People carping about each other’s pay is a terrible bore. When it concerns riches beyond our wildest dreams, to quote the eminent philosopher Robbie Williams, it becomes part galling, part comical.

One such carpist is our friend Jeremy Bowen (£150,000 - 199,999)  who is not happy.

I hear he’d been tweeting about this so I had a quick look. His Twitter feed is 99% retweets by Our Man in the Middle East of tweets from fans of all shapes and sizes praising his series “Our Man in the Middle East” to high heaven.

People have been riveted. They’ve been bingeing on the podcast, which contains the whole 25 episodes back-to-back, and learning oh so much about the Middle East.

Somewhere in there one senses a whiff of virtue-signalling in relation to their ability to ‘love’ a serious subject, as opposed to, say, watching box sets of whatever the current box-set set are watching.  

It appears that Jeremy Bowen is now, kind of, the idiot’s version of a serious historian - in the Stephen Fry sense. 

In amongst the adulation, there was a request for advice about ‘what to read’,  as a starter if you like, about the Middle East. Our man’s recommendation was a book called “The Arabs” by Eugene Rogan. The title alone signals that the book might not be the epitome of objectivity, at least, on Israel. A little research backs up this suspicion, although a blogger  called “The Angry Arab” is quite critical of the depth of the author’s pedagogical familiarity with Islam. (Reservations on both sides so he must be doing something right (!) ) 

Casting wider - a review by Dr. Matthew Hughes of another of professor Rogan’s books “The War for Palestine” places Eugene Rogan firmly in the category of revisionist historian, which I suppose does little more than confirm my own bias.

Israel’s supporters generally see Jeremy Bowen’s commentaries on the Middle East as pedestrian and partisan.

Celebration or triumphalism? Religious Zionists dance to commemorate 50th anniversary of capturing East Jerusalem pic.twitter.com/RRPVQIgIXZ

— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) May 24, 2017

Well, that's a loaded statement. How about you report the news rather than make it? pic.twitter.com/p6UY0F1vz9

— Jason Lax (@jasonlax) May 24, 2017

I don’t know enough about the wider issues concerning the Arab/Islamic world to critique Jeremy Bowen’s essays on Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Iran or the Gulf states but on the particular subject that interests me I deeply regret that he is represented by the BBC as the ultimate authority on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He rarely has anything informative to say on Islam or the antisemitism that drives the conflict and keeps it alight.

I do understand why people find his delivery appealing and accessible. 

As we’ve said before, Jeremy Bowen and the BBC seem to think the history of the Middle East began in 1967. Now a whole new generation of ‘experts’ on the Middle East has been engendered and Jeremy Bowen will be in the running for a pay rise.

'Nearness of Death' Our Man in the Middle East

The other day I urged you to watch this space. I said I hoped BBC Watch would unpack the factual errors in the 6th episode of Jeremy Bowen’s  radio 4 series Our Man in the Middle East.

“Episode 6: ‘Crossing the Divide’. Jeremy Bowen’s early afternoon “Our Man in the Middle East” slot on Radio 4, threw up a number of questionable Bowenisms. I hope BBC Watch picks them up soon. Watch this space.”

Here is BBC Watch’s much-needed analysis. 

Bowen’s selective potted history of Israel’s creation is riddled with crucial omissions. If this represents the public's primary source of information on the Middle East it’s hardly surprising that so many Brits sympathise with Israel’s enemies. Here is BBC Watch’s closing summary:

“Bowen’s basic story is, as ever, a very simple one: according to him, white “pale-faced” Europeans took over a land inhabited by passive ‘indigenous’ Arabs. In order to promote that politically motivated version of events, he has to omit context and relevant background information which would enhance BBC audiences’ understanding of the story as it stands today. As we once again see, Jeremy Bowen has no problem at all doing that.”

I think Jeremy Bowen sees himself as a kind of performance artist and poet, delivering his prose in an accent that seems to be part Welsh, part mid Atlantic gangsta, part Philip Marlowe.

In the episode devoted to the incident in which his Lebanese driver Abed was killed by Israeli soldiers, (No. 10) Bowen himself describes in stark detail the catalyst that cemented his anti-Israel sentiment.

This sorry tale sheds light on the angle upon which Bowen’s entire narrative has been shaped.  Bowen feels guilty because he thinks his own miscalculation was responsible for his driver’s death, at the same time as being unable to forgive the trigger-happy Israelis for mistaking him, with his pink shirt on, for a potential terrorist. The occasional nods given to Israel’s victims sound ‘grafted on’ and come over awkwardly; as pure lip-service.

