The BBC’s Relentless Anti-Israel Animus

You were no doubt as astonished as I to learn that one hundred BBC staffers recently released a letter complaining that their employer, the BBC, was biased against the Palestinians and in favor of Israel. That will come as a great surprise to those who have been following the reports from the Middle East of such editors and reporters as John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin, Barbara Plett Usher and Yolande Knell.

After all, the BBC has never told its audience that the “West Bank” — the name the Jordanians gave in 1950 to Judea and Samaria — was always intended by the League of Nations to be included in the territory that was assigned to Mandatory Palestine, which was then to become the future Jewish state. After all, Jews have been living in Judea and Samaria for the past 3,500 years. Jewish history was made not in Tel Aviv and Haifa, but in Judea and Samaria. That is what the statesmen at the League of Nations understood. The BBC never mentions that territorial dispensation. It’s as if the Mandate for Palestine never existed. Nor does the BBC ever mention Israel’s right to hold onto territory it won in the Six-Day War that it needs for its defense, as repeatedly pointed out by Lord Caradon, the British author of UN Security Council Resolution 242. You won’t hear a word about Resolution 242 on the BBC. Nor will you learn that the Hamas Charter explicitly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, and the expulsion, or killing, of all of its Jewish inhabitants. Surely we cannot understand Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas if we remain unaware of what Hamas is dead set on doing.

Finally, the BBC pays no attention to the texts and teachings of Islam that help explain Israel’s justified anxiety. The Qur’an claims that “the Jews are the greatest in enmity to the Muslims.” It calls on Muslims not to be friends with either Jews or Christians “because they are friends only with each other.” Muslims regard Muhammad as the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) and the Model of Coonduct (uswa hasana), and strive to emulate him in every way. Two of Muhammad’s most famous hadith are “war is deceit” and “I have been made victorious through terror.” Muslims find those statements admirable. Shouldn’t the BBC report on those Quranic passages and hadith, and why Israel is necessarily leery of putting its faith in treaties with the Palestinians?

Another lapsus in the BBC coverage of Israel and its Arab enemies is its failure to mention the key example of Muslim treaty-making with non-Muslims. Muhammad made a treaty of peace with the Meccans in 628 A.D., known as the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya. It was to last for ten years. But after 18 months, realizing that his own forces had attracted more recruits and become much stronger, Muhammad ignored the treaty and attacked — and conquered — the Meccan tribes that had opposed him. It is this treaty that has served ever since as the model for Muslims making agreements with non-Muslims. They are under no obligation to respect them if they, like Muhammad, feel ready to breach the treaty and attack. But you have never heard — not once — on the BBC about the Treaty of Hudaibiyya and its permanent relevance. Why do you think that is?

More on how the BBC covers Israel and the war in Gaza can be found here: “Untenable? A Top 10 of Anti-Israel Controversies Under the BBC Director General’s Leadership,” by Chaim Lax, HonestReporting, July 3, 2025:

Yet again the BBC has come under increased scrutiny in the fallout over alternative hip-hop duo Bob Vylan‘s incendiary performance at the Glastonbury Festival. Despite chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF,” the UK’s national broadcaster continued airing the live feed and kept the recording on its VOD service for several hours.

That Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, was physically present at Glastonbury on the day has only added to the pressure he is facing. But this controversy is only the latest in a string of embarrassing Israel-related scandals to plague the BBC since Davie’s 2020 appointment.

As the UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, recently stated in the House of Commons, “When you have one editorial failure, it’s something that must be gripped. When you have several, it becomes a problem of leadership.”…

In a May 2025 interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher made the baseless claim that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within the next 48 hours if a flood of aid was not allowed into the blockaded enclave.

To the BBC’s credit, Fletcher’s statement was challenged during his interview, and the broadcaster conducted further investigation, proving that this claim was unfounded and was based on a gross misrepresentation of data about possible malnutrition in the coming year.

However, despite the appearance of journalistic due diligence, HonestReporting uncovered that the BBC was continuing to repeat Fletcher’s statement in various reports without any proper context or clarification.

In fact, Tim Fletcher’s malevolent and absurd libel was wrong in every respect. It turns out that not babies, but children up to the age of six, could be in danger. Not in danger of “starvation,” but of “malnutrition,” a far less threatening condition. And this might happen not “within 48 hours” but over the next year.

Perhaps Bob Vylan’s”death to the IDF” chant, enthusiastically repeated by many thousands in the audience at Glastonbury, and broadcast worldwide by the BBC, will lead the British government to at last replace the hapless Tim Davie, and to have his successor set to work cleaning out the Augean stables of their anti-Israel muck.