Will the BBC learn anything from its latest Gaza disaster?

It is a common feature of abusive relationships that the abused partner – usually the woman – will believe the man, sometimes over and over again, when he says he won’t punch, rape, or emotionally torture her again. This is sometimes because the urge to believe that people can’t really be that terrible – that it’s all a misunderstanding, coincidence, a mistake – is incredibly strong. This is especially the case with someone you once loved, or admired.

But survivors of relationships like that eventually learn one thing: believe people when they show you who they are, whether bullies, liars, violent misogynistic thugs or antisemites. And that is why those of us who have for decades been aware of the bias against Israel – not a well-meaning or barely perceptible bias, but an embedded, existentially Arabist one – are not surprised now. We are sitting back with grim relief to see the British flagbearer of journalistic neutrality, the BBC, showing the world what it is with indisputable clarity.

The BBC aired a documentary entitled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which followed four children amid the rubble of Gaza. They featured it prominently on the News at Ten. But following an investigation by the splendid independent researcher David Collier it turns out that it was little more than an insider Hamas job. The film’s 14-year old narrator Abdullah Al-Yazouri’s father is Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Not quite a fair representation of the “young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire” then, nor one that is likely to offer “a vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone” for ordinary Gazans.

Not overly surprisingly, the BBC was defensive, saying it had done due diligence, before finally removing the documentary from BBC iPlayer on Friday. But as Kemi Badenoch observed: the initial “defensive reaction from BBC executives is profoundly troubling. It shows problems run deep. Surely it should have been immediately apparent that the programme was fundamentally flawed? The BBC also suggested that “usual compliance procedures” had been followed. But does filming inside Gaza not require something far beyond usual checks?

Quite so. But so far, so expected: a defensive corporation and an indignant pro-Israel Conservative. But at last there is something new: a genuine scandal that taxpayers’ money went into a Hamas-fronted piece of British broadcasting to the tune of £400,000. It finally seems as if the BBC has exhausted the value in its (and our) usual mealy-mouthed excuses for anti-Israel bias. We even have a Labour minister – Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary – demanding answers.

To those of us who have known this was in the BBC’s DNA all along, known the depth of the passion and compulsion infesting the whole corporation, this is a “told you so” moment. And yet, like Russian dolls, within this moment are so many other moments and sinister decisions that most people will never hear about.

Take the case of this documentary alone (as opposed to the reams of misreported and nefarious coverage from Israel’s campaigns over the years). Collier’s investigation also shows that another youngster in the documentary has a dad in the Gazan police force, whose job is to brutally enforce Hamas’s stranglehold. Another child featured is easily identifiable from pictures where he is posing with an automatic rifle, a Hamas headband and in the crook of the arm of a Hamas grown-up whose gun it is. The elder sister of the child chef in the documentary tweeted her praise for a Palestinian terror attack in January 2023 that killed seven Jews outside a synagogue. “Our job is not just to take revenge, our job is to take revenge well,” she wrote.

And so on. No wonder some are calling for a criminal investigation, given that taxpayers’ money was used by the BBC for material featuring and protecting proscribed terrorists.

The tragedy is that the BBC is actually still capable of good Middle-Eastern analysis when its passion for delegitimising the Jewish state doesn’t get in the way. Compare, for instance, the Hamas-addled kiddie sob fest with the sober, interesting and well-researched documentary it aired on Monday evening: Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7 October, which is a close study of the diplomatic ups and downs between the US and Israel since Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza.

If this latest BBC travesty has a silver lining, perhaps it’s that some people both within and without the corporation will experience a wake-up call, and will be able to find a way to make sure that in future deep dives, terrorists aren’t calling the shots.