Israel is by far the strongest state in the Middle East, militarily, economically and, despite the sometimes raucous nature of its political debate, socially and politically as well. As the veteran US negotiator Aaron David Miller has noted: ‘By any significant standard – GDP per capita; educational assets; share of Nobel prizes; even the global happiness index – Israel leads the region, and much of the rest of the world, by wide margins.’100
This impressive regional supremacy, achieved in part with the assistance of generous long-term financial support from the US, has a dangerous side effect: it can lull Israelis into a false sense of complacency. Why do we need to make peace with the Palestinians, some ask, when we’re doing just fine as we are? And when outsiders like me suggest that they may be mistaken, they respond: ‘Don’t you worry about us. We know how to look after ourselves.’
For the past seventy years, from the drafting of UN Resolution 181 up to the present day, the most obvious solution to the problem caused by two mutually antagonistic groups of people claiming the right to the same patch of land has been to divide the land between the two of them. In 1947, it was called ‘partition’; these days it is known more commonly as the ‘two-state solution’. But I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that, even if once it might have worked, and even if there was nothing wrong with the idea in principle, it is no solution now.
You could argue that the Palestinians have only themselves to blame. If they and Arab governments had accepted the UN’s original partition plan, if they had chosen the Gandhian path of non-violence, or the black South African path of mass civil disobedience, instead of hijacking planes and blowing up buses, who knows what they might have achieved? In the words of the Israeli politician and diplomat Abba Eban, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
The reason I no longer believe in the two-state solution is rooted in the five-decade-long Israeli settlement-building programme. From soon after the 1967 Six Day War, Israel started building on the land that they had conquered in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. As of early 2015, there were nearly 400,000 Israelis living on occupied land in the West Bank and another 375,000 in east Jerusalem. What that means is that not only all the land on which the settlements are built, but also the roads linking them to each other, and to ‘Israel proper’, would need somehow to be protected if they were to fall on the Palestinian side of any new international border between Israel and an independent Palestine. A look at a map of where the settlements have been built will quickly confirm that what the staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Virtual Library says of them must be true: ‘[The settlements’] purpose was to solidify Israel’s hold on territory that was part of biblical and historical Israel and pre-empt the creation of a Palestinian state.’101
As a result, any attempt to create an independent Palestinian state would end up looking not so much like a patchwork quilt as like a succession of ink blots left behind by a careless colonial conqueror. Israel will, in any case, be determined to provide security for its citizens living on the Palestinian side of any new border, and has always insisted that it must retain a security presence along the border with Jordan.
Add to that the additional complication that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are inconveniently separated from each other by about seventy miles of Israeli territory, so how could they ever form part of a unitary Palestinian state? Suggestions have ranged from the impractical – an elevated road bridge between the West Bank and Gaza that would be used exclusively by Palestinians – to the frankly insane: a tunnel that would extend beneath Israeli soil to link the two parts of an independent Palestine. Many diplomats now admit in private, although very few in public, that the two-state solution is dead, killed off by Ariel Sharon and others who boasted that the settlement-building programme would ‘create new facts on the ground’ and thereby make a viable Palestinian state an impossibility.
Interestingly, an idea that was frequently discussed thirty-plus years ago, while I was living in Jerusalem, is now beginning to resurface: some kind of federation or confederation that could serve as an umbrella state linking Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and perhaps even Jordan. Both the Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and the man who was at the heart of negotiations that led to the Oslo agreement, Yossi Beilin, have revived the idea, although it is hard to see in the current political climate either Israelis or Palestinians being at all keen to envisage a joint national identity. On the other hand, in Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, once implacable enemies, ended up as colleagues in government, so one should never rule anything out.
Toby Greene, of the Britain–Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), wrote in early 2016102 that a confederation might offer a solution to at least some of the problems associated with a two-state model. In the first place, Gaza and the West Bank could both belong to the confederation, even if not linked physically, if Israel was part of the same political entity. Second, Israelis living in the West Bank could remain as Israeli citizens but resident in the Palestinian region of a confederal state. (At the same time, it would enable the people currently known as Arab Israelis to become Palestinian citizens resident in the Israeli region of the new state.) And third, the security issue could be addressed if all three regions – Israel, Palestine and Jordan – accepted that Israel and Jordan would assume responsibility for the confederation’s external borders.
Most importantly, perhaps, a federal structure would answer the Zionists’ biggest dilemma: how can they claim to be democrats while continuing to rule over people with no political rights and whose land they occupy? The Israelis in a tripartite confederation could still argue that they have created a Jewish nation, or homeland, while the Palestinians could also claim to have won their own nation. Their borders would be internal borders, not external ones, and Jerusalem would be a shared capital. (After all, the original UN partition resolution envisaged Jerusalem as a city under international jurisdiction, so the confederal model could be seen as being close to the original vision.)
I know that it all sounds absurdly unrealistic and, in the current climate, it undoubtedly is. But I am not ready to accept that the Israel–Palestine conflict is a war without end. One day, each side will produce new leaders who are capable of bridging the divide, just as Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat did in the 1970s, and as Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat did in 1993. The only question is how many more people on both sides will have to die before their leaders take the next step.
