The furore encircling the BBC’s recently aired, then pulled, documentary: Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, is not dying down. Now Kemi Badenoch has joined the fray, calling for an inquiry into how it came to feature the son of a senior Hamas figure, passing him off as just an ordinary Gazan kid.

“It is well known that inside Gaza the influence of the proscribed terrorist organisation Hamas is pervasive,” Badenoch wrote in a letter to BBC boss Tim Davie, seen by the Daily Mail.

How could any programme from there be commissioned, without comprehensive work by the BBC to ensure that presenters or participants were – as far as possible – not linked to that appalling regime?

Would the BBC be this naïve if it was commissioning content from North Korea or the Islamic Republic of Iran?

She has called for “a full independent inquiry to consider this and wider allegations of systemic BBC bias against Israel”, adding: “Such an investigation must consider allegations of potential collusion with Hamas, and the possibility of payment to Hamas officials.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism was equally excoriating. It held a rally on Tuesday night outside Broadcasting House, calling on the public to join it in telling BBC bosses: “Britain has had enough.”

In a statement, the organisation said: “For over 16 months, we have watched our national broadcaster provide ever more sympathetic coverage to a proscribed terrorist organisation, hiding behind claims of impartiality. But there is nothing impartial about giving credibility to the claims of terrorists.”

David Collier too, the investigator who uncovered the true identity of Abdullah Ayman Eliyazouri, the principal narrator of the documentary, had harsh words for ‘Auntie’.

According to Collier, Abdullah is “Hamas royalty”, grandson of Ibrahim al-Yazouri who was a founder of Hamas, son of Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri, Deputy Minister of Agriculture in Hamas-run Gaza.

Revealing the links, Collier commented:

The child of Hamas royalty was given an hour on a BBC channel to walk around looking for sympathy and demonising Israel. … The current hierarchy at the BBC has turned a once respected state broadcaster into a propaganda outlet for a radical Islamic terror group.

The naïvety, stupidity and arrogance of our media has long been apparent. It has allowed Palestinian propagandists to turn our legacy channels into foolish outlets blindly spouting Hamas lies 24/7.

Collier is right, the problem has long been apparent.

A crisis 20 years in the making

Suggestions that the BBC is biased in its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict are nothing new. For decades now, both sides of the conflict have accused the BBC of taking their opponents’ side. This is not the first time flash points have been reached.

2004 saw the BBC come under fire repeatedly for perceived bias against Israel. Time and again that year its journalists were accused of taking sides. One, Barbara Plett, admitted in a BBC report to crying when she saw the helicopter carrying terminally ill Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat leaving his compound in the West Bank. Following a slew of complaints from the public, BBC governors admitted her reaction “unintentionally gave the impression of over-identifying with Yasser Arafat and his cause”.

Impartiality is no easy matter in Israel/Palestine, where even nouns are divisive. Spend some time there and you’ll discover that every feature of the landscape has at least two names, sometimes more. The land west of the River Jordan can be the West Bank, the Occupied Territories, or Judea and Samaria, depending upon who you’re talking to. None of these terms are neutral. The noun you opt for will immediately reveal your political biases. Who, then, could the BBC turn to for assurances that its reporting in the region was as impartial as its charter dictates it must be? The man BBC bosses chose was Malcolm Balen, an independent experienced television executive.

According to a 2007 report in the Independent, Balen was adept at walking those fine lines.

He [Balen] ruled on tricky questions such as the word BBC correspondents should use to describe the long chain of fences and walls that the Israelis were erecting along the West Bank, to keep out suicide bombers. Palestinians call it the ‘apartheid wall’. To the Israelis it is simply a ‘fence’. On Mr Balen’s advice, the BBC settled on the word ‘barrier’.

Balen duly set to work, watching hundreds of hours of footage over a one year period. His findings were set down in a 20,000 word report… the results of which have never been seen by the public.

Some licence fee payers, though, were curious, like Steven Sugar, a commercial solicitor from Putney. In 2005, he put in a Freedom of Information request to see the report. His request was turned down. Although as a public body the BBC does fall under FOIA rules, it is allowed to withhold information required for “purposes of journalism, art or literature”.

“A very large proportion of the Jewish community felt rightly or wrongly that the BBC’s reporting of the second Palestinian intifada or uprising that broke out in 2000 was seriously distorted,” he said. “I myself, as a member of the Jewish community, felt that and was very distressed by it. Now I don’t know whether it is important to see this report or not. Instinct says that if they don’t want to give it to me it may be important.”

