BBC editor's libel case against Owen Jones falls at the first hurdle. Here's why

Raffi Berg may be fighting for damages, but it's really the BBC in the dock – for being utterly wedded to an editor whose objectivity on Israel is so clearly in question

The High Court’s preliminary ruling this week in the libel case brought by the BBC’s online Middle East editor, Raffi Berg, against journalist Owen Jones is highly significant. It doesn’t settle the case – in fact, Berg’s lawyers say they intend to continue to a full hearing – but it does strike a blow against the Israel lobby’s years-long lawfare campaign to crush any meaningful criticism of Israel.

Berg is suing Jones for publishing an article that described “civil war” at the BBC – largely between executives and managers, on one side, and journalists on the other – over the state broadcaster’s efforts to obscure the criminal nature of Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The United Nations, international human rights organisations, Israeli human rights groups, and leading Holocaust scholars have all agreed that events in Gaza amount to a genocide. The western media, and most visibly the BBC, have all but banned the word “genocide” from their coverage. That has doubtless been a great comfort to both the Israeli and British governments, the latter having served as an active partner in the Gaza genocide.

This week’s ruling means that, should Berg continue the case, Jones will have to defend his article as an expression of his “honest opinion” – based on the evidence supplied by BBC insiders – about Berg’s role in the corporation’s coverage of Gaza.

Berg and his lawyers had hoped to force Jones to defend the article on the basis it was a “statement of fact”.

This distinction is crucial. Had the judge agreed with Berg’s team, responsibility would have fallen on Jones to prove what amounts to intent by Berg to skew BBC coverage – something that, in the absence of internal documents revealing what was being said behind closed doors – would have been nigh impossible.

Now the onus falls on Berg to show not only that Jones’ opinion was groundless but that Jones’ intent was to unfairly malign him. This time Berg and his lawyers won’t be able to rely simply on the usual antisemitism smears. They will actually have to produce evidence that Jones was acting in bad faith.

Tall order

In other words, Berg’s lawyers will need to show that Jones wrote the article out of malevolence towards Berg (and, doubtless his legal team would love to argue, towards Jews too) rather than the reality – that Jones wrote the article, first, because he takes seriously the duty of journalists, mostly honoured in the breach, to hold the powerful to account; and, second, because he believes, unlike Israel’s apologists, that war crimes and genocide are wrong, whoever the perpetrator and whoever the victim.

That is going to be quite a tall order for Berg’s team. In normal circumstances, lawyers would probably advise him to withdraw.

But notably, Berg did not choose normal defamation lawyers. He opted for Patron Law, led by Mark Lewis, a British-Israeli lawyer who moved to Israel in 2018 saying that, in his view, Britain and Europe were “finished” and that Israel was the only safe place for Jews.

Lewis is the former director of a highly controversial pro-Israel group, UK Lawyers for Israel, that is known for using legal threats to silence critics of Israel. His wife is the national director of Likud-Herut UK, effectively the British branch of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rabidly rightwing Zionist party.

Netanyahu himself, of course, is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which is seeking his arrest for crimes against humanity in Gaza.

One might have imagined that the BBC would have been quietly pressuring Berg to withdraw from the case from the outset, because it is drawing even more attention both to the scandalous failings by the BBC to properly cover Israeli crimes and give voice to the experiences of Palestinians facing genocide, and to the corporation’s refusal to listen to large-scale unrest among staff at those failings.

Berg may be fighting the court case but it is really the BBC in the dock – for employing someone like Berg as online Middle East editor when the BBC claims that not only does it strive to be objective, but it strives to be seen to be objective.

The Middle East is probably the most sensitive region the BBC covers. And yet as Jones and BBC staff make clear in the article, Berg – at a personal and ideological level – has done little to hide his own sympathies. He has utterly failed to present himself as objective.

The furore Berg has provoked among staff, and the reputational damage Jones’ article has caused the BBC, should have ensured that, at a minimum, the online editor was moved to another position. More properly, an internal inquiry should have been set up to investigate staff complaints.

But in fact, quite the opposite has happened. BBC executives have not only rallied to Berg’s side, suggesting that critics are being antisemitic. They also appear to be fine with him further airing the corporation’s dirty linen in a very public trial.

Extraordinarily, the BBC appears to have been so hands-off regarding Berg’s libel case that he has felt emboldened to hire a contentious firm like Patron Law to act as his legal representative.

‘Headless chickens’

All of which is making Jones’ case for him. Berg appears to have been protected from any repercussions at the BBC because his publicly partisan views on Israel and Palestine were exactly what BBC executives were looking for.

We can speculate why. In their 2009 book More Bad News From Israel, academics Greg Philo and Mike Berry report a senior BBC news editor telling them: “We wait in fear for the phone call from the Israelis.”

A 2012 article in the London Evening Standard described BBC executives – the people who appointed Berg to the post of online Middle East editor a few months later – as in a state of permanent terror about potential complaints from Israel.

A BBC insider told the paper: “To describe them as like headless chickens running all over the place would be to convey an impression of too much order and cohesion. They are cowering in corners. The fear is palpable.”

Most likely Berg was hired for the job because BBC executives were confident that his own take on events in the Middle East would largely keep “the Israelis” happy. The extent to which, in the process, he would infuriate journalists around him was considered of much less significance.

Jones’ article, The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza, published by Drop Site News last year, documents the ways Berg’s early journalistic work may have reassured them.

He started his career at US Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Speaking about that period, he says he was “absolutely thrilled” on later learning that the outlet was a front for the CIA.

After he moved to the BBC in 2001, one of his first stories, headlined “Israel’s teenage recruits”, was described by one journalist there as a “puff piece” for the Israeli military. Another article on Israeli settlers in the West Bank ignored the fact that the settlements are illegal under international law.

