In defending Israel I’ve come to realise that preconceived ideas and gut feelings override all reasonable argument. That is to say however well argued, very few are willing to engage, or even listen to any case you may make.

Even those who see themselves as profoundly logical abandon all reason when it comes to this particular topic. The so-called open-minded can’t literally be so, unless they’ve suffered catastrophic memory loss.
It’s a big ask. Why would anyone cast aside a lifetime of negative input the media has subjected them to, and suddenly agree to re-evaluate, reconsider or unlearn material that they’ve digested and misunderstood? It is firmly embedded, and it’s staying that way, thanks all the same.
Defenders of Israel face a fiercely stubborn resistance, impenetrably and formidably fortified and reinforced on a daily basis by the BBC.

Abandoning reason is not the BBC’s exclusive prerogative. We can all do it. Fruitlessly citing individual examples of unfairness, and still, despite past performance, hoping for a breakthrough in some kind of imaginary BBC future, has to involve blind faith. Where is the logic in believing that One Day someone important at the BBC might have that crucial, eureka-damascene-moment?
Silly me. It’s all water off a duck’s back to the Beeb, but here’s one anyway.
Yolande Knell has noticed that an Israeli hacker has retaliated. She noticed, in the best BBC tradition, the retaliation only. The provocation, no.

Here’s another one, and I’m using today’s examples but I could just as easily have picked any other random BBC day.

Israel is banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. How awful! Newsworthy because it fits a pattern perhaps. Less newsworthy because it does not, is the way the rest of the Arab World treats Palestinians. And the rest of the Arab World, unlike Israel, hasn’t even been threatened with holy Jihad with the intended goal of annihilation. They can be racist, discriminatory and evil to their hearts’ content, and no-one at the BBC bats an eyelid. But the BBC and their sibling, the Guardian, with hostility in their hearts send forth reporters just to put despised Israel under a microscope. The mission is to seek out whatever might conceivably add to their systematic vilification, egging each other on like a couple of gossips revelling in the character assassination of another.

I wrote the above yesterday, but despondency prevented me from posting then. That, and the fact the article did stick more or less to the facts and didn’t contain the BBC’s usual ‘Palestinians-as-victims’ emoting.
However, last night the BBC world Service spurred me into action by broadcasting a self-piying interview with a married couple who had been inconvenienced by this ruling. No, they were not actually inconvenienced yet, but they might be in the future.

Racist, apartheid, discriminatory, nationalistic and any other evil insinuations can be made by the media about ‘Jewish Israelis’ or ‘Israeli Jews’ for ever and a day, but never can the same be made about the people in the places where such things are a reality. We rarely hear from the BBC the openly-stated Palestinian boast that any future Palestinian state will be “Jew-free”.

The BBC will not engage with this simply because it doesn’t choose to. Sixty years of insidious, slippery, stealthy demonisation can’t be undone overnight, and rational argument will have no impact unless the BBC changes its mind.

Our friend Yolande Knell addresses the Bedouin question. I think it is fair to say that she sees it solely from the Bedouin perspective. So much so that her article comes across as another bit of pure Israel-bashing.
The fundamental issue concerns the human rights of a people who wish to hang on to their traditional way of life, when it clearly conflicts with the interests of certain other people who wish to abide by the law-and-order to which they’ve become accustomed.
In an ideal world, live and let live is a fine principle. But the reality is less than ideal. Compromises must eventually be reached and accepted all round.

Yolande Knell’s piece suggests Israel has pushed the noble Bedouin community from pillar to post, deliberately depriving them of their traditional way of life, forcibly relocating them to a static enclosure situated beside a rubbish dump. There are complex facts surrounding the legality of Bedouin rights to land, but Knell dismisses these in a cursory way and skews them till they seem discriminatory and racist:

“They mostly live in areas that Israel declared as state land or on private land leased from Palestinians. Some have deeds showing they bought territory when Jordan was in control of the area between 1948 and 1967.
Many of the nomadic communities settled there after leaving their ancestral land in the Negev desert. The Bedouin that remained became Israeli citizens but still have a tense relationship with the state.”

“When Jordan was in control” she says. Or would it be more accurate to say: “when Jordan invaded and occupied it in 1948 and annexed it in 1950”

Knell uses emotive language, sub-headings and pictures throughout.
It’s ‘Dalé jâ vu Farm’ all over again; and as with gypsy and traveller sites that perplex our own communities, these disputes are highly political.
I don’t claim particular expertise on this problem, but from what I’ve read it seems that many people feel that the Bedouin have indeed been treated harshly by successive Israeli governments. Equally their uncooperative behaviour has made things more difficult for everybody including themselves. The anomalies in their demands parallel our own Gypsies’ and travellers’ contradictory demands for the right to proper housing while insisting that they need to travel. Many people ask why should the nomadic gypsy lifestyle be romanticised to such an extent that it trumps the rights of the rest of society? Similarly, the question of enforcing the law in respect of illegal building. Consider the outcry if a traveller’s illegally erected shack is demolished, and its occupants evicted, in other words if it’s treated in exactly the same way as if it had it been constructed by a member of the settled community without proper planning permission, a scenario in which enforcement of the law goes without saying.

There are generally two sides to such tales of woe, and to understand the situation you’d need to know much more than you could learn from Yolande Knell’s one-sided polemic. Actually I suspect that anyone reading it wouldn’t realise that there is an alternative perspective.
One aspect she ignores is:

“The Israeli government has made numerous attempts over the years to solve the disputes with the 40% of the Negev Bedouin population which does not currently live in one of the seven purpose-built towns. Additional new towns are planned, with offers of free land, a waiver on infrastructure development costs and financial relocation packages for those moving there from illegally constructed encampments. No other sector of Israeli society is eligible for these benefits.”

So agree with it or not, if balance of any sort is to be achieved the BBC should be telling us that the Israeli government is at least trying hard to solve this difficult conundrum in as much detail as they tell us about the woes of the Bedouin. I don’t see what is to be gained from incessantly pushing a pro Palestinian agenda by publishing endless Israel-bashing articles and emotive images.