The BBC has apologized for airing footage of an Israeli city located inside the pre-1967 lines in a report about Jewish “settlements” on the Golan Heights.
The erroneous characterization, which was exposed by the prominent Boston-based media watchdog group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis), comes as the British broadcaster is under scrutiny for using the son of a senior Hamas official as a narrator in a documentary on Gaza, in the latest flawed reporting from the BBC, infamous for its long history of anti-Israel bias.
The online BBC Arabic video from December about the strategic importance of the Golan Heights used aerial footage of the Israeli city of Tiberias, located on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.
A voiceover then described Israeli communities in the Golan Heights with subtitles appearing on the screen reading: “There are more than 30 Israeli settlements in the Golan.”
“By implying that Tiberias is a ‘settlement’ while regularly referring to nearby Arab communities, some far newer, as ‘villages’ or ‘towns,’ BBC Arabic fuels the antisemitic stereotype according to which Israel’s Jews can never be truly indigenous to the land,” a spokesperson for CAMERA told The Jewish Chronicle.
“More broadly speaking, given the BBC‘s longstanding and disproportionate focus on Jewish ‘settlements,’ one might expect BBC Arabic editors to at least know what they look like.”
The U.S. recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel during President Donald Trump’s first term in 2019.
The Tiberias brouhaha comes one week after the BBC admitted to “serious failings” in the production of the documentary on Gaza in the wake of international criticism that has reached the highest echelons of the British government.
An analysis released last year found that the BBC violated its own editorial guideline more than 1,500 times in a four-month period after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel by repeatedly downplaying Hamas terrorism and presenting Israel as the aggressor.
The BBC’s annual budget is about $7.5 billion, mostly coming from annual license fees paid by residents of the United Kingdom of £159 (more than $200) per household.