Berg himself has done little to hide either his close ties to senior Israeli officials or his further “thrill” at learning his writings have pleased the Israeli establishment.

After he was appointed Middle East editor for BBC news online in 2013, Berg received unprecedented access to former and serving officials in Israel’s Mossad spy agency. He used those contacts to write a book, published in 2020, about Mossad exploits. Berg kept little critical distance from his subjects, saying that one former commander, “Dani”, became a “very close friend”.

Jones quotes a Mossad expert who criticises Berg’s book for romanticising the Mossad and for failing to scrutinise the illegality of many of its activities. That is one reason, presumably, why the book is so adored by Israeli officials – including, it seems, by Netanyahu, who has a copy on his shelf.

Certainly, from the enthusiastic responses of Israeli officials, one must assume that Berg’s book does not try to do much of what we normally associate with good journalism: scrutinise the centres of power.

‘Death by a thousand cuts’

Is Berg’s sympathetic portrayal of Mossad and Israel in his book an indication of how he operates more generally as a BBC editor covering Israel and Palestine? Many of those who work under him think so.

Journalists repeatedly identify Berg as the figure who most keenly shapes BBC coverage in ways that have soft-soaped Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

“This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” a former BBC journalist told Jones.

An insider said Berg “plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle East stories appear on the BBC News front page” – the main determinant of whether a story receives large-scale views or not.

A BBC journalist noted that the fear among BBC managers was so “extreme” anyone who wished to write about Israel or Palestine was told by editors: “If you want to pitch something, you have to go through Raffi and get his signoff.”

Another added: “How much power he has is wild. His reach goes beyond just the Middle East index, but to adjacent subject matters.”

BBC staff, Jones reports, point to “how Berg reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images, arguing he repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity, with one journalist characterizing his approach as ‘death by a thousand cuts’.”

Jones cites one notorious example from last July when Israeli soldiers allowed an attack dog to maul a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome and autism, Muhammed Bhar. After forcibly separating him from his family, the soldiers then reneged on a promise to get him medical help and left him to bleed to death from his injuries.

Middle East Eye headlined the story: “Gaza: Palestinian with Down syndrome ‘left to die’ by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack.”

The Independent newspaper headlined it: “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome mauled by Israeli attack dog and left to die, family says.”

The BBC gave the story no coverage for four days after these early reports. When it finally published, the headline was: “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome.”

Most readers, who never get past the headline or read only the first paragraph, would have had no idea that Israeli soldiers had effectively killed Bhar. The BBC’s presentation would have encouraged them to assume instead that he was an unfortunate victim of circumstance. Jones notes that it was 500 words into the story before readers learnt that an Israeli army dog had mauled Bhar, and a further 339 words before they learnt that he died from those injuries.

Jones details many similar examples. Yet Berg appears untouchable. Is that because he has been so effective at protecting the BBC from a mauling from Israel?

Berg’s influence has an outsize effect both because the BBC is the most visited news platform on the internet, and because many news organisations look to the BBC’s editorial stance as a template for their own coverage.

Power of truth

My most-read story ever on Substack (below), published last summer, concerned glaring failures by the BBC in its reporting of Gaza. Like Jones’ own article on the BBC, it obviously tapped into a public appetite to understand how the corporation’s coverage of the Gaza genocide has been so scandalously dismal.

I mentioned in that story a few key statistical takeaways from a report by the Centre for Media Monitoring on the BBC’s coverage of Gaza over the year following Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack:

• The BBC ran more than 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians.

• The BBC interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians.

• The BBC asked 38 of its guests to condemn Hamas. It asked no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools.

• Only 0.5% of BBC articles mentioned Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – in only 0.3% of news articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing.

• The BBC described Israeli captives as “hostages”, while Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge, were called “prisoners”.

• The BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza in the time period, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russian ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims as it was for Palestinian victims.

The point is that Berg isn’t acting either in a vacuum or against the grain of BBC coverage. He is implementing, through his editorial role, a political agenda dictated from the very top of the BBC, one that denies Israel’s genocide and thereby obscures Britain’s complicity in that genocide. The journalistic culture is entirely top-down.

Executives are there to protect British foreign policy on Israel – a policy that has been shared by both Conservative and Labour governments. In that way, they hope to save their own necks. Berg was chosen, and is himself protected, because his own pro-Israel worldview fits neatly with the interests of BBC executives desperate to curry favour with Israel and the British state.

That is now on full show in the corporation’s skewed coverage of Iran. Like much of the western media, the BBC has been keen, for example, to downplay one of the largest-ever single war crimes committed by the US: the “double-tap” bombing of a girls’ primary school in Minab, killing more than 160 Iranians, most of them children aged between 7 and 12, in the opening salvo of its illegal war of aggression against Iran.

BBC executives seem willing to back Berg however damaging the mounting revelations about the corporation’s profoundly skewed coverage of Israel. Meanwhile, Berg’s lawyers seem ready to pursue their case against Jones however much the odds stack up against them.

They have an incentive to do so because winning these kinds of libel cases isn’t necessarily about seeking damages, let alone justice. It is often about using the law as a tool, one to intimidate journalists and others. The goal doesn’t have to be to win your case. It can simply be to burden ordinary people with substantial legal costs to scare them off speaking obvious truths – truths that may be the only power we have to stop a genocide, or to challenge an illegal war of aggression.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

---

All my posts are freely accessible, but my journalism is possible only because of the support of readers. If you liked this article or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, or donate via Paypalor my bank account, or alternatively set up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on Twitter and Facebook.