Israel sows terror and Hezbollah is the resistance: Al Jazeera reports on the war

Just as a military analyst from Brussels explains that there is “no justification” for using “bunker bombs” in densely populated areas, a confirmation appears at the bottom of the screen: HASSAN NASRALLAH KILLED. It’s Saturday, early afternoon. Al Jazeera English reporters quickly move to a video about the life of the Hezbollah leader who was killed in an Israeli rocket attack in Beirut on Friday night.

Soon after, Iran is on the phone with Tehran University political analyst Mohammed Marandi mourning the death of “the great, if not the greatest, martyr of the Palestinian cause.” But “this does not change anything” about the “determination” of the “axis of resistance”, Iran and Hezbollah. “That is the logic that the West does not understand in supporting the genocidal Israeli regime” and its “holocaust in Gaza”.

NRC In recent days, it followed the coverage of Al Jazeera, the main Arab news channel, with (almost) 24-hour coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah. Israeli soldiers closed the channel’s office in the occupied West Bank last Sunday. The legal basis is the emergency law introduced last May, which previously led to the closure of Al Jazeera in East Jerusalem.

Although Ramallah is under the Palestinian Authority, Israeli soldiers forced Al Jazeera staff to close the office. Including for allegedly inciting terrorism, without providing evidence of this. “An attack on the right to know,” says a clip aired every half hour on English-language Al Jazeera.

Shortly after Nasrallah’s death was confirmed, Lebanese political analyst Faisal Abdul Sater appeared on an Arabic channel. He greets the audience and expresses his condolences for the “martyrdom” of Hassan Nasrallah, a “righteous servant” who “has joined his master” and is now part of the “enlightened caravan of martyrs.” According to Abdul Saater, it is an undeniable blow to Hezbollah that “one of the most prominent figures in the Arab and Islamic world” is no longer there. The man who brought about such “great victories” – as “the liberation of Lebanon in 2000 and the divine victory in 2006 (in the war against Israel, ed.).”

Analysts after Abdul Sater don’t give eulogies, but instead discuss much more neutrally the strategic implications of Hezbollah and how the assassination fits into Israel’s broader strategy.

Beirut skyline

In Al Jazeera in Arabic, the grid divides the screen into a mosaic of different images. Injured children in a Lebanese hospital, crying parents in Gaza. But also pictures of Israel’s missile defense or fixed cameras showing the Lebanon-Israel border or the Beirut skyline, without much happening.

Arabic Al Jazeera – not English – consistently talks about “martyrs” instead of the dead. They are both civilians and militants, both Gazans and Lebanese. The Israeli army is the “occupation” army and both Hamas and Hezbollah are the “resistance”.

This choice of words has met with opposition in Israel, where authorities may label the use of the Arabic word for martyr, “shahid,” on social media as “mindful” and a violation of the law. For many Israelis, this is synonymous with “terrorist”.

Al Jazeera previously used the term in connection with the “Arab Spring”, the Syrian civil war or its own correspondents who died in war zones. In 2022, Shireen Abu Akhleh was shot dead by an Israeli military star reporter. Israel’s siege of Gaza has already claimed the lives of several Al Jazeera journalists, and correspondent Wael Dahdoud has lost family members.

TV guests color the conversation

Visitors color the broadcast ideologically. They appear in the upper right corner of the grid and indicate the violence of the war, which occurs fivefold elsewhere on the screen.

There are many (former) soldiers, political analysts and experts on Israel and Hezbollah. All men. For example, Mohammed Samadi, a “military and strategic expert,” calls regularly from Jordan to see the war from Hezbollah’s point of view. “Now may be the right time for potential volunteers from Iraq, Yemen and Syria to attack the occupied country’s (Israel, ed.) north.” This would increase the pressure on the Israeli “army of occupation”.

It is easy for the viewer to distinguish the analyzes made by the guests from the “hard news” delivered by the host and correspondents. Journalists in the field are often women. For example, they stand with helmets and shrapnel vests in southern Lebanon or in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Somewhere in the middle ground between news and colored interpretation are the strategic discussions of the operations of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed branch of Hamas. Using bodycam footage and maps with moving arrows and dashed lines, we see how Hamas militants in Gaza ambushed Israeli tanks and jeeps.

