Two\u00a0observations about Jon Snow’s interview last night with Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan, for which Snow has\u00a0received a lot of criticism from those supportive of the\u00a0Palestinian case.<\/p>\n
First, we should notice how Snow chooses to frame the interview. This is his first question:\u00a0“Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to go on killing Gaza’s woman and children, civilians generally. Why are you encouraging them by continuing to fire your ineffective rockets?”<\/p>\n
That is quite some opener. In using the phrase “prepared to go on”, Snow implies\u00a0that Israel’s killing of civilians is\u00a0to a degree deliberate. In fact, that becomes the essential frame of the whole interview – and is the source of his irritating, even puerile line of questioning. Why antagonise Israel, when it’s clear it’s going to vent its fury on women and children? Why not hand over your weapons and let Israel blow up your tunnels? Why not abandon resistance?<\/p>\n
Snow’s framing does a great disservice to Hamas\u00a0but it damages Israel even more. Hamas are stupid, according to this approach, but\u00a0Israel is actually malevolent.\u00a0We should not discount the significance of the\u00a0assumption about Israel\u00a0Snow is\u00a0making on behalf of\u00a0his viewers. This may be\u00a0some sort of tiny\u00a0victory for the Palestinians in the media war.<\/p>\n
Second, Snow\u00a0keeps telling Hamdan: “There’s no time to go into the history”. In other words, we must\u00a0ignore the context. But this is precisely the criticism of media coverage of Israel-Palestine made by academics like Greg Philo. Their surveys show\u00a0the media fail to\u00a0provide\u00a0the historical context of the conflict, and this failure puts the Palestinians at\u00a0an immediate disadvantage, because their\u00a0case is essentially\u00a0historical – a demand for redress for\u00a0the injustices of 1948 and 1967. After all, Hamas represents an enormous group of refugees from those wars, forced out of their homes in what is now Israel and\u00a0imprisoned in Gaza. Without that context, we cannot understand what drives Hamas or\u00a0Gaza’s will to resist.<\/p>\n
The Israelis, on the other hand, would much rather we ignored the history, or only concentrated on marginal aspects of it, because the injustice \u2013 the dispossession of Palestinians \u2013 is precisely historical. So, in refusing to consider history, Snow is taking a side \u2013 Israel’s.<\/p>\n