With this in mind, and Bowen has made no secret of it, the fact that the BBC saw fit to appoint him as the BBC’s Middle East editor, while still claiming, with breathtaking arrogance, their scrupulous impartiality beggars belief

The other Jeremy

It was that episode from Jeremy Bowen today: Our Man in the Middle East, Part 10: The Nearness of Death. 

It was everything we expected - and more. 

There was him nearly being killed by Israel when his driver was "killed by Israel"; and him nearly being killed by Israel when Israel fired on a UN aid convoy going to help civilians in Lebanon; and Lebanese civilians, including women and children, having "suffered disproportionately at the hands of Israel"; and the Qana "massacre". All Israel's fault. 

Plus he used emotionally-forceful live recordings from all the incidents. And then he used more live recordings to rubbish Israel's version of events. 

All his version of events, of course. 

He also philosophised, in an oh-so-dispassionate-and-wise-sounding way, about the need to break the cycle of violence and revenge by seeing outrages as part of history (even though he didn't seem to be entirely living up to his own advice). 

There was plenty of moral equivalence as well, with Israel being made to sound (at the very least) no better than the rest. 

And he was the conscience-stricken hero of his own self-penned tragedy. 

And he did it all in a calm, thoughtful, award-winning tone of voice. 

I have to say it was a powerful listen, and made Israel sound very bad indeed. 

Goodness knows what the average Radio 4 listener made of it - though I can guess. Even I gulped at times. 

If I were a dictator I'd definitely hire Jeremy Bowen as my chief propagandist. 

Starting the fire

The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen has begun a new five-part series on Radio 4 called Our Man in the Middle East. 

It's been trailed as a "personal" history, and the website blurb backs that up by noting that he's "paid a personal price, coming under fire and losing a colleague in the course of reporting - on the worst day, he says, in his life."

(And, as we know, he blames the Israelis for that).

Looking at the episode previews, two of the five are specifically focused on the Israel-Palestinian conflict (as you'd expect from Jeremy). 

That said though, having listened to the first episode today, it might actually turn out that all of the episodes ultimately hinge on the Israel-Palestinian conflict - especially given that this episode, supposedly focused on the Gulf War of 1991, ended up dwelling on Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration instead.

Here's a transcript of the central portion of the programme. 

It's the sort of history that, I think, will appeal much more to your average Guardian reader than to your average Brit. 

It's the kind of history where Britain is always the guilty party, the bad guy.

Here Britain was the "duplicitous" deceiver of the honest Arabs, having caved in to the Zionist lobby, the country ultimately responsible for most of the past and present woes of the Middle East (via Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration). 

So here we go (and please imagine ominous minor-key music for its accompaniment):

Big powers have intervened in the Middle East to reshape it to their requirements since ancient times. It's strategically placed, connecting Europe with Asia and Africa. It's the home of the world's three great monotheistic religions, and for the last 100 years or so great powers have needed its oil reserves - the biggest in the world. 

Two imperial grandees created and, some say, cursed the modern Middle East when they carved up the Ottoman Empire at the height of the First World War. One was a French diplomat, Charles François Georges-Picot. The other, Sir Mark Sykes, was British. 

The Sykes-Picot agreement was designed to win the peace for Britain and France. It defined zones of influence in the Middle East for the two imperial powers. Borders of new states came later. But to win the war the British had already made promises to the Arabs. The Sharif of Mecca, Hussein Ibn Ali. lead an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks. In return he believed the British had promised him an independent Arab kingdom across much of present day Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Hussein kept his word; The duplicitous British did not. The requirements of empire came first. The promise of Arab self-determination was part of the collateral damage. Within 20 years a Palestinian scholar referred to Sykes-Picot as "a shocking document, the product of greed, stupidity and double-dealing". 

Another vision of the future cut across Hussein's hopes. Zionists lobbied Britain, successfully, to support the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. In November 1917 Britain's foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared that Britain would "view with favour" the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. Britain also promised that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." 

Making promises to both sides built a deadly contradiction into the Balfour Declaration. By the early 1920s Arabs and Jews in Palestine with killing each other. They are responsible for what they've done, but Britain started the fire.

For Palestinians the Balfour Declaration was a milestone on the road to catastrophe. For Israelis it led to statehood. A century on it's still politically resonant - triumphant or toxic, depending on your view of history.