On March 1^st 2013 the BBC’s flagship interview programme ‘Hardtalk’ featured Tim Franks – formerly a BBC correspondent in Jerusalem between 2007 and 2010 – talking to the Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua. 

The programme can be heard as a podcast here or watched on BBC iPlayer in the UK here.

Audiences actually never get to hear about AB Yehoshua’s latest novel and its subject matter (according to the author) of the relationship between West and East in Israel, because the interviewer repeatedly drags the conversation back to one issue – the peace process. Already in the introduction viewers get a hint of the interview’s tone as a whole when Franks refers to the failure of that process and “the journey Israeli Jews need now to take” – apparently without any such journey being necessary on the other side of the divide and ignoring the non-Jewish 20% of the…