It was a difficult summer for Israel, first and foremost for the majority of Israel’s population, which found itself running for shelter on a daily basis for weeks on end, as thousands of Hamas rockets, some Iranian-made, were launched from Gaza.

Meanwhile in the UK, demonstrations against Israel often saw the participation of protesters who openly supported Hamas and compared Israel to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, unabashedly spurting vitriolic hatred. One woman was videotaped during a protest saying “Israel is the most evil country in the world”, while another said Israel was surely “the anti-Christ”. At the same time, anti-Semitism reached unprecedented levels, with over 300 incidents recorded by the UK’s Jewish Community Security Trust in July alone.

Looking at the media’s role in shaping UK public opinion, a few patterns emerge: Coverage of the conflict by parts of the mainstream media was more mature than in the past; clearly lessons were learned and steps taken to avoid some of the usual pitfalls.

BBC Trending posted a strong video-piece pointing to the use of fake photographs supposedly from Gaza but in fact not from Gaza at all, but Iraq, Syria or elsewhere; another article detailed the low reliability of statistics on civilian casualty rates coming out of Gaza.

The main outlets positioned their correspondents inside Gaza as well as in Israel’s south, reporting on rocket fire and visiting the Hamas tunnels as they were exposed on the Israeli side by the IDF.

Israel’s case was further strengthened by the realization in significant parts of the media that the challenge posed by radical Islamist groups was not unique to Israel, and in fact was being faced by the UK itself, both in Syria and Iraq, and as a national security issue in the context of European jihadists returning home to pursue their terrorist aspirations.

Meanwhile, anti-Israel activists were outraged at what they perceived as a pro-Israel bias, demonstrating outside BBC offices, and holding meetings in which they repeated the classic age-old tales of Israel’s (in continuation of the Jews’) mythic “control of the media”.

Read the article in full at Ynet.