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 Israeli regime will end because occupying powers are illegitimate and 
 unsustainable, not because Iran plans to fire nuclear missiles at the 
 Jewish state or commit genocide. 
  
 Overlooked by the programme makers is the fact that "fragile" Israel is 
 currently the only country in the Middle East armed with nuclear warheads, 
 several hundred of them, as well as one of the most powerful armies in the 
 world, which presumably make most of its neighbours feel "fragile" too, 
 with far more reason. 
  
 And, as we are being persuaded how "fragile" Israel really is, another 
 former prime minister, Ehud Barak, is interviewed. "Ultimately we are 
 standing alone," he says, in apparent justification for an illegal, 
 unilateral strike. Iran's nuclear reasearch facilities, Barak warns, are 
 hidden deep underground, so deep that "no conventional weapon can 
 penetrate", leaving us to infer that in such circumstances Israel will have 
 no choice but use a tactical nuclear strike in its "self-defence". And, 
 getting into his stride, Barak adds that some facilities are in crowded 
 urban areas "where any attack could end up in civilian collateral damage". 
  
 But despite the terrifying scenario laid out by Israel's leaders, the BBC 
 website cheerleads for Israel in the same manner as the programme-makers, 
 suggesting that Israel has the right to engineer a clash of civilisations: 
 "With America unlikely to take military action, the pressure is growing on 
 Israel's leaders to launch a raid." 
  
 As should be clear by now, the Israeli government's fingerprints are all 
 over this BBC "documentary". And that is hardly surprising because the man 
 behind this "independent" production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam 
 Shalev. 
  
 Shalev, a graduate of a New York film school, has been making a spate of 
 documentaries through his production company Highlight Films, based in 
 Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, that have been lapped up by the BBC and other 
 foreign broadcasters. With the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for 
 Shalev to sell his films around the world. 
  
 Shalev, who claims that he doesn't "espouse a political view", started his 
 career by making documentaries on less controversial subjects. He has 
 produced films on Ethiopian immigrants arriving in Israel, and on the Zaka 
 organisation, Jewish religious fundamentalists who arrive at the scene of 
 suicide attacks quite literally to pick up the pieces, of human remains. 
  
 In the past his films managed to bypass the reticence of broadcasters like 
 the BBC to broach the combustible subject of the Israeli-Palestinian 
 conflict outside their news programmes by touching on the topic obliquely. 
 Importantly, however, Shalev's films always humanise his Israeli subjects, 
 showing them as complex, emotional and caring beings, while largely 
 ignoring the millions of Palestinians the Israeli government and army are 
 oppressing. 
  
 According to a profile of Shalev published in the Israeli media in 2004, 
 his success derives from the fact that he has developed a "soft-sell 
 approach", showing Israel in a good light without "the straightforward 
 'hasbara' [propaganda] efforts which explain Israel's case that Israel's 
 Foreign Ministry is required to disseminate to European and American news 
 outlets." 
  
 In the words of an Israeli public relations executive, Shalev has a skill 
 in telling Israel's story in ways that international broadcasters 
 appreciate: "[Shalev] also shows the Israeli side, he is not one of those 
 traitors who sell their ideology for money. He has the skill to market it 
 in such a way that overseas they want to see it, and this is very 
 important." 
  
 But recently Shalev has grown more confident to try the hard sell for 
 Israel, apparently sure that the BBC and other foreign broadcasters will 
 still buy his films. And that is because Shalev offers them something that 
 other film-makers cannot: intimate access to Israel's security forces, an 
 area off-limits to his rivals. 
  
 Before the disengagement from Gaza last year, for example, Shalev made a 
 sympathetic documentary, shown by the BBC, about a day in the life of one 
 Israeli soldier serving there. The film largely concealed the context that 
 might have alerted viewers to the fact that the soldier was enforcing a 
 four-decade illegal occupation of Gaza, or that the Strip is an open-air 
 prison in which thousands of Palestinian have been killed by the Israeli 
 army and in which a majority of Gazans live in abject poverty. 
  
 Interviewed about the documentary, Shalev observed: "The army really is 
 very, very careful. There is no indiscriminate firing. I saw, and this was 
 not a show put on just for us, that before any shot is fired there is 
 confirmation that there is nobody behind or in front of the objective. The 
 army is very sensitive to non-deliberate fire." 
  
 In other words, Shalev's film for the BBC shed no light on why Israel's 
 "deliberate" fire has killed hundreds of Palestinian children during the 
 second intifada or why a large number of civilians have died from Israeli 
 gunfire and missile strikes inside the Gaza Strip. 
  
 Earlier this year Shalev made another film for the BBC, "The Hunt for Black 
 October", to coincide with the release of Stephen Spielberg's movie Munich. 
 "The BBC gains exclusive access to the undercover Mossad agents assigned to 
 track down the Palestinian group responsible for the murder of Israeli 
 athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics," the BBC was able to glow in its 
 promotional material. 
  
 Shalev's latest film, "Will Israel bomb Iran?", follows this well-trodden 
 path. Arabs and Muslims are again deprived of a voice, as are non-Israeli 
 experts. 
  
 So why did the BBC buy this blatant piece of propaganda? 
  
 Here are a few clues. Shalev's film includes: 
  
   * footage taken from inside Hizbullah bunkers under the supervision of 
   the Israeli army as it occupied south Lebanon. 
  
   * a "rare view" of the inside of the Israeli army's satellite control 
   room, which spies on Israel's Arab neighbours and Iran and which, 
   according to programme, is "incredibly guarded about its security 
   arrangements". 
  
   * an exclusive appearance by Israel's former military chief of staff, 
   Moshe Yaalon, who we are told is "rarely interviewed". 
  
   * a glimpse inside a Rafael weapons factory, which the programme tells 
   us is "rarely filmed". 
  
 In other words, the BBC, and the other broadcasters who will air this 
 "documentary" in the coming weeks and months, has been dazzled by Shalev's 
 ability to show us the secret world of the Israeli army. So dazzled, it 
 seems, that it has forgotten to check -- or worse, simply doesn't care -- 
 what message Shalev is inserting between his exclusive footage. 
  
 It might have occurred to someone at the BBC to wonder why Shalev gets 
 these chances to show things no one else is allowed to. Could it be that 
 the "hasbara" division of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has got far more 
 sophisticated than it once was? 
  
 Is the Israeli government using Shalev, wittingly or not, and is he in turn 
 using the BBC, to spread Israeli propaganda? Propaganda that may soon 
 propel us towards the "clash of civilisations" so longed for by Israel's 
 leadership. 
  
 [Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is 
 the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the 
 Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the 
 United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is 
 http://www.jkcook.net] 
  
  
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  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)