On Saturday, October 12, the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent, Lucy Williamson, joined the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on a tour of an unspecified village that they were occupying in southern Lebanon. Footage showed leveled civilian homes and infrastructure, a familiar image for those who have been following Israel’s trail of destruction across Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon over the past year.
Williamson gave the Israeli military, including one Colonel Yaniv Malka, who also fought in Israel’s failed 2006 invasion, free reign to make claims that provided the justification for their actions in Lebanon. They claimed to have found weapons, including mortars, anti-tank missiles, and mines, inside civilians’ homes; and a house’s garage that was used as an equipment warehouse – all for an alleged October 7-style cross-border operation that Hezbollah was planning.
In response, on Monday, seven BBC Arabic journalists suspended their work for the corporation in protest. Hezbollah also condemned the outlet for its violation of “Lebanese land, sovereignty and… law”, calling on the country’s Ministry of Information to take legal action against the BBC.
Manufacturing Consent
This is not the first time that the BBC has been caught up in controversy because of its coverage of the ongoing Israeli war on Palestine and Lebanon. Williamson herself went on another IOF propaganda tour last November, a day after Israel first raided al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. On that occasion, she was shown fifteen guns, a bullet-proof vest (conveniently with a Hamas logo on it), and military booklets and pamphlets that the Israelis supposedly found within the hospital. She was also presented with laptops that the IOF claimed had information about Israeli hostages held in Gaza – however, she admitted that she was not actually shown any of the content on them.
Rather than questioning any of these claims, or indeed acknowledging that the Israelis may be hiding something by not allowing her to speak to Palestinian doctors or patients, she regurgitated their propaganda unchallenged. In choosing to do so, the BBC went even further than many other Western news outlets, who are overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Israeli line. For example, NBC in the U.S. noted that Israel’s use of incorrect and disputed information had undermined its credibility, while The Guardian admitted that the IOF’s evidence fell well short of proving that al-Shifa was Hamas’ headquarters.
"The raid on al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest medical complex, which has since been completely destroyed by the IOF, was a means for Israel to establish a precedent. Then, as now, the BBC has served as a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda and a means to manufacture consent for its future crimes."
The raid on al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest medical complex, which has since been completely destroyed by the IOF, was a means for Israel to establish a precedent. It was to show that, in their insatiable thirst for revenge in the aftermath of October 7, no place was beyond their reach and no international law was unbreakable.
Then, as now, the BBC has served as a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda and a means to manufacture consent for its future crimes. Last November, they helped to justify Israel’s systematic targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system and hospitals – a policy so viscerally apparent when we saw burning bodies, some still attached to IVs, in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Today, it is setting the foundations for further, indiscriminate attacks on the Lebanese people.
By reproducing unsubstantiated reports that Hezbollah is hiding weapon caches in homes and garages or IOF claims that they are finding “two or three times” more weapons in Lebanese villages than they did in Gaza, the BBC is acting as the mouthpiece through which Israel’s actions in Lebanon are normalized. Every house becomes a potentially legitimate target, every civilian a potential terrorist in disguise.
In just four weeks, over 2,400 Lebanese have been killed by Israel, mostly in heavily populated residential areas, with a further 1.2 million people displaced. However, just as in Gaza, Israel’s widespread destruction and the proliferation of humanitarian crises seems to have done very little to dent the capabilities of Hezbollah’s armed resistance, nor weaken their determination.
Despite this, Israeli arrogance has led them to truly believe that there is a military solution through which they will be able to destroy Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Iran et al. and impose a new order, with themselves as the hegemon, over the region. As far back as December 2023, Netanyahu was promising to turn Beirut and South Lebanon “into Gaza [City] and Khan Younis” in the event of an all-out war – a threat he repeated in early October.
Netanyahu has made Israel’s intentions clear and, by engaging in the IOF’s propaganda tour of a Lebanese village, the BBC is complicit in manufacturing consent for the widespread death and destruction that inevitably will follow.
‘We Want Peace, You Wanted War’
An interesting example of this consent-building process undertaken by the BBC is, somewhat curiously, the evocative presentation of Israeli army graffiti (or, more accurately, vandalism). In her reports from both her genocide tours with the IOF to al-Shifa and southern Lebanon, Williamson has drawn attention to messages that Israeli soldiers have left behind (in both cases on destroyed buildings).
In the case of al-Shifa tour, the camera pans to a Star of David with “IDF” written in the middle and “Never Again” written above – a reference to the promise that there would never be a repeat of the Holocaust. In southern Lebanon, an Israeli soldier (presumably reminding the now displaced villagers) wrote a lament: “We want peace, you wanted war.”
Presented without context or comment, what purpose does invoking such graffiti serve? Here, what is left unsaid allows for the BBC to promote a narrative that would perhaps be too obviously construed as propaganda if made explicit. It is designed to make the viewer sympathize with Israel who, through no fault of its own, has been drawn into conflict with its belligerent neighbors. Exploiting the history of the Holocaust, Israel’s response to the Hamas-led Al-Aqsa Flood Operation is portrayed as a necessary war to prevent a repeat of the genocide committed against Jews by fellow Europeans.
