Journalists doing an honest job in this country have to take account of the fact that Israeli or Zionist public relations are conducted with a degree of sophistication, which those on the other side have rarely matched. An accurate reflection of publicly expressed attitudes on the issue may well inevitably reveal at times a preponderance of sympathy for the Israeli side.

In other words, said Mayhew and says Tim Llewellyn, the BBC view is that it should not concern itself with striking a balance, but reflect the greater power of the Israeli lobby.

And it’s interesting, thirty years later, I had a very similar conversation, this was in about 2003 or 2004 during the Aqsa Intifada, when things were going very badly and the reporting by the BBC had, once again, deteriorated. I’m going to read what I wrote not long ago about this. I heard a similar view put by a senior BBC news executive with responsibility for Middle East coverage. And I was, like Mayhew before me, complaining about BBC bias and coverage of the second Intifada of 2000 to 2005. I put it to him that if the Palestinian side were not coming up with articulate spokesmen in modern studios in easily accessible locations like West Jerusalem, London, or New York, it was up to producers and reporters to dig them out, find ways of representing Palestinian representatives, commentators on Palestinian views, and put them on the air in the interests of impartiality. The executive’s rejoinder to me was in the same vein as the secretariat had replied to Mayhew, thirty years earlier. He said that if the BBC reporters and producers and editors did that, we would be doing the Palestinians’ job for them.

So, the situation at the end of the 1960s was that the Palestinians were beginning to put themselves on the map. They were doing it in many different ways, but the reporting of their case was still very tricky and still regarded with the greatest suspicion by the organised forces of the British media, the BBC particularly.

Of course, the Palestinians had their own difficulties. First of all, one way they were putting themselves on the map was in creating enormous difficulties in the Middle East itself. There was Black September in Jordan. There was the move to Beirut where they started to cause difficulties for the Lebanese government, after they’d been thrown out of Jordan, bringing their army into Lebanese territory, next door to Israel. And we know what came of that.

So the Palestinian image was being put forward, but sometimes in a negative way. However things did begin to change on other fronts. And I think this is very significant. In the 1970s, a number of different things were happening. The Palestinians were becoming recognised as a people with a cause, and more and more writers were beginning to take up that cause. The mood of the Western world at that stage was, especially among younger people, but among many politicians, somewhat revolutionary. It was the era of Vietnam. Les évenèments on the streets of Paris. There was a movement that said that the Third World, as we called it then, had to be heard. There were injustices that outlasted the end of colonialism. Colonialism was continuing in a new form. The French had only just got out of Algeria, leaving chaos behind them for a while. So there was a different mood abroad.

Secondly, the Palestinians themselves, although their name was in lights for hijacking, for the dreadful occurrences of the murders in Munich in 1972, the attacks across the Israeli border, the Palestinians would be making their case diplomatically. In 1973, the Arab States nominated the PLO and Yasser Arafat as the representative of the Palestinian cause, which was a massive step forward because many of the Arab States were deeply suspicious of Yasser Arafat.

In 1974 in November, Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He made his famous ‘gun and the olive branch’ speech, in which he said that if he was accepted diplomatically, if the world looked on the Palestinians with grace and favour, he would reply by being a diplomat himself. And we started to hear the first murmurs of the idea of a two-state solution. Of course, this was rejected by Israel, but the European powers were beginning to listen.

In 1973, Egypt attacked across the Suez Canal, into the occupied Sinai Peninsula and pushed the Israelis back. It looked like a defeat at first. The Israelis came back but the Arabs proved that they were a force to be reckoned with. Later on, in those seventies, there was the Camp David Peace Agreement, when Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt. This was not actually good news for the Palestinians, but it all helped to change the mood.

And the reason I’m talking about this is that during that period, interestingly, the BBC’s attitude — and this was about the time I joined them, as the mood of the politicians began to take into account the Palestinians — towards the reporting began to change.

When I arrived in the Middle East in 1974, I was able to report without fear or favour from the Arab side about what the Israelis were doing. I remember one of the first stories I ever wrote was about how the Israelis had blown up the Syrian town of Kuneitra, on the Golan Heights. The story they were putting out was that Kuneitra had been destroyed by shelling, but it was obvious when we went into there, in spring of 1974, this is after the October War in 1973, that the place had been blown up as the Israelis left, and this proved to be true, and the UN confirmed it. That story was used without fear of favour.

