Staff say broadcaster censors and punishes them if they expose Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity
The BBC’s decision not to broadcast a documentary exposing Israel’s targeting of medical staff in Gaza is just “one in a long line” of censorship decisions that reflects the corporation acting as “PR for Israel”, more than a hundred BBC staff and three hundred other media professionals have said in an open letter to BBC management.
Staff also accuse the BBC of punitive measures against them if they even refer to Israel’s crimes on their social media accounts:
The “Gaza: Doctors Under Attack” documentary is not the only exposé of Israel’s crimes that the BBC has censored. In February it deleted the documentary “Gaza: How to survive a war zone”, which showed Israel’s genocide from the perspective of Palestinian children after the UK Israel lobby demanded its removal on the spurious grounds that the narrator is the child of a civilian official in Gaza’s ‘Hamas’ government. There was no challenge, nor could there be, to the accuracy of what the documentary portrayed: destruction, hunger and fear inflicted by the occupation.
Nor is the BBC’s bias limited to documentaries. Studies have shown it gives an Israeli death more than thirty times more coverage than those of Palestinians and treats the deaths differently as well, naming even soldiers killed in combat and providing their life story, while anonymising Palestinians and casting doubt over whether reports of massacres by Israeli forces are accurate. The BBC has also collaborated with Israel lobby groups in deleting musical performances and other artists who speak out against Israel.
The BBC has also falsely reported other issues around Israel and the UK’s involvement in its crimes, including claiming that a British Israel lobbyist had met Israel’s foreign minister in London when he had travelled to Israel, during the genocide, for the meeting – and when Israel carried out a massacre of more than two hundred Palestinian civilians during a raid to rescue just four Israeli hostages last year, the names of the hostages were headlined in large texts while the two hundred and seventy-nine Palestinian civilians slaughtered was a tiny subtext and their deaths were described as “claimed” when the facts were well established. Almost seven hundred were also wounded, but this was ignored completely.
The BBC’s collusion with Israel has also extended to secret meetings, during the genocide, with a top Israeli general to ‘enhance support for Israel’ – and to cutting off experts who bring out facts about Israel’s crimes during interviews, while issuing grovelling apologies if any presenters dare to confront Israeli mouthpieces with hard truths:
This collusion is as unsurprising as it is appalling, given that several top BBC figures are Israel supporters, including one mentioned in the staff letter:
The inconsistent manner in which guidance is applied draws into focus the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, on the BBC Board and BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee. We are concerned that an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle, an outlet that has repeatedly published anti-Palestinian and often racist content, has a say in the BBC’s editorial decisions in any capacity, including the decision not to broadcast ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’.
Middle East editor Raffi Berg has been accused of collaborating with the CIA and Mossad, has gushed about Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu having Berg’s book on his shelf, and has ignored Israel’s ‘Hannibal directive’ slaughter of hundreds of Israelis on 7 October 2023:
Raffi is the tip of the iceberg. Scratch the surface of the BBC and you will find it packed to the rafters with Zionists who will frame the reporting on Gaza to centre Israeli interests.
Tamara Abood, former Channel 4 News commissioner.
We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October.
BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, ignoring decades of Israeli murder and oppression in Gaza.
And even the BBC’s ‘Verify’ programme, which supposedly checks stories for accuracy is suspect: its presenter Marianna Spring appeared in chains of emails between fake-left hack Paul Mason and British intelligence assets about ways to undermine left-wing or anti-war media, reportedly lied on her CV to get a media job and whose Wikipedia and internet histories have allegedly been scrubbed by intelligence-linked editors:
Spring’s colleague Chloe Hadjimatheou, who also appears in Mason’s emails, has been accused of whitewashing the late ‘former’ British spy James le Mesurier’s involvement in the Syrian ‘White Helmets’ and that group’s role in staging ‘terror’ incidents helpful to UK and US interests.
Now the latest staff letter, far from the first, refreshes concerns that the BBC, far from being an impartial reporter of events, plays a main role in advancing the imperial aims of the UK and its allies, especially the US and it’s imperial outpost Israel, to the detriment of their victims.
Please remember to support Skwawkbox if you can, to help ensure it can keep running. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (Skwawkbox will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount as it has to be entered by us). Alternatively, if you prefer to make a one-off or recurring donation by simple card payment, please use the form below:
Make a one-time donation
Make a monthly donation
Make a yearly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyThanks for your solidarity so Skwawkbox can keep doing its job of inconveniencing the right and helping to build the left!
Cornish Damo (might’ve been someone else, I haven’t time to rewatch the video just now) did a slot on this last night…sure I heard him drop a few fairly famous names in with the reporters who signed anonymously.
Charles Dance was one…
Damo hasn’t posted for a few days. Must be someone else. I, for one, would love to know more about this so hope you can locate the item for us. Cheers.
