By Rima Najjar
Author’s Note
The irony is sharp: Trump now complains about being edited by the BBC and placed within a narrative he rejects, yet for years he has shaped how the world sees Palestinians — through speeches, policies, and media interventions that reorder our story, silence our voices, or recast our suffering in politically convenient frames. I wrote this essay to trace the long arc of how the BBC has controlled which Palestinian voices are verified, which suffering is amplified or questioned, which events are reordered, and which narratives are framed or sidelined — and to place Trump’s lawsuit against the corporation in that wider context. This piece is both an analysis of institutional power and a reflection on the strange intersection where the mechanisms of editorial control he decries mirror the long experience of Palestinians under global media.
I. Introduction: Watching Trump Step Into Our Frame
As a Palestinian I experience Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC as a kind of dark comedy. Here is a U.S. president, complaining that the corporation has taken his speech — clipped it, rearranged it, and produced a meaning he insists was never there. The segment aired on Panorama, and the BBC has since admitted to an “error of judgment” in how it edited the footage. Suddenly, the venerable broadcaster is on the defensive about its neutrality. And here are Palestinians, watching this drama unfold with a sense of déjà vu so complete it is almost dizzying.
We have lived with BBC editing — of us, of our history, of our very vocabulary — since long before Trump first tested a microphone.
When I see commentators now asking, “If the BBC misrepresented Trump, what other narratives has it shaped this way?”, I want to answer: come and sit with us. We can tell you how it feels to grow up under a voice that is treated as neutral, objective and civilized, while constantly bending the story of your dispossession into shapes more acceptable to Western power.
ln this essay I trace that history and use Trump’s present outrage as a lens. It is not an argument that Trump and Palestinians are equivalent victims of media power; the comparison would be obscene. He is a president. We are a colonized and displaced people. But the mechanism he suddenly complains about — the clipped quote, the rearranged sequence, the quiet violence of omission — is one we know intimately. To understand why the BBC could do this to Trump, we must revisit the older story of how it has long done it to us.
II. After the Nakba: The BBC as Lifeline and Authority
To understand how the BBC came to occupy such a central role in Palestinian consciousness, we must begin in the decades after the Nakba. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, news was not a background hum in Palestinian life. It was a lifeline. After the Nakba of 1948, hundreds of thousands of us scattered into refugee camps and neighboring countries, many still sleeping with the keys to homes they believed, sincerely, they would one day return to. Every bulletin was scanned for signs that the world had come to its senses, that justice was awakening somewhere out there.
Arab state media, however, served not the people but the rulers. Much of it was saturated with bravado and propaganda. Broadcasters promised imminent victories that never came, glorified armies that collapsed in days, and spoke in a triumphant register that felt increasingly disconnected from the humiliations people experienced at checkpoints, in camps, and in exile. News of defeat was massaged into euphemism; news of failure was treated as temporary setback on the road to inevitable glory.
In that environment, the BBC and, to a lesser extent, Voice of America, broadcasting in Arabic, acquired the aura of reliability. Colonial history in the Levant had left deep scars, but it had also ingrained a sense that Western institutions — British schools, British hospitals, British universities, and yes, British media — were somehow more serious, more professional, more “civilized” than anything our own region produced.
Arab rulers, desperate to hold onto the power meted out to them by these same Western powers, tightened their grip on local media, making it easier for people to believe that freedom of information lay abroad.
Growing up in Jordan, I heard the drone of news from radios tuned to the BBC as though part of the air itself, not on the air. It wafted out of shops, taxis, living rooms. The phrases became familiar: “Our correspondent reports,” “according to official sources,” “the situation remains tense.”
The BBC’s Arabic service brought the world into homes that often lacked electricity for anything more sophisticated than a radio. That voice was taken, in many families, as a kind of secular oracle. If the BBC said something happened, then it had happened. If the BBC did not mention something, then perhaps it was not important.
Trust, once given, is powerful. It shapes not just what people know but how they know, and whose version of events they learn to elevate over their own.
III. The First Fissures: 1967 and the Tone of Defeat
The first real fissure in that trust came during the watershed moments when the BBC’s calm, authoritative cadence no longer matched the lived reality unfolding on the ground. For many in the Arab world, that turning point was the 1967 war.
As Israeli forces swept through Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in six devastating days, Arab regimes were still, for a time, broadcasting fantasies of resistance and counterattacks. The BBC, by contrast, reported Israeli advances with clinical precision — its voice steady, its language stripped of emotion, its updates arriving like dispatches from a distant control room.
