Israel-friendly framing of news was commonplace at the BBC during the two decades I worked there, but one colleague stood out for his single-minded promotion of Zionist narratives. He has since risen to an influential editorial position and gained a rare degree of notoriety on social media. I worked with this person for eight years, from his recruitment to the News Online World team in 2001, until I moved on from being a senior broadcast journalist on the Middle East online desk in 2009, and he took my place.
He was a likeable, collegial figure, whose phone call to our editor one day explaining he'd be late for the shift, after taking responsibility for an urban fox whose head was wedged in a bucket, became the subject of a seminal comic anecdote for our small, sociable team. I recall him once describing plans to attend a pro-Israel rally in London at the height of the Second Intifada, with a "really big" Israeli flag he had obtained and was looking forward to waving. I was taken aback at this candid political affirmation in the newsroom, but no one else seemed to take exception.
In fact, his attachment to Israel was considered an asset, a safety net stopping anyone's too-overt sympathies towards Palestine or the Palestinians from undermining the impartiality of our output. If you needed an Israeli perspective on something, it was always a case of "Ask Raffi".
This was long before Raffi Berg's rise to viral internet fame in the wake of the December 2024 Drop Site News article by Owen Jones entitled "The BBC's Civil War Over Gaza", which billed him as the main contributor to a failure by the BBC to adhere to its fairness and impartiality guidelines in Israel-Palestine coverage.
Berg, whose job title is BBC Digital Middle East editor, has become a lightning rod for criticism of the Corporation's output. Even now, when an X (Twitter) user vents about a headline that seems to exonerate Israel or dehumanize its foes, you'll often see someone attributing the offence to Berg personally, or his influence generally. If someone posts a BBC article presenting Israeli actions in a more sinister light, expect to see a comment below asking "Is Raffi Berg on holiday?"
It's obvious how Jones's article, based on testimonies from 13 anonymous staff members, has channelled the frustrations of many people seething at the BBC's succession of linguistic contortions and unequal framing favouring Israel since 7 October 2023. (That month, on a WhatsApp group of ex- and current BBC journalists, I objected to an item headlined "In a Gaza refugee camp, a father outlives his wife and four children". I remember several colleagues – not Raffi, though he's there on the group - defending the phrase, one saying it was "more evocative" than laying out the "off-putting" details up front, though the verb "outlives" was quietly amended later in the day.)
In November 2025, lawyers representing Berg announced he was suing Owen Jones for defamation, claiming the Drop Site News piece triggered an "onslaught of hatred, intimidation and threats". Most public commentary seems free of hate-speech or threats, though regrettably not all of it, and I emphatically distance myself from any attacks on him which are antisemitic or conflate Jewish faith with transgressions of the Israeli state.
A preliminary UK High Court ruling on 12 March agreed the Jones allegations were defamatory, but also deemed them legitimate expressions of opinion based on his interviews with BBC staff rather than statements of fact. This was a setback for the claimant's lawyers, who must now attempt to prove the defendant acted in bad faith writing his article.
The court decision prompted a predictable fresh wave of social media sniping at the BBC's reputation. Meanwhile BBC managers have strongly defended their man. Back in September, the former director general rebuked a parliamentary committee member imputing Berg's partisanship. "It's not fair," Tim Davie told Labor's Rupa Huq. "We’ve got reporters with a certain background who are doing excellent work."
After sharing with the BBC Press Office my critique of Berg's journalism presented here, it responded: "We reject your attack on an individual member of staff. Everything broadcast or published by the BBC must adhere to our editorial guidelines." My readers will be able to judge the accuracy of that statement for themselves.
Goosebumps for Mossad
One reason for Raffi Berg being singled out as a social media meme is undoubtedly the beleaguered BBC editor's own public record of veneration for Israel.
A resurfaced 2020 YouTube interview has him expressing excitement about exploits by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad documented in his book "Red Sea Spies".
As a Jewish person, an admirer of the state of Israel, to know these people carry out these kinds of fantastic operations, it's really what makes you tremendously proud. Talking about it still gives me goosebumps.
The "goosebumps" quote is often taken out of context to imply Berg rejoicing in the agency's bloody history of assassinations and terror attacks against Israel's enemies. Critics even accuse him, without evidence, of belonging to Mossad. To be fair, he was specifically discussing an undercover operation described in his book to smuggle Ethiopian Jews out of Sudan in the 1980s. But nor did Raffi make any effort to be impartial in the interview, let alone to be seen to be impartial, as the BBC often claims is essential in fulfilling its editorial mission.
