The Israeli attack on southern Lebanon has been going on for three days. ‘569 Lebanese nationals killed’ is written large at the bottom of the screen on Al Jazeera English. Israel has become wiser through previous, fruitless invasions of Lebanon, regular political analyst Marwan Bishara said in the broadcast on Wednesday evening. “They are opting for more asymmetrical methods of warfare,” says Bishara. “Like terror.”
NRC In recent days, it followed the reporting of Al Jazeera, the most important Arab news channel with (almost) 24-hour coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah. Last Sunday, the channel’s office in the occupied West Bank was closed by Israeli soldiers. The legal basis is an emergency law introduced last May, which previously led to the closure of Al Jazeera in East Jerusalem.
Although Ramallah falls under the Palestinian Authority, Israeli soldiers forced Al Jazeera staff to close the office. Including because of alleged incitement to terror, without providing evidence for this. “An attack on the right to know,” says the voice-over in a clip that is shown every half hour on the English-language Al Jazeera.
Skyline of Beirut
On the Arabic channel of Al Jazeera a grid splits the screen in a mosaic of different images. Injured children in a Lebanese hospital, crying parents in Gaza. But also images from Israeli missile defense or stationary cameras that show the Lebanese-Israeli border or the skyline of Beirut, without much appearing to happen.
The Arab Al Jazeera – not the English one – consistently speaks of “martyrs” instead of dead. These are both civilians and militants, both Gazans and Lebanese. The Israeli army is the army of the “occupying force” and both Hamas and Hezbollah are “the resistance.”
This choice of words has met with resistance in Israel, where authorities may label the use of the Arabic term for martyr – ‘shahid’ – on social media as “seditious” and a violation of the law. For many Israelis this is synonymous with “terrorist.”
Al Jazeera previously used the term in the context of the ‘Arab Spring’, the Syrian civil war or for its own correspondents who died in war zones. In 2022, an Israeli military star reporter shot dead Shireen Abu Akhleh. The Israeli siege of Gaza has already claimed the lives of several Al Jazeera journalists, while correspondent Wael Dahdoud has lost family members.
TV guests color the conversation
It is the guest speakers who color the broadcast most ideologically. They appear at the top right of the grid and indicate the war violence that takes place in fivefold on the rest of the screen.
There are many (former) soldiers, political analysts and Israel and Hezbollah experts. All men. For example, Mohammed Samadi, “military and strategic expert”, regularly calls in from Jordan to look at the war from Hezbollah’s perspective. “Now may be the right time for potential volunteers from Iraq, Yemen and Syria to enter the north of the occupied country [Israël, red.] to invade.” This would increase pressure on Israel’s “occupying army.”
Analyzes by the guests are easy for the viewer to separate from the ‘hard news’ delivered by the presenter and the correspondents. Journalists in the field are often female. For example, they stand with helmets and shard vests in southern Lebanon or the Bekaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon. Somewhere between news and colored interpretation are the strategic discussions of operations by the Al-Qassam Brigade, the armed branch of Hamas. Using bodycam footage and maps with moving arrows and dotted lines, we see how Hamas militants in Gaza ambushed Israeli tanks and jeeps.
Osama Bin Laden
Al Jazeera is a Qatar-funded channel, founded in 1996 and broadcast worldwide. However, the channel has been blocked in parts of the Arab world due to unwelcome reporting. The station became known in the West, among other things, by broadcasting messages from Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2006, Al Jazeera founded an English channel, which offered the Western world a window on the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011.
Abdou Bouzerda, VPRO journalist from Foreign Officecriticizes the image of “blood splashing from the screen” at the Arab Al Jazeera. It is true that the channel is “often live”. If a camera crew is standing near a bombed building, a dead body may appear on screen. This is then blurred out in repeats – or they warn about shocking images, says Bouzerda. “Al Jazeera overwhelmed the Arab audience, which was only used to state media.” Al Jazeera’s slogan, loosely translated, is ‘one view, and another view’.
