MAKES INTERESTING READING !
THIS LETTER HAS BEEN SENT TO JEREMY BOWEN AT BBC.
Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East Editor
BBC Television Centre
London W12
14 January, 2009
Dear Mr Bowen,
For as many years as I remember, I have been reading and listening to your reports from the Middle East .
And I'll put my cards on the table straight away; you and your BBC colleagues' perspective on Israel and its conflicts with its neighbours is (and always has been in my view) equivalent to the propaganda that comes from the Hamas information office or from the desk of President Ahmadinejad. You (by which I mean the BBC) are no more objective than say Fox News on US domestic matters, although unlike self-proclaimed partisan agencies, the BBC masquerades as an impartial voice.
Jews in this country are not fooled, neither do we especially care. I am of your generation (two years younger than you), a British jew born to Hungarian parents, a generation which by and large survived the Holocaust but whose parents' generation did not. You are not a jew and have no emotional concept of anti-semitism. And I don't mean the Neo-Nazi variety of skinheads and Hitler moustaches, but the more subtle, middle class prejudices which blighted my university days in the early 80s and which sits on a continuum of centuries of persecution, banishment and exodus wherever and whenever jews have tried to live in peace with other people.
Nor do you have the emotional capacity to understand why and where Israel came from (I don't mean the historical background which is self-evident). While I was at university on anti-apartheid marches in the early 80s, most of the campus population was on pro-Palestinian rallies wearing the trendy Arafat kafiyeh and subscribing to that peculiarly British notion that the underdog must somehow be the righteous party in any conflict.
(By the way, I recall that Arafat was an Egyptian not a Palestinian and that he chose the name Yasser as he felt himself to be an Arab victim of the British mandate in Palestine, lest we get overly hypocritical about Britain's history).
If you could understand the WHY of Israel, you would know that Israel does not care what the rest of the world thinks about it, ie whether you merely hate Israel a little in the fashionable way of the middle classes, hate it very much as most of the world does, or hate it with the full venom of President Ahmadinejad; these are all merely shades of hate. In essence, Israel being the embodiment of jewishness is ubiquitously despised, anti-Zionism and anti-semitism in my book being largely synonymous. As you know, Israel has only one true ally in the world, being the US , a largely jewish-led nation. Israel does not care or need to care about the rest of world opinion. Not should it; the rest of world opinion is and always has been hostile. If Ahmadinejad's dream of removing Israel from the map of the world came to fruition, very few people (including at the BBC) would mourn.
I think that the analogy you make in your latest diary on the current crisis between Britain and the IRA during the Troubles is weak; I would have thought that the Falklands War was a better exemplum of British attitudes to "defence" of the nation. And you'll be aware that this country has been fighting its own wars in the Middle East for some years now, although we have no obvious connection with either Iraq or Afghanistan . I recall also that Russia has had some not inconsiderable involvement in Chechnya and two Georgian breakaway regions, that China has had a hint of recent interference in Tibet , and that France 's conduct in Rwanda has not been entirely meritorious etc. You get the picture.
In other words, the recent pronouncements of the UN Security Council members to the latest Israel conflict is, shall we say, just a tad hypocritical. No change there: was it a couple of decades ago that the UN passed a resolution that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination? And now Israel is supposed to heed the words of an organisation which bemoans its very right to exist? I don't think so…
Of course it's not fashionable to be objective about Israel (sorry, I don't recall the BBC's report on the death of a friend of mine's twin girls aged 11 a few years ago in a bomb explosion on a bus in Israel ; perhaps there were no BBC reporters around at the time). Mr Bowen, Palestinians do not have the monopoly on suffering.
In summary, Israel does not care whether the BBC reports the facts or not. For the reasons mentioned above, Israel is not trying to court the favour of world opinion; this was a cause lost several centuries back. To put it bluntly, the fact that Israel exists as a highly successful nation state is two fingers up at you, at the BBC and at the rest of the world. Israel will be around whatever you write or say, diligently keeping its population ( Israel also has women and children, by the way), safe from Hamas bombardment.
Or to put it in the context of the defining historical event of the 20th century, Israel means: "Never again."
So you can write what you want.
Kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
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