BBC re-writes history on Israel peace talks, avoids mentioning previous Palestinian rejection of agreements

Robin Shepherd
robinsheperdonline.com
12 October '10

I know that this is not supposed to be amusing, but sometimes the sheer brazenness of the BBC’s rewriting of history to accommodate the Palestinians is laugh out loud hilarious. To wit: as I was browsing the BBC MidEast section on its website today — 10 out of 14 entries are on Israel, so you get a sense of the level of obsession we are dealing with — I came across a helpful little item explaining to readers the history of peace talks between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Arab world.

Authoritatively entitled History of Mid-East Peace talks, it’s a real gem. First off, it begins in 1967. Now that’s useful, because if you had to go back to 1947 you’d have to acknowledge that the Jewish/Israeli side accepted a UN partition plan, rejected in favour of violence by the Palestinian/Arab side, which would have inaugurated a two-state solution right from the start. But the BBC obviously doesn’t want to torpedo the Palestinian agenda from the get-go. So, as I say, history begins with the dreaded “occupation” 20 years later.

Now, not even the BBC can ignore the attempts by Bill Clinton to broker a peace in 2000 and 2001. During that process, as Clinton, his chief MidEast envoy Dennis Ross and a host of others have recorded the Israeli premier at the time , Ehud Barak, offered the Palestinians another two-state solution, dividing Jerusalem and giving the Palestinians a state on almost all of the pre-1967 West Bank. That too was flatly rejected by Yasser Arafat. But that’s not quite how the BBC chooses to characterise matters.

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