Israelis Are Dying: It Must Be an Escalation
By Jonathan Cook
Antiwar.com, July 18, 2006
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 Hezbollah 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 Hezbollah not only fired more rockets at
Haifa but one killed a group of eight railway workers in a station
depot.
Now that Israeli civilians 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 9 a.m GMT (noon Israel/Lebanon time)
hardly veered out of Haifa or Jerusalem. After the presenter's
headline declaration that the Hezbollah 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 better 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 arrived in my e-mail 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 Hezbollah scores against Israel.
Switching from the Arab channels back to the BBC for their 11 a.m.
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 ubiquitous spokesman Mark Regev. It was followed by 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 Hezbollah
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 Hezbollah'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 7 p.m. 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 8 p.m. news, one of the headlines was a menacing quote from
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah 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
Hezbollah could do if Israel continued its attacks.
They could have found this out even from the Israeli 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 Ha'aretz newspaper. In other
words, Nasrallah was warning that Hezbollah 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 just 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 to 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 e-mails – 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 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
noon 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 nonevent 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" Hezbollah 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 Hezbollah 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 prerecorded 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.
