"60 Minutes" decided to pull back the curtain on a charged confrontation it had with the government of Israel over a story it reported about Arab Christians in the country.
"We didn't realize it would become so controversial," Bob Simon, the reporter for the story, said on the show's Sunday broadcast.
The main thrust of the piece was that Palestinian Christians had become, in Simon's words, "the invisible people, squeezed between a growing Muslim majority and burgeoning Israeli settlements." The report showed a family of Palestinians boxed in on almost all sides by the wall the Israelis have built in the West Bank, and said that many are fleeing the country.
The story drew so much ire from the Israeli government that its ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, contacted CBS News chief Jeff Fager before the story even aired.
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