British national broadcaster apologizes after it used footage of an Israeli city in pre-1967 Israel during a segment on what it called “illegal Israeli settlements” in the Golan Heights.
By World Israel News Staff
Britain’s national broadcaster is again under fire for errors in its news coverage of Israel, which some supporters of the Jewish state have claimed are part of a broader pattern of anti-Israel bias and even antisemitism.
In December 2024, BBC Arabic published a video piece on the Golan Heights, following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the Israeli military’s deployment of forces into the demilitarized zone on the Syrian side of the Golan.
The DMZ, established following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was formed from territory held by Israel since 1967, captured by Syria at the outset of the 1973 war, and then recaptured by IDF forces.
While Israel retained control over most of the strategic highground, roughly 30% of the Golan was placed under Syrian civil control, most of which was designated as a demilitarized zone, secured by United Nations peacekeepers.
Following the return of Israeli forces to the DMZ in December 2024, BBC Arabic released a video segment on Israel’s presence in the Golan since 1967, including coverage of Israeli towns in the area.
According to the video,t “The settlements are considered illegal according to international law.”
While the United States recognizes Israeli sovereignty over most of the Golan, the European Union, United Nations, Russia, China, and Canada do not.
However, the media watchdog group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) later found that the BBC segment had used footage of an Israeli city, Tiberias, located inside the country’s pre-1967 boundaries, during its coverage of Israeli “settlements” in the Golan.
“There are more than 30 Israeli settlements in the Golan,” the segment’s voiceover and subtitles said as footage of Tiberias was shown.
Tiberias has had a “continuous Jewish presence since the 1700s at least,” a CAMERA spokesperson told the London-based Jewish Chronicle.
The spokesperson argued that the error “fuels” antisemitic tropes regarding Jews.
“By implying that it 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.
“More broadly speaking, given the BBC‘s long standing and disproportionate focus on Jewish ‘settlements’, one might expect BBC Arabic editors to at least know what they look like.”
The segment also used footage of Syrian villages in the Golan as examples of “Israeli settlements.”
The BBC later reached out to CAMERA to issue an apology, while denying that the errors constituted “racism.”
“We apologise for the errors but also do not accept the interpretation of these errors as ‘racism’,” the BBC told CAMERA, according to a report by the Jewish Chronicle on Friday.
The apology comes on the heels of a larger scandal regarding a BBC documentary on the Israel-Arab conflict.
At the end of February, the London police department’s counter-terror force launched a preliminary probe into the production of a BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, after it was revealed that the film’s narrator is the son of a Hamas minister in Gaza.
The payments to the narrator’s family raised questions regarding the possible misuse of public funds to support a designated terrorist organization.