Jeremy Bowen

Jeremy Bowen   ( journalist)
Born	6 February 1960
Alma mater	•  University College London •  Johns Hopkins University
International Editor In office August 2022 - Present Employer BBC News Bowen "makes Israel's job of genocide easier"

Jeremy Francis John Bowen is a Welsh journalist and television presenter. He was BBC's Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem between 1995 and 2000, and the BBC Middle East editor from 2005 to 2022, before being appointed the International Editor of BBC News in August 2022.

Facilitating genocide

On 4 October 2024, Jonathan Cook began his report with:

The BBC no longer bothers to hide the fact that its news service acts as nothing more than the British state's willing propaganda channel.

Last night on the News at Ten, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen secured a rare interview with Hamas’s deputy political chief, Khalil al-Hayya.

and concluded with:

What becomes ever harder to deny is that the BBC isn’t reporting what is happening in the Middle East. It is aggressively framing it in such a way as to present Israel as the victim of events, and thereby assist it in carrying out a genocide in Gaza and beginning a second slaughter in Lebanon.

Whitewashing jihadist interview

In December 2024 after the fall of the Assad government, Bowen interviewed Ahmed al-Sharaa, (aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and according to the BBC, the new leader of Syria. The interview, with softball questions and sympathetic filming, was designed put him in as favorable light as possible in a campaign to whitewash the leader, at the same time as the US dropped $10m reward on on al-Sharaa for his al-Qaeda links.

Adopting Israel's viewpoint on Hezbollah

Reporting on the Israeli–Lebanese conflict in September 2024, Jonathan Cook wrote:

With western media refusing to provide any meaningful context for Hezbollah’s actions, Israel’s self-serving narrative fills the vacuum: the assumption is that Hezbollah – and possibly all "Arabs" – are driven only by an irrational, antisemitic desire to murder Jews in Israel.

The implication is that Lebanon deserves whatever it gets from Israel.

The BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen helpfully oiled that particular wheel on Monday’s evening news this week by describing Hezbollah in the following terms: "Fighting Israel is in their DNA, why they exist."

Let’s ignore Bowen’s conflation of the military wing of Hezbollah and its political and welfare arms – precisely the Israel-centric view of Hezbollah imposed by the British government in designating the entire movement as "a terrorist organisation".

Do Hezbollah’s politicians, and the civil servants, police officers, doctors, teachers and adminstrators it employs to run Lebanon’s institutions – the "state within a state", as media outlets call it – exist only to "fight Israel?" Is that really the sole reason they exist?

But even if we ignore all the civilians involved with Hezbollah and focus exclusively on its military wing, is Bowen’s characterisation impartial, fair, or even accurate?

Hezbollah isn’t driven by a simple bloodlust to "fight Israel", as the BBC’s Middle East expert suggests. For many Lebanese citizens, it is there to protect their country from an Israeli military that has aggressively interfered in its affairs for decades, long before Hezbollah even existed.

Israel has invaded Lebanon repeatedly, overseen horrifying massacres such as those at Sabra and Shatilla, occupied Lebanon’s southern lands for nearly two decades, bombed its infrastructure, meddled in its politics, littered its territory with cluster bombs, and carried out aggressive flights by fighter jets over its territory, violating Lebanese airspace, non-stop all that time.

For many Lebanese citizens, Hezbollah exists because Lebanon needed a credible military fighting force to push out Israel’s occupation army – as it eventually managed to do in 2000 – and prevent any reoccurence.

It exists to deter Israel from continuing to meddle in Lebanon – just as Hamas exists to try to exact a price for Israel’s otherwise profitable brutalisation of Palestinians under occupation.

But if Bowen really imagines this kind of reductive reasoning about Hezbollah is fair, he should be consistent and describe Israel’s military similarly. Does the so-called Israel Defence Forces exist only to "fight its Arab neighbours?"

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Herzliya Conference/2009	2 February 2009	4 February 2009	Reichman University Tel Aviv Israel	Spooky 3 day get together in Tel Aviv

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Jeremy Bowen's interview with Gaza aid chief was shameful	blog post	14 May 2025	Jonathan Cook	BBC executives have appointed and protected Raffi Berg, a man who publicly counts a former senior figure in Israel’s spy agency Mossad as a friend, to oversee the corporation’s Middle East coverage. Excuses won’t wash any longer. We are 19 months into a genocide. Helping Israel to launder its crimes is to become complicit in them. No journalist should be allowing themselves to be pressured into this kind of moral and professional failure.
Document:The BBC is weaponising its Lebanon reporting to help disguise Israel's crimes	Article	27 September 2024	Jonathan Cook	By the third week of September, Israel had killed more than 750 Lebanese, compared to 33 Israeli deaths. The differential is even starker now. And yet the western media has not framed Hezbollah’s attacks as its "right to defend itself" – a right we are continuously reminded Israel has.

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References

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