Changing Mood

The mood was changing in the media. The Palestinian case was to be accepted. But at the same time, suspicions of what Israel were doing were growing and the old full-hearted support for Israel was dropping. So you see here, I’m showing parallel lines: as the government shifts, so does the BBC, and so do many of the other elements of the media.

We come to the fact that also at that time, the nature of the press corps in that area was changing. From the seventies onwards, and particularly as the 1980s approached, the newspapers and the BBC started to change their personnel. A whole new generation of younger reporters was beginning to emerge, both in Beirut, where the reporters like myself mixed with the Palestinians, civilian and PLO. We didn’t always get on terribly well with the PLO. They were quite rightly suspicious of anything Western, but we understood what was going on. We heard the Palestinian side of the story, and we were able to write our stories in a much more sensitive way about why the Palestinians were behaving the way they did and why they wanted their rights.

At the same time, in Israel, the newspapers and the BBC were beginning to get worried about the fact that so many of their reporters there were actually Jewish and Zionist, were supportive of Israel, were residents of Israel. And over the years, the foreign media gradually moved in excellent reporters from outside. Sometimes they were Jewish, sometimes they were not, but they were outsiders. They were people coming from Britain, from France, from Scandinavia, from Germany, from the United States, and people who took a different view of Israel, people who had a more objective view of Israel.

This made an enormous change. In the early eighties, people like Ian Black of the Guardian, a superb reporter who speaks Arabic and Hebrew, made a tremendous difference to the way the West Bank and the whole Israel/Palestine issue was being reported. And so we see gradually that under this kind of umbrella of overall British government approval, and of course the same is true with other European governments, to a certain extent, the French particularly, not so much perhaps the Germans, but the reporting became more balanced.

One big event, which is probably largely forgotten now, which helped this process was that the EEC — that’s the European Economic Community, which had nine members, of which the United Kingdom was one — made its famous Venice Declaration in 1980, in which it more or less recognised the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which was a big step at that time. And in a sense, in a sideways way, was critical of the Camp David Agreement, in which Israel had made peace with Egypt, without mentioning really in any significant way, the Palestinians, and left the rest of the Arab world in the lurch, emphasised the fact that the Palestinian question had to be looked at.

And so we have over that period between, I would say, 1974 and the Oslo Agreement, a growing feeling in government circles and in the West in general, less so in the United States, of course, who paid some lip service to this, but the Israeli lobby held on strong there. But certainly, as regards British journalists, the movement was in tandem with government thinking. Even under Mrs. Thatcher, junior ministers, like William Waldegrave and David Mellor, very different people who used to come out to the West Bank — I met them there — were very critical, openly critical of Israel, as indeed was Robin Cook ten years later, under Tony Blair. It would never happen now. But the mood was changing.

At the same time, the Israelis were making fantastic mistakes. Let’s just take a couple of them. People were becoming aware of Israel’s aggression in Lebanon, and the fact that in 1978, Israel had actually occupied the South of Lebanon. People talk as if Israel started to occupy it in 1982, but it didn’t. It started in 1978. That started to arouse problems. Many more press people came out because there was a UN force there, Irish journalists, Norwegian journalists came out. All sorts of people who would not normally have gone to the Middle East were attracted because of the presence of their countries’ soldiers on that tense border between Israel and Lebanon. And not surprisingly, because of the aggressive tactics of the Israelis, these reporters began to find out that the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the South were actually human beings, were oppressed, were having great difficulties under the Israeli thumb, and that the Israelis did not play cricket, to say the least.

So the mood started to shift yet again, but the biggest fundamental mistake the Israelis made was their invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which ended alas in that massacre, which I covered, which I was the first to get the news out about for the BBC, the Sabra-Shatila massacre. The Israelis did not carry out that massacre, but they allowed it to happen. It could not have happened without them. That, on top of a whole summer of Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon, of the Lebanese and the Palestinians and the ultimate invasion of Beirut itself, the massacre and the long and bloody and tedious withdrawal of Israeli soldiers back down through to the South, which they hung on to for another eighteen years, cast the Israelis in a terribly bad light, and they did not handle it well. They came in for enormous criticism at home as well.