Sugar was never to see the report. He died in February 2011 having challenged the BBC all the way up to the House of Lords and then back through the High Court. His widow, Fiona Paveley, picked up the baton to take the case to the Supreme Court in 2012, but was ultimately ruled against.

“Independent journalism requires honest and open internal debate free from external pressures. This ruling enables us to continue to do that,” the BBC said in a statement at the time.

But the BBC’s intransigence over the matter has long raised eyebrows. By 2007, the corporation had already racked up £200,000 in legal fees to fight Sugar, prompting David Davis MP to ask: “What could possibly be in this report that could possibly be worth £200,000 to bury? What is it they feel is so awful in this report?”

Five years later, a new Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the sum total had risen to £332,780.47, nearly a third of a million pounds – excluding in-house legal hours and Value Added Tax.

Journalist Raheem Kassam, who filed that request, commented at the time: “The BBC is guilty of thoroughly indefensible actions in hiding the Balen Report. If there is nothing to be afraid of, the BBC should stop wasting taxpayers’ money immediately and hand over the report.”

A Moot Point?

By now, of course, the findings are long out of date – and were never entirely secret to begin with. As long ago as 2007 the Standard had noted:

If BBC executives had hoped for a clean bill of health they were to be disappointed. Balen’s findings, given highly restricted circulation at the end of 2004, were frightening.

Although they were kept secret, elements leaked out, including Balen’s conclusion that the BBC’s Middle East coverage had been biased against Israel.

Independent analysts have since taken it upon themselves to conduct reviews of the BBC’s output on the Middle East conflict. Last year, respected international litigator Trevor Asserson hired a team of lawyers and data analysts to comb through the BBC’s output in the first four months of the Israel-Gaza war, from October 7th 2023 through to February 7th 2024. They used AI to scan almost nine million words gathered from reports on television and radio, in English and in Arabic. The results were damning.

“The findings reveal the BBC has materially breached its obligations in both its English and Arabic-language content, raising serious concerns about the BBC’s role as a trusted news source,” the report states.

They found that sympathy for the Palestinians vastly outweighed sympathy for the Israelis, even in the days following the October 7th massacre. Hamas was nearly 12 times more likely to be referred to as a “health ministry” than it was as a “proscribed terror organisation”, and while Israel was accused of war crimes 592 times in BBC reporting, Hamas was accused of the same just 98 times.

“That is the situation with English broadcasts; in Arabic, it’s much worse,” Asserson told Israel Hayom. “Our examination of the headlines on the BBC Arabic website found that even on October 7th, the day of the massacre, the content showed sympathy for the Palestinians, not Israelis.”

He added: “It’s disgraceful; the BBC in Arabic is no different from anti-Israel regime mouthpieces like Al Jazeera or Iran Times.”

For its part, the BBC dismissed the report entirely, waving it away with claims that the AI used to conduct the analysis was an “unproven” technology. Yet its response is at odds with its reasoning for not releasing the Balen report – in court, it successfully argued that the report was required for journalistic purposes as it was used to help shape output on the conflict and ensure even-handedness. If the BBC truly is interested in preserving its integrity and ensuring commitment to the highest standards of journalism, shouldn’t it be interested in new technologies which can better help it confront its own biases?

And still, the allegations of biased reporting continue to come thick and fast, prompting even BBC insiders to call for some accountability within the corporation.

Responding to the Gaza documentary controversy, former BBC Director of Television Danny Cohen called the film a major crisis for the BBC’s reputation, adding: “The BBC’s commitment to impartiality on the Israel-Hamas war lies in tatters.”

Cohen is right. If the British public can’t trust the BBC on this topic, why should we trust it on others? After all, Jewish licence fee payers are not the only group ever to have accused the BBC of bias.

If the corporation wishes to begin to rebuild trust in its brand, if it wishes to get its house in order, it would do very well to start by releasing the Balen Report and finally, after two long decades, own up to its own failings on the matter.

Donna Rachel Edmunds is a British-Israeli journalist, formerly in-house with Breitbart, based in London, and then the Jerusalem Post, based in Jerusalem. There she specialised in the radicalisation of the Palestinian people by their own leaders.

Stop Press: Gary Lineker has mounted a defence of the now-pulled BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone in a letter to BBC boss Tim Davie. The letter, signed by 500 television industry figures, claims: “This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence – a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.”

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