Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone detailed Israel’s level of destruction (Photo: flickr/UN Women)
The BBC screened a powerful documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, last Monday. It told the story of the genocide in Gaza through the eyes of four children.
The documentary sparked a major row with right-wing papers and Zionists seizing their chance to discredit it. “BBC forced to APOLOGISE after being dubbed ‘propaganda tool for Hamas’ in furious row over Gaza documentary”, crowed The Sun.
Labour politicians like Wes Streeting are demanding that the BBC finds scapegoats to blame for the documentary’s “serious flaws”.
The BBC pulled the documentary from its iPlayer and issued a grovelling apology. This row has nothing to do with journalism—but it has everything to do with silencing Palestinians.
Israel and its supporters want to dehumanise all Palestinians as terrorists to justify their genocide.
The campaign against the documentary was orchestrated by the Israeli ambassador to Britain, the viciously anti-Palestinian Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and a journalist, David Collier.
They jumped on the fact that the documentary featured the son of a Hamas official. Film makers Jamie Roberts and Yousef Hammash had to co-direct from London because international journalists cannot enter Gaza.
Collier called the documentary “raw Hamas garbage”. But it is not just Hamas that bothers Collier—its any Palestinian.
Collier claims that Hammash “is a Palestinian activist with a camera. How on earth did the BBC give this man the reins to produce a documentary?”
The narrator of the film is 14-year-old Abdullah. Collier revealed that Abdullah’s father was Dr. Ayman Al-Yazouri. Al-Yazouri, Collier says, holds a senior government position in Gaza.
Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, told the Daily Mail, “The BBC appears to have given an hour of prime-time coverage to the son of a senior member of the Hamas terrorist group.”
Between 1995 and 2003, Al-Yazouri taught chemistry in Dubai. He also studied at British universities, being awarded a PhD at the University of Huddersfield in 2010.
Between 2003 and 2011, he was a specialist in the United Arab Emirates’ ministry of education.
In 2011 he became an assistant deputy minister in Gaza’s ministry of education. His current role as Deputy Minister of Agriculture involves supervising “agricultural activities” in Gaza.
There is no evidence that Abdullah, a child, is a Hamas member. Abdullah said he wanted to be part of the documentary “to explain the suffering that people here in Gaza witness with the language that the world understands, English”.
Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Britain, but it is the elected government in Gaza. Many people in Gaza have connections to Hamas, and anyone working in an official capacity must work with it.
Prominent film-maker and journalist Richard Sanders explained that “Hamas are a core element of Palestinian life”.“They won the last elections and were the government in Gaza,” he added. “To exclude anyone in any way connected to them is to silence Palestinians—which, of course, is the aim.”
Sanders said the row was a “huge test” for the BBC. “If it fails to stand firm with the film-makers it will send an appalling signal.” The BBC has now sent that signal.
Collier wants us to believe that, “The child of Hamas royalty was given an hour on a BBC channel to walk around looking for sympathy and demonising Israel.”
The campaign against the documentary is part of Israel’s attempt to demonise all Palestinians as blood-thirsty terrorists.
But IDF soldiers who parade in Palestinian women’s underwear and shoot children for fun are treated as engaged in a legitimate war.
The Zionists and their apologists hate the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine.
We must demand the reinstatement of the documentary.
