By Jonathan Cook: BBC coverage of the attack on a soccer game in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).
It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbors might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, preemptive form of self-defense.
The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.