It became, in effect, the outlet that told the Arab world it had been defeated, and it did so in a tone that suggested this outcome was both inevitable and, in some ways, rational.
But in addition to reporting the facts of defeat, the BBC introduced a new vocabulary: the language of “buffer zones,” “security needs,” and “disputed territories.” The word “occupation” did not loom large in its early lexicon. Our catastrophe was rendered in neutral, almost technical terms.
Palestinians who experienced the Israeli advance as an extension of the dispossession of 1948 heard instead a story of borders in dispute, of a small nation seeking defensible lines.
For those who had believed in the BBC’s purity of purpose, this was a quietly devastating realization. The BBC was not simply delivering facts; it was reframing them. Its neutrality, it turned out, was neutral only in tone. In structure, it belonged firmly to the world that had divided, partitioned, and claimed authority over our lands.
IV. Internalizing Hierarchies, Defending Dignity
Yet this realization did not immediately sharpen political awareness about media bias; instead, it produced something more insidious — an unconscious absorption of the very hierarchies embedded in the BBC’s tone and framing.
Rather than prompting skepticism, the BBC’s authoritative style subtly reinforced a sense of our own inferiority and of Israeli military supremacy as the inevitable expression of “modernity” and “civilization.” At the time, there were no credible alternatives to Western media — no Al Jazeera, no proliferation of satellite channels, no independent Palestinian networks.
The educated elite — those who had mastered English — devoured the Middle East editions of Time, Newsweek, and The Economist. I remember my father subscribed to them all, reading them with a devotion that bordered on ritual, as though history itself might be postponed by a month’s delay in their delivery.
Those who could not access such magazines relied on the BBC for the facts of events but absorbed its subtext: that Western institutions were objective, rational, advanced — and that we, by implication, were not. It was not just that Israeli tanks and warplanes seemed unstoppable; it was that the BBC narrative treated their supremacy as reasonable, almost natural. Our resistance, in contrast, was presented as tragic but futile, or simply irrational.
This dynamic echoed decades later, when taxi drivers in the West Bank, exasperated by local propaganda, tuned into Israeli Arabic-language news for “reliable information,” even though those broadcasts routinely described Palestinian resistance fighters as mukharribīn — “saboteurs.” The contempt in the word was obvious, yet the habit persisted, a testament to how deeply the authority of the colonizer’s media had been internalized across generations.
What made this period so psychologically complex is that even as Palestinians unconsciously absorbed the hierarchies embedded in Western and Israeli media, an entirely different narrative was being nurtured in the spaces Western journalists rarely saw: the refugee camps.
In these cramped, precarious worlds, informal networks of storytellers, elders, teachers, youth organizers, and political cadres quietly undid the very narratives the BBC and Israeli broadcasts reinforced. The same word that Israeli radio used to demean Palestinian fighters — mukharribīn — was being reclaimed inside the camps with pride as fedayeen, whispered with admiration for those who dared confront the occupation.
Children grew up with two parallel vocabularies: the sterile, technocratic language of “security operations” and “responses to provocation” flowing from the BBC and Israeli broadcasts, and the visceral, lived language of resistance etched into the everyday conversations of camp life.
These informal networks were the first antidote to the subtle self-erasure induced by Western media. They restored moral clarity long before any formal alternative to the BBC existed — planting the seeds of a counter-narrative that would eventually challenge the monopoly the West held over the story of our lives.
V. First Intifada: Two Narratives Collide
The First Intifada in 1987 was the moment when these two narrative worlds — BBC neutrality and camp-forged resistance — collided in full public view.
For the first time, Palestinians were not merely the subjects of news but the producers of it: teenagers with stones, women confronting soldiers, neighborhood committees organizing mass civil disobedience.
This uprising was intensely visual, unfolding in alleys and refugee camps where international correspondents did not always have the final word. Raw footage, sometimes filmed by local cameramen and smuggled out, showed scenes that could not be easily folded into the old clichés of border skirmishes and “tensions.”
Yet even as the uprising’s reality was impossible to ignore, the language the BBC used often muted its political significance. What Palestinians experienced as a mass anti-colonial revolt was framed in London as “unrest,” “rioting,” or “violence” on “both sides,” with the structural realities of occupation backgrounded to the point of abstraction. Soldiers facing children with stones became “clashes.” Military law over an occupied people became “administered territories.” The word “occupation” itself remained strangely shy.
