As Trump mouthpieces attack the BBC from the right Tim Llewellyn reports on further BBC censorship and poor treatment of Gary Lineker
The BBC’s decision in mid-February to drop the TV documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone from its iPlayer streaming service is a classic example of how viscerally the broadcaster fears the pro-Israel lobby, to the detriment of most of its coverage of Israel-Palestine during the past 25 years. (BBC Report) Now it has compounded this editorial cowardice by withholding from broadcast another documentary, Gaza: Medics under fire, which tells the stories of doctors, surgeons and hospital staff and thus the sick and the wounded they tend, operating under Israeli bombardment.
This programme was ready for broadcast in February, but the BBC is keeping it under wraps until its internal findings on the first suspended documentary are complete. Whenever that may be. As of this date of writing, we are nearly four months in the waiting..
It is hard to keep up with this litany of BBC backdowns in the face of Israeli and pro-Israeli pressure. The Gary Lineker case is yet another, so let us go back to the first capitulation.
As soon as a Zionist reporter and activist revealed that the 13-year-old narrator of the “How to Survive” documentary, Abdullah al-Yazouri, was the son of the deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas Government; and that the word “Yahud” (Arabic for “Jews”) had been changed to “Israelis” in Gazans’ comments in the film, the BBC caved in. In the “hysteria” of the subsequent weeks, especially in the Tory media, whose support for Israel and loathing of the BBC are unyielding, the Government, MPs, academics, former TV executives and myriad letter-writers, bloggers and online tyros joined the general condemnation. The BBC, instead of reserving judgment until it had conducted an internal investigation of the case, whatever that case was, apologised through announcements of regret by the director-general, Tim Davie and the chairman of the BBC Board, Samir Shah. This only encouraged the critics.
The BBC then appeared to blame the company that made the documentary, Hoyo Films. Its spokespeople said Hoyo had misled the BBC about the identities of the characters appearing in the film and any possible connections between them and Hamas, which the British Government deems a terrorist organisation. (The BBC does not itself describe Hamas as “terrorists” but has to be constantly aware of the Government’s stance.) It appeared that the BBC itself may have been less than assiduous in pursuing Hoyo about the narrator’s family connections.
Thus, the debate about the film became one of the BBC’s processes and self-acknowledged error, with the programme’s merits and validity unaddressed, and with them any defence against allegations of antisemitism and possible pro-Hamas propaganda. The film is unobjectionable on any of those counts, and a period of calm, while people watched the documentary and the BBC compiled an honest report, would have been a wiser solution.
In a word, the tremulous BBC muffed it.
The film shows the reality of a civilian population, a militarily occupied people, under the relentless bombardment of one of the world’s most lethal military forces, supported in weaponry and intelligence by the United States and Western Europe, especially the UK and Germany.
The 13-year-old Abdullah is our guide, on camera. Nowhere in the film does he say or show anything that could be construed as Hamas propaganda. In fact, at a number of points, terrified Gazans on the run from the blitzkrieg curse the Hamas leadership. “May God curse you, Sinwar,” cries a woman fleeing the bombs. “They’ve killed our children while Sinwar is hiding under the ground,” yells an elderly man. They mean Yahya al-Sinwar, the Hamas leader whom the Israelis killed in October 2024, a few months after these people were filmed. One telling portrayal is that of 11-year-old Zakaria, who, like a person possessed, follows the ambulances as they bring in the bodies and the wounded, and helps the medics unload victims and corpses.
What future mental tortures will that little boy suffer? Will he ever be normal? “He seems as if he’s 40,” says an uncle. He is asked if he likes Hamas. “No, because they started this war. They caused all this misery. It is wrong.”
Other Gazans, who celebrated the 7 Oct breakout, or cheered as Iranian missiles sailed overhead towards Israel last October, wonder aloud on screen about the brutal reprisals. Hamas propaganda? Hardly. This film is a candid picture of resilience mixed with fear under a savage bombardment, we see repeatedly targeting civilians and, disproportionately, women and children.
As for the accusation that substituting the word “Israeli” for “Yahudi” was somehow to try to erase Palestinian antisemitism, it is ludicrous. The Palestinian Arabs called the European Jewish immigrants who began arriving in Palestine in the late 19th Century “Yahud’,” Jews, because that is what they were, that was their identity. The Yahud did not become “Israelis” until the creation of the state in 1948, but the old terminology continued.
When Israel was created, most Palestinians became refugees and many Arabs were reluctant to utter the word “Israel. “Zionist state” was preferred when I arrived in the Middle East in 1974.
Time and habit have changed much, and the word “Israel” is no longer shunned. But it is hardly remarkable that Gazans would refer to their nemesis as Yahud when the fighter-bombers and the soldiers” uniforms are emblazoned with the Star of David, that blue and white flag flutters over the military bases, roadblocks and tanks, and the Government of Israel has ruled that Israel is a Jewish state, a state where full rights of citizenship are only for Jews.
For the BBC, a chance to keep showing us an all-too-rare example of brave, honest mainstream media reporting has been lost through a combination of institutional fumbling and cowardice in the face of Zionist pressure.
It has not stopped there.
Now, another BBC-commissioned documentary, concerning perhaps the even more currently agonising case of medical teams and patients under Israel’s continuous and arbitrary bombardment, has been withheld from broadcast—Gaza: Medics Under Fire. The team that made the film, Basement Films, said the BBC had postponed it until the review of How to Survive a War Zone was complete. Since then, the doctors and others who took part in the film have threatened to withdraw their consent to the programme’s being broadcast at all, and anyway, the fact that the documentary was filmed last year means it could well be outdated if left on the shelf much longer.
Gary Lineker was among a group of high-profile cultural figures who wrote to Director-General Davie saying the decision is an example of “political suppression.” We know what has happened to Lineker. The vocal and much relied on Zionist tendencies in British political and media life have nailed, spuriously,  a widely heard, widely watched and widely revered sports titan who also stood up for common decency and human rights, as a conveyor of “antisemitism” because of a rat emoji that appeared in a social media post he forwarded (Arab News). He had not seen the emoji, and even if he had would not have necessarily associated it with antisemitism. Nor would I have, as rats to most of us are just broad symbols of anything from filth to treachery to cunning and not immediately linked to the Nazi tropes of the 1930s.
But down he went, down he has gone, like Jeremy Corbyn: no longer ever probably to shake off the “antisemitic” slur in the mainstream public prints and airwaves.
I think these three stories illustrate how trenchant is the fear of offending Israel and its many powerful associates in British public and commercial life, and how fundamentally this affects how we who rely on such institutions as the BBC to give us an informed fair picture of the world are short-changed: our knowledge of what is actually happening to the Palestinian people, and why, are impaired. The BBC is also locked in a constant struggle over its very existence with a Government, any government it seems, that supports Israel come what may (so far), and is thus constantly trimming its sails to the Israeli breeze.
In the case of the Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone documentary, many more people than would ever have seen the film on BBC2 or on iPlayer have now been alerted to it by the public debate and have been able to watch it at their leisure on any number of streaming services worldwide. Just put Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone into your search engine. There are plenty of links. The doctors’ film is in greater peril while the BBC dithers, perhaps until it is no longer relevant. In the case of Gary Lineker, the BBC has assisted massively in smearing a broadcasting genius and civil rights champion, but I doubt he will disappear for long from public platforms.