Israelis are dying: it
must be an escalation
By Jonathan Cook
07/17/06 "Information
Clearing House" -- --
Here we go again -- another
“serious escalation” has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC
World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. So what
prompted the BBC’s judgment that the crisis was escalating
once more?
You can be sure it had
nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after
five days of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000
sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country’s
south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling
ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them
women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives
apparently empty of meaning or significance in this
confrontation.
Nor is it the Lebanese roads
and bridges being pounded into dust, the petrol stations and
oil refineries going up in smoke, the phone networks and TV
stations being obliterated, the water and electricity
supplies being cut off. The rapid transformation of a modern
vibrant country like Lebanon into the same category of
open-air prison as Gaza is not an escalation in the BBC’s
view.
No, the BBC proffered a
first, hesitant “escalation” on Thursday night when
Hizbullah had the audacity to fire a handful of rockets at
Haifa in response to the growing Lebanese death toll. The
worst damage the Katyushas inflicted was one gouging a chunk
of earth out of the hillside overlooking the port.
But the BBC felt confident to
declare the escalation had turned “serious” on Sunday when
Hizbullah not only fired more rockets at Haifa but one
killed a group of eight railway workers in a station depot.
Now that Israeli civlians as
well as Lebanese civilians are dying -- even if in far
smaller numbers -- the BBC’s battalions of journalists in
northern Israel finally have something to report on.
So BBC World’s broadcast at
9am GMT (noon Israel/Lebanon time) hardly veered out of
Haifa or Jerusalem. After the presenter’s headline
declaration that the Hizbullah strike on Haifa was a
“serious escalation”, the news segued into a lengthy and
sympathetic interview with an Israeli police spokesman in
Haifa by Wyre Davies; followed by another lazy interview,
lasting the best part of five minutes, with an Israeli
government spokesman in Jerusalem; followed by Ben Brown in
Beirut interviewing a British holidaymaker about her night
of horror in her hotel.
And in those 15 minutes that
was about as close as we got to hearing what the Lebanese
had been enduring from a night and morning of Israeli aerial
strikes on Beirut and the country’s south. If there was any
mention of the suffering of Lebanese civilians -- and
doubtless the BBC will tell me there was -- the reference
was so fleeting that I missed it. And if I missed it, then
so did most BBC World viewers.
The true nature of the
“serious escalation” was soon apparent -- or at least it was
if one watched Arab TV channels. They showed an urban
wasteland of rubble and dust in the suburbs of Beirut and
Tyre that was shockingly reminiscent of New York in the
immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks.
They cut intermittently to
local hospitals filled with Lebanese children, their faces a
rash of bloody pockmarks from the spray of Israeli shrapnel.
More terrible images of children burnt and lying in pools of
blood arrrived in my email inbox from Lebanese bloggers.
But in the BBC’s lexicon,
escalation has nothing to do with the enormous destruction
Israel can unleash on Lebanon; only the occasional,
smaller-scale blow Hizbullah scores against Israel.
Switching from the Arab
channels back to the BBC for their 11am broadcast in the
hope of finding the same images of devastation in Tyre and
Beirut, I stumbled on yet another timid interview with
Israel’s ubiqitious spokesman Mark Regev. It was followed by
the two headlines: Nine dead in Israel after a “barrage” of
attacks on Haifa; and foreign governments prepare to
evacuate their nationals out of the region.
At noon James Reynolds as
good as gave the game away: the Hizbullah strike on Haifa,
he said, proved that the rockets are “no longer just an
irritant”. Now it was clear why a “serious escalation” had
begun: Israel was actually being harmed by Hizbullah’s
rockets rather than just irritated. Until then the harm had
been mainly inflicted on Lebanese civilians, so no
escalation was taking place.
As I regularly flicked to the
BBC’s coverage all afternoon, I found almost no mention of
those dead in Lebanon. They had become “non-beings”,
irrelevant in the calculations not only of our world leaders
but of our major broadcasters.
