What You'd Know About Israel If You Watched Al Jazeera TV

By Shane Bauer, New America Media. Posted January 9, 2009.

"There is nowhere safe in Gaza," an enraged John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, told Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in front of the Al Shifa hospital today. Those words came after the Israeli Defense Forces bombed a UN school that was being used as a refuge. Later in the day, a second UN school was struck by the Israelis, killing at least 40. "Everyone here is terrorized and traumatized and they have the right to be because there is no safe haven…This violence needs to stop now. Neither side can wait for the other to stop first," he said.

While Al Jazeera might be the only channel reporting from inside Gaza, scores of channels across the Middle East are airing constant commentary as well as images of wailing women, dead children, and burning buildings on loop. On the Syrian satellite station Al-Sham, for example, a pro-Hezbollah series about Israel's occupation of south Lebanon was alternated with a 20-minute musical piece sung over images of dead babies, American soldiers kicking men in orange jumpsuits, a naked Arab man with a bag over his head running from American military dogs, stone-throwing Palestinian children, and endless footage of blood-soaked Palestinians and Iraqis. The song's chorus, "The heart of humanity has died. It died between us brothers. Maybe we forgot one day that all Arabs are brothers," reflects the deep anger that people are feeling toward the inaction of Arab governments here.

By and large, media here is "all Gaza, all the time," and the more people see and hear about what is going on there, the angrier they seem to get. As I rode a bus into the Palestinian refugee camp, Yarmouk, a few days ago, the Syrian radio station was taking calls. A woman screamed into the airwaves, "The people of Gaza don't need food; they need guns to resist the Israelis!" The bus remained silent, full of straight-faced, clench-jawed passengers.

Many went home and watched the ground invasion live a couple of hours later in night vision-green on Al Jazeera. Since then, the death toll has climbed to at least 598, according to Al Jazeera, with 2,700 injured.

Meanwhile, the world's only live coverage of the tragedy is kept away from American eyes. While Al Jazeera English competes with CNN and BBC as one of the largest networks in the world, no major American cable provider has been willing to carry the channel since it launched in 2006. Some say cable providers are squeamish about working with a channel popularly perceived in the United States as giving airtime to terrorists.

But Al Jazeera is finding its way around the problem. Today, Americans hungry for inside coverage of Gaza can download Livestation, a free program that will let viewers watch Al Jazeera English among other international networks. Defiant as always, Al Jazeera might break through another media blackout, and into American homes.

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