Tim Franks: How I realised that being Jewish really does affect my Middle East reporting at the BBC

Telegraph

7 days ago

This should not be about me. I understand that. The turmoil in the Middle East that we are witnessing – partially witnessing – supersedes anything of interest about me and my convictions. That should always be true of BBC journalists. But as philosophers have pointed out: Jews can be useful to think with.
So this is one Jew's attempt to be useful.
On one level, it's dead easy. All BBC journalists know the price of entry: when you come to work, you leave your proclivities at the door. That's the blood oath, tattooed across our chests. What I have come to realise, in a selectively quotable phrase that will be catnip to the conspiracists, is that my Jewishness is informing my journalism. And, perhaps more strangely to some, my journalism is informing my Jewish identity.
This, I grant, is a change. These are words I never thought I'd think, let alone utter. What's changed is that I've changed.
Back in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a short book on anti-Semitism. It's at times brilliantly incisive, at others clankingly off. One of his more penetrating observations is that Jews can be 'over-determined'. He meant that their motives are always under scrutiny. And that, in itself, can be disabling: Jews can feel trapped in the cage of others' preconceptions.
When I started my tour of duty as the BBC's Middle East correspondent almost 20 years ago, I was extremely dubious about the gig. I felt profoundly unprepared and ignorant. Up to that point, I hadn't really tried to navigate the raging currents of opinion across the region; I'd just tried to bypass them. Even if, somehow, I could reach a point where I might think myself sufficiently well-informed, could I trust my subconscious tendencies?
Lots of people very publicly offered their own answers to this question even before I took up the role. They said that it was inevitable I'd be biased one way or another, tilting the balance either for good or for ill. Or that I was on a mission impossible: trying to occupy simultaneous states of Jew and journalist.
In 2008 I was a year or so into my posting and hoovering down lunch at the back of our old, scruffy bureau on Jaffa Street. I heard screaming outside and looked out of the third floor window. A front-loader tractor appeared to have hit a bus. A moment later, it was clear it was no accident. I watched the tractor reverse and then smash back into the bus, so that it tipped over.
A colleague and I raced down the stairs and out onto the street. We pursued the tractor, against the fleeing crowds, as it careened into, and even over, cars and pedestrians. Eventually, a passer-by managed to climb on to the outside of the cab and shoot the driver at point-blank range. We filmed the killing, close up.
Back in the bureau, I drew breath and started broadcasting. 'So Tim,' asked one presenter down the line from London. 'Was this terrorism?'
'I don't know if the man in that tractor cab belonged to a militant group,' I said. 'But what I can say is that what just happened on the street outside sowed terror among those who were there.'
So far, so unexceptional. Except that within hours, there was both condemnation that the BBC – that I – had failed to call it 'terrorISM', and also condemnation that we were giving this one deadly incident disproportionate airtime because it happened to take place on our doorstep.
In other words, I was taking flak from both sides.
For my critics the report simply added to what, in their minds, was the substantial body of evidence that – as they took pains to tell me – I was either a self-hating Jew with obvious political proclivities, or, in the message from one listener, a hook-nosed parasite erupting from the bowels of honest journalism.
I was more than willing to engage with audience criticism of what I was covering and how I was covering it. Often there could be a reasonable doubt to address – a context I had failed to make clear, a shorthand that had been too short. But often that criticism had first to be picked out of a slagheap of causation: that my choice of words, the story I had chosen to report had betrayed my filthy prejudices.
In response, I chose simply to deflect, not to engage, to meet the rage with a neutral glance.
As far as I was concerned, my Jewishness and my journalism were like two sets of kosher cutlery: one for the meat, one for the milk; different drawers, never mixed – and that was vital, given the toxic brew of identity politics, blood-letting in the Middle East, and boiling fury over the BBC.
This strategy seemed to work, at least for me, then and in the years since, as I repeatedly returned to the region, and in my current role as presenter of Newshour, the main news and current affairs programme on the BBC World Service.
Recently, however, I've had a revelation: I've been deluding myself.
This revelation came as I scuffed away at a hitherto unknown family history. As I discovered forebears of mine scattered across centuries and continents, the reporter within me started to interrogate them, and the Jew within me realised I was no dispassionate observer.
Why had cousin Diz – you may know him as Benjamin Disraeli – apparently faked his familial back-story so that, outrageously, my rather more mundane family line had not been included in his genealogy?
What did it say about the place of Jews in the lands where they have settled, and the evergreen lure of fantasies about Jewish power?
In an 1890s political pamphlet Abraham Mendes Chumaceiro (pictured above on a stamp) wrote: 'Where is it written that all Jews think the same?'
And while it was quite right that, decades after his unremarked death, another cousin – Abraham Mendes Chumaceiro – was celebrated for his championing of black civil rights with a bust, a stamp and a street-name, I found myself drawn to a throwaway sentence he wrote in an 1890s political pamphlet: 'Where is it written that all Jews think the same?'
That remains a question for the ages.
I have always known that I am blessed that I do a job I love in a country where I can openly practise my faith. It's a given that neither was always the case for my ancestors from Lisbon to Amsterdam, from Lithuania to Curaçao.
But unshrouding this family history made me see that what fuels the Jew within me also fuels the journalist within me, and vice versa: the struggle to understand, a sense of injustice, of wonder, of humility about how much we know and how much we are almost certainly getting wrong, and a certain base level of set-jawed bloody-mindedness.
So: I'm a Jewish journalist at the BBC, and this is what I think. My job is to be questioning, and self-questioning. It may not be easy. But it is that simple.
Tim Franks's book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, The Jew And An Argument About Identity, is published by Bloomsbury at £20. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books