PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION TO THE BBC
On 26 February I complained to the BBC about a news item on BBC 24, repeated every hour, on the ‘success’ of Israel’s vaccination programme. It omitted the fact that over 4.5m Palestinians had not been vaccinated.
This is an addition to the 20% gap between the take up between Israel's Jewish and Palestinian citizens. As Aymen Odeh, leader of the Arab Joint List complained there was a “complete absence of a campaign to encourage vaccination among Arab citizens in the Arabic language’’ unlike that in the Jewish population.' (Forward 16.2.21)
At the end of February Israel announced that it will provide vaccinations for Palestinians who work in Israel or in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The obvious reason being to protect Jews not Palestinians.
Israel has also restricted access to the vaccine for foreign workers and asylum seekers.
In response the BBC on 27 February gave 4 examples of where BBC correspondents have ‘reflected calls from human rights groups for Israel to take responsibility for Palestinians’ or challenged Israeli government or Zionist spokespersons. The BBC went on to say that ‘We consider that we have reflected all sides of this news story across our output.’
Israel’s racist discrimination in its vaccine rollout is not ‘one side’ of an ‘ongoing story’. It is a fact which the BBC has omitted in the vast majority of its news output.
Section 4 of its Impartiality Guidelines states that the BBC is not required to maintain absolute neutrality ‘on every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles.’ The principle of non-discrimination between people on the grounds of ethnicity is a fundamental democratic principle.
Would it have been appropriate for the BBC to be neutral about Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews and the holocaust? Actually the BBC did indeed ignore the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, up to and including the holocaust. So in that sense it's being true to form.
We demand that the BBC adhere to Section 3 of its Editorial Guidelines-Accuracy which state that:
‘The BBC must not knowingly and materially mislead its audiences. We should not distort known facts, present invented material as fact or otherwise undermine our audiences’ trust in our content.’
We demand that EVERY TIME that there is coverage of the ‘success’ of Israel’s vaccine roll-out that it should also include the exclusion of the vast majority of Palestinians. Otherwise it will be misleading its audience and be in breach of its own guidelines.
For further information see Amira Hass’s Israel's Vaccine Apartheid Ha'aretz 1.3.21.
Tony Greenstein