John Ware journeys to Israel for a fresh look at how it has responded to the changes sweeping the region in the wake of the Arab Spring. He meets Israelis from all walks of life to go beyond the news clichés and analyse what is next for the world’s only Jewish state as both the religious and the secular battle over its future.
There were a couple of minor linguistic problems with this programme, namely the use of the catch-all term ‘religious’ in order to describe the haredim and their conflict with the mainstream, ignoring that said mainstream (on that issue, at least) is secular-religious. Moreover, the other tussle between secular and religious Israelis as regards two states or one is not between all secular and all religious Israelis, need it be said.
However, I found this programme did a very good job of outlining and explaining the fractured nature of both Israeli and Palestinian societies, as those divisions pertain to both internal and external conflicts. It’s worth a watch.
While North Korea’s ‘Supreme Commander’ Kim Jong-Un has been threatening thermo-nuclear war against the United States, Panorama reporter John Sweeney spent eight days undercover inside the most rigidly-controlled nation on Earth.
Travelling from the capital Pyongyang to the countryside beyond and to the de-Militarised Zone on the border with South Korea, Sweeney witnesses a landscape bleak beyond words, a people brainwashed for three generations and a regime happy to give the impression of marching towards Armageddon.
(Source: BBC)
Passover: On Not Knowing the Heart of the Stranger
“How do you solve a problem like immigration?”, the BBC’s Your Call phone-in show was entitled this morning, thus further perpetuating the fallacy that immigration or indeed immigrants are the problem to begin with. The name of the show, and also the character of the people who called in to express their contempt for immigrants and a want to shut the borders and start again as if that were even possible or desirable, is shamefully entirely in-keeping with the xenophobic political and cultural atmosphere which has descended over this nation since the start of the most recent recession.
It has encouraged by both mainstream parties on the left and right, and also UKIP, the latest incarnation of the know-nothing right that hates everything yet suggests nothing. The beginning was Gordon Brown when he came up with the useless slogan, “British jobs for British workers,” formulated out of a want to appeal to his party’s trade unionist base which is, to speak broadly, far from internationalist. The present Conservative government, unable to resurrect our failing economy, has taken on this idea and deepened it, appealing to the latent fear of the foreigner and the notion that immigrants are busy either stealing jobs, clogging up waiting lists for housing, or arriving here only to live off the welfare system. Just today, for example, David Cameron will announce proposals to cut non-European immigration still further, while instituting new restrictions on access to state-subsided housing and the National Health Service.
This evening, Jews around the world will celebrate and commemorate the first night of Passover, the exodus out of Egypt, and the transition from slavery into a free state. In so doing — and if you’ll excuse the pop Judaism — Jews will consider not only their own triumphs and struggles but the universal, timeless, and essential message of the holiday. In the Haggadah, recited at every Passover Seder, it reminds Jews that “in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out from Egypt,” to consider that journey afresh and not only what that means for Jews today but also those in their own countries who are in need and around the world yet to experience their own human liberation. “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger,” it states clearly in the Book of Exodus, “for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (23:9).
What was so marked about the way those callers to the BBC spoke about, and the manner in which our government deals with, our nation’s immigrants was and is how little empathy they have for the stranger. ‘The immigrants’, ‘these immigrants’, ‘them immigrants’: they are often referred to in the collective and in a manner designed to lump them all together and demonise them as a parasitic collective. I find it deeply disturbing and shameful for a country that markets itself around the world as a tolerant, open, and pluralistic democracy. I might suggest that before they speak in future, our Prime Minister, our politicians, and the British people ought to consider themselves as if they were the stranger, to think what it might be like to be the outsider in a strange land where the majority seem to hold you in contempt merely for who you are, what language you speak, and indeed what colour your skin is, because the current debate and tone is frankly unacceptable.
What led avowed socialist George Orwell to write a novel beloved of the Right?
David Aaronovitch traces how a decade of political chaos shaped Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian future.
