by JONATHAN COOK
The series serves Israel’s interest in reviving the genocide in Gaza and spreading Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing operations to the West Bank.
There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.
The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.
He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him.
Exclusive: “If anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible.”
Abdullah al-Yazuri, the 13-year-old narrator of Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, speaks to MEE after the BBC pulled the documentary.
“I worked for nine months, and it was all wiped.” pic.twitter.com/JbbcHc19Ys
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) March 5, 2025
His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas — as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.
The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza — this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine — that has received none of the controversy.
And for good reason.
Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode aired Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from The Guardian.
It “speaks to everyone that matters,” the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.
What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present Western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.
Which is no mean feat, given the subject matter: nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.
But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative — one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.
‘Honest Broker’ Fiction
The Road to 7th October presents an all-too-familiar story.
The Palestinians are divided geographically and ideologically — how or why is never properly grappled with — between the incompetent, corrupt leadership of Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, and the militant, terrorist leadership of Hamas in Gaza.
Israel tries various peace initiatives under leaders Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. These failures propel the more hardline Benjamin Netanyahu to power.
The United States is the star of the show, of course. Its officials tell a story of Washington desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved.
Yes, you read that right. This documentary really does resurrect the Washington as “honest broker” fiction — a myth that was supposed to have been laid to rest a quarter of a century ago, after the Oslo Accords collapsed.
Consortium News for more