* Israel withdrew its troops and civilian settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, although with Egypt, it still maintains a blockade of all Gaza’s borders.
† UN Resolution 181 envisaged the establishment of independent Arab and Jewish states and a ‘special international regime’ for Jerusalem. It was rejected out of hand by all Arab governments.
‡ Benjamin Disraeli, who was Prime Minister for nine months in 1868 and again from 1874 until 1880, had converted from Judaism to Christianity at the age of twelve.
CHAPTER 12
AT LAST THE BBC
Get on your toes, keep your wits about you, say goodnight politely when it’s over, go home and enjoy your dinner.
SIR TERRY WOGAN, ON THE ART OF BEING A RADIO BROADCASTER
Dear Margaret Budy, I am writing to ask whether you are considering taking on any new presenters, on either an occasional or regular basis, for The World Tonight … I have extensive radio experience, mainly for the World Service, but also for CBC in Canada, IRN, CBS and, as the enclosed cassette illustrates, US National Public Radio.
THE LETTER IS DATED 5 February 1989, and it is just one in a bulging file of similar letters that still sits at the back of my filing cabinet. I was writing to anyone I could think of to find a way out of The Observer and I can now reveal, for the first time, that I also applied to be presenter of Channel 4 News (they gave the job to a chap called Jon Snow instead). Tony Howard’s throwaway remark when he left The Observer (‘Why don’t you give it a go?’) had push
ed me over the edge: I was determined to become a broadcaster, just as he had recommended when I asked him for advice as a student nearly twenty years earlier.
I had never met the editor of The World Tonight. We had no mutual friends or colleagues, but I had read somewhere that she had recently taken over the programme, so I thought that she might perhaps want to try out a new presenter voice. The line in my letter about my ‘extensive radio experience’ was a huge exaggeration – true, I had been interviewed a few times as a foreign correspondent, but I was always answering the questions rather than asking them, and I had never presented a live news programme in my life. The demo cassette that I sent in had been put together with the help of my Middle East NPR friend Deb Amos, who was now living in London. I had scripted an imaginary introduction to The World Tonight, and we recorded it in her flat. I clearly remember that she insisted that I held an umbrella over my head as we did so – she said it was to get the acoustics right, but I have always suspected that it was to make me look an idiot.*
Of all the editors I wrote to, Margaret was the only one to suggest we had lunch together. We ate in a little Italian restaurant round the corner from Broadcasting House, and we seemed to get on well. ‘There’s only one way for me to find out if you can do this,’ she said, ‘and that’s to give you a couple of presenting shifts.’ There was to be no pilot programme, no voice test, just a great big gamble – for both of us – based entirely on the evidence of my demo tape and my CV. And so it was that a few weeks later, I left The Observer’s offices in Battersea just a bit earlier than usual to make my way to Broadcasting House. As I walked from Oxford Circus Tube station north along Regent Street, I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks. For a moment, I was unable to take another step. What was I doing? Why on earth did I think I could do this? I was about to present a live news programme on national network radio, and I had never done anything remotely similar before.
The production team must have been just as nervous as I was, but none of them let on. The World Tonight had a team of three regular presenters at the time: Richard Kershaw (‘magnetically good-looking and telegenic, [he] developed a dashing on-screen persona reporting from the world’s trouble spots’ – Daily Telegraph), who was best-known as a reporter for BBC television’s Panorama and as a presenter on Nationwide; Alexander MacLeod, a former foreign editor at the Sunday Times and diplomatic editor at The Scotsman; and, less frequently, David Sells, who like me had started out at Reuters and who had then become one of the BBC’s best foreign correspondents. I had met him a few times in the Middle East and admired him enormously.
It is probably fair to say that my arrival was greeted with both suspicion and trepidation. I learned much later that some of the team were not best pleased to discover that a woefully inexperienced radio novice was being entrusted with their programme. Fortunately, they never knew that on my first presenting shift, when I took my seat in the studio, I realised that I had no idea what the red and green lights on the studio desk meant. I was far too embarrassed to ask, but by the end of the programme, I had managed to work it out for myself: when the red light was on, it meant that my microphone was live, and the green one went on to warn me that there were ten seconds left before the end of a recorded item. When it went off again, I was expected to say something.
Margaret had lined me up with three consecutive presenting shifts. The first programme passed off without problem, but the second was somewhat marred by a twelve-second silence – an eternity – when a recorded item failed to materialise on time. The producer responsible later rose to become the controller of Radio 4, thus proving what I have always believed to be true: that although mistakes in the studio are to be avoided whenever possible, they are not life-threatening. Unlike brain surgeons or air traffic controllers, radio producers do not risk causing someone’s death if they mess things up. The same goes for presenters. My personal theory is that listeners quite like it when presenters get into trouble on air, as long as it does not happen too often – my former colleague Jim Naughtie’s slip of the tongue with the name of Cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt probably endeared him to the nation far more than any number of incisive interviews or beautifully scripted reports from the United States.
