Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East

April 5, 2009

Email to Radio Rhema

The theme of Radio Rhema's Sunday Night Live talkback programme on April 5 was ‘Israel, Palestine and the Peace Process’. The programme opened with a discussion between the host, Tim Sisarich, and the authors of a recently published book, Israel -— Five Views on People, Land and State. The talkback that followed was well balanced, largely due to the efforts of Tim Sisarich to look at the Middle East conflict from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. KBRM member Kirsty Walker listened to the programme and emailed Radio Rhema after one caller spoke extensively about the Palestinian refugees who left Israel in 1948. Her email was read on air:

Hi Tim, If you want to talk about the Arabs who left Israel when the Arab nations invaded it in 1948, don't forget the more than 800,000 Jews who were ethnically cleansed from ALL the Arab nations following the establishment of Israel. They were forced to leave their ancestral homes, leaving property and possessions, ending up as refugees in Israel.
Don't forget that not all Arabs were driven out of Israel by Jews — Arab leaders told many Palestinian Arabs to leave because they truly believed that they would defeat Israel and the Arabs would be able to return to their homes.
Don't forget that many Jews had been living in Israel for many generations and that many Arabs had only been in Palestine since the turn of the 20th century, seeking employment in Jewish run industries.
Don't forget that Jordan destroyed the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem and forcibly removed the Jewish residents from that city until the Israelis regained it in 1967.
There is pain on both sides of this conflict, but too often modern Jewish history is buried under Palestinian grievances. For every Palestinian claim, you will find that there is an equally compelling Jewish one, it's just that the media only concentrate the Palestinian side of the story.

As the debate continued, Kirsty made a brief call near the end of the programme.
In her call Kirsty suggested that the Christian community needed to better inform itself about the often complex history and politics of the Middle East, and particularly about the organisations involved in the conflict; that the mainstream media was not an unbiased source of news about Israel; that the growing anti-Israel coverage in the UN and the media was feeding anti-Semitism globally and that Christians needed to speak out and act against this growing anti-Semitism.