BBC’s Middle East editor ‘explains’ Gaza violence

The BBC employee charged with "providing analysis that might make a complex story more comprehensive or comprehensible for the audience" fails to do so.

On the morning of May 15th the BBC’s Middle East editor went to the Gaza Strip – tossing an ‘open prison’ quip to his 169,000 Twitter followers on the way.

The Middle East editor’s role was described by the BBC as follows when it was created 13 years ago:

“Jeremy Bowen’s new role is, effectively, to take a bird’s eye view of developments in the Middle East, providing analysis that might make a complex story more comprehensive or comprehensible for the audience, without the constraints of acting as a daily news correspondent. His remit is not just to add an extra layer of analysis to our reporting, but also to find stories away from the main agenda.

Later the same day, the BBC News website published a filmed report by Jeremy Bowen titled “What’s at the root of the protests in Gaza?” and billed:

“The BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen explains the reason why people have been protesting in Gaza.”

Given that above job description, one would therefore have expected Bowen to provide BBC audiences with the information concerning the background to the ‘Great Return March’ that they have been lacking for the past month and a half, such as the involvement of multiple Gaza factions – including Hamas and other terror groups – in its planning, organisation and financing and maybe even clarification of the connections of British Islamists to the project. Likewise, one would of course assume that Jeremy Bowen would have informed BBC audiences that the publicity stunt’s prime aim is to attract attention, with one organiser describing it as “a rally that the whole world and media outlets would watch.”

However, Jeremy Bowen’s entire ‘explanation’ went like this:

“This is the outside wall of Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, celebrating paramedics, fire-fighters. Emergency services were very busy here yesterday and inside the hospital there are a lot of people with gunshot wounds. There is shock here in Gaza at the scale of the killing. Yes, they were of course expecting casualties but more than fifty is a lot. That’s the biggest number killed since the war of 2014.

The thing about Gaza, the thing about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is that the issue at the heart of it doesn’t change. And that issue is that there are two peoples on one piece of land and until they can find a way to share it, they will continue to suffer.”

Completely absent from Bowen’s ‘why can’t they just get along?’ narrative was the fact that Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip almost thirteen years ago, relinquishing all territorial claims to it. Also missing was Hamas’ existential commitment to Israel’s destruction – as expressed in its founding charter, in the rationale behind its ‘Great Return March’ and in its continued use of terrorism against Israeli citizens.

The problem, therefore, is not that “two peoples” cannot find “a way to share”. The problem is that major factions within one of those peoples cannot tolerate the existence of the other under any circumstance.

That simple fact is precisely what Jeremy Bowen has avoided telling the BBC’s funding public for the past thirteen years and – as his latest trite report once again demonstrates – he will likely continue to do so.

 

 

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