Last week acclaimed Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa won her lawsuit  against the prestigious Oxford Union.  The 200-year-old debating society at Oxford University in the UK had invited Abulhawa to defend the motion, “This House believes Israel is an apartheid state engaged in genocide” in Nov. 2024.  Her 20 minute opening statement was breathtaking in its hard-hitting logic and condemnations against Zionism and Israel.   In the end, Abulhawa’s side won the debate, with 278 yeas versus 59 nays.   A day or two later, the Oxford Union posted a video of the debate online as is the custom.  However the Oxford Union had intentionally edited several statements Abulhawa made in the debate, likely as a way to soften the criticism of Israel. 

A  report in the Electronic Intifada details the cuts – here are two:  

“One deleted passage described the Israeli military leaving explosive toys in southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s that detonated when children picked them up.

“Another asked listeners to imagine Palestinians inflicting on Jewish captives the sexual torture inflicted on Palestinians in Israeli prisons, describing assaults with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks and fire extinguishers, and referring to the torture and death in Israeli detention of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned Gaza orthopedic surgeon, killed in April 2024.”

Two years later, with the help of the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), Abulhawa won her lawsuit—to replace the edited version with her unedited or original version.  Of course the Oxford Union admitted no responsibility for this, and there was no apology. 

Also last week, Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, broadcast  “Bearing Witness: Canadian doctors in Gaza” on its award-winning radio program Ideas.  It was a good but a tardy sign that, three years after the start of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, the CBC featured short interviews with five Canadian physicians who have been providing care and hope to Palestinians in Gaza over the last three years. 

Two women and three men talked about what they had seen, whom they had saved and the far larger number they could not save.  Two talked about the problem of being allowed to enter Gaza, and how they were denied the right to carry in medicines, painkillers, bandages and medical equipment.  One woman doctor had three young children whom she must have seen in the faces of her scores of young patients she attended to. Nahla Ayed, a veteran CBC journalist and herself of Palestinian background, was the host. 

The Dog that Didn’t Bark

I listened closely. 

But like the Sherlock Holmes tale The Dog that Didn’t Bark, it was what was missing that told me what I needed to know. 

At no time, not in Ayed’s respectful introductions, nor in any doctor’s own words was the word Israel mentioned. 

So Dr Eman Loubani, a pediatric emergency physician from London, Ont who volunteered to go to Gaza, was stopped by border officials on her way into Gaza from Jordan.  She had got permission from the UN, and had got “initial approval” by the Israeli army, then was forced to grovel for two to three hours just to be allowed to enter the all but destroyed enclave.  

That was the first and last time the word Israeli was mentioned on the program. 

It couldn’t be a mistake.  Or an oversight.  If anyone had listened to Ideas from the start, it was not clear who had shot and bombed the people the doctors were trying to save.  It was never said that Israel was responsible for the shootings and bombings.  It was not noted that Israel had caused the deaths of more than 75,000 people in Gaza, including 60,000 children.  

How childish.  How ridiculous, you say.  Everyone knows who is behind the genocide – we don’t need to be told. 

Why air brush out the word Israel?

But wait. There is something about five doctors’ eyewitness accounts of the horrors of civilian life and death under brutal occupation, something about the only conflict in the world in which medicines, drugs, blood pressure equipment and even some doctors are not allowed in.  Again, Dr Loubani said she was on one of two UN buses attempting to enter Gaza to bring health care workers.  For two to three hours the buses were held up by the authorities.   An Australian doctor and nurse “had been turned back because they had spoken out against the genocide publicly.” 

But I have a feeling the words Israel and Israeli had been air brushed out of the doctors’ accounts.  

To a person just tuning in, though the doctors talked about the army, the authorities, and even the soldiers – there was no mention of who they were. 

Here we have it.  

After the CBC has been justifiably  criticized for refusing to air pro-Palestinian guests, and warning journalists not to “cross the line” into antisemitism in their coverage, and not to offend senior producers, the CBC finally aired interviews with Canadian doctors who had volunteered to work in Gaza.  

So why delete the words Israel and Israeli from the interviews? Surely it was the Israeli army that patrolled the border into Gaza and refused admission to the two medical volunteers.  Surely it was Israeli sharp shooters that blasted bullets into children’s heads.  Surely it was Israeli drone strikes that killed and maimed Palestinians who have to shelter under plastic tents.  Surely it was Israel that had bombed every one of the 36 hospitals in Gaza , so only a couple can still function on a very limited basis—without drugs, anaesthetic, dressings, clean water or prosthetics.   

I doubt that in the original interviews all five doctors never said the word Israel.  Or used the adjective Israeli.  Of all people,  the doctors knew who had perpetrated the war crimes, and the slaughter of mainly women and children.  I’m sure they referred to the Israeli army and the IDF. 

But none surfaced in the Ideas broadcast.  

Does it matter? We all know who’s responsible. 

Well it matters because once again we have evidence of Canada’s public broadcaster’s refusal to allow even medical doctors who were themselves in Gaza to tell the whole truth, to name the genocidal state of Israel as it could offend “official” Jews and make trouble for the CBC.   

In the case of Susan Abulhawa a court had to force the Oxford Union to broadcast her arguments in full – not air brush her pointed even aggressive language concerning Israel’s crimes.  In the first week after the edited version was posted, more than 250,000 people watched.  However, pro-Israel forces at Oxford can no longer censor the truth.  

We’re not so lucky here. 

Photo at the top and below: Razan, three, holds the bullet that was removed from the nape of her neck by UK-Med surgeons. The bullet passed through her mother’s hip and into Razan, narrowly missing her spinal cord. (Photograph: Kieran Seager in The Guardian)