A statement later in the same podcast attracted less attention although it seems just as problematic, if not more so.
Absolutely, it's a story of positivity. The wonderful thing about it is, and this is another reason why I can really talk to audiences, non-Jewish audiences, it's not a political story. It's not about politics, so forget your preconceived ideas or notions about Israel, and so on and so forth. It's a humanitarian story… It's about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of the most tremendous adversity.
What chances do you think a Muslim journalist would have of keeping their BBC job after publicly enthusing about their self-appointed mission to write books specifically to influence non-Muslim audiences in favor of Palestine or Iran?
But we don't need clips on YouTube, or anonymous BBC insiders opining about Berg's alleged political interference, to question the suitability of his senior editorial role shaping output related to Israel and its actions in West Asia. The main body of evidence is hiding in plain sight, in dozens of articles on the BBC website carrying his byline.
Rereading the pieces after a 20-year hiatus reinforces an impression that my colleague wasn't just reporting about Israel though; it looks more like his mission to cover the country as a "humanitarian story… about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of the most tremendous adversity" started in the early 2000s.
Honest and Dishonest Reporting
The cream of the crop of Berg's Israel-focused feature articles appeared early in his BBC career. I recall voicing concerns about his reporting to our editors at the time, but to the best of my knowledge no action was taken in response. It was striking how differently our two oeuvres were treated in that respect.
Whenever something I had written appeared under a BBC "Israel and the Palestinians" banner, a reputation I had developed for being critical of Israel meant every line was closely scrutinized and anything deemed problematic was edited out. A couple of my pieces, from Gaza and Hebron, were spiked altogether. Even so, my work often provoked reams of complaints from an army of pro-Israel media monitors. (I was honored to receive successive "Dishonest Reporter of the Year" citations, in 2005 and 2006, from that absurdly named bastion of Zionism, Honest Reporting.)
Evidently, my colleague was never subjected to the same editorial microscope. As you will see, Raffi's writing paraded a succession of omissions, inaccuracies, distortions and solipsisms on the BBC's web pages. That he rose to a key editorial position adjudicating Israeli-Palestinian content despite this canon of work – or because of it, perhaps – tells you everything you need to know about the corporation's supposed impartiality.
Again, imagine if such bias was on display by a Muslim or Palestinian.
Berg's early work can be divided into four broad periods:
- From 2002, emerging as a sympathetic narrator of Israeli stories during the Second Intifada.
- From 2004, attention focusing on the predicament and human stories of Israeli settlers.
- The summer of 2006, deployed to cover the Israel-Hizbullah war.
- From 2007, returning to miscellaneous Israeli narratives, before dropping from view in 2009.
Although each period displays specific themes and characteristics, some unifying principles govern his writing that make it distinctly "Bergian" - most obviously, while Palestinians are mentioned in passing, his Israeli Jewish characters are fleshed-out individuals with recognizable feelings, backstories, dilemmas, hopes and fears. Here are three examples among dozens.
" When you arrive on a scene [of a bombing] you don't have time to start thinking. The worst is when you get home that night… " said Zelig.
"It's like a lottery," said Idit's uncle, Eliezer Katzenstein. "It frightens me to think about what happened with Idit."
"At that moment," said Inna, "my life turned 180 degrees".
Palestinians, with only rare – and as we'll see, quite specific – exceptions, lack the intimate human depth with which he endows his Israelis. They tend to be viewed through Israeli eyes, invariably as a collective threat or as hapless victims. Attempts to elucidate their psychological condition reveal negative emotions.
"We could see the Palestinians celebrating, night after night, for four nights, shooting wildly in the air and starting fires," said Moira Dror.
Palestinian children are often among the casualties caused by discarded explosives.
In an office on the fourth floor of a building in East Jerusalem, a group of Palestinian women wait impatiently.
By contrast, his Israeli protagonists' familiar ordinariness seems designed to better capture our empathy. It's there in the first line of his first BBC feature, "Israel's teenage recruits", which presents conscription into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a challenging, but necessary, duty that plucky teens embrace with stoical resolution.
