I know that this is not supposed to be amusing, but sometimes the sheer brazenness of the BBC’s rewriting of history to accommodate the Palestinians is laugh out loud hilarious. To wit: as I was browsing the BBC MidEast section on its website today — 10 out of 14 entries are on Israel, so you get a sense of the level of obsession we are dealing with — I came across a helpful little item explaining to readers the history of peace talks between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Arab world.

Authoritatively entitled History of Mid-East Peace talks, it’s a real gem. First off, it begins in 1967. Now that’s useful, because if you had to go back to 1947 you’d have to acknowledge that the Jewish/Israeli side accepted a UN partition plan, rejected in favour of violence by the Palestinian/Arab side, which would have inaugurated a two-state solution right from the start. But the BBC obviously doesn’t want to torpedo the Palestinian agenda from the get-go. So, as I say, history begins with the dreaded “occupation” 20 years later.

Now, not even the BBC can ignore the attempts by Bill Clinton to broker a peace in 2000 and 2001. During that process, as Clinton, his chief MidEast envoy Dennis Ross and a host of others have recorded the Israeli premier at the time , Ehud Barak, offered the Palestinians another two-state solution, dividing Jerusalem and giving the Palestinians a state on almost all of the pre-1967 West Bank. That too was flatly rejected by Yasser Arafat. But that’s not quite how the BBC chooses to characterise matters.

Writing of the talks at Camp David, the BBC’s Paul Reynolds says:

“There was no agreement. However, the negotiations were more detailed than ever before. The basic problem was that the maximum Israel offered was less than the minimum the Palestinians could accept”.

Hmm. Well that’s one way of putting it. Here’s another, and this is from Dennis Ross:

“Both Barak and Clinton were prepared to do what was necessary to reach agreement…Can one say the same about Arafat? Unfortunately not…”

And, continued Ross in his records of the talks: “It is not just that he [Arafat] had, in the words of President Clinton, “been here fourteen days and said no to everything”. It is that all he did at Camp David was to repeat old mythologies and invent new ones, like, for example, that the Temple was not in Jerusalem but in Nablus. Denying the core of the other side’s faith is not the act of someone preparing himself to end a conflict.”

No indeed. But then Dennis Ross is only the most experienced Mid-East negotiator alive. What is his version of events against the BBC’s?

The so called Annapolis process of 2007 is also distorted by the BBC in shameless terms. Once again, there is no mention that then Israeli PM Ehud Olmert had at around this time repeated and expanded upon Barak’s offers. This time to be flatly rejected by none other than Mahmoud Abbas.

The BBC agenda here is clear. To go back to 1947 and to note the Palestinian/Arab rejection of peace would be to locate the core blame for the conflict at the door of the Palestinians. To note Arafat’s rejectionism in 2000 and 2001 as well as Abbas’s in 2007 would be to do likewise. Therefore, all mention of such inconvenient truths is cynically and deliberately airbrushed from the picture.

It is not even as if the BBC could have accepted basic journalistic ethics and quoted someone such as Ross to offer readers a view of the conflict which they could then go away and mull over for themselves. They have adopted the Soviet-era view that even to allow for the possibility of a different narrative is to break apart the rigid ideological uniformity that their position so desperately requires.

Yes, you could argue that Reynolds and the editorial staff of the BBC simply don’t know about the UN partition resolution; that they have never heard of Dennis Ross; that they do not know about Bill Clinton’s angry denunciations of Arafat’s rejectionism; that they simply forgot about Olmert’s offers to Abbas in 2007. Believe all that if you want to.

But I ask you: which is the more likely explanation? A group of people so ignorant that basic facts are simply lost on them? Or the sinister machinations of mature and calculating minds who know exactly which facts to leave out to sustain a pre-ordained agenda?

Not one of life’s most taxing puzzles, I’d respectfully suggest……..