A new BBC documentary series that began Monday night and examines recent peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians shows that the BBC still has some way to go to satisfy the many critics of its Middle East coverage. But following a complaint from an Anglo-Jewish activist to the BBC's overseer of Mideast coverage, the BBC did at least reword a trailer for the series, replacing language that placed all blame on Israel for the failure of peace efforts.
* Readers' talkbacks appear at the end of the article
The three-part series, “Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs,” has already elicited a flood of protest letters, mostly e-mails, from activists in the British Jewish community against alleged anti-Israel bias.
The series is produced by Norma Percy, who won an award for her 1998 documentary “The Fifty Years War” on the same subject. It attempts to chart the negotiators' progress from former US president Bill Clinton's first efforts up to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in August using interviews with several of the key players.
The first episode opens with then-premier Ehud Barak's attempts to negotiate peace with Syria during a visit to Washington and Clinton's subsequent trip to Geneva for abortive talks with the late Syrian president Hafez Assad.
The scene then switches to Camp David where Barak and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lock horns and fail to agree on the next stages of peace negotiations, before examining Clinton's last-ditch efforts to seal a deal on his visit to Jerusalem prior to giving up his presidency.
One viewer, activist Joy Wolfe, lodged a formal complaint to the BBC over pro-Palestinian bias even before the program was broadcast.
“How are we supposed to give any credence to the BBC's constant claim it is not biased when even in a trailer for an important series on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that bias and injection of opinion is there for all to see?” she wrote in an e-mail to senior BBC executives including Malcolm Balen, the BBC executive who serves as a kind of ombudsman for coverage of this region.
The trailer in question heralded, “The story of how Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak persuaded President Clinton to devote his last 18 months in office to helping make peace with Yasser Arafat. But Barak got cold feet twice. Then Ariel Sharon took a walk around Jerusalem's holiest mosques, and peacemaking was over.”
“Firstly, there is absolutely no evidence to back the view that 'Barak got cold feet twice,'” wrote Wolfe. “He and Arafat shook hands on the most generous peace settlement terms the Palestinians could have ever hoped for.
“It was not Barak who got cold feet, but Arafat, who walked away to unleash more violence as his answer.”
A senior BBC source derided the complaint, telling The Jerusalem Post that such is the situation with constant and often inaccurate complaints that many inevitably are given perfunctory replies and little or no notice is taken of them. The Jewish community does itself no favours with these interventions, the source added, and as for writing in before a program has even been shown, that takes quite some hutzpa.
Balen plainly took a different view, however, writing back to Wolfe to say that the trailer “was not written by a journalist and does not reflect the programme... It will be changed.”
And, indeed, it was, to state: “The story of how Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak persuaded President Clinton to devote his last 18 months in office to helping make peace with Yasser Arafat. But after tense negotiations the deal was never made.”
While the BBC board of governors has just appointed an independent panel to examine whether the publicly-funded corporation's Middle East coverage is for accuracy, fairness, context, balance and bias, “actual or perceived,” the series appears to underline inherent problems in its approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, some critics charge.
Robert Malley, a former special assistant to Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs who has been frequently quoted as blaming the talks' failure on Barak rather than Arafat, is one of the documentary's main sources of information – a telling choice by the Brook Lapping production company which made the documentary.
Key Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, who was intimately involved in all the stages of the Clinton administration's dialogues with both parties, and who, like Clinton himself, has publicly rejected the notion that Barak bears primary blame for the failure, was not interviewed.
It has been reported that Barak feels he has not been accurately or fairly portrayed in the documentary over a number of aspects, including the suggestion that it was he who rejected the Camp David formula.
In his memoirs, published last year, Clinton flatly blamed Arafat for making a “colossal mistake” in refusing peace terms at Camp David. The talks ended, the former president wrote, when “again, Arafat said no... It was hard to know why he had moved so little... An Israeli government had said that to get peace, there would be a Palestinian state in roughly 97 percent of the West Bank ... and all of Gaza... Perhaps he [Arafat] simply couldn't make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman.”
The BBC said the series deals with seven years of crisis as “presidents and prime ministers, their generals and ministers tell what happened behind closed doors as peace talks failed and the intifada exploded.”
When featuring Sharon's ill-fated trip to the Temple Mount in late September 2000, which the documentary suggests triggered the Palestinian uprising, scant mention is made of the rock-throwing onto Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall that immediately followed his visit. Viewers instead get the perception that it was Israeli measures against Palestinians on subsequent days that acted as the trigger for the intifada.
The second installment is said to depict how Sharon reacted to the Netanya Passover suicide bombing by launching Operation Defensive Shield which included the “bombing of Arafat's compound to rubble.”
