We can excuse actors for their Palestinian bias but not broadcasters

It was only a matter of time before the usual luvvie suspects stuck their heads above the parapet to declaim against Israel.

Miriam Margolyes, tick. Tilda Swinton, tick. Maxine Peake, tick. The actresses have joined more than 2,000 other thespians, artists and musicians, including Steve Coogan, Charles Dance, Harriet Walter and filmmaker Mike Leigh, in signing an open letter condemning Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

Nowhere in the missive, though, do they mention, let alone decry, the cause of the increased hostilities and suffering in the region, the Hamas terrorist attack of two weeks ago.

The signatories call on the government to end its support of Israel, and accuse it of “not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them”.

The full list can be found on the Artists for Palestine website and, on closer inspection, is mostly made up of unknown writers, poets, illustrators, curators and the odd “cultural worker”, from France, the US and, curiously, Iceland, as well as Britain.

But it is the higher profile names who lend their fame to one side of an intensely complex and volatile situation that are most irksome.

Many of this lot have past form, jumping on any passing bandwagon that gives scope for virtue signalling. Margolyes is perhaps best remembered for posing naked with a dead John Dory (that’s a fish for the uninitiated) in a sustainable oceans campaign, while Peake is a veteran Corbynista who quite recently called for “violent revolution” in the UK.

In normal circumstances, no one much minds what ill-informed nonsense they spout or what publicity seeking high jinks they get up to in pursuit of fashionable causes. 

We tend to indulge the nuttiness of our cherished performers – Benedict Cumberbatch in a post-Hamlet rant at the government over the refugee crisis, or Emma Thompson flying 5,400 miles for a save the planet protest – because they are, well, performers.

Without being too dismissive of their enthusiasms, we just don’t take them as seriously on the political stage as we do in their day jobs.

But the thoughtless, gullible gifting of their weight to the Artists for Palestine just days after the butchering of babies, grandmothers and partying teenagers by Hamas is beyond the pale, even for the most naïve arty types.

What stands out most from the list is those who are absent. Unless I missed them, there is no Emma Thompson, no Greg Wise (her husband), no Mark Rylance or Cumberbatch, no Hugh Grant or Emma Watson, or other leading lights prone to sharing their views.

While a veritable roll call of stars – including Thompson, Juliet Stevenson and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour – backed jailed climate protesters recently in a show of solidarity, the same luminaries are now uncharacteristically quiet.

One hopes they are reluctant to sign up to pro-Palestinian propaganda in the current climate, given the atrocities committed against Jews in Israel, and if that is the case, we must applaud them for their restraint.

Anything or anyone that inflames already heightened tensions is irresponsible at best and, at worst, dangerous, potentially inciting hate and glorifying terrorism.

The past fortnight has seen the highest total of antisemitic incidents in the UK since records started more than 40 years ago, according to the Community Security Trust, a British charity serving the Jewish community. 

Scotland Yard is expecting a weekend of pro-Palestinian protests, some of which are backed by Hamas-supporting organisations, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned on the BBC’s Today programme yesterday that such events in this country, which could attract those who call for the destruction of Jews, were grounds for concern.

He was worried, he said, about the lone operators “who feel they get permission from big group demonstrations”.

He also singled out the BBC, which insists Hamas terrorists are “militants”, over its refusal to refer to acts that “are so unambiguously terroristic” as terrorism.

The corporation has come under fire since October 7 for what is perceived as an anti-Israel bias among some of its top journalists.

The BBC – for many of us, here and around the world, once the gold standard of truth telling – has now admitted that its report blaming an Israeli air strike for the Gaza hospital explosion this week was flawed.

Security minister Tom Tugendhat said, on Today on Thursday, the report had “real costs” and could have contributed to the failure of Joe Biden’s Middle East peace talks, abandoned in the wake of the blast.

And government insiders told the i newspaper that BBC reporting, and its failure to apologise after the initial hospital claims were disputed, had contributed not just to the breakdown in diplomacy but to tensions between communities within Britain, following the reports of a rise in antisemitism.

It’s bad enough if actors, who perhaps know no better, stir up public passions, but less forgivable are the seasoned correspondents, who we trust with delivering the first draft of history, when they call it wrong.

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