Opinion

Did the BBC cover up the anti-Semitism of Gaza’s children?

Was the motivation of the broadcaster to avoid diminishing sympathy towards the Palestinians while increasing antipathy towards Israel?

For those that missed the coverage let me bring you up to speed.

According to a report in the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s oldest and most widely read Jewish newspaper, the BBC substituted the word “Israelis” for “Jews” in its translation of interviews with Palestinian children.

The documentary, Children of the Gaza War, was presented by the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet to mark the first anniversary of the conflict and included extensive and sympathetic interviews by Doucet with both Israeli and Gazan children and their parents.

At one point in the film, a Gazan child says the “yahud” are massacring Palestinians. However the TV subtitles read: “Israel is massacring us”. The Jewish Chronicle pointed out to its readers that the correct translation for “yahud” from Arabic to English is “Jew”.

Lyse Doucet
Lyse Doucet

Lyse Doucet told the JC:

“We talked to people in Gaza, we talked to translators. When [the children] say ‘Jews’, they mean ‘Israelis’. “We felt it was a better translation of it.”

The Jewish Chronicle appears to be raising two very important issues. Are Palestinian children in Gaza antisemitic and can we trust the BBC to be fair to Israel?

Let me attempt to unscramble the thinking (or lack of thinking) going on here.

Listener context

With words (and much else) context is everything.

To Jewish ears, mine included, the pejorative use of the word “Jews” conjures up enough historical baggage to fill the reclaim hall at Ben Gurion airport.

Immediately I’m thinking: ‘Christ killers’, ‘blood libels’, ‘pogroms’ and the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.

Very soon I’m thinking: ‘Nazis’ and ‘gas chambers’.

If that’s how the children of Gaza think of me, and every other Jew in the world, then doesn’t the BBC have an obligation to tell us? This seems to be what the JC’s article is inferring.

If this is the truth and the children of Gaza are cold hearted, old school, antisemites then they do not deserve the world’s sympathy.

The State of Israel is again entitled to present itself as the victim rather than the villain and as the guardian of Jewish safety against the genocidal intentions of those that seek to harm us.

I’m sure that advocates for the State of Israel would want to update me on my understanding of antisemitism and move me on from its classic Euro-centric brand to its new mutation in the Middle East.

They would no doubt point me to the rhetoric and propaganda of Hamas, its charter, and the views of other more extreme Islamist groups. They would direct me to text books, TV channels, websites and social media to illustrate how widespread is anti-Jewish hatred in the ‘Arab world’. Pogroms and blood libels have been replaced by rockets and terror tunnels.

This was the emotional, political and historical context into which the Jewish Chronicle was happy to pitch its story.

Speaker context

But the speakers, in this case the children of Gaza, have context too. And it’s just as emotional, political and historical.

If the Jewish Chronicle cared to give it a little consideration, it might realise that there are many good reasons why the children interviewed by Doucet would naturally choose the word “yahud” when describing their enemy.

Don’t we call Israel the ‘Jewish State’? Don’t we insist that it is the State not just of its Jewish citizens but of all Jews wherever they may live? Don’t Israeli Prime Minister readily talk as if they represent the interests of the Jewish people around the globe? Don’t our communal leaders throughout the Jewish diaspora act as defenders and apologists whenever Israel faces criticism? The Jewish Chronicle certainly knows that all of this is true. In fact it promotes all of this every week.

So, if you were a Palestinian child in Gaza is it really so unreasonable to think that “Jew” and “Israeli” were interchangeable?

Haven’t we made identification with the State of Israel so central to modern Jewish identity that the Gazan children are only reflecting what we have been saying of ourselves for decades? We are at one with Israel.

I understand that identity politics can be complicated but in accusing the children of antisemitism I think we are trying to have our Jewish nationalist cake and eat it.

But there is plenty more context where this came from.

If you are a child in Gaza then over the last seven years, during three Gaza wars, either you, or a relative, or a friend, are likely to have lost someone close to you, had your home damaged or destroyed, watched your parents lose their business, been forced to move out of your home, had your school or mosque blown-up, had a limb amputated, or been orphaned.

