Complaint
A complainant argued that there were two material inaccuracies in this online article and its related podcast. Firstly, the article had wrongly stated that the Sea of Galilee (also known as Lake Tiberias) lay within the area occupied by Israel in 1967. Secondly, the podcast had been wrong in saying that, in 1948, Israel had given the lake “a new name, inspired from the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible]” when in fact its original Hebrew name of Kinneret, which had never fallen out of use, had been restored. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the ĢƵ’s editorial standards of accuracy.
Outcome
The first statement had already been acknowledged as an error by the management of ĢƵ Arabic, and the article had been amended to make clear that the lake lay within recognised Israeli territory (with a note explaining the correction). In the ECU’s judgement, this served to resolve the issue of complaint. The ECU accepted that the second statement, which had been made by a contributor to the podcast rather than a representative of the ĢƵ, was inexact but did not regard it as materially misleading. While Kinneret is biblical in origin, it is clear from historical sources that by the modern period the lake was widely known by other names and that the Hebrew name had largely fallen out of common usage. The ECU noted included in the Jewish Virtual Library which says “in Israel, the biblical name Lake Kinneret … has been revived”. Independent historical mapping and sources support the notion that this revival was part of the broader post-1948 nation-building effort, in which were re-adopted. In that context, the ECU judged that the contributor’s reference to Israel having “coined a new name inspired by the Tanakh” can be reasonably understood as a way of describing that process of reintroduction rather than a literal claim that Israel invented the name in 1948.
Resolved/not upheld