It WAS Damo, tim…
https://youtu.be/wDIWbn47__w?si=kp_yBiJqqHzbrCPl
Charles Dance, Miriam Margolyes, Mike Leigh and William Dalrymple (no, me neither I’m afraid)
Meanwhile, following Wednesday’s Parliamentory vote to proscribe Palestine Action the Rainbow Collective have made the decision to temporarily take down the online version of the film ‘To Kill a War Machine’ and authorise no further showings of the film until further notice.
https://tokillawarmachine.com/#SupportSection
Statement reproduced below:
Filmmakers statement on To Kill a War Machine
Following the vote in the House of Commons on 2nd July 2025 to proscribe Palestine Action, Rainbow Collective have taken the difficult decision to temporarily take down the online version of our film, ‘To Kill a War Machine’ and authorise no further screenings of the film until further notice.
As filmmakers with 20 years of experience documenting movements for social justice around the world, we produced ‘To Kill a War Machine’ independently, within the law and had it certified for cinema release by the BBFC. The film itself does not become illegal, as it was produced and edited prior to proscription. However, future distribution of anything which could be interpreted as showing sympathy for or inviting support for a proscribed organisation will become illegal.
It has always been Rainbow Collective’s intention to tell critical and truthful stories with integrity. We never want our documentaries to expose our audiences or communities to danger from the state and, as such, the film will remain unavailable until we have absolute legal assurance that it can be distributed within the law.
This is for the safety and wellbeing of the communities wishing to organise events or screen the film, as we have been advised that it is they who would face the greatest legal exposure.
We have been overwhelmed and humbled by close to a hundred community screenings being organised over the past week, on line and in person, in cinemas, theatres, community centres, pubs, museums, and living rooms across the UK and around the world. We have never witnessed such an urgent, impassioned and dynamic mobilisation around a film in our 20 years working in the industry.
We feel that this is an important film, one in which activists and members of the public put forward arguments for why direct action is justified, morally and legally, against the companies supplying genocide. We also feel that proscription of a non-violent protest group is the most concerning example of authoritarian overreach that we have seen in the UK in our lifetimes, not just on the right to protest but on the rights of independent film makers, writers, journalists and artists like ourselves who should be allowed to platform the views and actions of non-violent protesters.
We will post further statements as the situation develops and hope to see you all at a screening as soon as we can get the film out there in a way that keeps everybody safe.
With love and solidarity,
Richard York & Hannan Majid,
Directors & Founders, Rainbow Collective, 3rd July 2025
How Palantir, Google & Amazon armed Israel’s genocide in Gaza | Antony Loewenstein | The Big Picture
WEAPONS and SURVEILLANCE-TECH – Palantir (+google/+Amazon/+Apple & +META/Microsoft etc.,) know where the Money is!
I don’t know whether it’s the same these days on the football terraces – I stopped going a long time ago – but back in the day a favourite chant aimed at the local plod taking the opportunity to earn some overtime was “where did you get that hat?”
A similar question in the context of the settler Zionist State might well be something along the lines of “where did you get that policy?”
Charles W. Anderson, assistant professor of history at Western Washington University, explains:
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1643031#
“The present fractured state of occupied Palestine bears more than a passing resemblance to the now distant era of the 1930s. Many of the military tactics Israel uses to control the Palestinians, and especially its fascination with collective punishment, date back to the British Mandate, and specifically to the suppression of the Palestinian insurgency from 1936–39, known as the Great Revolt. Aside from tactical repertoires for managing and repressing the Palestinians, important elements of the systems of military law which Israel has employed to rule over the Palestinian minority in the Jewish state (1948–66) and the population of the West Bank and Gaza (1967–present) also stem from the British counterinsurgency state built in the 1930s…..
…….Everyday life, and its social and economic foundations, became a battleground during the Great Revolt……
……..The colonial state intruded upon all manner of daily activities, degrading Palestinians’ living conditions and turning the mundane into a site of contest and a pressure point through which to exercise power.
The colonial regime converted schools and hotels into military bases, seized crops and livestock, and invaded, assaulted, and demolished homes, villages, and urban quarters. Quotidian and ritual activities like attending prayers or going to school were made contingent on docile behaviour or random circumstance; even funerals were prohibited as potential “disturbances.”
Villages were temporarily incarcerated and the movement of goods and persons was restricted and rendered dependent on compliance with state surveillance. The rebels were determined to build an alternative sovereignty and public realm that would incorporate the Palestinian population.
To destroy that project and cow the population into submission, colonial authorities employed an array of collective punishments that targeted the body politic. The result was a sustained attack on the daily life of the colonized that operated through four registers: economic sanctions, the control of space, the loss of bodily autonomy, and movement controls.
No less than its other legacies, this article contends that the 1930s counterinsurgency established a critical precedent for Israel’s subsequent approach to the Palestinians, one premised on the systematic disruption and degradation of everyday life as a means of curbing resistance and controlling the population……”
——————————————
Whilst this [downloadable] paper runs to about 6,400 words, there’s still plenty of weekend left to digest yet another legacy of the Exceptionalist British [ie English] Oligarch aristocracy which that same entity continues to use to this day to bend everybody else to its will.
Wherever they are in the world. Palestine, Russia, China et al. Behind any designated Official Enemy of the Collective Worst you can find the British [English] Establishment and their political and media lackeys and sycophants working feverishly behind the scenes pulling the levers, shaping the narrative, imposing their exceptionalism.
Most of the world’s problems would likely disappear the moment those which make up this malevolent and useless entity and their minions were permanently and unequivocally made to cease to exist.