Gary Lineker was famously never booked for foul play despite a 16-year career in professional football with more than 650 club and international appearances. Unfortunately, off the pitch it was his instinct towards fair play that ultimately ended his career at the BBC, where he has presented its flagship football programme Match of the Day since 1999. “It wasn’t meant to end this way,” he said in an emotional sign-off on Sunday.

The official reason for Lineker’s “resignation” (insiders say it’s obvious he left to avoid the BBC sacking him) was that he reposted a recent clip of Palestinian-Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu to which an uncredited social media user had added a rodent emoji and the caption “Zionism explained in two minutes”. Israel supporters clamoured that Lineker was repeating the established antisemitic trope of Jews as rats, once a staple of the vile propaganda of Nazi Germany. However, Buttu’s message itself was historically accurate and bore no trace of racist discourse, just cold hard fact, and the BBC’s most highly paid presenter says he did not even notice the emoji, or he wouldn’t have posted the clip. He duly apologised and deleted the post. But that was not enough. Israel’s advocates have been after Lineker ever since he started speaking out in favour of justice for Palestine. It’s reasonable to assume their friends in positions of power at the world’s biggest public service broadcaster decided this time he had to go.

In any other context, it’s impossible to imagine a football pundit being defenestrated for such a mistake. No one is suggesting that Lineker intentionally put out an antisemitic message or harbours a scintilla of animus towards Jewish people. Instead, his harshest critics, a group called the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a blatantly pro-Israel advocacy organisation, ridiculously claimed the broadcaster had abused his position to promote “increasingly propagandist politics… even promoting dehumanising and extreme messages”.

No other country’s advocates could make such outlandish claims against a titan of British broadcasting and be taken seriously. But we’re talking about Israel, which routinely weaponizes accusations of antisemitism against its critics; it’s also 2025, nearly two years into the world’s first livestreamed genocide committed by Israel; and it’s the BBC, which has made some horrible and cowardly editorial choices in Israel’s favour since 7 October 2023. Many critics believe these decisions have served to provide cover for the deliberate destruction of life and the things that make life possible in Gaza since the Palestinian resistance broke through the occupation army's defences on that day.

The argument against Lineker was that, in pursuit of the BBC mission to provide balanced news coverage, employees should be seen as impartial on controversial topics, including sports presenters and especially prominent “names”. Lineker rejected that position in a recent interview, saying that, yes, topics like domestic UK politics should be kept within the domain of impartiality, but why does Israel enjoy the same privilege, when it’s not extended to other faraway places. He then relayed an old journalist’s adage about the importance of reporting facts over opinion. The argument goes, if one person says it's raining and another person says it’s sunny, don't quote them both—look out the window! In other words, you can’t take a “both sides approach” when the world’s worst crimes are being committed, and brazenly lied about, by the perpetrators.

But the reality in Britain today, and across the west I’m sure, is that if you look out of the window and see Israel raining all its military might down on Gaza, starving a captive population, with its politicians openly admitting a desire to kill or drive away as many as possible, you’d be wise to keep your mouth shut. If you don’t, you’ll put your career at risk, or worse. Several prominent pro-Palestine journalists have been arrested under counter-terrorism laws in the UK and could face jail sentences for the crime of… we don’t know yet, but the real crime was purely “doing their job in a way that made Israel look bad”. It’s an indictment of Britain’s entire journalism profession that this story has received zero coverage in the mainstream media.

The irony is that however much our government and our mainstream journalists distort the reality, Israel’s war for narrative control has already been lost. Social media cannot be filtered by a few powerful editors and media moguls. Tiktok and Instagram stories coming out of Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere are too powerful, too compelling, for anyone but the most propagandized fan of Israel to ignore. That’s probably why there was overwhelming public support for Lineker, and massive disdain directed at the BBC for caving into the pressure to remove such a beloved figure. A post to the story by BBC culture and media editor Katie Razzall entitled “Gary Lineker: A sorry end to a BBC career” was torn to shreds by users on the corporation’s X account. Commenter @TheBluSocialist spoke for many when she wrote: “History will remember him fondly....  the BBC, however, will be known as the broadcaster complicit in genocide.”

Razzall’s piece contains several ludicrous lines, including that it “was difficult to see how [Lineker] could continue presenting for the corporation, particularly at a time when the BBC is enmeshed in another controversy surrounding a documentary about Gaza, which it pulled after discovering the child narrator was the son of a Hamas official”. In fact, the pulling of the film, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was just another scandalous example of the BBC surrendering under Israeli lobbying (covered by Tamooda in March). But—like Gary Lineker—it made Israel look bad and the result was inevitable.

Perhaps more controversial (but unremarked on by Razzall or any other BBC journalist) is that a new documentary called Gaza: Medics Under Fire, investigating Israeli attacks on hospitals and staff in Gaza, is being suppressed by the corporation despite having been cleared editorially multiple times, according to its coproducers Basement Films. What’s “difficult to see” in reality is how the BBC can continue claiming to be impartial, given how many times crucial information has been left out, glossed over, or turned upside-down in the corporation’s relentless efforts to keep Israel’s collapsing reputation intact. 

For example, the BBC rarely mentions that the weight of evidence has led many credible authorities to conclude Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. If an interviewee ever makes the accusation, the BBC interviewer will invariably push back strongly on Israel’s behalf. It happened for the umpteenth time on the day of Lineker’s last broadcast to Dr Tanya Haj Hassa. Meanwhile, the numerous genocidal statements by Israeli officials that provide prima facie evidence of murderous intent are usually buried deep in articles on the BBC website, if they are reported at all—Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocation of the crushing of biblical Amalek has never been reported by the BBC. More broadly, so much of the shocking footage from Gaza streamed to our phones never makes it to the BBC’s pages. No wonder audience are furious. Even the odious leitmotif of Israeli soldiers posing with the underwear of dead or displaced Gaza women has never appeared on the BBC websites. As a former employee in that newsroom, I can guarantee such a story would definitely have been covered with glee if it had been a recurring feature of any other army’s conduct.

As Israel’s starvation siege on Gaza and continued bombing campaign produces some of the most disturbing stories and images to date, there have been modest signs broadcasters and politicians are changing their permissive language towards Israel to something more critical. Until we see concrete action—cutting off the supply of weapons that Israel needs to continue waging war, economic sanctions, material intervention to stop the mass slaughter—we can consider any statements to be mere lip gloss. Meanwhile, the disappearance from our screens of Lineker—one of the UK’s best-loved and most high-profile broadcasters—for an inadvertently offensive Instagram post shows us that the UK still a long way from being able to have free and honest discussions about Israel.