Bombs fall, armies move

Unlike with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the British media were slow to recognise Israel’s invasion of Lebanon on 1 October as an invasion. The BBC’s headline yesterday morning was: ‘Israel says troops enter Lebanon for “limited, targeted” ground raids on Hizbullah.’ ITV News led with something very similar. Hugo Bachega, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent in Beirut, described it as a ‘ground incursion’ (not that different from the IDF spokesperson’s description of the invasion as a ‘raid’). Only later in the day did both news organisations change their language to acknowledge that this was indeed an invasion.

The right-wing press were more prepared to describe it as such than the liberal media. Tuesday morning’s headlines in the Times, Telegraph and Mail all used the word ‘invasion’ while the Guardian’s overnight lead referred to ‘ground attacks on Hizbullah’. Twelve hours after the invasion started, the Financial Times was still using a headline of ‘Israeli troops move into Lebanon’ as if this were an inconsequential tactical manoeuvre and the soldiers were merely stretching their legs.

When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’

As with a lot of reporting on Gaza, broadcasters are reluctant to name Israel directly and immediately as the source of violence, as if the ‘strikes’ and ‘blasts’ materialised from the night sky. The Centre for Media Monitoring argued in a comprehensive report earlier this year that news coverage of Palestinian deaths tends to use ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel) and the action (shot, bombed, killed)’, in contrast to the far more ‘emotive’ language used when covering the deaths of Israelis.

Yet despite this asymmetry of media coverage, it’s never enough for some supporters of Israel, who seem to think that any pro-Palestinian voice on the airwaves is evidence of underlying antisemitism across the media. The Jewish Chronicle, looking to regain credibility after it published made-up stories about Israeli intelligence, went on the attack. Stephen Pollard, its former editor who once described the JC as ‘Israel’s candid friend’, fumed that the BBC’s Today programme gave airtime to an ‘Iranian government apologist, Prof Seyed Mohammad Marandi of Tehran University, to broadcast a series of grotesque antisemitic slurs’.

Obviously having an Iranian government apologist on Today meant less time for Israeli government apologists to appear on the programme, such as Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, or the spokesperson David Mencer, who claimed – against all evidence – that ‘we don’t want to harm ordinary Gazans’ and that the IDF was taking ‘all possible steps’ to avoid harming civilians.

Pollard and others are particularly offended by any suggestion that genocide might be taking place in Gaza (despite the findings of the International Court of Justice) or that Lebanon has the same right to self-defence that we are constantly being told Israel has. As the Centre for Media Monitoring pointed out in relation to Gaza, there is a huge disproportion between the number of pieces in the British media insisting that Israel has the right to defend itself compared to those arguing that the same rights should be extended to Palestinians – and now to Lebanon.