Osama bin Laden

Al Jazeera is a Qatari-funded channel that was founded in 1996 and broadcasts worldwide. However, the channel is blocked in parts of the Arab world due to unwanted news. The station became famous in the West for, among other things, sending messages from Osama bin Laden, the man behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. In 2006, Al Jazeera established an English-language channel that provided the Western world with a window into the “Arab Spring” of 2011.

Abdou Bouzerda, VPRO editor State Departmentcriticizes Arabic Al Jazeera’s image of “blood splattering on screen”. It is true that the channel is “often live”. If the camera crew is standing near a bombed building, a body may appear on the screen. This then becomes blurred when repeated – or they warn of shocking images, says Bouzerda. “Al Jazeera captured an Arab audience accustomed only to state media.” Al Jazeera’s slogan, loosely translated, is “one view and another view.”

According to Bouzerda, Al Jazeera Arabia is doing some damage 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.’ On the other hand, he needs space for analyzes coming from the Israeli side, which are now mostly limited to “Netanyahu’s speech”. or Israel’s Chief of Staff’.

Horrors in pictures

On both channels, in English and Arabic, the reporting balances the victimization of the population with the militancy of the militias. English Al Jazeera seems calmer. At the bottom of the screen, news headlines scroll on the screen alternating with grim statistics of the war, such as the number of Palestinian casualties. But also the number of victims of Hamas terror on October 7.

Horrors are also filmed here. As Biden speaks at the United Nations General Assembly, we see the body of a child lying on the hospital floor next to him on the screen. Journalist 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 being “forced to operate without anesthesia.”

The siege of southern Lebanon began on Monday morning, September 23, less than a week after Hezbollah’s explosive sirens and walkie-talkies were hit hard. The Israeli military warns tens of thousands of Lebanese by text message to leave if they live near a Hezbollah weapons depot. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” Al Jazeera host Maleen Saeed asks the reporter on the spot. He agrees. Even Hezbollah units don’t know where each other’s weapons are kept, he says.

The picture changes to journalist Zeina Kahdri, who reports on 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 rose to hundreds.

Al Jazeera analyst Marwan Bishara is asked for an explanation every day. Immediately after Joe Biden’s speech at the UN on Tuesday, he criticizes the way the US president, as a Cold War veteran, “demonizes” Russia and China. Bishara says Biden is “promoting divisive alliances like NATO.” And in the meantime, “he is arming Netanyahu as he brings the region to the brink of collapse.”

“Mafia Militia”

Among the anti-Israel analyses, one interview, on Tuesday morning, stands out. Dan Perry, former editorial director of the Associated Press, criticizes Al Jazeera’s reporting as if Israel fired the first shot and is now deliberately targeting civilians. Anchor Saeed immediately interrupts him, “Those fifty dead kids aren’t fighters, are they?” Perry claims that Hezbollah immediately decided to fire rockets into Israel after October 7th. He regrets the suffering of civilians, but this “catastrophic situation” is a direct result of the aggression of the “Iranian proxy mafia militia”, Hezbollah. “After a year, I’m not surprised that patience has run out.”

When asked, Perry is ready to answer NRC says that Al Jazeera English is “at least trying to give space to conflicting views”, which he sees as “an important step in the Arab world”, where there is little freedom of the press. “Though my expectations are low.”

He calls the Arabic Al Jazeera “completely propagandistic and serving political Islamism in the region.” He calls it “difficult” for Al Jazeera, “because the audience expects a political angle.” For the channel to talk about the genocide in Gaza “simply does not meet the UN definition,” Perry says. “Genocide does not mean: many deaths.”

According to Perry, Al Jazeera does not mind that Netanyahu’s government has placed additional restrictions on the channel when reporting on Israel. “It’s almost comically stupid: what little attention the channel paid to the Israeli perspective has now been cut,” Perry said. “Typical far-right idiocy. Do something that sounds good but is bad. This is the language of authoritarianism.”

On Friday afternoon, Netanyahu will address the UN General Assembly, which he calls a “swamp of anti-Semitic bile” and “anti-Israel.”flat earth society‘” mentions. According to the Prime Minister, in Israel’s “noble struggle, everything is done to spare the innocent”.

Immediately afterwards, in the Al Jazeera studio, the host asks how that speech “matches the reality” where Israel has “denied Palestinians the right to citizenship and occupied (their) land for decades.” London-based analyst Marwan Bishara shakes his head. “Without that unconditional, blind, stupid US support,” he says, “we wouldn’t be listening to a war criminal lecture the world about hypocrisy and human rights.”

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