On Dec. 9, the BBC documentary Podcast aired an episode titled “The Struggle of Israel’s Peace Movement” which follows four members of Standing Together, an organization made up of Arab and Jewish Israelis who campaign for peace. However, the episode erased almost entirely the reasons that a peace movement needs to exist – that is, decades of conflict and terrorism. Instead, we are given once again a frozen in time narrative, that the only Israeli victims of the conflict were victims on Oct. 7, that the only act of Palestinian violence that has ever taken place was Oct. 7, and that Israeli society is uniquely militaristic and engaged in arbitrary subjugation of its Palestinian neighbors. This begs the question, of course: if there was no war before Oct. 7, why did the Peace Movement exist at all?
Presenter Emily Wither opens the episode in Judea and Samaria, where the group are protecting Palestinians harvesting olives. She reports:
Alon Lee Green is a Jewish Israeli and the national co-director of Standing Together, a mixed grass roots peace movement of both Israelis and Palestinians. They’ve spent the last two years campaigning for a ceasefire in Gaza, now they’re shifting their focus to rising violence in the West Bank. The UN says there’s been more than 150 documented attacks by settlers on the olive harvest this year.
What Wither fails to mention alongside those 150 reported attacks is the INSS figures which record 11,569 Palestinian terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria since October 7, including 87 Israeli fatalities.
She goes on:
Jewish settlers have built around 160 of these settlements since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War. This is land the Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for a hoped-for future state. It’s now home to 700,000 Jews who live alongside an estimated 3.3 million Palestinians. Most of the world considers Israeli settlements as illegal under international law. Israel disagrees and far-right settlers now sit in the heart of the Israeli government. They say the land was promised to them by God, and the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich says building settlements will bury the idea of a Palestinian state.
This framing, including the deeply misleading mantra of “illegal under international law” which CAMERA has previously established contradicts the BBC Editorial Guidelines, leaves a listener with an impression that all settlers are “far-right” and engaged in religious extremism in land they believe was “promised to them by God,” an opinion which they know their audience will view as irrational within their own cultural context, particularly in the UK. She doesn’t mention the 3000-year continuous Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, or that the land was occupied by Jordan prior to 1967, or that it is specifically illegal for Israeli citizens to enter areas under Palestinian Authority control. Once again what emerges is a one-sided narrative of religious settlers annexing Palestinian land, while the Palestinians themselves have no agency, no governance of their own areas under the Oslo agreement, and no responsibility.
Wither goes on to Standing Together’s Tel Aviv headquarters to interview Rula Daoud, co-director of the movement, about the hardships she has faced as an Arab citizen of Israel. Daoud states:
So my neighborhood was in Yaffa and there was a playground, we were there with our kids, there was a man, you know, civilian, but he had a gun. So he felt that he needs to come to the playground with his kids, with other people’s kids, wearing a gun. In Yaffa. And you know, people don’t feel secure, especially Arabs, when they see guns. Because, unfortunately I can be shot, and it will not make any difference, you know, this government will not care, the judicial system will not care, probably nobody will be jailed, this is how we see it, you know as Arabs, he went to the playground with the gun, and an argument started between him and another parent and he told..
Wither: What did the parent say?
Rula: He told him, why are you here with a gun, like why, you see our kids, my son is afraid, ok, and he him but I am here to protect them, and he told him but my son doesn’t see this as a protection because he sees what’s happening, what you are doing inside of Gaza. And when he says what you are doing inside of Gaza, it exploded. And people kind of got in the middle, just both of you leave, and this is just a playground for kids, and a whole month nobody played in that playground because of the argument there was between two parents. This is kind of you know the reality that we live in, an unsafe reality.
Aside from the allegation that if she was shot as an Arab citizen of Israel that it would not be investigated and nobody would be punished, for which there is no evidence offered, this story is presented with no context as evidence of Israeli Jewish brutality. No questions are asked of why a father may feel that he needs to carry a gun to take his children to a playground. According to INSS there have been 30,345 Israeli casualties across arenas since the beginning of the war. That number represents a huge collective trauma of which BBC listeners are left entirely unaware. Once again, the Israeli is inexplicably aggressive, and the Palestinians are passive victims.
Finally, Wither moves on to Haifa to meet with Sali Abed, another Arab member of Standing Together, who has just had a baby:
What was it like becoming a mother during this time? When rockets were flying around the country and you were having to go into bomb shelters?
Sali: Yeah, horrible, it was horrible. I was here literally alone, just having to go in to like wake up my newborn to go into a shelter it was horrible.
Wither manages to acknowledge the existence of the war here without any context at all. Where were the rockets and missiles coming from? Who were they aimed at? At all stages of the documentary Whither takes time to attribute Israeli violence, be it settlers, the IDF, or a father in a playground, but when the victims of aggression targeting civilians are Israeli, the violence is random, arbitrary, and entirely passive. The rockets weren’t fired by anyone or fired at Israeli mothers scrambling to shelters with their newborns, they were simply “flying around.”
Once again, Palestinian agency is entirely erased.
The overall picture this documentary creates is one of a war which doesn’t have two sides, but a unique aggressor and a passive, helpless victim. To produce a documentary about a peace movement which only shows pain, suffering, and trauma on one side, and lays all agency, responsibility, and violence at the feet of the other, is a narrative decision which fails catastrophically in the BBC’s commitment to impartiality and accuracy.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.