Shai Ben Shalom has just turned 18. Like millions of his peers around the world, the teenager from Netanya is mapping out his future. But […] Shai's plans are on hold, interrupted by a call to arms.
Berg's "ordinary Israelis" trope finds perfect pitch when he talks about colonial settlers living on land captured by Israel in 1967. Inhabitants of Migron, an illegal Jewish-only settlement that is not recognized even by Israel, "enjoy the facilities of a small village, including a playground, creche, synagogue, library and a health center". In the settlement of Tene Omarim, this time authorized by Israel despite it being similarly illegal under international law, people live "happily in [a] growing, secular close-knit community". In Israeli-occupied Sinai, before the peace deal with Egypt, Jewish settlers "established farming and fishing communities and turned [Yamit] into a modern, thriving Mediterranean town". Israeli settlers are just like you, he seems to say, only somehow more… wholesome.
His BBC debut about conscription introduces a Bergian refrain that we see in numerous articles – that Israelis are reluctant to fight, but implacable enemies force them into the fray.
[W]hile young Israelis hope for peace, they know it will not happen soon… "[O]ur parents told us, 'when you grow up there will be no army and you will have to bear no weapons'," said Lior, "but it's a dream."
When a teenage interviewee fantasizes about joining an intelligence unit that "knows if terrorists are going to bomb the cities", we encounter another favorite topic for Berg, the unexplained hostility towards Israel among Palestinians and their proclivity for inflicting indiscriminate violence in civilian settings.
Israeli Mothers Fear for Their Children, Palestinian Ones Not So Much
Berg's first dozen articles establish the pattern of seeing nearly everything through a narrow Israeli lens. After the teenage recruits, he introduces us to Zelig Finer of the Orthodox Jewish volunteer body-part recovery unit Zaka that gained infamy for its members' atrocity fabrications after the 7 October 2023 attacks. Next come Jews who've recently immigrated to Israel "regardless of the problems".
After that we meet Idit Ben-Dor in a piece entitled "Israeli mothers fear for their children", about the nagging anxiety of bus travel amid a succession of Hamas attacks. A change of emphasis comes with "Foreign victims of Mid-East conflict", although – you guessed it – his "victims" are casualties of suicide bombings rather than anyone killed by the IDF. We also get the curious case of "Israel's first Eskimo soldier".
The 2002 bomb attack on the Hebrew University (HU) in Jerusalem (his alma mater, although that is not mentioned) receives Berg's full attention, with a reaction piece written from London on the day of the blast, quoting a British eyewitness:
Alastair Goldrein had just finished his Hebrew lesson for the day and decided to head to the Frank Sinatra cafe … when, he says, "the earth thundered".
A few sentences later comes a haunting depiction of one of the bombing's' nine fatalities – who also happens to be the first person of (presumably) Palestinian origin to appear under Berg's byline not wearing a suicide vest. The quote resonates with sympathy for the bombing victim, but with a hint of objectification – totemisation, even, as a casualty of violence by their own side.
"I carried a body out and looked at her face," said Alastair. "She was unmistakably an Arab girl. She had taken a hammering and it was terrible to look at."
A second feature appeared on the HU attack's first anniversary, sent from the field this time. (The material was gathered during a private trip by Berg to Israel, as was common practice for News Online staff back then.) The author includes this self-congratulatory quote from university president Menachem Magidor:
"Those who did it sent a message, that they are against one of the most pluralistic, open, peace-loving institutions which exist in the Middle East."
It's a bold claim from the leader of a university described in a recent study as "a strategic outpost for the Zionist movement to stake a symbolic and political claim to Jerusalem".
The first phase (2002-03) ends with a profile of leftist Israeli lawyer Leah Tsemel. Demonstrating Berg's BBC license to frame stories according to Israeli perspectives, her life's work campaigning for Palestinian human rights is distilled into the pointed headline "The Israeli who defends suicide bombers".
From 2004, as PM Ariel Sharon pushed ahead with his Disengagement Plan, Berg went into overdrive to explore the issue of Jews being displaced from the "Biblical" land they occupied - in one piece that occupation is characterised without challenge as a "return to their ancestral homeland". Eight articles take different angles related to the Sharon plan, beginning with the piece already mentioned, "Settlers' painful memories of withdrawal", which offers an empathetic account of a group of Israeli settlers who were evicted from Egypt in 1982 now facing the same fate after they moved to colonies Gaza.
