What is Truth?

As we know, the BBC has become a target for right-wing politicians and oligarchic media magnates. With its Charter up for renewal in 2027, the Corporation is in defensive mode. BBCTV now airs a daily ‘showcase’ of programmes and ‘public service benefits’  to stress the value of its work to the public. The hope seems to be that the slogan ‘this is our BBC’ will encourage the public to defend the BBC’s integrity, indeed its very existence, from the corporate vultures as they gather.

The broadcast trailers - advertisements in all but name - show a variety of BBC programmes and activities. Those attached to the News channels reiterate that ‘the fight for truth is on’, emphasising the value of a reliable, unbiassed news service. ‘Trust is earned’, says the slogan. This is laudable as an aim, but in practice somewhat at odds with the BBC’s respectful, even obsequious, attitude towards the very politicians who attack it.

This is particularly true of its treatment of Palestine, whereby the BBC studiously avoids upsetting the stage-managed sensibilities of the Zionist lobby and its supporters - which includes the current government. Almost every BBC news item even remotely about Palestine includes one or two paragraphs like the following.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

At least 73,035 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, including more than 21,280 children, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen as reliable by the UN.

Caveats like this, often verbatim, appear in almost every relevant news item and many irrelevant ones too. The one quoted here is from a news report about the Irish Football Association debating whether or not to sanction Israeli football teams. However remote the connection, Hamas, somehow, has to be dragged in. If they are part of a so-called ‘fight for truth’, these paragraphs need to be questioned…

In response to the…Hamas-led attack. Israel’s attacks on Gaza had begun some 16 years earlier, when the enclave was closed off, deprived of resources, repeatedly bombed and turned into what Noam Chomsky described as ‘the world’s largest open-air prison’. Hamas’s prison breakout, though, did provide an excuse for Israeli escalation, for which the Zionist state had already prepared.

Campaign in Gaza. This was not a ‘campaign’ because this was not a war. It was the deliberate destruction of a civilian society by one of the world’s best-armed military powers. In a word: a genocide.

About 1,200 people were killed. The implication is ‘killed by Hamas’. Hamas did kill hundreds. These were largely military personnel and security forces, part of the apparatus of occupation which an occupied population is legally entitled to resist. No doubt civilians too were killed by Hamas, by other groups or by irregulars, who broke out at the same time. This was unwarranted criminality, deserving of prosecution. Also undoubtedly, many, possibly hundreds, were killed by Israeli forces. This is borne out by the many orders under the Hannibal Directive issued that day, and also by the kind of damage sustained by vehicles and buildings which could only have been caused by Israeli weapons. Though this is generally known, and accepted by the IDF, and though it is as criminal as any Hamas civilian killings, it is seldom if ever mentioned by the BBC.

251 were taken hostage. At first, many Israeli hostages were released by negotiation, in exchange for Palestinians taken hostage by Israel. Then, as Israeli destruction intensified, exchange became more difficult logistically and politically. Some hostages died under Israel’s ‘friendly fire’. Though much attention has rightly been given to the plight of the Israeli hostages and their families, Palestinian hostages, as many as 10,000 of them, many in jail without charge or trial, many being treated violently, many of them children, are almost never mentioned by mainstream broadcasters.

The territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. Israel’s account of what happened (or did not happen) on 7th October is accepted uncritically by the western press, and the figures and accusations tend to be recounted verbatim, including invented ones about beheaded babies and numerous rapes. By contrast, statements by the Palestinians are always described as coming from ‘Hamas-run’ sources, as though this should invalidate them. Even the phrase accepted as reliable by the UN implies ‘but not necessarily by the rest of us’. Ghastly though the figures are, querying them is pointless. The world has seen for itself the scale of the physical and human destruction and is forming its opinion accordingly, based on the actual truth.

The BBC’s selectivity is very far from ‘the truth’ for which its reporters are supposedly fighting. It is deliberate obfuscation if we pretend that a ‘conflict’  began on 7th October 2023 and that what has happened since is a regrettable but understandable response. The destruction of Palestine was debated and decided upon at the end of the 19th century, and has been implemented with ever-increasing violence and cruelty throughout the 20th and 21st. Ignoring this helps to perpetuate the injustice.

Picture by Duccio of Christ before Pilate.

What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer (Francis Bacon)