The three-part series, “Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs,” has already elicited a flood of protest letters, mostly e-mails, from activists in the British Jewish community against alleged anti-Israel bias.

The series is produced by Norma Percy, who won an award for her 1998 documentary “The Fifty Years War” on the same subject. It attempts to chart the negotiators' progress from former US president Bill Clinton's first efforts up to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in August using interviews with several of the key players.

The first episode opens with then-premier Ehud Barak's attempts to negotiate peace with Syria during a visit to Washington and Clinton's subsequent trip to Geneva for abortive talks with the late Syrian president Hafez Assad.

The scene then switches to Camp David where Barak and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lock horns and fail to agree on the next stages of peace negotiations, before examining Clinton's last-ditch efforts to seal a deal on his visit to Jerusalem prior to giving up his presidency.

One viewer, activist Joy Wolfe, lodged a formal complaint to the BBC over pro-Palestinian bias even before the program was broadcast.

“How are we supposed to give any credence to the BBC's constant claim it is not biased when even in a trailer for an important series on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that bias and injection of opinion is there for all to see?” she wrote in an e-mail to senior BBC executives including Malcolm Balen, the BBC executive who serves as a kind of ombudsman for coverage of this region.

The trailer in question heralded, “The story of how Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak persuaded President Clinton to devote his last 18 months in office to helping make peace with Yasser Arafat. But Barak got cold feet twice. Then Ariel Sharon took a walk around Jerusalem's holiest mosques, and peacemaking was over.”

“Firstly, there is absolutely no evidence to back the view that 'Barak got cold feet twice,'” wrote Wolfe. “He and Arafat shook hands on the most generous peace settlement terms the Palestinians could have ever hoped for.

“It was not Barak who got cold feet, but Arafat, who walked away to unleash more violence as his answer.”

A senior BBC source derided the complaint, telling The Jerusalem Post that such is the situation with constant and often inaccurate complaints that many inevitably are given perfunctory replies and little or no notice is taken of them. The Jewish community does itself no favours with these interventions, the source added, and as for writing in before a program has even been shown, that takes quite some hutzpa.

Balen plainly took a different view, however, writing back to Wolfe to say that the trailer “was not written by a journalist and does not reflect the programme... It will be changed.”

And, indeed, it was, to state: “The story of how Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak persuaded President Clinton to devote his last 18 months in office to helping make peace with Yasser Arafat. But after tense negotiations the deal was never made.”