The BBC has long found itself in a tough spot regarding the question of Israel and Palestine. Supporters of Israel have alleged that the corporation’s coverage of the war in Gaza is biased against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, pro-Palestine campaigners condemn its programming for supposedly taking Israeli claims at face value and therefore overlooking the plight of Palestinians. Within this atmosphere, the BBC feels that its cherished “impartiality” is more important than ever.

At the centre of this controversy is the unlikely figure of Match of the Day host and former England centre forward Gary Lineker, who today confirmed that he was quitting the BBC following a scandal over alleged antisemitism. Last week he shared an Instagram story from the group Palestine Lobby which attacked Zionism, with a caption reading: “they take the land and claim it as theirs.” The graphic featured a small illustration of a rat, which has for decades been used as an antisemitic trope. Lineker, faced with a growing backlash, deleted the post and apologised.

This is far from the first time the football presenter has tested BBC guidelines. In 2023, he compared the UK Government’s asylum policy to Germany under the Nazis. He has since expressed horror at the deaths of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the IDF, and has accused his employer of “capitulating to [Israeli] lobbying”. Lineker does not seem all that well-versed in the nuances of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet his views are not politically extreme, and he is clearly not himself antisemitic. His is a standard liberal humanitarian view — shared by plenty in Britain — that too many Palestinian civilians, especially children, are being killed and that it ought to stop.

The Lineker controversy essentially boils down to what is meant by being “impartial”. When Amol Rajan said to him in an interview last month that the BBC needed to be “impartial” in its presentation of the Gaza war, Lineker fired back that it needed to be “factual”. He rightly pointed out that the BBC “wasn’t impartial about Russia and Ukraine”, given that the former launched a brutal war of aggression against the latter three years ago. Since then, the BBC has not hidden the collective institutional view that Ukraine is essentially the victim and Putin’s Russia the aggressor.

If this boils down to an individual’s political opinions, why was Andrew Neil permitted to tweet his political opinions while serving as the corporation’s big-name political interviewer? For years, Jeremy Clarkson openly discussed his political opinions, quite a few of which weren’t exactly in line with the Beeb consensus. While the issue is more keenly felt within the BBC, other news channels have struggled to stay entirely impartial. Rachel Riley has publicly expressed pro-Israel views and campaigned against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, yet she’s kept her Channel 4 job on Countdown.

The idea of broadcasting impartiality is itself a charade. After all, the BBC permitted Lineker to criticise the human rights record of Qatar when the 2022 World Cup was held there; why should the line be drawn only when he publicly takes issue with Israel’s human rights abuses? The BBC does not necessarily have a bias towards Israel; a more likely explanation is that it wants to avoid damaging publicity by involving itself in a debate which so sharply divides opinion in the West.

How the BBC currently interprets and enforces “impartiality” is unworkable. While media organisations should ideally not broadcast tendentious propaganda, their employees are also private citizens, and will inevitably hold political views on various issues — not least concerning the Gaza war, where the British government is diplomatically and militarily supporting Israel. In the age of social media, these individuals have further opportunities to make their views public. The response to Lineker’s comments only exposes the farcical inconsistency with which the BBC has applied its rules.

---

Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

buffsoldier_96

---