The March 5th edition of the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme included an item (from 2:45:41 here) relating to a meeting of the Arab League in Cairo the previous day. Remarkably, that item did very little to inform the BBC’s domestic radio audiences about the content of a proposal put forward by the Arab League, with two of the three questions posed to the contributor relating to other topics.
Also notable was the failure of the presenter, Amol Rajan, to challenge any of his interviewee’s problematic statements or point out his omissions. [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]
Rajan: “Arab leaders are attending an emergency summit in Cairo today [sic]. The 22-member League of Arab States has approved an Egyptian proposal for a phased reconstruction of Gaza. You may recall a few weeks ago President Trump talked about moving the population of Gaza out of Gaza in order to build something like the Riviera of the Middle East. This is the point at which his defenders say don’t take the president too literally. And of course Arab leaders have a very different plan now. They say it will take 5 years, they want 53 billion dollars to fund the reconstruction and they want to reassert the primacy of the PA – the Palestinian Authority – eventually restoring them to power and shutting Hamas out. Israel has rejected the plan.”
Rajan’s introduction of his interviewee failed to point out to listeners that, like the authors of the proposal, he is Egyptian and the first question related not to the Arab League’s proposal but to his interviewee’s already publicised rejection of that earlier one put forward by the US administration.
Rajan: “Let’s speak to Ambassador Hossam Zaki who is the assistant secretary general of the Arab League. […] Thank you very much indeed for joining us, for making the time when you’ve got such a busy day. Can I just ask you to spell out very clearly from your point of view why it is that President Trump’s idea, which does have some support from Israel – the government of Israel – why is his approach wrong?”
Zaki: “Well his approach is wrong because it is based on the forced displacement of Palestinians out of their homes and of their land. This is against international law and we have said this time and again. This is not a way to treat this man-made crisis. This is a war that has been waged by Israel partly in…with the aim of driving Palestinians out of their territory. And they want to grab the territory and they have a problem which is the Palestinian people because it…it still holds to to its territory and its land and this a kind of proposal that would help driving them out of their land and it’s not acceptable.”
Rajan failed to point out to his listeners that the “man-made crisis” began because Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th 2023 and slaughtered 1,200 of its citizens. He made no reference to the fact that Hamas, other Gaza Strip-based terrorist groups and even Gazan civilians took hundreds of hostages and that 59 Israelis and foreign nationals are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip seventeen months later. Neither did he bother to ask his interviewee how his predictable claim that Israel’s aim is to drive Palestinians out aligns with the fact that after seventeen months of war, the vast majority of them are still there – not least due to Egyptian refusals to allow them to escape a war zone. Rajan also failed to challenge Zaki’s unevidenced “grab the territory” assertion.
Instead, Rajan chose to focus listeners’ attentions on a selected part of a social media post.
Rajan: “Well the reason I ask you, if I may Ambassador, is because Oren Marmorstein […], the foreign ministry spokesman for Israel, wrote on social media ‘Now, with President Trump’s idea, there is an opportunity for the Gazans to have free choice based on their free will. Instead, Arab states have rejected this opportunity, without giving it a fair chance, and continue to level baseless accusations against Israel.’ Before we get into why you think your plan is superior, what would you say to Mr Marmorstein?”
Zaki: “Well the Israelis continue to think and speak in their own bubble. They are not in touch with what the rest of the world is saying. They, I think, deliberately choose not to be in touch because if they were in touch, much of what they have been doing would not be done. So…those comments and other comments are really against everything international law says and against…humanity and against morals. So we don’t place much importance on such comments. We know where they go.”
Interestingly, Rajan refrained from telling listeners that the social media post he selectively quoted also relates to the fact that the Arab League’s proposal fails to mention the October 7th 2023 attacks by Hamas, thereby avoiding the need to ask Zaki why that is the case.
Rajan: “Understood. And looking at your proposal in some detail, reading about it, you do have…you do place significant importance on the idea the Palestinian Authority – the PA – being able to eventually run Gaza. There’s the question of funding, there’s a five-year plan. But why do you think, based on what you’ve seen so far, that the PA has the necessary eh…political and leadership clout to do the job that’s required?”
Zaki: “Well it has the moral authority. It has the administrative capability, even though it has been severely curtailed by the Israeli occupation. And it has the know-how because it has been in government and in government business for 30 years since Oslo, since ’93. So we know that if we want Palestinians to be governed by Palestinians – as everybody in the world wants except Israelis and some Americans of course – I think this is the best way to go about it. This is…there is no other way. We do not want to have non-Palestinians come into Gaza and govern Palestinians. That would not be the right thing to do.”
Interestingly, Rajan did not ask his Egyptian interviewee what he thinks about the fact that “non-Palestinians” – i.e. Egypt – governed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip between 1948 and 1967. Neither did he point out to listeners that the Palestinian Authority has not held elections for over 19 years, that its president is now in the twentieth year of his four-year term, that the PA is rife with corruption or that it continues to give financial rewards to terrorists. Instead, Rajan closed the item there:
Rajan: “Ambassador Hossam Zaki, assistant secretary general of the Arab League, thank you very much indeed for your time.”
As noted at the Jerusalem Post, the Arab League proposal was welcomed by Hamas.
“If you don’t want to wade through all the clauses – filled with tired and outdated ideas like the “right of return,” a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, Israel-occupied Golan, a UN peacekeeping force, genocide, apartheid, and the “indispensable role of UNRWA” – just know this: Hamas welcomed it. And that is really all one needs to know to judge the plan.
“We welcome the plan to rebuild Gaza, and we call for the provision of all the elements needed for its success,” Hamas said.
Why wouldn’t Hamas embrace it? The plan makes no mention of them – not once – nor does it acknowledge the terrorist organization’s brutal attack on October 7, the event that triggered the war and the devastation that followed. […]
The proposal envisions a team of independent Palestinian technocrats running Gaza initially until a reformed Palestinian Authority assumes control. Nowhere does it mention disarming Hamas or demilitarizing the territory – so naturally, Hamas has no objections.”
One might have thought that the ‘Today’ production team and Amol Rajan – who claimed to have been “looking at your proposal in some detail” – would have considered that part of the story to be relevant to their obligation to provide “a range and depth of analysis” so that BBC audiences can become “informed citizens”, particularly in light of the mentions of Israel and US rejections of the plan.
Moreover, not only were Zaki’s claims and omissions not challenged by Rajan during the live broadcast, they were further uncritically amplified in a March 5th BBC News website report by David Gritten titled “US and Israel reject Arab alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan”:
“The Assistant Secretary General of the Arab League, Hossam Zaki, told the BBC on Wednesday that Trump’s approach was unacceptable.
“It is based on the forced displacement of Palestinians out of their homes and of their land. This is against international law and, we have said this time and again, this is not a way to treat this man-made crisis,” he said.
“This is a war that has been waged by Israel partly with the aim of driving Palestinians out of their territory,” he added.
He also described the Israeli foreign ministry’s response to the Arab plan as “against humanity and against morals”.”
The BBC’s partial chosen framing of this story – including the erasure of the context of the October 7th atrocities – could not be clearer.
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