4-1 is hardly a fair assessment and Gavin, by his own admission in an article in today's Jerusalem Post says his treatment was fair.
The other guests included a member of the Knesset, a member of the International Commission for Peace and academic Dr Gharda Karmi.
I was presenting the show and you can go onto the archives and make your own judgment - http://www.presstv.com/prg_detail.aspx?SectionID=3510509
What's wrong with calling Israel the Zionist State? Gavin has absolutely no problems using the Z-word in the title of his organisation.
Can we please have less of the victim mentality?
Kind regards
Yvonne Ridley

Indeed. I'd encourage readers to check out the broadcast.

Here is Gavin Gross's JPost piece: Where is Israel's satellite TV news channel?. By "treated fairly," I read it to mean that he was treated politely and not edited. I don't read anything beyond that. In fact, he says:

It was only when I was being fitted with a microphone in the studio that I discovered the true title of the debate was actually, "Is the Zionist State Trying to Wipe Palestine off the Map?" Although I was treated fairly and given sufficient time to make my arguments, and the entire program was later broadcast unedited, the whole structure of the program from the crude title to the pre-recorded segments were designed to frame the discussion precisely according to the channel's viewpoint. For example, an inflammatory pre-recorded clip showed Muslims praying on the Temple Mount while a voice-over claimed that the foundations of the Al-Aksa mosque were being "deliberately destabilized" by Israel, which was trying to "ethnically cleanse" Palestinians from the holy city.

ALONGSIDE THE threats posed by Iran's nuclear program and support for terrorist organizations, the growth of Iran's broadcasting capabilities...

"Bait and switch" is "a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is."

This is how wikipaedia explains the tactic that seems to have been employed, successfully, to entice Gavin Gross to participate in this broadcast.

"How Will the Map of Palestine Be Determined?" was the title offered to Gross in the invitation.

It was only when he was "being fitted with a microphone in the studio"

that he "discovered the true title of the debate was actually":

"Is the Zionist State Trying to Wipe Palestine off the Map?"

The broadcast seems to have contained all the ills that can be expected from such a media outlet:

Fraud, lies, projection, and even "taaroff", that Iranian hollow practice of polite dissembling, where people people express nice sentiments that they do not truly mean or feel.

I didn’t like the way the Arab woman author (Dr. Ghada Karmi) interrupted the Zionist rep, Gavin Gross. She tried to do so repeatedly early on in the show. That was when Gross was trying to say that the Jews were a people 2,500 years ago. She kept saying “yes, back then…” while he was trying to say "yes, since then."

He could’ve raised some other points:
a) That, since the nation-state is a relatively recent invention, and one limited to Western Europe, the definition of who’s a people or a nation or not is a fluid one in most parts of the world, not least the Arab middle east. The Jews have as much or more claim to being a nation than the Palestinians. If she is claiming that the Jew’s notion of nationhood was recent, what about the Palestinians’?

b) She talks about the lack of a biological basis for nationhood. Not that I’m totally comfortable with that as a criterion, but it realistically IS a basis, if not purely so. Aside from the Icelanders, the Jews have the purest, most easily identifiable chromosomes of any people in the world, and they genetically resemble each other far more than they do their host populations. Their genes also link them to precisely that region of the middle east. This has been written up. He should have known that and responded with it, not to portray Zionism as a racial theory, but to counter her arguments.

c) When she mentions that the Jews have no culture in common, that they’re “just a religion,” he does respond somewhat. But he should have specified that, since the Jews didn’t proselytize, the boundaries of nation and religion in their case coincided. They descended from a tribe, and were only defined as a religion by latter-day Western European Jews anxious not to be thought of as Jews. He should have said that the Jews were identified as both a people AND a religion.

d)He should have also mentioned that Yiddish and Ladino both drew from Hebrew, and so do not represent unrelated languages. Also, they do not demonstrate the fact that the Jews are not a nation because, otherwise, there wouldn’t have been two Jewish languages but over a hundred, representing the hundred or so countries they’ve lived in.

e) The Jews speak the languages of the countries they’re “from” only because of assimilation that started to occur in the 19th century. Even then, if they spoke the language of the country they lived in, it was as a second language. At least in central and Eastern Europe, they spoke Yiddish as their first language throughout the centuries until only a few generations ago.

Instead, he just says that the Jews consider themselves to be part of “Am Yisrael” wherever they live. But that’s not a strong answer. After all, the woman had just finished saying that the Zionists created a belief in nationhood. All he countered was that the Jews believe they're a people. Period. That won't convince anyone.

When the Arab Israeli said that the Palestinians never left their homeland except in 1948, Gross should have been able to answer with whatever statistics there were, showing that there was in-migration caused by an improvement in the economy that was a result of Jewish and British activity, and as the result of an earlier effort by the Ottoman Empire, which attracted people from all over the empire to populate what was then an under-populated area.

And he should have had numbers, whatever numbers there are. The Jews were a slight majority in Jerusalem but only 10% of the general population. He should have taken a close look at that 90% to see who they really were. Natives all? I doubt it. Mostly? Maybe, and in that case he's in trouble. But if 90% is 90% of a tiny population that didn't even live in much of the territory, then he has something to go on.

Also, Gross should have been more familiar with the Arab claim that the Israelis have been depopulating East Jerusalem, and denying id’s to 50,000 Palestinians. It seemed to me that the Palestinian interlocutors were using every old argument from the Palestinian play book. Gross should have been on top of this “50,000” argument, as it probably isn’t a new one.

When they were discussing Jerusalem, Gross kept interrupting that same Dr. Karmi, and gave her the high moral ground, allowing her to claim (falsely) that she had listened to him politely and he should do the same for her. She kept saying "let me speak" all the while she was hogging the conversation. Really, Zionist activists should be trained to deal with tricks like this.

Admittedly, he was on thin ice when they speak of the creeping Judaization of Jerusalem, of the settlements around Jerusalem, because that happens to be true.

The Arab guests were on weaker ground when they spoke about the Israeli excavations. He did ably describe the nature of the bridge being built, but he should have countered again when the others averred that it was disturbing the foundations. When Dr. Karmi said archeologists were critical, he should have countered: who, where? [because it's not true] When she said UNESCO disapproved, he should have countered that this was due to politics, not to an honest appraisal of the situation. She was making a lot of weak points here. He should have listened calmly and then demolished her arguments point by point.

I’ll stop here. I stopped the video. I just couldn’t watch it anymore. The Arabs were partly right, but that’s the problem. The parts that were right made it seem as if they were 100% right. Also, given that the viewing audience was probably more familiar with the Arab narrative than with the Jewish, it was easier to make the Arab case. To make the Jewish case would have taken hours, since a lot of basic history would have had to be taught.

This Gavin Gross is a brave man. He did alright from what I could see, but he could have done better. Repeating weak and tired Jewish arguments that convince only Jews wasn’t going to cut it.

Really, he should have gone nowhere near that program. And that video about the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa! Even though Ridley gave the floor to Gross immediately after, the deck was already stacked against him. I hope that the viewers were smart enough to notice that. They probably weren’t.

The Jewish case is a hard one to make. It takes a knowledge of history that most people don't have, and perspectives that they don't share. The Arab case is simple, even if it's not all true, and it can be made to fit neatly into the colonialist-vs-indigenous model that has become the boilerplate through which most people look at history these days.