Listening to this coverage from our living rooms or hearing it reported via short-wave, Palestinians realized in collective clarity something we had only sensed subconsciously before: the BBC was not merely flattening our story but translating it into a vocabulary that protected Western sensibilities and preserved Israel’s legitimacy.
The Intifada made it impossible to reconcile the authority of that clipped British accent with the lived truth of children facing rifles. It was a political awakening not only on the streets of Palestine but inside the minds of Palestinians who now understood that Western “neutrality” came with its own ideological commitments — and they were not neutral at all.
VI. Second Intifada: The End of Narrative Monopoly
If the First Intifada cracked the veneer of BBC neutrality, the Second Intifada shattered it.
Beginning in 2000, the uprising unfolded in a media environment transformed by satellite TV, 24-hour news, and the rise of Al Jazeera — and for the first time, Palestinians could see their own reality broadcast live, without passing entirely through Western filters. The images were impossible to soften — children shot at close range, homes demolished, neighborhoods reduced to rubble.
While Arab networks showed these scenes in their full emotional and political weight, the BBC often framed them within the familiar lexicon of “security measures,” “retaliatory strikes,” and “clashes,” as though the structural imbalance between an occupying army and an occupied population were a matter of symmetrical misfortune.
I remember watching the footage of Muhammad al-Durrah, the terrified boy crouching behind his father moments before being shot — broadcast uninterrupted on Arab channels, while the BBC treated it with cautious distance, emphasizing “claims,” “counterclaims,” and Israeli denials.
The disparity between what we saw with our own eyes and what the BBC asked the world to believe was too great to ignore. The Second Intifada made explicit what had long been implicit: Western neutrality was a political stance, shaped by global hierarchies that had once made us trust its voice.
It was not simply that the BBC could not tell our story; it was that it refused to recognize our story as one of colonization, not just “conflict.”
With that, we arrive at the period where the BBC’s distortions can be traced through specific, documented decisions — decisions that, when laid beside the Trump case, reveal a common editorial machinery at work.
VII. Jenin, 2002: Gatekeeping Credibility
The battle of Jenin in April 2002 was the first time many Palestinians — and many across the Arab world — saw the BBC doing something eerily similar to what Trump now accuses it of: shaping the meaning of an event not simply through what it reported, but through what it withheld, framed, doubted, and rearranged.
During Israel’s large-scale invasion of the refugee camp, journalists were barred by the Israeli army for days. As Palestinians fled or phoned relatives, the reports were harrowing: homes bulldozed with people inside, bodies in alleyways, entire families missing. Arab networks broadcast these testimonies immediately — urgent, unvarnished.
The BBC, however, positioned itself not as a witness but as the arbiter of credibility. Palestinian accounts were “unverified,” casualty numbers “inflated,” while Israeli denials were treated as inherently authoritative. Every Palestinian testimony demanded external validation; every Israeli statement arrived pre-validated.
This is the first major parallel with the Trump case: just as Panorama allegedly reorganized Trump’s speech into a sequence that altered its meaning, the BBC’s editorial posture in Jenin reorganized the entire narrative by placing Israeli statements first and Palestinian testimony last, with skepticism disproportionately applied to the latter. The ordering itself produced meaning.
When journalists finally entered the camp after the army withdrew, the devastation was undeniable — streets flattened, homes crushed, the smell of death everywhere. Yet even then, the BBC maintained its tone of “balance”: Palestinians “claimed” atrocities; the Israeli army “stated” it had conducted legitimate operations. The grotesque asymmetry — an army with tanks versus a camp of civilians and lightly armed fighters — was linguistically flattened into a debate between two equally credible “sides.”
For Palestinians, the significance of Jenin lay not only in the destruction but in the BBC’s implicit claim to epistemic authority: only after the BBC saw the rubble with its own eyes could Palestinian suffering be acknowledged as real. Until then, our narratives were treated as hysteria or propaganda.
In Trump’s lawsuit, he says the BBC edited his words so that viewers would see an intent he rejects. In Jenin, the BBC edited Palestinian reality so that viewers would doubt a suffering we had no power to edit back. Different contexts, same mechanism: editorial sequencing determines truth.
VIII. The Balen Report: Internal Evidence, Externally Denied
If Jenin was the moment Palestinians saw the BBC’s bias publicly, the Balen Report was the moment they understood it existed privately — acknowledged inside the corporation yet hidden from view.
