A documentary built around a carefully curated cast of Israeli progressives serves up yet another dose of pseudo-investigative TV – stripped of context and mainstream views – all designed to reassure Britain of what it already thinks about the IDF
November 13, 2025 11:56
The director is a 34-year-old British-Iranian from Liverpool. The producers include a left-wing Israeli who last year made a film exposing “the conduct of the Israeli military in the West Bank”, and a freelancer who seems to have worked largely for the BBC and radical punk media outfit Vice.
Every single person interviewed on screen hails deep from within Israel’s progressive movement, aside from one or two far-Right extremists who got involved for reasons unknown and ended up uttering predictably inflammatory things, at which the audience could scoff.
You could almost feel the frisson of excitement running through crew and viewers alike when two left-wing Jewish Israelis – Jewish Israelis! – declared that their own country was guilty of “genocide”. Of course, none of the vast majority of Israelis that disagree ever made an appearance.
Welcome to ITV’s Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, the latest piece of genocide porn aiming to lend the credibility of the mainstream media to popular smears of the Middle East’s only democracy. There have been several such programmes, but the particular joy of this offering was that it managed to get the Jews to condemn themselves. Chef’s kiss!
They say that an antisemite only accuses a Jew of theft for the pleasure of seeing him turn out his pockets. Well, on this occasion, ITV managed to sniff out some Jews who quite happily accepted the charges and amplified them for good measure.
With not a single voice given to mainstream opinion, and Israel’s official denials largely relegated to a few lines on the screen just before the credits, a balanced piece of television this was not. What was it, then?
Well, it presented itself as an intrepid investigation revealing the true barbarism of the IDF. But the majority of Britons think the IDF is barbaric anyway, so what exactly was the point? That is a question to which the obvious answer is probably the correct one.
There were certain structural giveaways. First of all, the Palestinian casualty figures made no mention of the numbers of combatants, a slight-of-hand to which we have become wearily accustomed over the last couple of years. The data was attributed to the “Hamas-run health ministry” in the usual perfunctory way, without any recognition of the fact that this made them unreliable to the point of uselessness.
Secondly, although much was made of the physical destruction of Gaza, the fact that most houses had been booby-trapped by the jihadis, necessitating their destruction by Israeli sappers, received no attention.
Even more egregiously, the tunnels, euphemised as “used for smuggling, warfare and to avoid Israeli airstrikes”, were not mentioned until 40 minutes had elapsed, and then only in connection with allegations that Israeli troops had placed GPS trackers on Palestinians to map the labyrinth without endangering their troops.
The tunnels, of course, were another reason why so much of Gaza had to be destroyed. Shorn of such crucial context, the targeting of Gaza’s infrastructure looked rather like a war crime, particularly since the producers managed to winkle out an unsavoury rabbi living in the “Beit El illegal settlement” who openly relished driving a bulldozer into vacated Palestinian homes.
There was the usual claim that Israel had dropped more munitions on Gaza than had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; as usual, nobody pointed out that as many as 246,000 people were killed in Japan, suggesting that Israel had successfully protected a great number of civilians while targeting Hamas underground.
Similarly, the opening shot of the documentary showed a street scene with various Palestinians filming a building with their phones. A few seconds later, it was shelled. To the informed viewer, this was confirmation that the IDF had given advance warning to evacuate. To most people, however, this was evidence of a horrific crime.
Starvation allegations were also present and correct, complete with footage of inexplicably well-fed Gazans, and testimony from an anonymous man who claimed to have worked for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation claiming that Israeli troops had wantonly killed civilians seeking aid.
Given the scandal surrounding Anthony Aguilar, an American GHF contractor who sensationally told the BBC that Israeli soldiers had murdered a young boy, only for that young boy to later turn up alive and well, you’d have thought that ITV would be more careful. But this was an anonymous account delivered with no detail, so I suppose there was no risk of such embarrassment.
As Israel is a rambunctious democracy with a strong tradition of public dissent and a volatile political system, it is the easiest thing in the world for Western Israelophobes to find leftists in the country willing to cooperate with such propaganda.
To give them their due, some Israeli soldiers may very well have committed atrocities on the ground. Remember Abu Ghraib, where American forces subjected Iraqi detainees to torture, sexual humiliation, rape and murder in 2003-4? Criminals can be found in every army. Three hundred thousand Israeli troops served in Gaza, and there may have been a number of psychopaths, fanatics and murderers among them.
As Ze’ev Jabotinsky put it in 1911: “As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them.” Certainly, that is suggested by some of the testimony and footage showcased by ITV.
If true, these people must be brought to justice. But to warp the context, exaggerate the ubiquity of these crimes and deprive the sensible majority of a voice paints a false picture of an IDF comprised entirely of evildoers. Which is what most people think anyway.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out now
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