One of the BBC’s duties, alongside accurate and impartial news content, is to educate. The first public purpose item in the BBC’s Royal Charter is:
1. To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them:
The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”
It is therefore deeply concerning that the BBC is engaged in a pattern of deconstructing and re-writing Jewish history, replacing facts with a heavily editorialised reimagining that serves a political purpose.
In the BBC documentary “The Other War,” aired on 2 May 2024 and available on iPlayer, Isobel Yeung offers an explanation of the military occupation of the West Bank:
Yeung: “To understand why (Israel occupies the West Bank) you need to go back generations. In 1917 the British Government declared public support for creating a home for the Jewish people from across the world in Palestine. It was known as the Balfour Declaration. The British would occupy Palestine for almost 30 years before handing the matter over to the UN. In 1948 following the horrors of the Holocaust, the state of Israel was born.”
Archive: “Palestine lies shattered with bombs and strewn with dead. Victorious Haganah troops have driven the Arabs out of the beleaguered city”.
Yeung: “Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who made up the majority of the population here, were displaced from their land”.
Archive “These people, as a result of the war in Palestine have either fled or been expelled from their homes and their livelihood”.
Yeung: Generations then grew up in neighbouring countries and in refugee camps like Tulkarm and others. Today these camps look like concrete slums and some have become a hotbed for Palestinian fighters. But it wasn’t until 1967 during what’s known as the six day war that the Israeli military would take control of the West Bank. Starting the military occupation”.
This construction of the history of the region is fascinating. First, we need to look at the use of the word Palestine. Their claim that “The British Government declared support for creating a home for Jewish people from across the world in Palestine” suggests that, in 1917, there was a nation state of Palestine, which there wasn’t.
It was a region of the Ottoman Empire, and its administrative borders didn’t correspond with either the British mandate of Palestine, which was created in 1922, or the modern borders of Israel, either with or without the territories across the green line.
At the same time, the sentence states that the Jews came from all over the world, crucially, creating an idea of Jewish otherness and distance. This paves the way for the often repeated and ahistorical claim that the British Government gave Jews who came from Europe a country that belonged to someone else as a consolation prize for the Holocaust – as Sarah Montague framed it on Radio 4 in March:
Israel, where I’m broadcasting to you from, was created to provide a safe homeland for the Jews.
This reduction severs the historical connection of the Jewish people to Israel, and it others them, framing them within that antisemitic trope, the “white settler colonialist”.
Yeung also, somewhat remarkably, manages to talk about not one but two wars with no adversary. The Israelis “drive the Arabs out” in 1948 for no reason, and then appear to decide to take the West Bank, again without precipitating events or an enemy to fight. Partition, and its rejection by the Arabs, evaporates. Jordan, its occupation of the West Bank and its expulsion of ancient Jewish communities, completely vanishes. Is this an accurate and impartial summary of how we got here? Does it promote the audience’s understanding of the wider world so as to help them engage as global citizens?
Not so much, no.
This would be bad enough if it was a one-off mistake. But, it appears to be part of a disturbing pattern.
In his documentary “The Settlers” aired on 27 April 2025, and available on iPlayer, Louis Theroux describes Hebron:
Louis Theroux: “Hebron is an ancient biblical city, home to some 200,000 Palestinians, a place holy to three major religions. In 1968, a year after it was occupied by Israel, a community of Jewish settlers moved in illegally”.
Notice how Theroux says the city is holy without mentioning Judaism.
Hebron is one of the three holy cities of Judaism, home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and, crucially, home to an almost continuous Jewish community for thousands of years, interrupted only by the Hebron Massacre of 1929 and the later occupation by those evaporating Jordanians, who are once again not credited with any role in history.
When you strip away the ancient Jewish connection to Hebron you are once again left with the interloper Jew, coming from elsewhere, to illegally usurp that which does not belong to him.
Theroux also gives us a great example of the BBC’s use of the word biblical. Britain is a very secular country. The British Social Attitudes Survey shows that, in 2018, 52 percent of British people did not identify with any religion while as far back as 1998 only 4 percent of British people said they believed the Bible should be taken literally, word for word, and were more likely to identify the Bible as a collection of “stories and fables” with “no contemporary meaning.”
This means that when the likely audience is considered (something the BBC is required to do), the word biblical does not necessarily land as “historical.” To a secular British ear the word biblical implies not ancient truth or historical epoch but mythology.
Theroux does not stop there. When interviewing a Jewish woman about the settler movement, he is faced with the etymology of the word “Judea”:
Jewish woman: “The ancient name of this area is called Judea. The meaning of Judea is it belongs to the Jews. So you can’t take all the history, put it in the garbage and say “ok it’s not belong to the Jews” The history said it belongs to Israel”.
Theroux: “A selective reading of history that ignores the Palestinians who have lived on the land for generations”.
The existence of Judea is not selective history. It’s history. But what appears to make the BBC uncomfortable is the ancient Jewish connection to the land, which is always framed as irrational religious hysteria, against Palestinians who are framed as physically connected. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in recent reporting over the archaeological site at Sebastia.
In the 9 August article titled, “Israel accused of weaponising archaeology at ancient West Bank sites”, journalists Usher and Tulley play a fervent game of linguistic keep-away with Jewish history.
Up in the hills above the Roman columns of the ancient site of Sebastia, in the occupied West Bank, are olive fields that have been cultivated for generations by Palestinian families.
Sebastia is framed as Roman, and the Palestinians are immediately given a physical connection to the land through olive trees. What the audience is not told though, is that Sebastia is Samaria, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Israel. Instead, they offer readers a scare quote from UNESCO:
Unesco says that the main threat facing the site concerns what it calls the “planned expropriation and creation of the ‘Samaria’ (Shomron) national park, which could divide the property.
This suggests that ‘Samaria’ is an invention, masking something called ‘Shomron’ which aims to implant something new onto Palestinian land. Unfortunately for the BBC, of course, the words Sebastia, Samaria and Shomron are in this context essentially interchangeable names for the exact same thing, with Shomron simply being the Hebrew word for Samaria. Usher and Tulley tell the audience none of this.
In the same article Judea appears, in a reference to King Herod, but instead of being linked to Jewish history, it is instead placed within a Christian context:
“Further to the south in the West Bank and just in sight of Jerusalem is Herodium, a manmade hill with an extraordinary palace built on its summit by King Herod, who ruled the Kingdom of Judea just before the Christian era”.
This choice erases completely the Jewish character of the kingdom and people Herod ruled over.
These incidents show a disturbing pattern of revisionist history, one that leans into the settler colonialist trope of the outsider Jew, using European Holocaust guilt to steal Arab land and inventing fairytales to justify their actions.
The BBC seems willing to fail in its first charter duty rather than tell the truth about Jewish history. Maybe one day future archaeologists will find their integrity in the dust of Sebastia.