The Right Kind of Bias

The BBC’s decision to pull a documentary about Israeli war crimes in Gaza shows how its enforcement of 'impartiality' almost always benefits just one side

BBC Director General Tim Davie

The BBC on Friday announced that they will no longer broadcast a planned documentary about medics in Gaza because of the alleged anti-Israel bias of its filmmakers.

The film, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, had already been factchecked by the BBC, with the corporation insisting until just a couple of weeks ago that it would be shown “as soon as possible”.

However, after months of sitting on it, the Beeb finally announced that they would no longer broadcast it due to “impartiality concerns” about its makers.

According to the BBC, these concerns stemmed from public comments by one of the film’s directors in which they accused Israel of “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing”

This was apparently enough for the corporation to pull the film, because “Israel has denied accusations of war crimes and genocide”.

Now the fact that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza is hard to credibly deny.

Just this week, the head of the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said they had identified “clear evidence” of Israel committing war crimes in Gaza, whilst the International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying they have grounds to believe he is guilty of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

Now obviously Netanyahu and other Israeli figures accused of these crimes have not been tried and it it is perfectly reasonable for the BBC to cite their denials.

But what it is not reasonable to do is to completely pull an accurate documentary about those crimes, simply because one of its makers has come to the reasonable conclusion, having conducted extensive reporting in the area, that Israel is responsible for them.

Yet that is exactly what the BBC has done.

This goes to the heart of what is wrong with the BBC’s approach to “impartiality” and how its enforcement of it almost always benefits just one side.