THE BBC’s refusal to face up to its anti-Israel bias is not new. The 2004 Balen Report – a 20,000-word document which examined hundreds of hours of the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – has never been released.
Now we hear that the BBC Chairman and Director General have been sitting on another dossier – this time an internal one – since May and that details persistent anti-Israeli bias.
There is no evidence in that period they have done anything to check it. In fact in this period they have allowed further lies distortions and anti-Semitism to be peddled in their Global Story series. And just like its flagship BBC Verify, the Global Story has already sunk into familiar territory – distortion, misinformation and anti-Semitic conspiracy – compounded by the BBC’s habit of openly allowing political activists to shape its coverage.
The episode that took my eye was titled ‘Why Netanyahu gets what he wants from the US’.
As the title implies, the programme set out to suggest that successive US Presidents are little more than puppets of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The claim that Israel secretly controls America is a classic anti-Semitic trope rooted in centuries-old conspiracy theories about Jewish power and manipulation. It recycles the same false narrative once used in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that Jews operate behind the scenes to dominate governments, media, and finance. In the modern form, it disguises traditional anti-Semitism in political language but serves the same purpose: to demonise Jews as a hidden, malevolent force.
This classic anti-Semitic framing was locked in from the opening line: ‘From the BBC, I am Tristan Redman – and this is the Global Story. Benjamin Netanyahu has a proven history of getting exactly what he wants from US Presidents, including Donald J Trump.’
Let’s ‘verify’ this claim. Since 1996, across his three stints as Prime Minister, Netanyahu has held office for about 216 months – about 36 under Clinton, 94 under Obama, 48 under Trump (so far) and 38 with Biden. During that period, three of those four presidents took major policy actions directly contrary to Netanyahu’s stated goals:
1996-1999 – Clinton: Confrontations over Oslo and ‘settlements’;
Late 1990s – Political pressuring – US abstention on UNSC Resolution 1073, the Mashaal affair;
1998-1999 – Clinton: Overt support for opposition leader Ehud Barak before election;
2009-2017 – Obama: The ‘Daylight’ doctrine;
2010 – Obama: Public rift over Biden visit;
2014 – Obama: Arms and munitions delays during Gaza war;
2015 – Obama: Iran nuclear deal;
2016 – Obama: UN Security Council Resolution 2334;
2023 – Biden: Open opposition to Netanyahu’s judiciary legislation;
2023-2024 – Biden: Open criticism of Israeli operations in Gaza;
2023- 2024 – Biden: Weapons delays.
The programme’s central assertion collapses under its own weight. Despite what Redman states in his opening line, the historical record shows not subservience but recurring friction, policy clashes, and at times outright hostility between US administrations and Netanyahu. Far from being ‘a man who always gets what he wants’, Netanyahu has long faced open opposition from American presidents. The framing statement is demonstrably false – an outrageous, defamatory and anti-Semitic distortion of historical fact.
The programme claims to ask why Netanyahu (actually Israel) so often enjoys US support. Yet the obvious answer is never promoted. Israel is a strategic ally, faces many of the same enemies, and shares core democratic values with the United States. With that simple truth omitted, all that remains is the anti-Semitic conspiracy.
This kind of anti-Semitic framing has become increasingly typical of the BBC’s coverage of Israel – emotional, agenda-driven, dripping with anti-Jewish racism, and echoing the tone and talking points more commonly found in campus anti-Israel activism than in serious journalism.
To help the false narratives along, the Global Story invited the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, Lyse Doucet, to serve as its resident expert on all things ‘Israel’. Doucet has a very long history of displaying anti-Israel bias and manipulating the truth.
The BBC pushes falsehoods about Israel daily, so unpacking every distortion in the podcast would be a tedious and futile task. The focus should stay on the ‘Bibi controls America’ trope. Still, I’m reluctant to let the BBC’s historical inaccuracies go entirely unchallenged, so I will highlight just one of the many factual errors.
Lyse Doucet: ‘When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – the peacemaker – was assassinated, by a hardline Israeli Jew who did not like his peacemaking. And about that time that is when I first became conscious of Netanyahu. He had been making inflammatory speeches about the Oslo Peace Accords, about Prime Minister Rabin.’
