Forget a 10-month genocide in Gaza. Only when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians living under its military occupation are we supposed to start worrying about the “consequences”, writes Jonathan Cook.
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights last Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell — and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).
- READ MORE: After Golan Heights attack, will the Israel-Hezbollah conflict escalate?
- Other Israeli war on Gaza and Middle East reports
It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbours might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defence.
The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.
Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation that targets and murders children playing soccer.”
Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.
Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.
Panic as Israeli strike hits near Gaza school playground on 11 July 2024. Video: The Guardian
Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football 0- especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.
So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organisation than Hizbullah?
Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.
Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.
(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)
The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months — that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”
So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.
A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.
Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.
Update – ‘Tightening the noose’:
Facebook instantly removed a post linking to this article — and for reasons that are entirely opaque to me (apart from the fact that it is critical of the BBC and Israel).
Facebook’s warning, threatening that my account may face “more account restrictions”, suggests that I was misleading followers by taking them to a “landing page that impersonates another website”. That is patent nonsense. The link took them to this Substack page.
As I have been warning for some time, social media platforms have been tightening the noose around the necks of independent journalists like me, making our work all but impossible to find. It is only a matter of time before we are disappeared completely.
Substack has been a lifeline, because it connects readers to my work directly — either through email or via Substack’s app — bypassing, at least for the moment, the grip of the social-media billionaires.
If you wish to keep reading my articles, and haven’t already, please sign up to my Substack page.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This article was first published on Substack and is republished with the permission of the author.