Max Blumenthal's new book on Gaza
Max Blumenthal’s new book on Gaza

If you want a picture of what it was like to be a child in Gaza last summer I’d recommend Max Blumenthal’s The 51 Day War. Blumenthal entered the Strip during the sporadic ceasefires last August, and in the days following the truce, collecting testimonies from children and adults while the memories and the blood were still fresh. He describes entering the ruins of Eastern Shujaiya after Israeli shelling and bombing from F16s: “I began to sense that I was inside a vast crime scene.”

After reading his account, with its eyewitness stories of random killing, casual brutality and deliberate humiliation of civilians, all at the hands of the ‘the most moral army in the world’, it strikes me that it would be miraculous if the children of Gaza had not developed sweeping and indiscriminate views about Jews.

Racism in plentiful supply

So perhaps the children of Gaza are antisemitic. If so, we have given them a great many reasons to be so.

But are we Jews, and Jewish Israelis in particular, free of such charges of racism? On the evidence of last summer it’s a categorical ‘No’.

Don’t we (adults and children) also hold sweeping and indiscriminate views about Arabs, and Palestinians in particular.

The quality of the discourse I heard from the Jewish community in Britain last year was far from up-lifting. It echoed the lines being pumped out by Israeli spin doctors on air and online.

The Palestinians are not like us.

They teach their children to hate.

They do not value life like we do.

And to prove these points the following summary of Palestinian military strategy was put forward:

Israel uses missiles to protect its people while Hamas uses its people to protect its missiles.

It was a propaganda slogan that gave permission for the indiscriminate mayhem unleashed by the Israel Defence Forces from land, sea and air.

The bottom line of all this talk is that the Palestinians are considerably less human than we are.

And in Israel there was far more rabid commentary than this doing the rounds last summer. Not just on Twitter and Facebook (“kill Arab children so there won’t be a next generation”), but from newspaper columnists, academics, Rabbis and all the way up to the Knesset itself. Blumenthal quotes the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset at the time, Moshe Feiglin, who wrote on his Facebook page suggesting mass transfer of Gaza civilians to the Sinai border so that their former homes could be shelled to “exterminate nests of resistance”.

I’m not sure how much Israeli Jewish racism the Jewish Chronicle got around to reporting last summer. If it did, I trust there was no sleight of hand with the translation.

As for trusting the BBC, the corporation gets equally criticised by Palestinian advocates as it does by Zionists. Personally, I think the BBC is not perfect but it gets most things right most if the time. In the grand scheme of things, it is not part of the problem.

To return to Lyse Doucet, her documentary was powerful and she clearly felt for the children on both sides of the divide. But the pictures of devastation in Gaza spoke louder than anything being spoken. It hardly matters how the children choose to label their foes.

What needed no translation in Doucet’s documentary was the trauma still on the faces of Gaza’s children. It’s hard not to think that as time passes the trauma will turn to bitterness and the bitterness to hatred.

What else would you expect?

The upshot of all this is that the Jewish Chronicle has its news priorities seriously skewed along with its ethics.

If the JC really cared about the Jewish future and the safety of the State of Israel it would be calling for Israel to ditch the demonising rhetoric, open the borders to reconstruction in Gaza and start talking to Hamas.

This is not naivety, it is common sense and basic humanity.

This post first appeared a week ago on Patheos, in its Writing From the Edge series, and at Robert Cohen’s site.

 

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“At one point in the film, a Gazan child says the “yahud” are massacring Palestinians.”
It’s like Amerindians saying “The whites are driving us out”. They don’t necessarily mean that the white people as a broad category are doing this, like whites in Italy, but whites in their specific context in North America.

Most Zionists did not have a problem with Israeli troops carving Stars of David everywhere they went in Gaza. And if they do they need to take it up with the butchers in Jerusalem.

Solid article, Robert.

The Jewish Chronicle has an obvious agenda and mission, doesn’t it? I thought I remembered something from last summer’s massacre related to TJC and here it is, from wiki:

“In 2014 the paper published an advertisement for the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Gaza appeal, for which it received complaints from a significant number of readers. The editor issued an apology for the publication of the advert,[7] stating that the paper’s position was supportive of Operation Protective Edge, and that he did not accept the generally published figures on the number of civilian casualties, believing many were terrorists. The editorial stated that “Almost alone in the British media the JC has stressed Israel’s right to defend herself and sought to explain why Israel was faced with no choice but to take action in Gaza.”[8]”

I’ve long appreciated Lyse Doucet’s reporting. I accept her rational explanation.

