A correspondent has sent me details of an interesting exchange he has had with the BBC.

My correspondent began by sending this to the BBC:

I live in Israel and was recently in London where I happened to meet one of your employees. He/she told me that in his/her department (I will not specify) there is a rule that the strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean must not be referred to as Israel, in the office, but as Palestine. Now Palestine ceased to exist in 1948. Please confirm if he/she is accurate in his/her statement?

He received no acknowledgement, let alone a reply. So he wrote again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Seven times, in all. Which is an interesting thing in itself, given the BBC Chairman Michael Grade’s statement that “The real test of any organisation is how it deals with complaints” and that, under its charter, the BBC must respond.

Eventually he received this:

Thank you for your emails. Firstly, please accept our most sincere apologies for the delay in replying. As you may well be aware, the BBC receives a phenomenal amount of correspondence everyday, however, we know our correspondents appreciate a quick response and we are sorry you have had to wait on this occasion.

I understand you would like to confirm the information that you have received from one of the BBC employees whilst you was visiting London.

However, I must explain that the BBC employs thousands of staff members, therefore, without a name, we cannot look into this matter further. If you do have a name, and/or department of the person you spoke to, please write back and we will be more than happy to follow this up if possible.

In the meantime, please be assured that I have registered your complaint and concerns on the daily log, this is an internal document which will be made available to the senior management of the BBC.

For more information about the situation in the Middle East, please refer to the following website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2001/israel_and_the_palestinians/default.stm

You will see from the above website that in our reporting, we refer to Israel and he "Palestinians". An example can be found in the country profiles which makes references to the "Israeli and Palestinian territories".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/country_profiles/803257.stm
May I take this opportunity to thank you again for taking time to contact the BBC.

Katherine Tsang
BBC Information

My correspondent replied by pointing out that the identity of the employee was irrelevant to the question, which is straightforward: if there is a rule in at least one department that
the strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean must not be referred to as Israel in the office, but as Palestine. To cite how the BBC publicly describes it is again irrelevant to a question about internal policy.

There has, so far, been no response, either from Ms Tsang, the Governors, or Michael Grade, to whom he then wrote.

I have no idea if there is such a practice internally. But it’s a perfectly straightforward question, and the BBC’s refusal simply to say that the answer is no leads one to think that the answer is yes.

So here’s a question to anyone who actually knows: is it indeed the case that, internally, there is at least one department which, formally or informally, refers to Israel as Palestine? Feel free to email me at mail@stephenpollard.net if you’d rather not leave a comment.