BBC Bowen’s Insidious ‘Analysis’ of Israel’s Media Battlefield

The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen barely conceals his disdain for Israel these days.

This is his latest “analysis“:

Let’s break this down.

Israel’s borders with Gaza are shut. Period.

Foreign journalists were previously able to enter the Gaza Strip through the Erez Crossing, which has been closed since October 7 for obvious reasons. There is no “business as usual” for passage between Israel and Gaza for anyone, including journalists.

The international media do, however, have the ability to attempt to enter Gaza through the Rafah Crossing on the Egyptian side.

But Bowen believes that Israel is preventing foreign media from entering because “there are things they don’t want us to see and that they want to master the media battlefield.”

It is arguably not to Israel’s benefit that foreign journalists are absent from Gaza. Because Palestinian stringers and agenda-driven Arab outlets such as Al Jazeera are currently the only ones supplying all of the coverage from inside the Strip.

HonestReporting has, on numerous occasions, documented how some Palestinian media workers in the employ of foreign media are, at best, clearly invested in promoting the Palestinian narrative, and at worst, expressing antisemitic views and support for Hitler.

Despite a steady flow of damaging footage from Gaza showing injured women and children while suspiciously never showing Hamas terrorists, Bowen still believes Israel is “controlling the media.”

Such conspiratorial thinking is dangerously close to a classic antisemitic trope.

But is Israel also controlling its domestic media in the cause of ensuring its people don’t see any Palestinian suffering?

Israel’s government may wish it had some semblance of control over the country’s newspapers and TV stations, but the reality is that Israeli media is fiercely independent.

The Israeli media also unsurprisingly caters to its domestic audience. And like any country at war, the nation, including its media, rallies behind the flag.

Jeremy Bowen might point out that UK and US media were highly critical of wars conducted by their own countries such as in Iraq. But Israel’s war against Hamas isn’t being conducted in a faraway land. It’s on the home-front, and it’s mostly Israeli civilians, not foreigners, who have been murdered, raped, and kidnapped on October 7 in their own homes and on Israeli soil.

Israel is a country still traumatized by those events, and for Bowen to expect Israeli media to be broadcasting the same sympathetic content on Gaza as his own BBC or other foreign media is both unrealistic and meant to portray Israelis as somehow immune to the suffering of ordinary Palestinians.

How dare Bowen make such a judgment. Israelis are still processing and trying to come to terms with October 7 and the resulting impact on the country.

Israeli TV news is now broadcasting footage of the funerals of Israeli soldiers, many of whom were reservists who left their families and day jobs to defend their country. Many may have lost their lives because the IDF has used ground troops rather than airstrikes precisely to avoid causing Palestinian civilian casualties.

But when the war ends, most Israeli media outlets will swiftly change tack, harshly criticizing the Israeli government as they did before October 7 and perhaps even more so. And that criticism will extend to how the war was conducted, including the military tactics and whether Palestinian (as well as Israeli) casualties could have been avoided. Israeli media outlets aren’t subservient to the Israeli government or considerations of patriotism.

The time for criticism and self-reflection will come in the Israeli media. But not right now, while Israeli soldiers are risking their lives, Hamas still holds hostages, and Israeli civilians are still under attack.

Jeremy Bowen is correct: there is a media battlefield. Israel has every right to fight on that battlefield especially when foreign journalists like himself weaponize their news reports to assault the Jewish state.

The author is the Editorial Director of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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