The BBC’s anti-Palestinian bias: a trauma case study

JVL Introduction

We have often published about what is wrong with the BBC’s coverage of Palestine before as well as after October 7th 2023.  This writer digs deeply into many examples on how the term “trauma” is frequently applied by the BBC to Israelis and rarely to Palestinians.  So we hear again and again that Israelis were traumatised by the events of that day and, of course, are assumed to carry intergenerational trauma from the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  And yet, nearly 80 years of ongoing Nakba, displacement, restriction, incarceration, torture, demolitions and then bombardment is rarely named, let alone the associated intergenerational trauma considered.

It is not as though the high levels of mental illness for Palestinians is unknown; not as though the Gaza Trauma Centre has not existed for decades and not as if journalists are unable to empathise, to imagine how they would feel, for example, being unable to protect their children from experiencing things no-one should have to. And yet, time after time, these journalists – and it is not only the BBC – fail to use their skills to write in a way that includes the experience of Palestinians.  Are they, like most Israelis and those who support the State of Israel unequivocally, also unable to consider Palestinians as full human beings?  That is certainly a slippery slope.

LL/RK

This article was originally published by Al Akhbar on Fri 13 Jun 2025. Read the original here.