Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East
Radio New Zealand shows how to interview - and how not to
Radio New Zealand's Sunday programme (22 Nov) featured interviews with both sides about the Middle East peace process. During the programme, Chris Laidlaw, the interviewer, made evident his own very clear sympathy for the Palestinians and his animosity toward Israel. Laidlaw's interviews were in stark contrast to Kathryn Ryan's interview with Rabbi David Rosen on the following Thursday, during which she asked neutral questions and allowed her subject to hold the floor. A KBRM member wrote to Mr Laidlaw as follows:
Dear Chris,
We should at least be grateful that Israel got an all-too-rare right of reply on Sunday (your interviews with Mustafa Barghouti and Dor Shapira), but your own sympathies were plain to hear. Allow me to take issue with just a few points raised.
Judging from your audible nods, you approved of Barghouti's repeated references to Israel being an ‘Apartheid’ state. It would have been very interesting to hear you or Barghouti back up this assertion. Have you been to Israel? If you had, you couldn't have failed to observe a flourishing multi-ethnic state, in which all citizens (including close to 1.5 million Arabs — over 20 percent of the population) enjoy virtually equal rights. Show me a single one of Israel's neighbours where that is the case.
Or is what bothers you that Israel, while a secular state, has a uniquely Jewish identity? If that were the case, then you must have real problems reconciling yourself with the ‘Arab Republic of Egypt’, ‘Syrian Arab Republic’, or ‘Islamic Republic of Iran’. In all those countries, as throughout the Middle East, substantial Jewish communities existed alongside Muslims for millennia... until the twentieth century, that is, when those countries largely cleansed themselves of their Jewish peoples. Granted, many if not most of these willingly migrated to Israel, where, finally, they could live as equals. Israel could always have sought to politicise these diverse migrants — declare them refugees, as has been the fate of the Palestinians refugees - but instead focussed on their integration.
(Rhetorical question: if, as can be fairly safely deduced, you support the Palestinians' right of return and/or compensation from Israel, no doubt you would support the same rights for the roughly similar number of Jews deprived of citizenship and property throughout the Arab world last century?)
Moving on. You seem to have bought wholly into the line that it is the Jewish settlements that are the main impediment to peace. Not decades of Palestinian intransigence, violence and terrorism, all underscored by withering and hateful rhetoric against Jews. Nor the series of disastrous wars initiated against Israel from the day of its inception, wars that have conditioned Israel to aggressive self-defence. No, listening to Laidlaw and Barghouti, it all comes down to a series of Jewish settlements dotted around Jerusalem.
Yes, the settlements are politically provocative, and the settlers themselves can come across as dogmatic and arrogant. But looking back over the 61 years since Israel was founded, do you seriously believe that the Palestinians would jump at the chance of peace if only the settlements didn't exist? Moreover, if it's evidence of Apartheid you're looking for, look no further than the apparent attitude of Palestinians that no Jews should live among them. Just as Arabs have lived for centuries in what is now Israel, so too have Jews in what is now the West Bank (and Gaza for that matter ... unilateral Israeli withdrawal from that territory didn't seem to bring peace any closer).
But most stunningly of all, at one point in your discussion with Barghouti you seemed almost to advocate that Palestinians [should] resort to violence (with just enough wriggle room: it was of course other people who might consider such actions justified). Have another listen to what you said, and try to explain how else your words might be interpreted. Just as breathtakingly, you characterised such a course of action, were it followed, as a new departure, as though the Palestinian struggle has to date exemplified peaceful resistance. Chris, have you somehow forgotten the Second Intifada, not to mention the unremitting violence that preceded it] Well, such memories are all too fresh in Israeli minds.
That's why Israel resorted to building a wall to protect itself, although you probably see this as a further act of Apartheid. You also variously portrayed the wall as a land grab. Shaking this perception will be nigh on impossible for Israel. All I would say here is that, to my knowledge, Israel is the only country in the region to have given up land for peace, and I've no doubt it will do so again.
Regardless of all the ugly symbolism that so troubles you, the wall has been very effective: suicide bombers are no longer at liberty to terrorise Israeli citizens. That's why it exists. Such walls, as unfortunate as they are, are not in fact such a rarity in the Middle East: try Googling the one that Saudi Arabia has built to separate it from Yemen, or [the one] on Egypt's border with Gaza. Yet despite being the country with the clearest security imperative for having such a wall, it is only Israel that is condemned by Western commentators like yourself. Doubtless you were also among those who looked the other way while Hamas fired some 8,000 rockets into Israel over the course of four years, then hotly condemned Israel for acting to prevent these outrages against its people.
From the safety and comfort of inner-Wellington, you have the luxury to wring your hands and wax elegiac about the ‘brutality of the imagery’ of the wall. You seemed almost querulous that Israel doesn't dismantle it simply because an international court would like it to. Again, given the widespread tendency, exhibited by you on Sunday, to not so much as acknowledge the gruesome acts of terrorism that prompted the wall's construction, are you surprised that Israelis have long-since stopped holding out for the West's approval? Even the Israeli left has come to resent the moral relativism, appeasement and hypocrisy they hear at every turn.
In your discussion with Shapira, you seemed to suggest that Palestinians' hatred of Israel is the direct result of Israeli actions. Well, here's some news for you: they hated Israel and its people long before they became ‘occupiers’. Have you had a chance yet to consider the question you read out on air, namely why it was that the PLO was founded when the West Bank and Gaza were occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively? What a tragedy that those countries didn't use that period of relative peace between Israelis and Palestinians to forge a Palestinian state instead of plotting Israel's destruction. How tragic that Israel's neighbours could not abide a sovereign Jewish entity covering less that half a percent of the Middle East (with a land area of between a half and two-thirds that of the Netherlands).
Contrast your loaded questions with Kathryn Ryan's to Rabbi David Rosen on Thursday. Ryan asked intelligent but neutral questions, and allowed her subject to expand on these as he saw fit. The result was an engrossing discussion. We didn't learn what if any prejudices Ryan might have, which, however highly esteemed she is, is exactly as it should be.
I'll leave it there. I don't expect you to be swayed by anything I've said. But if nothing else, perhaps just resist musing aloud on the relative merits of Palestinian violence against Israelis. God knows there's been enough of that already.
Best Regards,
[a KBRM member]