Israel can ban all the films it wants. The Palestinian voice cannot be silenced
In the whole row over the BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, not one word was written about what this film told us about the way Palestinians are surviving a war that has spanned a year and a half.
None of the following voices appear to have been heard in the controversy over screening this film.
A woman fleeing with an empty water bottle, after another Israeli evacuation order, shouted to no one in particular: “God damn you all. May God curse you [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar.”
A boy told the camera in a deadpan tone: “We saw people dead in front of us. One had his guts coming out of his stomach. Are we in a safe place?”
Zakaria, an 11-year-old hustler scratching a living out of cleaning ambulances at al-Aqsa Hospital, explained how he worked alongside members of the media, doctors and paramedics: “I love being a volunteer. I want to volunteer for an ambulance unit.”
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A paramedic, who wore headphones as a way of shutting out the hell around him, reflected: “I need to wash this shirt. Children are so pure and innocent. Seeing them injured is one of the hardest things to witness. Headphones are the most important thing. They help me escape the war, the hospital’s gloom, the bombings, the dead, the injured.”
Mohammed Tahir, an orthopaedic and peripheral nerve surgeon from London, held up an arm he had just amputated from a 10-year-old boy. “Look what the Israelis are doing to the children of Gaza,” he said. “This is what it comes to. There is no power or strength except by Allah.”
But this, naturally, is the whole purpose of cancelling a documentary as damaging to Israel as this one.
It is to cancel not just the documentary, but any means by which Palestinians can express the extraordinary brutality they are enduring at the hands of a nation whose raison d’etre is victimhood - victims of centuries of European antisemitism, of the Holocaust, of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.
The BBC folds
The furore has focused like a laser on Abdullah al-Yazuri, the 13-year-old narrator who has committed, in the eyes of Israel’s propaganda industry, three capital offences: first and foremost, he is alive. More than 14,500 children are not.
His second offence is to speak English fluently and thus be credible to a western audience. This is a monopoly held by supporters of Israel, and it is keenly guarded.
Abdullah’s third offence is to be objective and non-political. He is the one who delivers statements from the Israeli army after each civilian massacre its soldiers commit.
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The only line of editorial Abdullah delivers is hard for anyone outside of Gaza to disagree with: “Have you ever wondered what you’d do if your world was destroyed?”
Salvation, and the end of the nightmare of having credible Palestinian voices from Gaza on prime BBC television, came in the information that Abdullah’s father was deputy agriculture minister in the government run by Hamas.
The BBC folded like a pack of cards.
When this conflict is finally over and Palestinians have the state they so richly deserve, this period will be looked back on as Israel's, and the western liberal media's, darkest hour
The boy’s father, Ayman al-Yazuri, is a technocrat. He was widely labelled as a “Hamas chief”, “Hamas official” and “terror chief” by commentators and news organisations in Britain.
But as Middle East Eye revealed last month, Yazuri has a scientific rather than political background. He previously worked for the UAE’s education ministry - which is no lover or employer of anyone linked to the Muslim Brotherhood - and he got his PhD at a British university.
If any government is formed in Gaza after this war, it will be run by technocrats like Yazuri.
To the Israeli military, anyone who works in Gaza - whether technocrat, professor, medic, journalist or aid distributor - is a target. Its soldiers have killed these professionals deliberately. A vast amount of evidence exists to this effect.
But to the international community, which includes Britain, technocrats like Yazuri are the only solution to the postwar governance of Gaza. And neither the BBC nor Channel 4, if they are true to their public service charters, are supposed to base their editorial judgements on the propaganda and false news emanating from Israeli military intelligence.
Absurd claim
Neither broadcaster subscribes to the view that all Palestinians in Gaza are guilty and should be exterminated, which is now a mainstream view in Israel. Both services should be capable of distinguishing between a government worker and a member of Hamas, or indeed a member of its armed wing, al-Qassam Brigades, proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries.
Channel 4 also interviewed Abdullah.
“Channel 4 News’ experienced foreign reporting team became aware his father held a technocratic role within the Hamas government in Summer 2024 and they took a decision not to feature him again,” the broadcaster noted in a statement this month.
“Once Channel 4 News’ senior leadership team recently became aware, action was taken to provide additional context to the archived online copy of the reports in which Abdullah features.”
This, too, treats Abdullah and his father like a bad smell. But neither has done anything wrong.
Nor is there any evidence that Hamas coloured or influenced the BBC documentary, whose script was written in London. If Hamas had had anything to do with it, the following would certainly not have appeared: “They have killed our children, killed our women, while [Sinwar] is hiding under the ground.”
We do not know the father’s views about Hamas, but let us assume he supports their aims. Does this automatically disqualify his son from appearing in a documentary meant to represent the Palestinian narrative, particularly as the Israeli one is so fully and repeatedly expressed every day?
It is a well-known fact in Palestinian society that children do not blindly follow the political beliefs of their parents. It is common to find sons in Fatah and fathers in Hamas.
