BBC broadcast song glorifying ‘heroes’ who murdered Jews

Another part of the song, not played during the BBC broadcast, refers to the third killer Al-Zir: “Muhammad Jamjoum, Ataa Al-Zir and Fuad Hijazi, the power of ammunition / Look at the one going first, the distinguished person / They are executing us on verdicts of the oppressor.”

The BBC Arabic programme showcases Palestinian playwright Ghannam Ghannam performing his one-man show With My Own Eyes 1948 to around 100 people in the Al-Mahatta Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan in July 2024.

During the show, Ghannam sings the following lyrics from Ibrahim’s song, encouraging the audience to take part: “From Acre Prison went forth the funeral of Muhammad Jamjoum and Fuad Hijazi / Take revenge for them, my people, take revenge." He goes on to praise Jamjoum, Hijazi and Al-Zir as “martyrs”.

At the beginning of the programme, part of BBC Arabic’s Art of Life series, the BBC presenter introduces Ghannam as a Palestinian performance artist who draws on his own heritage to play “a hero, a narrator and also a listener”, according to translations by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera).

The playwright, the BBC says, highlights the “Palestinian cause” in his performances, using “poetry, story-telling, and political speech”.

In a longer video of the full performance on Ghannam’s own YouTube channel, he makes several other comments that were left out of the BBC broadcast. These included antisemitic remarks about "vulgar" Jews and statements about Palestine being "indivisible."

At one point in his performance, Ghannam relays to his audience experience of standing in the queue of a shawarma stand in Haifa, the northern Israeli port city: “It was possible for you to distinguish the Palestinian from the occupier in that queue with utmost simplicity,” he says, according to Camera.

“There was an outsider, alien to you, wearing a kippah and those tzitzit [things] going down from his shirt, laughing with his friend and his voice is loud and vulgar.”

Referencing the Israel-Hamas war, he says: “The natural condition between us and the Zionist enemy is this flare-up and this war ... Palestine is indivisible. Palestine is Palestine from the river to the sea and from the north to the south.

“Therefore, all of it is now occupied. And nobody should tell me anything [about] peace treaties, [Palestinian] Authorities etc., it is all occupied from the river to the sea, and we are facing a historical task to liberate it from the river to the sea so it would be Palestine the way we want it to be, our Palestine.”

The Arab riots of 1929 are a key moment in Israeli history, demonstrating that antisemitic violence in the region is not a reaction to the establishment of Israel in 1948, but existed long before; and that it targeted Jews who had deep family ties to the land, not immigrants from Europe.

Israeli scholar Hillel Cohen sheds light on the three killers in his book 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Al-Zir, from Hebron, was given two death sentences after breaking into the home of Rabbi Kastel wielding an axe and attacking the Kapiluto family home where he killed two, including a yeshiva student.

Jamjoum was sentenced to death after the “premeditated” murder of two fathers and sons in Hebron. Hijazi, the most educated of the three men, who had been appointed by the government to help Safad’s wounded, led an armed gang into the Afriyat home where a mother and father were killed.

Towards the end of the show, Ghannam invokes a metaphor: “You know that a question is a gun, and the answer is a bullet in the question gun. And my question is: Why did they defeat us? Why do they defeat us [still]? Why do we not defeat them? Load the answer bullet into the question gun and fire it in any direction you wish.”

The BBC broadcast only contains the final sentence of this extended metaphor.

A different performance of the same show by Ghannam was published by the Syrian Arab News Agency’s YouTube channel 10 months ago.

A spokesperson from Camera told the JC: “The last time Palestinians went out en masse to forcefully take what they perceived as ‘our land which was occupied in 1948’ was on October 7, 2023.

“Judging by this precedent, it seems that both Ghannam and the filming crew that was present in his show on behalf of the BBC knew full well that the ‘answer bullets’ he had encouraged his audience to fire could intentionally end up inside the bodies of unarmed civilians (‘occupiers’ in his vocabulary).

“His glorification of the three 1929 murderers – whose victims' families lived for centuries in the part of the Ottoman Empire that became Mandatory Palestine – reveals the true antisemitic nature of the violence he celebrated as a noble act of patriotism.

“For BBC Arabic to follow the steps of the official news agency of Assad's regime in Syria, couple this horror show with inspirational music and portray it as though it is merely a presentation of folklore and political heritage, reflects the BBC's broader failure to critically address an internal Palestinian discourse that is infested with bigotry.”

A spokesperson for the BBC said: “The BBC is clear it does not tolerate antisemitism. Camera has submitted a detailed complaint on this issue which we will consider on its merits and respond to formally in due course, but reporting on a play does not mean endorsing it.”