The World Tonight is one of four news and analysis programmes broadcast through the day on BBC Radio 4. It follows Today at breakfast time, The World at One at lunchtime, and PM at teatime (or drive time if you prefer). Anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant proportion of The World Tonight’s listeners tune in either when they are having a bath or after they have gone to bed. Politicians tend to listen in the car on their way home after a late-night vote at Westminster. It has always covered more foreign news than its stablemates, which suited me just fine, especially when it enabled me to travel to the world’s hotspots myself to report from the field.
When I started working for the programme, it had a reputation as a bit of a BBC backwater; fewer people listen to the radio in the evenings than in the mornings, and its emphasis on stories from overseas, to the almost total exclusion of any UK news, made it seem to the grittier kind of BBC news people like an eccentric uncle who insisted on telling the family about faraway places they had never heard of. Its calmer, more considered approach to current events, eschewing the manufactured excitability of its daytime stablemates and their sweaty fascination with entrail-gazing in the Westminster village, appeared to its unkinder critics to exude the musty odour of a home for retired schoolmasters, or perhaps a gentlemen’s club inhabited by snoozing ex-diplomats and army officers.
None of that reputation was entirely fair, although it was far from being the liveliest listen on BBC radio and tended to be somewhat worthy and joyless. I slowly became aware that I had been taken on board as a symbol of a new approach: I was younger than the existing stable of presenters (I was forty-one when I started), and had a somewhat less solemn approach to news coverage. I did believe in taking the world seriously, but I also had a regrettable fondness for levity, so my on-air tone was perhaps several degrees lighter than had become the World Tonight norm. After all, its revered first ever presenter, Douglas Stuart, who had done so much to establish the programme’s early reputation, had been praised by senior BBC executives for his ‘statesman-like qualities’103 (he was in fact a distinguished former foreign correspondent), and I had never aspired to be a statesman.
For a few more months, I struggled on at The Observer while leaping at the chance to present occasional further editions of The World Tonight whenever there was a gap in the presenters’ rota. I was indecently keen to make a mark, and rushed into print with a diary column for The Listener magazine in which I admitted my childlike excitement at finally having dipped a toe into the world of broadcasting.
For me, there’s a special pleasure in sitting in a studio opposite newsreaders like Charlotte Green or Peter Donaldson, whose voices have reached me in every room of [my] house … to be reading the headlines while Charlotte Green waits patiently to read the news is as if I were trying to tell a joke in front of Woody Allen.104
Radio 4 newsreaders were gods (and goddesses). Their impeccably moderated tones contributed to an impression that the words they spoke had been engraved in stone by some superior being. It was The News. So it was something of a shock to discover that the voices belonged to ordinary human beings, made of ordinary flesh and blood, who were enormous fun to work with, and who, very occasionally, were fallible.
Once, after having eaten supper in the BBC canteen, one of Radio 4’s best loved newsreaders became violently ill just moments before she was due to read the news at the start of an edition of The World Tonight. (No, I am not going to name her; it could have happened to anyone.) As she rushed out of the studio with a muttered ‘Sorry’, the newsroom editor laconically handed a pile of scripts to me and said: ‘I think you’d better read this.’ Which I did, thankful that my musical training in sight-reading enabled me to stumble through the news bulletin relatively unscathed.
At Bush Ho
use, a World Service newsreader once simply forgot that she was due to read a two-minute news summary halfway through Newshour. As the seconds ticked by, with still no sign of her, I frantically searched for the scripts in a computer file, and – again – ended up reading them myself. Yes, they are gods, but, just occasionally, with feet of clay.
With the advent of social media, some newsreaders descended from Mount Olympus and emerged to frolic among mere mortals on Twitter. They acquired tens of thousands of followers who discovered what only we privileged colleagues had previously known: that they are funny, clever and extremely good company. It was all part of a demystification process that turned broadcasters from remote figures intoning Great Truths from on high into fellow mortals trying as best as they could to contribute something to the sum of human knowledge.
Foreign correspondents who return home to a job in head office, as I had done, are prone to a usually incurable medical condition known as ‘foreign correspondentitis’. The symptoms are chronic ennui, a propensity to moan endlessly about the idiocy of their bosses, and an unshakeable belief that their unique talents are grotesquely underappreciated. I suffered from a relatively mild form of the disease when I returned from the Middle East, but faced with the deepening problems at The Observer, I was more than ready to jump ship.
I had to make a decision: was I prepared to risk being able to scratch a living as a freelance broadcaster with a mortgage and two young children to support? With Margaret Budy’s help, I wangled a meeting with the diminutive, but formidable, head of BBC radio news and current affairs, Jenny Abramsky, to test the waters. ‘I can’t make any promises,’ she said, ‘but if you do decide to leave The Observer, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ Just to make sure, I introduced myself to the bosses at the BBC World Service as well, calculating that if I could not get enough work at Radio 4, I might be able to carve out a place for myself at Bush House.
Is Anything Happening? Page 29