He explores how, after the war, the threat of the new atom bomb played a crucial part in the birth of Nineteen Eighty-Four - and how Orwell coined the term ‘cold war’ in the process.
He traces the impact on the novel of the provocative ideas of an American ex-communist, James Burnham, who predicted a world dominated by three tyrannical superstates.
He finds out why Orwell saw some form of Western European Union as the best way to prevent Britain being swallowed by Big Brother.
And he asks why, if Orwell was an English socialist, the totalitarian party ruling ‘Oceania’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four is called ‘IngSoc’ - which is short for ‘English Socialists’.
With Peter Davison, Frances Stonor Saunders, DJ Taylor, Hugh Wilford
The German invasion of Poland in 1939 marked the beginning of the Second World War and the escalation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. It also was the beginning of one of the war’s truly inspiring and remarkable stories.
Prisoner A26188 tells the story of a young Polish girl Henia. Born into a middle class Jewish family, she lost her father, brother and sister during the German occupation, survived four concentration camps, and went on to bear witness to the creation of Israel in 1948.
Now in her eighties, Henia’s harrowing personal testimony starts with her family’s removal from their home in Radom, Poland, to the ghetto, then Plaszow concentration camp, made famous by Schindler’s list, onto Majdanek then Auschwitz and finally Bergen-Belsen. Henia describes with calm and dignity the terrors of the camps, the cruelty of the SS, the Death March and how, through a combination of her own resourcefulness and luck, she survived. In this extraordinary testament Henia explains, how after being reunited with her mother and brother, she makes her way to Palestine, sees in the birth of Israel, falls in love with a young South African and moves to Africa to start a new life.
Filmed by her niece, this is her story of survival, and a legacy to her family and other survivors of genocide.
(Source: BBC)
Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, said the Negev desert - a vast tract of land in the south of the country - was key to its survival.
Sixty years on, some fear the idea of populating the desert with Jewish settlers is turning into a demographic fight.
Newsnight’s Tim Whewell reports.
Begins at 20.30
(Source: BBC)
In New York, Razia Iqbal talks to the prolific writer and academic Joyce Carol Oates, about how she finds so much work rewarding. Oates attributes her enormous output to a love of writing and a Protestant work ethic. She has turned her pen to numerous subjects including professional boxing, Marilyn Monroe, Detroit and a memoir of life after the death of her first husband. All while still working as a full time academic. Razia Iqbal asks after so much work is it still as rewarding as it has always been?
The appeal of her programmes has always been aesthetic. Production values seem higher than ever in this new series, with beautiful lighting and composition. But there was less of the food porn you associate with Nigella. And she seemed more at ease with herself. Less flirtatious. Though she still had that unnerving habit of smiling at the same time as she was talking.
I suppose we’re meant to take Nigellissima as meaning something like “quintessence of Nigella”. And certainly some kind of distillation seems to have taken place. I don’t know whether it’s ungallant to point out that she takes up quite a lot less screen space than in previous series or whether it would be ungallant not to mention it. But it’s true anyway. She is positively Sophia Lorenesque here, which fits rather nicely with the food – a kind of naturalised Notting Hill version of Italian dishes – a cuisine which, she told us, has been an enduring influence on her since she worked as a chambermaid in a Florence hotel (a biographical detail that I fear may have provoked cardiac arrhythmia in some of her older admirers).
(Source: BBC)
Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, tells for the first time the inside story of how it felt to be condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, and to spend the next decade in hiding. To coincide with the publication of Rushdie’s new book about that time, Alan Yentob has been given unique access to the author and to the bodyguards who lived with him. Friends and writers like Ian McEwan and Hanif Kureshi speak frankly, as do Rushdie’s sister, ex-wife and sons.
(Source: BBC)
One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival is the launch of a new novel by Ian McEwan. In a Review Show special, Kirsty Wark talks to the author about his books, including Enduring Love, Atonement and Saturday, the films that have been based on them and, of course, his latest - Sweet Tooth - which is published this week.
(Source: BBC)