In other pieces, he addresses: religious Jews "in spiritual turmoil" over Sharon's plan; settlers still homelessmonths after their eviction; settlers relocating from occupied Gaza to the occupied West Bank; Israelis once buffered by illegal settlements now living "on the frontline with Gaza"; and West Bank settlements that might be next for the chop.
If, amid this Israeli exclusivity, you wonder how our rules on due impartiality were observed … that's a bit of a puzzle. The BBC manual says being impartial requires "reflecting all relevant strands of public debate and challenging them with consistent rigor". Evidently, Berg was permitted to leave this trifling detail to others, as demonstrated by his single assignment to Gaza, where he focuses on training the Palestinian police "to assert control in an area of increasing lawlessness" after Israel's withdrawal. The territory's 1.5 million inhabitants must have been unavailable for interview that day as he only comes back with quotes from members of the EU Co-ordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (EUPOL COPPS).
Berg's only early example of a Palestinian protagonist, Walid Shoebat in a 2004 article, "Palestinian militant turned peacemaker", speaks volumes (see below). To my mind, the fact the BBC published unchallenged the falsifications of such an obvious Israeli stooge makes a mockery of its accuracy and impartiality rules.
For the July 2006 war and its aftermath, Berg was deployed to Israel, now a fully accredited BBC reporter. Pieces of note include "Testing time for Haifa's Arabs", an improved – though still one-sided and historically misleading – attempt to portray characters of Palestinian origin. The following day, in "Plight of animals at Haifa Zoo", one detects Berg applying more narrative flair to personify and individualize the zoo's captive quadrupeds than his mostly nameless, voiceless – dehumanized, in other words – Palestinian characters:
Buba the bear is not well. She has been locked inside for most of the past nine days… The conditions are taking their toll on Barbara, an elderly 32-year-old Bengal tiger… [T]hree African lions - Simba, Jungle and Gov - sit in their small indoor compound, watching with suspicion… [W]orst affected by the sirens and intermittent booms are the 17 baboons.
Thankfully, for reasons of space perhaps, we are not told the name of all seventeen baboons.
After Israel's failure – not addressed by Berg – to achieve its war aims of eradicating Hizbullah and releasing two IDF prisoners of war, we get "Israeli family mourns war victim". The piece takes unusual pains to put us in the shoes of Doron Farkas whose "peace-loving" son, Thom, was killed during an air assault on Lebanon. "[H]is Apache Longbow helicopter came down in as yet unclear circumstances," Berg writes, neglecting to mention it's an attack helicopter; a photo of what could be Thom and his mum standing by a much less aggressive-looking aircraft is included with the article. One third of the text describes, in heart-rending step-by-step detail, how Doron felt as the Farkas family learnt of Thom's death. Credit where credit's due: it's a masterful lesson in how to generate sympathy for one's subject in a news feature.
Berg's pieces continue highlighting Israeli narratives through 2007. Headlines include: "Why did Israel attack USS Liberty", which rubbishes as "conspiracy theories" the growing consensus that Israeli's combined air and marine assault during the 1967 war, which killed 34 American crew members, was deliberate; he also avoids mentioning the main finding of a 2003 independent inquiry by retired senior US officers that Israel committed "acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the US"; "Israeli village brings hope for 'lost' youth" obliquely commemorates the "controversial" British Mandate-era figure Orde Wingate; "'How I picked up a suicide bomber'" is a model of the whole Berg genre; and "Israel's fight against sex trafficking" buries the lede that a UN report has described the country as "one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women".
Another Palestinian-focused piece appears with "Hope flowers for West Bank school", although a flowering of hope appears nowhere in the piece. The school has laid off half its staff and is about to be cut off by Israel's apartheid wall. Berg's callous headline serves as a laconic commentary on the once-optimistic vision encapsulated in the institution's bilingual name, Zuhūr al-Amal/Hope Flowers.
The following year, 2008, search results fetch only three contributions: "Israel's dilemma over sick Gazans", which one could almost mistake for an Israeli government press release (see below); "Joy and sorrow as Israel marks 60th", three-quarters of which is taken up with Israeli joy and the remainder with its Palestinian corollary (in a valiant attempt at balance); and "Living in Jerusalem's Old City", which seems to airbrush Israel's illegal occupation since 1967 while drawing false equivalence between the occupied population and colonial settlers.
