On Israel, the BBC seems incapable of getting the simplest thing right

Yahoo

20-04-2025

The BBC has a tried and tested playbook when it comes to managing a crisis. Prioritise reputation over transparency, announce a review that reduces the heat and hope that the storm eventually blows over.
It is now two months since the broadcast of the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was quickly revealed to feature the son of a Hamas minister whose family received payment for his participation.
This journalistic debacle highlighted many failures in the corporation's due diligence and accuracy when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war. Not least among these was the spotlight thrown on the BBC's decade-long policy of mistranslating the word Yahud as Israelis rather than Jews.
The word Yahud is consistently translated from Arabic into English in dictionary sources as Jew, but when it came to its reporting of the Middle East the BBC decided it knew better.
On five occasions in the documentary, the BBC altered the meaning of Yahud, masking the racist nature of its use. In one instance, the translation of an interviewee who praised Hamas's genocidal leader Yahya Sinwar for 'jihad against the Jews' was altered to fighting 'Israeli forces'.
In doing so, the BBC whitewashed the racist meaning of statements by Palestinians, as if British people should not be allowed to make up their own minds about racist intent.
Anti-Semitism was 'triaged' by the broadcaster to make it more palatable and Palestinian interviewees more sympathetic, with attention deflected towards Israel. This really matters because to understand the Israel-Hamas war, the genocidal ambitions of Hamas and its supporters must be confronted head-on.
When Hamas terrorists attacked families on October 7 their intention was not to kill Israelis. It was to kill Jews whether they were men, women, grandmothers or tiny babies. By failing to transparently translate the word Jews when used by Palestinians, the BBC has been withholding crucial information on a conflict driven by the well-documented racism of Hamas and its supporters in Gaza.
While an investigation looks into the many editorial failings in the documentary, the BBC pledged to address the translation question separately. It is not clear why two months later there has been no decision on such a clear-cut issue.
There is no doubt that the Arabic dictionary definition of Yahud is Jew. Speak to experts and they will tell you the same. A veteran Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh explains: 'When I speak to Palestinians and they say 'Yahud' I will write it in English as 'Jew'. This is the accurate translation. If the BBC or any other media organisation are subtitling it as 'Israeli' they are misleading viewers.'
This mistranslation has deep roots at the BBC, where the rightful concerns of the Jewish community have been ignored for many years.
The issue goes back to 2013 when a concerned licence-fee payer complained to the BBC about the mistranslation of Yahud but was met by a wall of corporate intransigence. On this occasion as on many others, the BBC's complaints' system operated primarily to defend the broadcaster rather than transparently deal with the issue at hand. In making this ruling, the BBC institutionalised a decade-long journalistic policy, which meant that the racist meaning of statements by Palestinians could be hidden from public view.
This mistranslation is symptomatic of much wider problems in the BBC's reporting of Israel. Not for the first time did the BBC ignore racism because its target was Jewish people. Not for the first time did the BBC defend a serious failing in its Middle East coverage because it was more concerned about its reputation than factual accuracy. Not for the first time did members of the Jewish community approach the BBC with reasoned arguments but find themselves ignored by the institution.
It is not surprising that so many British Jews have deep concerns about the BBC's reporting on Israel when crucial issues of accuracy like this have been left uncorrected by the corporation for over a decade.
For too long, the BBC has not taken issues of anti-Semitism as seriously as other forms of racism. The time for fundamental change is now, and there is no better place to start than on the Yahud question. Only a clear-cut translation as Jew can be accurate.The question for the BBC's director general Tim Davie is simple: who knows better when it comes to translation – the BBC or the dictionary?
Danny Cohen was the director of BBC Television between 2013-2015
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