Beware the bias against Israel

When Tony Blair and Israel's Ariel Sharon sit down for dinner and diplomacy at Downing Street tonight, they are likely to agree on at least one thing: the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Media aides of both Prime Ministers have angrily accused the BBC of bias in Middle East coverage. Indeed, Israel's press office in Jerusalem has done what one can't help suspecting Alastair Campbell would quite like to have done here - withdrawn bureaucratic co-operation usually extended to foreign media representatives.

As is almost always the case when politicians in free societies go to battle with a news organisation, the result has been unedifying. The politicians have overstated their case, by suggesting the Beeb is deliberately setting out to broadcast lies. The BBC, for its part, has protested too much. For while the governors were quite right, given the broader implications for media freedom, to have refused to prostrate themselves in response to Mr Campbell's public dressingdown, the fact is that the BBC's presentation of Middle East issues has often been misleading.

That matters - if only because BBC coverage has come under fire just as efforts to secure peace between Israel and the Palestinians are showing the first stirrings of life since their collapse in blood and fire two-and-a-half years ago. There remain roadblocks along the "road map". But any prospect of rescuing the peace process hinges on understanding where it went wrong; and what the real issues are.

Britain, along with Washington, is a key player in the process. The Beeb, as the main public platform in this country for information and discussion, has a particular responsibility to get things right.

All news organisations inevitably get things wrong. So do governments, Israeli and Palestinian, and reporters are simply doing their job recording events that some would prefer not to be recorded. My own experience as a reporter on both sides of the Middle East conflict is that BBC reporters do their best, in difficult circumstances, to convey the truth as they see it. But particularly in its flagship news and current affairs programmes - a trend that took hold after the September 11 attacks in the US and has accelerated during the suicide-bomb stage of the Palestinian intifada and, more recently, the Iraq War - the BBC has often tended to provide a narrative of the Middle East which risks undermining the professionalism that generally marks on-scene reporting.

I happened to be on a BBC radio panel on the night of September 11, while bodies were being pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, and was startled to hear a fellow panellist remark that the real question was US policy towards Israel (fortunately, the presenter and another panellist jumped in to challenge the suggestion).

ONLY days later, as a consumer rather than a participant, I heard BBC presenters grill Henry Kissinger in almost identical terms (and then remark at how weird it was that Americans so missed the point of September 11). Repeatedly since then, I have heard presenters let pass remarks after suicide bombings in Israel suggesting that the "real question" is Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In the run-up to the Iraq War, leading BBC radio and television figures routinely suggested that, again, the "real issue" was not Saddam Hussein, but Israel. One Radio Five presenter wondered out loud shortly before the war whether it was a good idea for the White House to have a spokesman named Ari Fleischer (that is, presumably, a Jew). On BBC-TV's Question Time, a member of the audience suggested that a war against Saddam would not be on the agenda if it were not for "the Israelis" in the Bush Administration (again, presumably, a code-word for Jews - a remark that astonished me and, I still dare to hope, others, but not evidently Mr Dimbleby).

US policy towards Israel is, of course, an issue relevant to any understanding of Middle East politics. So, too, are Israel's policies on the West Bank and in Gaza (pace Tam Dalyell, with his recent suggestion of some "Jewish cabal" controlling US and British policies on the Middle East, there are almost as many different views on issues like West Bank settlements as there are Jews). But the Twin Towers attack was not about US support for Israel. A mere reading of al Qaeda communiqués over recent years would suffice to establish that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute barely registered on Osama bin-Laden's pre-September 11 radar screen: his enemies of choice were US forces in his home country of Saudi Arabia and the undemocratic, "un-Islamic" regimes that ruled and still rule Gulf states.

Nor is it the case that the suicide bombers who have set out to murder civilians in Israel have been acting in spontaneous response to occupation. Anyone with even a nodding familiarity with the mechanics of such attacks must surely know that a young Palestinian man or woman cannot simply go to a DIY store, get explosives, strap them on, and head out for "battle". The terror attacks are a deliberate policy of organisations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that provide the explosives, strap them on to human bombs, then launch them.

For these organisations, "occupation" means not the West Bank or Gaza, from which Israeli forces had begun to withdraw after the Oslo peace accords, but the core 1948 state of Israel established with United Nations endorsement. Moreover, the full-scale suicide-bomb campaign got under way after talks between Palestinians and the (then Labour) government of Israel, in Taba, had come tantalisingly close to an agreement that would have brought nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza - and, under a sovereignty- sharing arrangement, predominantly Arab parts of Jerusalem - under Palestinian control.

IN practical terms, of course, the BBC cannot be expected to rehearse the history of Israel and the Palestinians in every news or current affairs programme. Still less is this possible in reporters' dispatches from the scene. But the role of editors and presenters is a tip-of-the-iceberg one. It involves a responsibility to be aware of the issues the lie beneath the day-to-day news, and to ensure context. When they fail, the inevitable result is bias, a narrative that is at least misleading, and often inaccurate. The fact that this may not be deliberate is important to recognise. Sadly, however, it doesn't change the outcome.