Why is no one listening to Palestinians?
“The Palestinian cause has exposed the illusions and duplicities of our democracy.” So says columnist Yasmin Alhibai-Brown in the piece we reproduce below from The i Paper, reflecting on the BBC’s film about children’s lives in Gaza.
Her comment is borne out by establishment outrage against the BBC over its handling of the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone which it has withdrawn from iPlayer. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is demanding “proper explanations about what went wrong in this case, why due diligence wasn’t done on the people that were featured in the film, people who worked on the film, and also on the use of language.”
We have to ask, where is the inquiry into systematic sidelining of people who have been victims of genocidal attacks for 16 months? Why is no one listening to the British Palestinian Committee, which has told the BBC that its decision to remove “one small representation of the plight of Palestinians from its platform… contributes to an atmosphere of silencing, discrimination, and additional trauma for Palestinians in Britain.”
Why is there no acknowledgement of serious concerns from people like former BBC newsreader Karishma Patel, who wrote in the Independent: “The controversy over the pulling of the ‘How to Survive a Warzone’ documentary is a distraction from a much bigger problem my old employer has with impartiality.”
Why no hearing for Jews who oppose the censorship that is often exercised in their name?
How long will our politicians and pundits ignore the agony of Palestinians like author Ahmed Masoud, reduced to publicly ripping up a copy of his own work in an act of protest? It’s time to take note of, and act upon, his words: “We’ve been speaking forever, but no one listens”.
NWI
Published
by
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
The Oscars ceremony on Sunday was the usual stuff: glitz, lovey hugs and kisses, fake smiles, gossip, ups and downs. It was also highly unusual. The low-budget film Anora, about a sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch, won Best Picture; its young star Mikey Madison won Best Actress in a Leading Role. And No Other Land, about settler violence and the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank – co-directed by Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli – won the Oscar for Best Documentary.
What’s more, their speeches were openly political. Basel Adra called for “serious action to stop the injustice and stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people”. Yuval Abraham averred (“the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people must end”), accused the Trump administration of “helping to block this path”, called out Hamas for keeping a number of Israeli hostages, and ended with this evocation: “Why can’t you see that we are intertwined, that my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe?”
As Trump’s America becomes more authoritarian, too many prominent people are simply adjusting to that new reality. But these two unbowed, uncowed men spoke up, knowing they would discomfit many in the glam Oscars crowd.
Unlike Americans, we are not living under an elected autocracy. But let’s not fall into comfortable complacency. The Palestinian cause has exposed the illusions and duplicities of our democracy.
Last Thursday, an open letter was sent to the BBC’s chair and top executives. It was signed by 500 figures from the media and arts sectors, including Gary Lineker, BBC presenter Anita Rani, actors Juliet Stevenson and Riz Ahmed, musician Nitin Sawhney, journalist and academic Gary Younge, and others. I was a signatory.
Our letter expressed concern about the removal from the BBC’s iPlayer of the film Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone – which gives voice to Palestinian children – after objections were raised by some prominent British Jews, chief among them Danny Cohen, previously director of television at the BBC.
They revealed that the main narrator, 14-year-old Abdullah, was the son of a Hamas agricultural minister and asked why there had been no diligent supervision of the independent company that made the programme. Fair point. The BBC should apologise in a written statement on screen.
But this effective banning of Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, is surely wrong.
In a letter to The Guardian, Peter Grimsdale, a former commissioning editor at the BBC and Channel 4, agrees the programme should be put back on iPlayer with “appropriate changes, so we can all see it and judge it for ourselves”.
The BBC has issued an apology and admitted “serious flaws” in the making of the documentary. This will not lead to closure. It never does.
In 2020, the Board of Deputies of British Jews raised hell over an “unjustifiably offensive” News at Ten report about the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The accused was the BBC’s deeply serious international correspondent Orla Guerin. Standing in the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, she sombrely uttered these words: “In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”
These are truths, but forbidden truths.
On 31 March, Seven Jewish Children: A Film for Gaza, based on a controversial play by Caryl Churchill, now 86, will be shown at the Prince Charles Theatre in London’s Leicester Square. Churchill’s European Drama Prize lifetime achievement award was withdrawn in 2022. She remained steadfast.
Funds raised will go to Medical Aid for Palestine. See you there.
Yasmin Alhibai-Brown is a member of the small but constantly growing group of supremely humane public writers who can write about Palestine-Israel without the painful contortions which characterise the pronouncements from the army of Israel apologists in the BBC and mainstream media
Orla Guerin was moved from covering Israel in 1996 a few days after Mark Thompson– director general of BBC returned from his visit to Tel Aviv to reassure Ariel Sharon that the BBC backed Israel. BBC live in fear of a call from the Board of Deputies who claim to speak for all Jews in UK but in fact only speak for those attached to synagogues
Alibhai-Brown is a gem, thanks for republishing her article and please do this again as most of her writing is now behind a paywall. I seem to remember someone in a past Comments section describing her as an ‘Uncle Tom’ and supporting the Islamophobia Award given to her! Shortsighted to say the least…
This is welcome, but Alibhai-Brown is late to the party. I recall her buying into the antisemitism smears against Corbyn and the Left. Don’t recall an apology though.
Just want to add, to Alasdair, that BoD doesn’t even represent synagogue congregations. It ‘represents’ those who bother to vote from one particular group of synagogues. And even there, many people affiliate to those United synagogues for help with funerals and specific occasions, regarding the BoD as an irrelevant joke. No longer a joke unfortunately, and rapidly being outflanked on the right by the hair-raising CAA ( ‘campaign against antisemitism’) which now has government endorsement and funding. Let’s not forget the TOTALLY self-selected JLC ‘Jewish leadership council’, although they are easy to overlook because they conform to the antisemitic stereotype of working behind the scenes with important people.