At this point Berg's articles diminish in frequency, and he stopped reporting from Israel. It's not clear to me why – I wasn't around to witness it. He took my place as full-time Middle East online writer in 2009 when I moved to a different unit. In 2013, he was named Middle East online editor when that position fell vacant, where he's remained ever since.
Palestinian Suffering Versus Reality
It is possible to delve deeper into the author's apparent attitudes and reflexes with a closer look at his reporting prose. We've already run into the group of Palestinian women who "wait impatiently" in Lea Tsemel's office at the start of "The Israeli who defends suicide bombers". Rather than expend curiosity about potential reasons for their irascibility (Could they be failed suicide bombers?), Berg muses about a series of pictures on the wall. One of them shows shackled Palestinian prisoners "watched over by menacing-looking Israeli guards". Is this our author showing a sign of empathy for Israel's victims? If so, it doesn't last long.
As I sit there wondering about the images, I am brought back to reality with a jolt. "Come," commands a woman with a gravelly voice.
It's tempting to infer the ugly side of Israel's occupation wasn't "reality" for Berg.
Another blind spot suggests itself in "Israel's religious crisis over Gaza plan". He reports an IDF deserter opposed to disengagement has just "shot dead four Israeli Arabs on a bus". He then discusses warnings from rabbis that "insubordination could lead to violence" (my emphasis). He's just referred to the cold-blooded murder of four people in the previous sentence, but any violence is yet to come? I don't suggest Berg is unable to conceive of an Israeli killing Arabs as "violence", but it's extraordinary that neither he nor his subeditor cringed over this inadvertent juxtaposition.
His next feature, reporting from a vigil to mark 10 years since PM Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, also displays authorial ambivalence about Israeli violence. I scoured the 600-word piece to assess how it contextualized the murder, by a far-right Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords and egged on by right-wingers like Benjamin Netanyahu. To my surprise, the killer's motives and identity apparently weren't considered important enough to merit explanation. The closest Berg gets is quoting a despondent vigil-goer:
"That night," she said, "they murdered Rabin and they murdered peace."
Who "they" might be is not revealed.
You immediately notice a change in emphasis when Berg recounts acts of violence perpetrated by a Palestinian rather than an Israeli assailant, for example the Zaka article, when his interviewee describes the aftermath of a bombing in a West Jerusalem pizzeria. "There were kids with blood on them lying on the side of the road with their mothers, teenagers with friends, lying there on the floor just crying for help". Berg then takes up the story. "Moments earlier a Palestinian with explosives strapped to his waist had entered the packed restaurant and blown himself up." No ambiguity this time.
Nor do you find any in "Israeli mothers fear for their children", which starts with a dramatic near-miss scenario that Berg deploys in several articles.
Idit Ben-Dor takes the bus to school every day, but on Tuesday she missed her ride. Now she is thanking God that she did, for the 32A from Gilo, packed with schoolchildren, never reached its final destination. Minutes after passing through Idit's neighbourhood, the bus and many of its young passengers were blown to pieces by a Palestinian suicide bomber.
Although this isn't atrocity propaganda on a 40 beheaded babies level, the emphasis on young victims works hard to ramp up the horror of the attack. But if Berg's narrative beats ("packed with schoolchildren", "many… young passengers blown to pieces") have style, they lack substance. The bombing killed nineteen passengers, of whom two were minors aged 11 and 15.
Another discrepancy is visible in Berg's epistemological approach to the reliability of his characters' personal stories. Israelis have only to utter a claim, especially about violent Palestinian actions, to be immediately deemed credible, however contradictory or overblown it might appear.
Earlier this year, their anxiety turned to desperation when Palestinian gunmen fired 40 rounds at the family car. No-one was hurt, but the event so traumatized Sally that she is receiving psychiatric help and sometimes believes her son, Ron, was killed.
Meanwhile Palestinian contentions, however obviously true, are treated with skepticism. In "Israel's dilemma over sick Gazans", the caveated testimony of a maimed child even comes with its own ready-made justification to exculpate the IDF.
