The Board of Deputies has written to the BBC condemn an analysis piece written by the corporation’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, regarding Israel’s alleged “war crimes” in Gaza.
Commenting on the June 8 article, the representative body of the UK’s Jewish community said it had “deep concerns” over its content, including what it called “problematic, unnecessary and offensive references to the Holocaust”.
The piece, published for BBC: In Depth – which offers “in depth and expert analysis” from BBC News – was entitled “Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes - how governments respond could haunt them for years to come”.
In it Bowen, who has long faced accusations of anti-Israel bias in his reporting, wrote: “In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.”
He also cited death toll figures provided by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. While he did make clear that the numbers were supplied by the terror group and do not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, he failed to mention that its data has been repeatedly debunked by statistical analysis.
Indeed, Bowen referenced a study by medical journal The Lancet suggesting that the death toll was actually under-reported, despite the ministry itself revising its numbers down on multiple occasions.
Moreover, the lengthy piece included an interview with Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), during which she accused Israel of “hollowing out the Geneva Conventions”, adding that the “same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention”.
However, the article dedicated a fraction of the time to Hamas’ alleged war crimes – including the taking of hostages and use of civilian infrastructure for human shields – compared to a catalogue of accusations against Israel.
But the Board’s ire was raised further by Bowen quoting Baroness Helena Kennedy KC – a lawyer and patron of Medical Aid for Palestinians – regarding the linking of the current conflict in Gaza with the Holocaust by some Israeli politicians.
Kennedy, who is not Jewish, said: “The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn't be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.
"You have to conduct a war according to law, and I'm a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I'm afraid that we're not seeing that.”
In its letter to the BBC in response to the piece, the Board wrote: “Our president wrote to senior BBC executives this morning to complain about the unacceptable bias in the piece, which seems not to consider the Hamas war crimes which started and sustain this conflict, as well as highly problematic, unnecessary and offensive references to the Holocaust.
“Meanwhile there is no prominent coverage of the discovery of the body of Hamas leader Muhammed Sinwar, found in a bunker under the European Hospital, nor the widely circulating images of Hamas executing a Gazan in a public square.
“The BBC is failing in its duty of impartiality. It remains too frequently credulous to the claims of the Hamas terror organisation. This latest piece is campaigning journalism that is not what the licence-fee payer should be expected to subsidise.”
A BBC spokesperson said: ““We have replied directly to the Board of Deputies to say that we don’t agree with their characterisation of this piece – we consider this a duly impartial piece of journalism on a legitimate topic of enquiry, from a highly-respected colleague.
"We are in full agreement with them that we should be reporting on all aspects of the conflict across our output and to this end we once again call upon the Israeli government to allow international journalists free access to Gaza.”