Similarly, the graffiti in the southern Lebanese village implies a war imposed upon the Israelis, a peace-loving people who just cannot find any partners for peace. Rather than drawing attention to the bloodlust that has engulfed Israeli society from top to bottom since last October, we are presented with the image of a people who kill because they must, not because they want to.
The Arab and Muslim once again becomes the bloodthirsty savage, unable to tolerate those that are different. The Israelis become an extension of Western civility and liberalism, only acting in self-defense, besieged by enemies on every side.
Such attempts by the BBC and other Western media outlets to manufacture consent over the past twelve months have become much more difficult when we are able to access a constant stream of genocidal words and actions right to our phones. We have seen Israel commit war crimes in Rafah, Beirut, and everywhere in between. Even the casual observer cannot escape this reality and yet, news organizations such as the BBC continue in their attempts to fool us.
Complicity in Genocide
In late December 2023, the South African government brought forward a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of “genocidal acts” in what, at the time, had been over two months of relentless violence. After two days of argument and counter-argument, in which the South African legal team brought forward meticulously researched evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent and acts, the ICJ ruled that it was “plausible” that acts of genocide were taking place in Gaza.
According to the Genocide Convention, all states are responsible for preventing and punishing anyone who commits, conspires, incites, attempts or is complicit in genocide. As Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who resigned over the organization’s inability to prevent Israel’s genocide in Palestine, noted in an article for Mondoweiss: the Western media has been complicit.
He argues, “In the face of the first live-streamed genocide in history unfolding on the screens of people from Boston to Botswana, it is simply not credible to suggest that Western media companies are not aware of the realities on the ground and of what they are doing to obscure them. They have indisputably made conscious choices to hide the genocide from their audiences, to systematically dehumanize the Palestinian victims, and to insulate the Israeli perpetrators from accountability.”
Even if we put Williamson’s genocide tours with the IOF aside, there is ample evidence of the BBC’s attempts to obscure the true nature of Israel’s actions in the region and present it as a war of self-defense. Tellingly, back in January 2024, the corporation aired the entirety of Israel’s defense during the ICJ hearing, while only partially airing the South African legal team’s arguments the day before – perhaps the most symbolic example of their bias.
Elsewhere, much has been made of the choice of language used by media outlets. By now, we are all too familiar with the phrase “the Hamas-run Health Ministry”, which is used to cast doubt on the validity of the Gaza death toll (which by all accounts is likely to be a gross underestimate). Similarly, the new, Lebanese iteration, “Hezbollah stronghold”, often used to describe the Dahiyeh neighborhood, implicitly justifies targeting this residential suburb of Beirut on the pretext that Hezbollah is ever-present.
As far back as December 2023, a study by Jan Lietava and Dana Najjar found that Israeli victims were given more coverage and compassion than Palestinians by the BBC. It found that Israelis, particularly men, were more likely to be described in relatable language (mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, etc.), while terms such as “massacre” and “slaughter” were almost exclusively used to describe acts perpetrated against Israelis.
Taking a larger sample of news media available in the UK, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) found that, in the UK, the active voice (“killed”), was used 55% more for Israelis than for Palestinians, whose deaths were often described using the passive voice (“died”).
Despite changing habits and the relative democratization of news sources, the BBC still remains the single most popular news source in the UK (in addition to being a mouthpiece for British interests abroad). Its coverage of Israel, which is adamant about spreading death and destruction across the region, therefore has the potential to shape public opinion. As Mokhiber notes, this audience “is not limited to uninvolved bystanders. It includes as well Western government officials and policymakers directly complicit in the genocide, through the provision of military, economic, intelligence, and diplomatic support to Israel, as well as the voting public that enables this support.”
By obfuscating Israeli crimes, the BBC is deceiving the British public and using its position to manufacture consent for the ongoing status quo in the region, as well as the UK government’s continued support. By starting history on October 7 and failing to acknowledge over a century of Zionist settler colonialism and acknowledging the legitimacy of all forms of resistance, the BBC is able to portray Israel as the victims, fighting a necessary war (with some regrettable excesses) against its inherently hostile and intransigent neighbors.
Now that Israel’s actions have crossed the legal threshold and led to it being put on trial for genocide, the BBC also finds itself in the dock. Williamson’s adventure into southern Lebanon with the same army that is accused of this great crime against the Palestinians is but the latest case in the BBC’s long and ignominious history of complicity in Israel’s crimes.
The corporation continues to expose itself as a vassal for imperialist and Zionist interests; and an enemy to all of those struggling for Palestinian liberation and an end to the European settler colonial project that has stained the West Asia region for 76 years. We must continue to amplify counternarratives that support our cause and always remember that when Israel was committing the greatest of all crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese people, the BBC participated.
They will be held accountable.