Crying out in pain, Ahmed lies in a hospital bed in Barzilai Medical Centre, his blood-encrusted lower limbs heavily bandaged. Two weeks earlier, the 17-year-old became another victim of the violence between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants when he lost his left leg, he says, in an Israeli missile strike against militants in Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
Did you spot the precision-guided hasbara? In Berg's telling, this "sick Gazan" wasn't the "victim" of an Israeli air strike, but "of the violence between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants". Not only that: we are expected to believe Ahmed acknowledged his injuries resulted not from the illegal and indiscriminate bombing of a densely populated civilian area, but "he says, in an Israeli missile strike against militants". Through deftly worded reported speech, Berg has the child owning up to being collateral damage himself!
Overemphasizing Israeli suffering, downplaying its Palestinian equivalent, obfuscating Israel's agency, and circumspection about the testimony of Palestinians, all have a familiar ring in 2026. That's because they're part and parcel of complaints about mainstream coverage of Israel's genocidal wars.
Twenty years ago, Raffi Berg exemplified a narrative perspective which characterizes everything wrong with media portrayals of West Asia today - recent examples being the BBC framing the start of the IDF's ethnic cleansing of South Lebanon as "Israel says 'limited' ground operations under way…", or Sky News posting on X "Two Israeli soldiers killed as attacks in Lebanon leave nearly 400 dead".
Religious Differences: 'Even Nuns Hated The Jews'
It will surprise no one that Jews and Judaism get very positive treatment throughout Berg's work. Neither Muslims and Islam nor Christians and Christianity get such a fair hearing.
On the politico-religious front, he seldom misses an opportunity to assert in his own words, or via his interviewees, the Jewish people's historical and religious connections to, and rightful ownership of, the land they occupy. Jewish displacement under Sharon's 2005 Disengagement Plan is treated accordingly.
Take this passage about a hard-line religious settler who – after twenty-one years of "home-building" in Gaza (not occupation, mind you) – has relocated to another colony in the West Bank.
As the setting sun cast an orange glow over the Hebron Hills, Mrs Yitzhaki gazed out across the vineyards beneath her patio, a chill wind in the air. "It's colder here, of course," she said, "and the view is very different, but it's all the Land of Israel."
If that unchallenged proclamation transmitted in a BBC News article does not ring alarm bells, how about this?
The Yitzhakis have kept the keys to their house and left with the promise to their children that one day they would go back.
Three possible scenarios account for the author allowing his interviewees to seemingly expropriate so blatantly the powerful symbolism of the door key for generations of Palestinians living as refugees or internally displaced people. Berg and the Yitzhakis may not be aware of it; perhaps they're aware of it but don't care; or they're deliberately trolling the reader. My guess is the first, or maybe the second, and I hope it's not the third, but none of them align with BBC editorial standards.
You may wonder if there is any reference in Berg's work to the primordial connection between Palestinians and their usurped homeland. The closest his reader gets to glimpsing it comes in "Israel's settlement quandary", which includes an exchange in East Jerusalem (under Israeli occupation since 1967, although he neglects that detail) between two Jewish immigrants from the US. One says settlement activity should increase because "we've got a God-given right to settle any part of the land". The other disagrees, not about the land being "God-given", but that Israel should be more flexible.
"Giving up settlements will show good faith," she says. "Palestinians are attached to this land just as much as Jews."
While adherents of the Jewish faith tend to be portrayed as peaceable heirs to God's covenant with Abraham, followers of other monotheistic faiths get quite a different billing. In Berg's first mention of Muslims, Rowan Harb, a Christian Palestinian student who talked to the author a year on from the HU campus bombing, helps him shine a light on some classic Islamic behavior (as well as providing one of his signature near-miss scenarios).
Rowan is no stranger to violence - one brother was murdered by two Muslim friends for dating a Muslim girl, while another narrowly escaped a Palestinian bomb at a Tel Aviv nightclub in 2001.
Indeed, violence and hostility seem to be Berg's principal reference points in describing what it means to be a Muslim. In "Palestinian militant turned peacemaker", Berg relays Walid Shoebat's claims that his "own brother threatened to kill him for abandoning Islam" and that his uncle called the "biblical matriarch Rachel … a 'Jewish whore'" before throwing Walid out of the house for defending her.
You won't find any balancing view of Islam as a religion that advocates peace and mercy in Berg's writing. The only other time Muslims are specifically mentioned is in the Orde Wingate-honoring "Israeli village brings hope to 'lost' youth", where an Israeli NGO director tells him: "We embrace Muslim kids here, wherever they come from". There is an exception to the magnanimity, however. "I cannot come up with any positive statement in terms of the 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees," the director divulges to his interviewer. Berg does not indicate if he gave any response.