The brother of Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub, Nayef Rajoub, is prominent in Hamas. The son of prominent Hamas leader Hassan Yousef, Mosab Yousef, is celebrated by the Israelis for having turned on the movement, and is quoted freely.
To claim that a son is compromised by the work of his father is absurd.
Different standards
Both the BBC and Channel 4 have a public service duty to be impartial in all their editorial output. This means applying the same editorial standards to Israelis and Palestinians.
But they patently do not.
On the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attack, the BBC ran a documentary on the testimonies of the survivors of the Nova music festival. We Will Dance Again was heart-wrenching to watch.
But no one would have dared to impugn the credibility of the witness they bore by referring to what their families and fathers did. None of the male witnesses who were of military age were questioned about what they did as soldiers.
Instead, this was said: “Around 3,500 partygoers went to the Universo Paralello - Nova Music Festival. 364 were murdered, and 44 others taken hostage.”
The word “murdered” is wholly justified as a description of what happened on 7 October to unarmed civilians attending a rock festival, but the documentary on Gaza says only that more than 46,800 Palestinians in Gaza had “died”.
Patently different standards were being applied, not least the fact that Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone survived only four days on air before it was pulled.
Let us be clear about what is taking place here.
Israel’s prosecution of a war that regularly, openly and brazenly involves war crimes - like the current withholding of aid, electricity and water to Gaza to pressure Hamas into releasing all the hostages - would be impossible without the silence of the mainstream media.
It buys this silence by courting and grooming over decades significant numbers of editorial staff, in the expectation that one or two will end up in key positions of editorial control. It does the same to all rising political stars in every major political party.
And it intimidates them whenever the Palestinian voice breaks out of its collective gag.
On the rare occasion when that happens, the Palestinian voice is as eloquent, measured and righteous as any other oppressed people throughout history.
'We have no other land'
I have reported from Masafer Yatta, the collection of hamlets in the South Hebron Hills in the occupied West Bank, which the Israeli army declared a firing range, like many others, when the story of the continual eviction of Palestinians failed to get global attention.
In Masafer Yatta, villagers are being pushed into caves as their homes are being bulldozed.
It took a documentary like No Other Land, produced by a team that included Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, to get that attention for this village. Their film won an award at the Berlin film festival and latterly an Oscar.
This testament to the quiet, peaceful determination of around 1,000 Palestinians (half of whom are children) in eight villages to stay on their land took years to come to light. Filming began in 2019.
Women confront soldiers. Schoolchildren are in class when a bulldozer attacks the side of their shack, forcing them to jump through windows to escape.
A Palestinian woman asks a soldier whether he is ashamed to be demolishing her home. He replies: “That’s the law. Why should I be ashamed?”
Another villager is asked why she doesn’t leave. “We have no other land,” she replies.
The film was recorded before the Hamas attack of October 2023. All the violence shown in it is done by the Israeli state. Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills have nothing but words and their moral right to be on their land to confront the ceaseless expansion of the Israeli state in the occupied West Bank.
Propaganda failing
What Israel is doing is against all international law.
And yet, when this film won one of the major awards at the Berlinale, it caused a major political storm in Germany.
Germany’s minister of state for culture, Claudia Roth, justified her clapping for the filmmaking duo who accepted the award by saying she was clapping only for the Israeli, not for the Palestinian. Her racist admission spiralled into a PR catastrophe.
Abraham ended his acceptance speech with a call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and for a “political solution to end the occupation” - nothing more.
Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner described the speeches at the Berlinale closing ceremony as an “intolerable relativisation”, writing on X: “The full responsibility for the deep suffering in Israel and the Gaza strip lies with Hamas.”
A delegate for the Christian Democratic Union called on Roth to resign, while a Free Democratic Party politician suggested that the film festival should no longer receive state funding.
The festival’s outgoing Italian curator, Carlo Chatrian, criticised the German political establishment for “weaponising” antisemitic rhetoric for political gains. This year’s Berlinale has faced a widespread call for boycott for both its silence over Gaza and its handling of the backlash against No Other Land.
The good news is that Israel’s propaganda is not working. Public opinion in all the western nations whose media and festivals practise this censorship is turning rapidly against Israel and towards the Palestinians.
Where were you, and what did you do when Gaza and the occupied West Bank were being pounded into dust, a future generation will ask its parents
The trend is sharpest in the US, where 59 percent of Democrats sympathise with the Palestinian people - a 16-point jump in the last year - while only 21 percent sympathise with Israel, a drop of 14 points. In the US as a whole, the percentage of Americans who sympathise with Palestinians is up six points from last year to 33 percent, whereas support for Israel is at its lowest in 24 years. Only 46 percent of Americans polled said their sympathies lay with Israel.
This shift in public support is unprecedented in all the decades of this conflict. It’s no wonder that Israel and its army of supporters are panicking; they are on the wrong side of history.
When this conflict is finally over and Palestinians have the state they so richly deserve, this period will be looked back on as Israel’s, and the western liberal media’s, darkest hour.
Where were you, and what did you do when Gaza and the occupied West Bank were being pounded into dust, a future generation will ask its parents. The answer will be interesting to hear.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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