It wasn’t till the 7pm news
that I saw meaningful images from Lebanon, as Gavin Hewitt
followed a fire crew trying to put out an enormous oil
refinery blaze in Tyre. Although we saw some of the
suffering of the Lebanese population, the anchor felt
obliged to preface the scenes from Lebanon with the
statement that they were Israeli “retaliation” for the Haifa
attack, even though Israel had been launching such strikes
for four days before the lethal rocket strike on Haifa.
In the same broadcast, an
Israeli cabinet minister, Shaul Mofaz, was given air time to
make the claim that parts of the rockets that landed in
Haifa were Syrian-made. Allegations by the Lebanese
president, Emile Lahoud, widely shown on Arab TV that Israel
had been using phosphorus incendiary bombs -- illegal under
international law -- received no coverage at all.
On the 8pm news, one of the
headlines was a menacing quote from Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah,
the Hizbullah leader, that “Haifa is just the beginning”.
Mike Wooldridge in the Jerusalem studio made great play of
the quote, taken from a broadcast Nasrallah had made several
hours earlier.
The BBC may have lifted the
sentence from the Israeli media because they missed out the
important conditional context inserted by Nasrallah -- it
was only the “beginning” of what Hizbullah could do if
Israel continued its attacks.
They could have found this
out even from the Hebrew media if they had taken the care to
look more closely: “As long as the enemy pursues its
aggression without limits and red lines we will pursue the
confrontation without limits and without red lines,”
Nasrallah was quoted as saying by the daily Haaretz
newspaper. In other words, Nasrallah was warning that
Hizbullah would give back as good as it gets -- a standard
piece of rhetoric from a military leader in times of
confrontation.
The BBC is no worse than CNN,
Sky and, of course, Fox News. It is possibly far better,
which is reason enough why we should be outraged that this
is the best international broadcast coverage we are likely
to get of the conflict.
The reporting we are seeing
from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is
no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working
assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more
valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify
massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a
mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even
the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists.
It is just the way Arabs are.
That is why the capture of
two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters
than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli
bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed
on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese
lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to
die in the coming days.
There is no excuse for this
asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon jusy as
they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon
just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can
show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily
as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese
casualties just as easily as they can those in Israel.
But they don’t -- and as a
fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.
My previous criticisms of
British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s
military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have
struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of
emails -- some defensive, others angry -- from a few of the
reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage,
unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that
they personally do not take sides. They are not
“campaigning” journalists after all, they are
“professionals” doing a job.
But the problem is not with
them, it is with the job they have to do -- and the nature
of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s
Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does
about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC
demands that he does not ask his bosses questions when told
to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police
spokesman who offers us only platitudes.
Similarly, we see James
Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at 12noon to show
emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for
shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us
that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That non-event was
shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and
evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we
never saw taking place just over the border? These images
from Lebanon exist because the Arab channels spent all day
showing them.
Matthew Price knows too that
in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after
we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their
version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even
the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough
Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its
citizens, how it must “punish” Hizbullah. This is not
journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign
power.
Can we imagine Ben Brown
doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC
cameras telling us how Hizbullah has no choice faced with
Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa
harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian
infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?
Would the BBC bother to show
pre-recorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in
Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of
course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to
take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by
Israeli air strikes, but his fear -- or more precisely, the
fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside -- is not part of
the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.
These reporters are working
in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news
executives far away from the frontline who understand only
too well the institutional pressures on the BBC -- and the
institutional biases that are the result.
They know that the Israel
lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without
suffering flak; that the charge of anti-semitism might be
terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is
expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British
governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators;
that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the
line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more
intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.
This distortion of news
priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives --
in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands,
of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is
portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack,
its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a
regional war -- a war of choice being waged by the Israeli
government and army -- is likely to become inevitable.
So to Jeremy Bowen, James
Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price and all the
other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the
Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them
there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of
intentions, but shame on you.