Christianity does not fare better than Islam. This vignette is from the Shoebat profile:
In the middle of a riot, Walid was part of a group which snatched an Israeli soldier who was trying to quell the violence. They beat him senseless and tried to lynch him, before he was rescued by troops and the group fled. "We ran to a monastery where the nuns protected us - even they hated the Jews!"
Inverted Reality
The world Berg presents in his early BBC features is a rich source of misinformation and/or disinformation. If you spend time following the links here, you'll find these and other examples that we don't have time to explore more fully:
- Leah Tsemel was born in the "Israeli" city of Haifa in 1945, three years before Israel came into being.
- Arabs and Jews "coexisted in Haifa for over 100 years in peace and war", ignoring the Palestinians' mass expulsion by Zionist forces in April 1948.
- Shilo settlement is described as "the ancient capital of Israel and for centuries the Biblical home of the holy Ark of the Covenant", turning scripture into journalistic fact.
- He asserts the IDF "was originally sent into Gaza" to protect Jewish communities.
- He ignores Israeli missile strikes on Jabaliya Camp in October-November 2005 to be able to claim "after a period of calm, Palestinian militants unleashed another barrage of Qassams" on Israeli inhabitants of the Gaza envelope.
- A political scientist is quoted saying that relocation of 500,000 Jewish settlers would be highly problematic because "[t]here are very few precedents in history where 8% of a population has been moved". Don't mention the Nakba!
While preparing this article, I contacted Raffi to see if he wished to comment on these specific formulations, or any of my analysis of his published work, but I didn't receive a reply.
Throughout my re-engagement with Berg's BBC features, I found no clearer illustration of his approach to accurate, impartial Israel-Palestine journalism than the afore-mentioned profile of Walid Shoebat. The "militant-turned-peacemaker" was subsequently exposed as a fraud by the likes of CNN and the Jerusalem Post, although his discredited claims still grace the pages of the BBC without comment. One smells one's first rat during Shoebat's dubious account of the 1967 war.
"On the sixth day… the news said: 'We cleansed Jerusalem of the Jews'. Then we opened the door and there was this Israeli tank with the Star of David flag standing in our street!"
The protagonist quickly outs himself as a vehicle for Israeli demonization of Palestinians.
"From kindergarten we were taught that Jews were dogs," said Walid. "We were taught that Jews were the converts of monkeys."
Some of Shoebat's claims might seem far-fetched in the mouth of the most dedicated hasbarist.
"My whole dream was to die as a shaheed [martyr]. At demonstrations I would open my shirt hoping to be shot - but the Israelis would never shoot at the body, so I never succeeded."
After (claims of) being rescued by antisemitic nuns and a spell in Israeli prison, Shoebat goes on his redemptive journey as described by the title.
"I started thinking, really the Jews didn't do us any harm but we hated them and accused them of all this horrible stuff. I began to think more openly"
The final section of the article begins: "Walid's convictions led him to renounce violence and convert to Christianity". We already have enough information to infer that abandoning Islam and renouncing violence amount to roughly the same thing in this journalist's mind. However, the piece builds up to an even more remarkable transformation.
We're told Shoebat, filled with "remorse at the folly of his youth", has resolved "to speak out against militancy as a way of solving the Palestinian problem". It's not exactly peace-making on a par with Arafat's "gun and olive branch" speech at the United Nations or Sadat's historic flight to Jerusalem. In fact, the interviewee confidently assures Berg he'd be lynched if he set foot in his hometown of Beit Sahour. But then comes the Dostoevskian money-shot in which our author finally gets to endow this lone Palestinian with the emotional intensity of his many Israeli Jewish characters (not to mention the inmates of Haifa Educational Zoo and Botanical Gardens).
Walid wants to meet the Israel[i] soldier he tried to kill almost 30 years ago. His voice cracking with emotion, Walid said he would offer the soldier his hand and say to him: "'Please understand, we were just children, brainwashed to kill you, to hate you.' I would seek his forgiveness."
At last! A Palestinian with deep human feelings. If only all the "brainwashed children" of Palestine would take the same journey, one can imagine the future BBC Middle East online editor thinking, then the "peace-loving" Israelis could finally fulfil their wishes in their "God-given" land.