Prejudice on prejudice

During last week’s Israeli commemorations of the Holocaust, BBC international correspondent Orla Guerin dared to mention Palestine at the conclusion of an interview with Rena Quint, a survivor of the World War II Nazi mass extermination of Europe’s Jews. While visiting the Israeli memorial to Jewish victims, Guerin said, “In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”

British Jewish leaders, including ex-BBC executives, quickly castigated Guerin and called her comment “anti-Semitic,” anti-Jewish. Former BBC chairman Michael Grade and former director of television Danny Cohen have called her remark “unjustifiably offensive” as it appeared to connect the Holocaust with Israel’s brutal policies toward Palestinians.

Cohen was particularly incensed. He said her “attempt to link the horrors of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply offensive and upsetting. It was unnecessary, insensitive and particularly ugly in the days before Holocaust Memorial Day. Adding insult to injury, the report uses pictures of Holocaust victims in Yad Veshem during the sequence in which this link is made. This is inexplicably and unjustifiably offensive.”

A BBC spokesman retorted, “The brief reference in our Holocaust report to Israel’s position today did not imply any comparison between the two and nor would we want one to be drawn from our coverage.”

Grade condemned the BBC for failing to apologise and for assigning an unidentified spokesman the task of putting forward its position on this issue. Guerin’s “impartiality” on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was questioned by Amanda Bowman, vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

This was not the first time Guerin crossed swords with British pro-Israel figures. In 2004, she was accused by the Israeli government as being anti-Semitic because she conducted an interview with a Palestinian teenager who wanted to be a suicide bomber.

Guerin’s determination to report honestly has also earned her Cairo’s condemnation. Her 2018 report, “Shadow over Egypt,” on the harsh Egyptian campaign against dissent riled the authorities as she focused on men and women who were “disappeared” or imprisoned. Some of those interviewed or whose families she contacted claimed they had no connections with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the initial focus of the crack-down.

This was expanded to sweep up liberal and leftist activists. Alaa Abdel Fattah, who played a key role in the 2011 uprising, has been jailed repeatedly for a number offensives, including for planning protests against trials of civilians in military courts. As he is the nephew of highly-regarded Egyptian novelist and activist Ahdaf Soueif, his incarceration has been adopted by international human rights organisations.

Pro-government Egyptian lawyer Samir Sabri responded to the programme by filing a lawsuit against Guerin and demanding her deportation. Egypt’s Information Service warned Egyptians to boycott BBC media interviews and meetings. The BBC stood by the “integrity of (its) reporting teams.”

Guerin, born in Dublin in 1966, qualified as a journalist and took a master’s degree in film studies. She worked for hometown newspapers, joined Irish radio in 1987. She began her career as a foreign correspondent by reporting from Eastern Europe, reporting from Bosnia during the war. Ineluctably she became a war correspondent, although she later observed that she did not set out to be shot at.

She was hired by the BBC in 1995 and, based in Rome, returned to her familiar beats in Europe. In January 2001 she became the BBC’s correspondent in Jerusalem and in early April 2002 the BBC lodged an official complaint with the Israeli government after its soldiers fired at her television team, compelling it to take cover while covering a peaceful Palestinian demonstration in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. (This was a common occurrence at the time as Israel was in the process of re-occupying the West Bank). Guerin is married to Reuters correspondent Michael Georgy, a dual US-Egyptian citizen.

She was dispatched to South Africa in 2004 and returned to the region in 2011 to report on the conflict in Libya. I met her in 2013 after she settled in Cairo to cover the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution as well as Israel’s brutal 2014 assault on Gaza. Honest reporting about death and destruction during that onslaught did not endear her to the Israelis.

Orla Guerin was not the only honourable colleague present at the Holocaust memorial events in Israel. Canadian Barbara Plett Usher, now the BBC’s regional correspondent, has been back in Jerusalem for some months. She was posted in Jerusalem in 2000 where she eventually married Graham Usher, contributor to Middle East International and The Economist’s Palestine correspondent. In 2005, the couple moved to Pakistan and in 2009 to New York, where she reported on the United Nations. Graham Usher died at 54 in 2013 from a rare brain disease.

In 2004, Plett Usher watched dying Palestinian President Yasser Arafat climbing, “with faltering steps,” into the helicopter that took him to hospital. At that time he stood “for a people exhausted by war, bereft of hope, abandoned by their (Arab) brothers and fearful of the future.” She stated, “...when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry... without warning.” For all his faults and failings, Arafat was “the symbol of Palestine (whose) life (had) been one of sheer dedication and resilience.”

She then described sharing the Palestinians’ experiences in Ramallah during Israel’s 2002 siege, when army tanks roamed the streets to enforce curfews. The Israelis crashed into the courtyard of Arafat’s compound and trapped him in a couple of rooms where they could have taken him out at any moment. “During those black days in Ramallah, he was a symbol of Palestinian unity, stead-fastness, and resistance,” stated Plett Usher.

Her words did not best please the Israelis, whose British allies filed a formal complaint with the BBC governors. They upheld an accusation of bias and apologised for “an error of judgement” in allowing her words to be broadcast. However, the offensive words remain on the BBC website where they can still be accessed, and she has been posted to Jerusalem.