VIEWPOINT: Israeli evidence fails to penetrate BBC narrative
2 June 2010
Carmel Gould
Imagine the following scenario: Palestinians shoot dead 10 Israelis. The circumstances of the shootings are unclear but the following day, video footage emerges showing clearly a sequence of lone Palestinians approaching a large group of Israelis one at a time and being met with brutal violence. The footage shows a mob of Israelis battering each Palestinian with sticks and poles as soon they are within reach. At one point, the Israeli mob throws one of the Palestinians from height.
How would the release of such film impact the media narrative of the event? I would imagine that the film would be positioned as crucial evidence that it was the Israelis, and not the Palestinians, who were the aggressors and that the latter must have fatally wounded some of their attackers in self-defence.
BBC coverage of the Gaza flotilla raid indicates that footage released by Israel showing its troops being set upon by and repeatedly struck by baton-weilding ‘peace activists’ has not had the expected impact on its overarching narrative of events. Yes, the footage has been broadcast on its news channel and can be easily found on its website – but the implications of what can been seen on the video are simply not penetrating the prevailing account of ‘disproportionate’ Israeli force against ‘innocent civilians’.
The day following the release of Israel’s footage, the BBC News website had simply moved on. Its top story headline yesterday read, ‘Witnesses cast doubt on Israel's convoy raid account’ and delivered a series of testimonies from convoy participants claiming that there were no knives or weapons.
Stating near the start that ‘Israel says its soldiers were attacked with "knives, clubs and other weapons" and opened fire in self-defence’ is insufficient because it implies that all the readers have is the Israelis’ word on this. The only mention of the video footage which ‘apparently’ showed soldiers being attacked was buried towards the end of the piece, along with a quote from an Israeli soldier. Below this was the BBC website’s single reference to extremist statements made on Friday by Mavi Marmara passengers, about heading for martyrdom and Mohammed’s army returning for the Jews.
In today’s lead story, ‘Gaza flotilla: Israel starts to free foreign activists’ the claims of the activists remain but all reference to the Israeli footage is erased, along with the voice of the Israeli soldier and reference to the extremist passenger statements.
Furthermore, a special page sprang up called, ‘Gaza flotilla - Eyewitness accounts of Israeli raid’, created by the BBC News website team especially to catalogue the testimony of passengers like Norman Paech saying that he ‘only saw three activists resisting’ and that the passengers ‘had no knives, no axes, only sticks that they used to defend themselves’. However, late today, it has been updated to include Israeli soldiers’ testimony.
Such a page could have been created 24 hours ago following the release of testimony from the Israeli soldier who was thrown off the deck of the Mavi Marmara and is in hospital with a stab wound in his stomach, but it was not. This was a top story yesterday at 3.30pm on Haaretz – a key source for news stories critical of Israel’s military – and contains vivid testimony. The soldier says: 'At that point, another twenty people starting coming at me from every direction... They jumped at me and hurled me to the deck below the bridge. Then I felt a stabbing in my stomach – it was a knife. I pulled it our and somehow managed to get to the lower level. There, was another mob of people.'
The only reference to Captain R’s experience to be found on the BBC website is in a very balanced article by correspondent Paul Reynolds, but this has not been absorbed into the wider BBC narrative.
There are clearly many important questions remaining about the circumstances in which 10 people died – was every instance of the deployment of lethal force justified? Was it wise/legal for Israel to board the ship in the first place? Is the continued blockade of Gaza wrong? However, none of this excuses the refusal of the BBC to give due prominence to clear evidence which goes to the militancy and violence of passengers on the flotilla.