Question: ‘Can you explain why that was, Lyse – why was he so against it – and why was he so opposed to Yitzhak Rabin?’
Lyse Doucet: ‘He has always been consistent in his politics, refusing to accept the need for a Palestinian state, believing that the Oslo Accords would not be good for Israeli security, being very critical of the Palestinian leader.’
Doucet goes on to lay the blame for the collapse of the peace process squarely at Netanyahu’s feet, mentioning only ‘a spate of suicide bombings’ in a post-Rabin world.
This is poppycock. You cannot answer why Netanyahu opposed the Oslo Accords in 1995 without acknowledging the devastation on Israel’s streets – and the wave of terrorism – prior to the Rabin assassination:
Afula bus bombing – April 6 1994
Hadera bus station bombing – April 13 1994
Dizzengoff street bus bombing – October 19 1994
Netzarim Junction bicycle bombing – November 11 1994
Beit Lid double bombing – January 22 1995
Kfar Drom bus attack – April 9 1995
Ramat Gan bus bombing – July 24 1995
Ramat Eshkol bus bombing – August 21 1995
And these were just the suicide bombs. These attacks defined the Israeli public mood at the time – fear, grief and deep scepticism toward the peace process – yet the BBC erases them entirely.
How could such crucial information be withheld from the BBC’s audience?
The truth is that facts like these interfere with the narrative the BBC prefers to tell. In their version, Rabin is cast as a near-messianic figure, peace was within reach, and Netanyahu – through incitement and extremism – destroyed it all.
Such mythology has no place in serious journalism, yet at the BBC it now seems routine.
Refocusing on the key issue of falsely claiming Jewish control of America, the BBC’s Global Story interview then gets a whole lot worse. Tristan Redman amplifies Tucker Carlson’s anti-Semitic conspiracy line.
Redman: ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen, in the last few days, the podcaster Tucker Carlson has said that Netanyahu is bragging to leaders around the world that he runs America and he runs Trump.’
Carlson: ‘This is a fact. I’m not guessing about this because I talked to people he said it to. He’s running around the Middle East, his region and his own country and telling people point blank – just stating it – I control the United States. I control Donald Trump.’
These are the words of Tucker Carlson, a far-right extremist, pushing an anti-Semitic trope about Jews controlling America. There was only one reasonable journalistic response: to call this out directly. Lyse Doucet did not.
When asked if she agreed, instead of immediately challenging Carlson’s conspiratorial line, Doucet rewired the story so it looks like Trump began independently and was later converted into Netanyahu’s puppet, a narrative that depends on a falsified timeline. US envoys held secret talks with Hamas in early March 2025, the US-Houthi ceasefire was announced on May 6 2025, and Trump’s public 60-day ultimatum to Iran ended in June 2025. None of these happened ‘at the start’ of his presidency as she implied.
By mis-stating the chronology, Doucet not only distorted the record but reinforced Carlson’s anti-Semitic insinuation instead of debunking it.
The show lists four producers – one of whom is Aron Keller, who has been mentioned on my website before (never a good sign). In October 2024, Keller posted he was starting a new job as a producer at BBC Studios.
Keller is a long-time activist for the hard-left ‘anti-occupation’ group Na’amod and along with Rivkah Brown he was one of the founders of Vashti Media, a product of the Corbyn era – known for playing down Labour’s anti-Semitism and supporting Corbyn in the 2019 election.
An impartial observer he is not. Keller has a long history of anti-Israel protest, and has often taken part in the mass pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London since October 7.
Here he is in early 2024 protesting against Israel in a march organised by groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain and the Palestine Forum of Britain.
This is him a few months earlier on Vauxhall Bridge:
This pro-Palestinian political activist is producing anti-Netanyahu content for the BBC, paid for by our licence fee.
Let me be clear: Keller is entitled to his political views, and no one should object to his pursuing a career in film production simply because he is catastrophically wrong on the question of Israel. He is not, ultimately, the primary target of criticism here – though one might reasonably think he should have recused himself from this particular production. The real issue lies with the BBC’s editorial standards. It is extraordinary that a public broadcaster would permit a political activist to produce content directly connected to his own field of activism.
But given the BBC is now pushing classic anti-Semitic tropes on its programmes, perhaps we should not be surprised at all.
This article appeared on the website of David Collier on October 27, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