According to Bouzerda, Al Jazeera Arabia is doing some detriment to its slogan in the conflict between Israel and Hamas (and now Hezbollah). For example, when Hamas blows up a tank “and a defense analyst says: ‘Look how brave the resistance is.'” In contrast, he misses room for analyzes from the Israeli side, which are now mainly limited to “a speech by Netanyahu or the Israeli Chief of Staff”.
Horrors in pictures
On both channels, English and Arabic, the reporting balances between victimization of the population and militancy of militias. The English Al Jazeera does have a calmer appearance. At the bottom of the screen, news headlines scroll across the screen in a ticker, alternating with the grim statistics of the war, such as the number of Palestinian casualties. But also the number of victims of the Hamas terror on October 7.
Horrors are also depicted here. While Biden speaks at the United Nations General Assembly, we see a child’s body lying on the floor of a hospital on a screen next to him. Reporter Tareq Aub Azzoum in Deir Al Balah in the Gaza Strip talks about people arriving at the hospital “in pieces”. He talks about the “difficult choices surgeons have to make about who to treat first” and that they are “forced to operate without anesthesia.”
The siege of southern Lebanon began on Monday morning, September 23, just under a week after Hezbollah was hit hard by a series of exploding beepers and walkie-talkies. The Israeli army warns tens of thousands of Lebanese by text message to leave if they live near a Hezbollah weapons depot. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” Al Jazeera presenter Maleen Saeed asks the reporter on the spot. He agrees. Even Hezbollah units do not know where each other’s weapons are stored, he says.
The image switches to journalist Zeina Kahdr, who is reporting among the hectic scenes in southern Lebanon. “Just like in Gaza, Israel chooses to put civilians in the line of fire.” The death toll on the Lebanese side soon reached the hundreds.
Al Jazeera’s analyst Marwan Bishara is asked for an explanation every day. Immediately after the speech from Joe Biden at the UN on Tuesday, criticizing the way in which the American president, as a veteran of the Cold War, “demonizes” Russia and China. Biden “promotes divisive alliances,” says Bishara, “like NATO.” And in the meantime, “he is arming Netanyahu as he brings the region to the brink of collapse.”
‘Mafia militia’
falls between the anti-Israel analyses one interviewTuesday morning. Dan Perry, former editorial director of the Associated Press news agency, criticizes Al Jazeera’s reporting, as if Israel fired the first shot and is now deliberately targeting civilians. Anchor Saeed immediately interrupts him: “The fifty children who died are not fighters, are they?” Perry argues that it was Hezbollah that immediately decided to fire rockets at Israel after October 7. He regrets the civilian suffering, but this “disastrous situation” is a direct result of “the aggression of the Iranian proxy mafia militia”, Hezbollah. “After a year, I am not surprised that patience has run out.”
When asked, Perry is willing to answer NRC says that Al Jazeera English “is at least trying to give space to contrarian views”, which he considers “an important step in the Arab world”, where there is hardly any freedom of the press. “Although my expectations are low.”
He calls the Arab Al Jazeera “downright propagandistic and serving political Islamism in the region.” He does call it “difficult” for Al Jazeera, “because the public expects a political perspective.” The fact that the channel speaks of genocide in Gaza as a given “simply does not match the UN definition,” says Perry. “Genocide does not mean: a lot of deaths.”
According to Perry, it does not harm Al Jazeera that Netanyahu’s government has imposed further restrictions on the channel when reporting from Israel. “It is almost comical stupidity: that little attention that the channel paid to the Israeli perspective has now been cut off,” said Perry. “Typical right-wing extremist idiocy. Doing something that sounds good, but is bad. This is the language of authoritarianism.”
On Friday afternoon, Netanyahu will deliver a speech to the UN General Assembly, which he calls a “swamp of anti-Semitic bile” and “an anti-Israel”flat earth society‘” mentions. In Israel’s “noble struggle,” according to the prime minister, “every effort is made to spare innocents.”
Immediately afterwards, in the Al Jazeera studio, the presenter asks how that speech “rhymes with the reality” in which Israel has “been denying Palestinians the right to citizenship for decades and [hun] land occupied”. From London, analyst Marwan Bishara shakes his head. “Without that unconditional, blind, foolish support from the US,” he says, “we wouldn’t be listening to a war criminal lecture the world about hypocrisy and human rights.”
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