There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.
The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.
He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him.
His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas – as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.
The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza – this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine – that has received none of the controversy.
And for good reason.
Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.
It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.
What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.
Which is no mean feat, given the subject matter: nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.
But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative – one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.
Hellbound and Down 