The BBC must submit to external investigation

The BBC has admitted that its recent documentary on Gaza was a huge failure of journalistic standards.

For those who have not been following the story, the corporation has been forced to admit – among other things – that the narrator of the programme was the son of a Hamas official and that a payment was made by the independent production company which made the film to the family of a member of a terrorist organisation.

Despite this extraordinary breach of standards, the corporation has announced that events surrounding this debacle should be examined by a BBC executive.

This is wholly unacceptable. The broadcaster should immediately announce an independent investigation so that licence fee payers can be certain that all the facts will come to light and nothing will be hidden. The BBC should not be marking its own homework when it has failed so calamitously to pass the most basic of tests.

When it comes to an independent investigation there is a great deal to examine. The BBC has been forced to admit something truly shocking: that licence fee payers’ money spent on this programme reached the hands of a Hamas family. That is, public money was given to a family tied to a terrorist organisation responsible for mass murder, rape and the kidnapping of babies.

The public deserves to know the full facts on this payment, including whether any criminal laws have been broken. If necessary, the police should investigate.

The BBC must also explain why the words of Gazans interviewed in the programme were mistranslated to whitewash their racist connotations. On at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”.

The BBC has a track record of mistranslating these words. The question is why the BBC has chosen to hide this evidence of anti-Semitism in its reporting of the Middle East.

An independent investigation must also examine the issues of deep-seated anti-Israel bias that have become systemic at the BBC. The crisis created by this documentary did not happen in a vacuum. The corporation’s journalism has been severely compromised by an acceptance of Hamas as a trustworthy resource for newsgathering.

Over the past 16 months I have catalogued hundreds of examples of BBC bias against Israel, ranging from journalists celebrating the October 7 terrorist attacks to endemic bias at BBC Arabic and misreporting of key episodes of the war.

Yet at no point would the BBC even acknowledge it had a problem. In attempting to discuss these issues, I have found the BBC’s most senior executives to be defensive, evasive and in denial.

Many in the Jewish community have felt gaslit by the BBC as a result. It is this unwillingness by the corporation’s management to address the systemic problems in its coverage of Israel that has led inexorably to the latest journalistic failures of the Gaza documentary.