Israeli Government Boycotts Al Jazeera

As Hugh Miles documented in Al Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel That Is Challenging the West, the Qatar-based satellite broadcaster has managed to offend at least half the Middle East's most powerful and not-so powerful regimes in its brief 12-year life, including Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and most Palestinians.

Israel is taking its displeasure with the network to a new level. It's boycotting it.

"According to Israeli officials," Haaretz reported, "the station is heavily biased in favour of the Islamic Hamas movement, which administers the Gaza Strip. The officials also accuse al-Jazeera of staging a candlelight protest that that followed an Israeli government decision last month to reduce electric and gas supplies to the salient in response to continued Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel."

The newspaper also notes that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah organization, which controls the West Bank, are equally unhappy with the station for allegedly favoring Hamas. But it's worth recalling what Walid al-Umari, Al Jazeera's chief correspondent in Israel and the Occupied Territories, told Haaretz more than a year ago: ""Al Jazeera's motto is 'the opinion and the other opinion.' For 50 years the Arabs heard the Israeli opinion through a third party, their regimes. We make a point of interviewing as many Israelis as possible, because we respect the viewer's intelligence. Let him be the judge. We don't dictate anything to anyone."

For Al Jazeera, the boycott, which is more likely to hurt Israel than help it (there's no sense is Israel silencing its own projections to 50 million viewers in the Middle East), is only the latest, not the last, controversy for the never-dull network.

Here's my new profile of Al-Jazeera.

See Also:

• The Verdict on A Jazeera
• Israeli Cable Provider Drops CNN, Picks Up Al Jazeera
• Oprah's Quiet Conquest of Arab Airwaves