Now I was covering the Middle East at that time. So were my colleagues, many fine reporters like David Hirst at the Guardian, Robert Fisk of The Times… The Washington Post reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Sabra-Shatila. We can see how Israel was really under the media gun. Things weren’t perfect, don’t get me wrong. Israel’s support in America remained strong and it still remained strong, but somewhat subdued, in Britain.

I remember coming back after Sabra-Shatila, and my stories had run without any demur, there was no question. And so it went throughout the 1980s. You start to see the pattern.

What changed though — and there’s a lot more detail to this, which you can ask me about — what really changed I think was in 2000, the mood in the British government changed. Tony Blair was a strong supporter of Israel. Gordon Brown was a strong supporter of Israel. The attacks on the Twin Towers cast a great shadow over the Arab and the Muslim world, for all the wrong reasons, but it did. The Second Intifada, which was a violent Intifada on both sides, was very badly reported. The BBC hedged its bets, it made terrible mistakes in its reporting. The reporting of that Second Intifada, well, I thought was disgraceful and I said so publicly. It was terribly unbalanced. The language used to describe the way Palestinians behaved and the way Israelis behaved was very different.

I’ll just give you one example. Just before the Intifada started, there was an attack on Israeli Palestinians inside Israel itself. In October 2000, Israelis in a mob stabbed two Palestinian Israelis to death south of Tel Aviv. In subsequent violence, thirteen Israeli Palestinians were reported killed. The BBC and ITV reporting was muted. After these attacks, two Israelis held prisoner in a Palestinian police station in Ramallah were killed by a crowd of Palestinians who thought they were undercover agents. Now the language used to describe them was extraordinary. They were ‘killers’. There was ‘rage in their faces’. The descriptions of these acts were much more colourful and vivid than they were about the killers of the Arabs inside Israel. There was a terrible imbalance in the way cause and effect were described. Israelis were always retaliating for Palestinian attacks. And that’s something that still holds true today.

In 2001, the Israelis assassinated a Palestinian leader of the PFLP, firing a rocket through his office window in Ramallah. A month or so later, in a hotel in East Jerusalem, the PFLP assassinated the Israeli tourism minister, shooting him dead inside a hotel inside the West Bank. Now, when that happened, I recall the reporting of the death of the Israeli minister, who was a hardliner, made no mention of the fact that this was an answer to a murder of a Palestinian in the weeks before. And continually we found that there is what I call a spurious imbalance, a spurious equivalence in the way the two sides were reported.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is described as a war, it takes on warlike terms. One side against the other side, as if there were two equal sides involved in all this.

That’s been the nature of the reporting, I think ever since the beginning of 2000 and the Second Intifada. The Israelis regained their strength, their power over the media. And what we’ve seen in the past few years, unfortunately, with all the protest against this, the board of governors at the BBC reported in favour of these criticisms of the BBC and other broadcast media in 2006. But it did no good. The BBC took absolutely no notice of it. In fact, they got worse, and we see to this day that the reporting is still either missing completely or biased against the Palestinians.

I’ll give you one example. I want to read to you from an interview, and this is typical, which John Humphrys did with a BBC correspondent in Jerusalem after there had been attacks in Jerusalem against settlers and other Israelis. This is how Humphrys began his conversation with this correspondent. Humphrys speaking, ‘yet another attack on Israelis last night, this time an Arab man with a gun and a knife killed a soldier and wounded ten people. Our Middle East correspondent is (I’ll leave his name out to save his face). The number is mounting. Isn’t it? The number is about fifty now, isn’t it?’

Not only does Humphrys’s introduction make it sound as though only Israelis are being attacked. He implies that the fifty who’d been killed since the beginning were all Israelis. The correspondent doesn’t correct him. He says, ‘yes, we think around fifty, over the course of the last month or so, John.’ In fact of the fifty dead, all but eight were Palestinians.

So you see this tremendous imbalance of cause and effect, of who’s doing what to whom, and the lack of explanation why. That same correspondent I heard recently, after more attacks in Jerusalem, was asked why these young Arab men, Palestinian men were carrying out these attacks. He had no answer. He said he didn’t know. That is quite pathetic. Without, in any way, excusing these attacks on Israelis, on settlers, there is an explanation and he could have found it out by ringing up any of a dozen easily accessible Israeli and Palestinian social workers, sociologists, commentators, and experts inside East Jerusalem within a few minutes.