In 2004, the BBC commissioned senior journalist Malcolm Balen to review its reporting on the Israel–Palestine conflict. The 20,000-word report examined hundreds of hours of coverage. It was prompted by persistent complaints — including from the Israeli government — of alleged anti-Israel bias. The report was completed. It circulated internally. Then it vanished.
When Palestinians, activists, and media critics requested the report under the Freedom of Information Act, the BBC fought them all the way to the courts. In 2012, the UK Supreme Court upheld the BBC’s right to keep it secret, accepting its claim that the report was held “for the purposes of journalism.”
The significance is profound. The BBC had investigated its own coverage of our dispossession and resistance — then ensured that its findings would never be seen by the people whose story it claimed to tell. Palestinians, whose credibility was constantly scrutinized on air, were denied access to the institution’s own self-scrutiny.
Here the parallel with Trump’s case becomes especially sharp. One outcome of his lawsuit, if it proceeds, may be the forced disclosure of internal emails, editorial notes, and cutting-room decisions. He demands to see the machinery that turned his speech into a sequence he rejects. Palestinians have spent decades wishing for exactly that kind of insight into how our reality has been cut, rearranged, and retold.
Trump claims the BBC misled the public about his intent. Palestinians know the BBC has misled the public about our condition. The difference is that Trump has the power to drag the corporation into court and force the curtain open. We never did.
IX. The 2009 Gaza Aid Appeal: When “Neutrality” Withheld Humanity
During the 2008–09 war on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead), as images emerged of children pulled from rubble and entire neighborhoods destroyed, Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) — a coalition of major humanitarian NGOs — produced an appeal film to raise funds for Gaza’s civilian population. It asked all major broadcasters to air it.
Most agreed. The BBC refused.
Its justification was that broadcasting the appeal could compromise its “impartiality” on a politically contested conflict. The refusal sparked protests outside BBC offices, resignations, and tens of thousands of complaints. Lawyers later represented Gazan families and a British complainant who argued that the decision had denied vital aid to people living amid the ruins.
Here the BBC was not accused of misediting an interview or misquoting a politician. It did something more profound: it blocked a humanitarian plea because recognizing Palestinian suffering in a straightforward way was deemed politically risky. The effect was to render Palestinian child victims invisible precisely when they needed visibility most.
Again, the mechanism mirrors what Trump alleges but at a vastly greater moral scale. Trump complains that the BBC edited too much. In Gaza, the BBC edited too little; it chose not to air at all. In both cases, editorial judgment reshaped reality — once in a television script, once in the flow of humanitarian empathy and money.
The decision implied that Palestinian suffering was politically charged in a way other suffering was not. Appeals for victims of natural disasters or wars elsewhere did not trigger an impartiality crisis. But Gaza did. Neutrality here did not mean standing above politics; it meant acquiescing to a political demand that Palestinians remain, as much as possible, ungrievable.
X. Gaza 2014: “Both Sides” as Moral Laundering
The 2014 war on Gaza (Operation Protective Edge) was one of the most intensely mediated conflicts of the decade. Palestinians themselves filmed much of it, uploading videos of wrecked apartments, bloodied children, and desperate hospital scenes. The asymmetry of death was overwhelming: over 2,000 Palestinians killed, more than 500 children; on the Israeli side, 73 deaths, most of them soldiers.
Yet night after night, the BBC relied on a framing template Palestinians already knew well: the pseudo-neutral language of “both sides.” Israel “responds” to rocket fire; Hamas “continues to launch rockets”; “clashes” erupt; “both sides” blame the other. The structural facts — that one side held overwhelming power and the other lived under blockade — were pushed to the background.
This is not to say the BBC lied. It showed bombed buildings and grieving families. But it slotted them into a familiar narrative: a tragic, symmetrical conflict between two equally culpable parties. The result was that a viewer could almost forget occupation existed at all.
This, too, parallels Trump’s complaint at a structural level. He says the BBC took fragments of his speech and arranged them into a storyline — “Trump incited violence” — that suited its editorial frame. In Gaza, the BBC took fragments of Palestinian death and Israeli justification and arranged them into a storyline — “two sides caught in tragic conflict” — that suited its need for balance.
The difference is that Trump can hold a press conference to tell the world the edit was wrong. The residents of Shuja’iyya and Rafah cannot.
XI. Gaza 2023–24: The Collapse of Trust
The 2023–24 war on Gaza marked the final rupture, the moment when large numbers of people worldwide — not just Palestinians — stopped treating the BBC as a reliable narrator of this conflict.