I agree with your argument with regard to the “Jewish State”, etc. Do the children and people of Gaza think of Max Blumenthal, Dan Cohen, Amira Hass, Alex Levac, Gideon Levy, etc. as the enemy?

NO.

Thanks, Robert.

Well.

Don’t we call Israel the ‘Jewish State’? Don’t we insist that it is the State not just of its Jewish citizens but of all Jews wherever they may live? Don’t Israeli Prime Minister readily talk as if they represent the interests of the Jewish people around the globe? …
So, if you were a Palestinian child in Gaza is it really so unreasonable to think that “Jew” and “Israeli” were interchangeable?

Of course, this is true. The children are innocent and Zionists claiming to represent “the jews” have no ground to damn it being anti-semitic when perpetrators of zionist crimes are identified as “the jews.”

However, I’m off the opinion that there is one angle missing in this story. When children call those who commit the massacres “the jews” they didn’t invent that sectarian language, but they got it somewhere: from family, TV and political and cultural leaders. Taking into account that “family” usually gets their language from TV and political and cultural leaders, take out the family here, and look on to mass media and political and cultural leaders.

Be sure it’s not Israeli political and cultural leaders and not Israeli TV where they get that sectarian language from. These Israeli media and leaders spread that sectarian message, but the families of the children talk arabic. So, be sure, it’s Arab political and cultural leaders and mass media spreading the sectarian language.

Now, it’s not hard to find it: take Hamas, Egypt brotherhood politicians, clerics, GCC media, and others, many of them use that sectarian language. They cannot claim innocence. Over and over they are being told that sectarian language is disgusting, wrong and harmful to the struggle of Palestinians. What they do amounts to treason, treason against the struggle of Palestine and treason against peace in West Asia and Northern Africa.

Over and over again, people from Neturei Karta, Jews against Zionism and many more tell them that zionism is not judaism, and that Israel lays a false claim on judaism and Israel is not acting in the name of “the jews.” At the PLO, in Iran, Hisbollah, Syria and other independent countries the message was received well, and it is well understood that to win a struggle, the opponents – or enemies in case of war – shall as group be defined as narrow as possible, so as to have as few enemies as possible. So Iran, Hisbollah, Syria and so on teach their people to struggle against zionism and takfirism, not judaism and sunna.

In most regional countries allied with the US, however, that logic is known, but wilfully ignored. TV, preachers and politicians in these US-aligned countries, GCC, Egypt, Jordan, often speak in sectarian terms, and define opponents as wide as jews, Shia or infidels, and often all of them together. To me it’s pretty obvious, that this is a willfully and treasenous strategy in betting on xenophobia to sabotage the liberation of Palestine and the struggle to end colonialism in the arab world, executed by the political leaders of these US-allied countries – who are often also on good terms with Israel. Of course, Israel is on good terms with the anti-semites in the arab world, as almost everywhere, because anti-semitism is the life elixier of Zionism.

The children of Gaza, interviewed by the BBC, blaming the jews for the Israeli massacres, were duped be these arab traitors, as well as their families where they got this sectarian junk from.

“Haven’t we made identification with the State of Israel so central to modern Jewish identity that the Gazan children are only reflecting what we have been saying of ourselves for decades? We are at one with Israel. – See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/semitism-gazas-children#sthash.J6SIxf05.dpuf” RC

But when Israel,s apologists claim Israel is surrounded by a sea of Arabs or run to the pols, the Arabs are going in droves or Arab terrorism or Arab intransigence or Arab hatred blah , blah, blah , thats no issue. Apparently Israeli Jewish children refer to Jordanians or Palestinians or Lebanese , etc etc.I should darn well think ,the children of Gaza hate the people who imprison them and bomb their homes and schools and hospitals and spray them with skunk juice and beat them up .Why would it be such an unusual thing for them to hate “The Jewish State”.Hell , I hate “The Jewish State because of it,s policies and actions.So if I say I hate Israel all will be forgiven.This is just sem-antics by people who are scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to divert attention from their evil deeds.

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