By then, Palestinians were live-streaming their own destruction. Viewers could watch, in real time, as families huddled in buildings that would be flattened minutes later. They could see entire neighborhoods erased. Against this, BBC coverage often appeared hesitant, hedged, delayed. Casualty figures from Palestinian health authorities were routinely couched in caveats — “not independently verified” — long after UN agencies affirmed their credibility, while Israeli claims were relayed with less visible caution.
Over 100 BBC staff eventually signed a letter accusing their employer of favouring Israel and criticizing its reluctance to use language appropriate to the scale of devastation. Their revolt confirmed what many already sensed: the problem was not a misjudged phrase or headline; it was structural.
By this point, the parallels with Trump’s grievance were unmistakable. He complains of being placed within a narrative frame hostile to his intent. Palestinians have been placed within a narrative frame hostile to our existence as a colonized people. He seeks reputational correction. We seek recognition of a basic truth: that a globally trusted news organization has, for decades, filtered, softened, or doubted our reality in ways that materially shaped global indifference to our dispossession.
XII. Why the BBC Does This — to Trump and to Us
Why has the BBC done this to Trump and to Palestinians? The answer lies not in conspiratorial intent but in institutional logic.
First, brand protection. The BBC survives on its reputation for fairness. Facing Trump, that instinct tilts toward strong narratives that portray him as dangerous. A producer may feel justified in tightening an edit to make the point land — crossing into distortion.
Facing Palestinians, brand protection means avoiding the appearance of being “anti-Israel.” British institutions live under the shadow of accusations of antisemitism; pressure from Israeli officials and lobby groups is intense. The easiest way to avoid those accusations is to ensure Palestinians are never given too much unfiltered narrative space.
Second, dependence on official sources. In U.S. politics, the BBC leans on establishment voices that often view Trump with hostility. In Palestine, the imbalance is extreme: Israel controls access, movement, and the conditions under which foreign journalists can report. Israeli spokespeople are always available; Palestinian journalists are killed, arrested, or discredited. Thus Israeli voices become “authoritative,” Palestinian voices “unverified.”
Third, the BBC inherits a colonial epistemology. Institutions born in empire trust states, armies, diplomats, Western-educated elites — and distrust rebels, colonized peoples, and those who speak from the margins. Trump is framed as a destabilizing populist; Palestinians are framed as emotional or partisan when narrating their own suffering. The underlying logic is the same: trust flows upward.
Fourth, fear of complaint. Complaints from Trump supporters are politically manageable. Complaints from pro-Israel groups can damage the BBC’s institutional standing. Thus the discrepancy: boldness in covering Trump, extreme caution in covering Palestine.
Finally, narrative simplicity. Trump fits a ready-made story: the demagogue. Israel–Palestine is complex but gets flattened into a convenient template: two sides, endless conflict, ancient grievance. Occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing get edited out.
The BBC’s misediting of Trump is, in this sense, the domestic echo of its long misframing of Palestine. But the stakes are not equivalent. Trump faces reputational harm. Palestinians have faced erasure, dispossession, and death under a narrative regime that treats our oppression as debatable and our testimony as secondary.
XIII. Conclusion: The Black Box We Always Wanted Opened
More than anything, this essay is my attempt to reclaim narrative clarity. To say: we saw this before you did. We lived inside the consequences of Western media power long before an American president turned it into a scandal. The irony is sharp: Trump now demands what Palestinians were never granted — the opening of the BBC’s black box, the exposure of its editorial machinery.
He wants to know who cut his words, in what order, under whose instruction, and with what rationale. We would like to know who decided Palestinian deaths required extra verification, who chose to call us “militants” instead of resisters, who buried the Balen Report, who refused the Gaza appeal, who scripted “both sides” even as one side’s bodies piled high.
He seeks vindication for a speech. We seek recognition for a history.
If Trump’s case forces the BBC to disclose internal emails, cutting notes, and editorial chains of command, then for one moment our struggles intersect — not because we share politics, but because the mechanism that harmed us is now harming him. Should those documents emerge, perhaps more people will finally approach the BBC not with automatic trust but with informed scrutiny.
What Trump calls defamation, Palestinians have lived as erasure. If this moment of institutional crisis leads even a few more people to question the BBC’s inherited authority, then perhaps some measure of truth may emerge from a lawsuit never filed with us in mind.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
15 November 2025
Source: countercurrents.org
