Between the "Al-Aqsa flood" and the Arab media. Pause at the lines. and between them

Arab paradox:

The issue of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the Arab media would not have been raised without the question points raised by the coverage of Arab media outlets and others of wonder in more than one direction. With an issue that has long been described as the first and the cause of the nation, logic calls for the Arab media to be on the heart of one man, putting aside its biases and agendas to play its role in covering field and political developments, and going far in opening spaces for discussion between Arabs, and between them and others, in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening, and to seek advanced awareness of what is going on around it from regional and international stakes, which do not lose sight of historical and civilized dimensions that refer to the interests and fate of an ancient nation.

This is what is supposed, but the reality tells us a different scene, because Arab screens and websites, although at first glance seem similar in their coverage of the developments of the Israeli-Arab conflict, a closer look reveals before us dimensions included in the folds of the headlines, and between the sides of articles and reports, whether visual, audio or written.

Some may see this approach as an exaggeration in tracking down the "stumbling blocks of the Arab media", detracting from its role, which is based on common ground stressed by the Arab League whenever the Arab Media Day scheduled for April 21 of each year is celebrated again, an occasion that has never lost sight of the Palestinian concern, especially at this stage when Zionist ambitions in Jerusalem have intensified, under Netanyahu's most extreme right-wing government.

Challenges made last year's Kuwait session talk about the great Arab media entitlement towards Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause in general, and its role in enlightening the Arab street, and supporting the Palestinian media in the pressures it is subjected to.

These trends were reinforced by the selection of Jerusalem as the permanent capital of Arab media by the Council of Arab Ministers, without avoiding the traditional question of how these recommendations and decisions are translated on the ground, and their effectiveness every time they are tested by the widespread Israeli attacks and the Western alignment behind them, as well as the irony of the dispersion of Arab media discourse due to political dependence on one side or the other.

Challenges that prove that the accountability of the Arab media, at a station of the gravity of the battle of the "Al-Aqsa flood", is a professional necessity and a national obligation that does not accept complacency or postponement in any case.

Informative Bracket:

In order to liberate the demand - as the ancients say in their terminology - we can draw as a matter of simplicity a media arc related to the operation "Al-Aqsa flood" whose two contradictory parties are media arms of the resistance movements, matched by Zionist media, on the disparity you will find within each camp in the approach and discourse of the approach and the methods adopted in monitoring the news and providing it with analysis and selection of angles.

Between these two camps there is a fierce war no less fierce than that taking place on the ground, and in both you find what translates into a firm commitment to supporting one of the two parties to the conflict and enabling his narrative, and even waging psychological warfare on the opposite side, including justifying military actions against him and defaming him, and turning public opinion against him in all possible ways.

Within this division, channels such as Al-Aqsa, Al-Manar, Palestine Today, and others played a remarkable role in supporting the military effort and mobilizing public support for it. These channels have faced attempts to silence them on the grounds that they are the voice of what Israel and all allied countries consider terrorist organizations that have no right to exist in the first place.

Between this and that, there is a wide area of a large spectrum of channels, presenting themselves as news or public channels, which find themselves interested in covering major regional and international events, and it is certain that a war of the magnitude of the one taking place in and around Gaza cannot be ignored after international and regional powers entered the line, amid warnings of the slide of the dangerous security escalation into a real war, and it has already turned into that.

Here, the lam of the definition becomes deceptive and mined, because talk about Western or Arab media quickly falls into a generalization that is based on a right that can be turned into a falsehood that inhabits the details.

If the Western media, in general, shows a blatant bias towards the Israeli narrative, making Hamas's attack and labeling it a terrorist confiscation of anyone wanted in any news material or discussion, the Arab media seemed difficult to categorize the whole.

From one channel to another, and from one location to another, the news of the "Al-Aqsa flood" comes to the fore, and if the amazing field surprise accomplished by the Qassam Brigades imposed itself on the early days, it was only necessary to monitor the manifestations of that unprecedented military operation, and ask the question about its merits and dimensions, the ways have parted with the media in the Arab world, drawing a map of approaches that carry in their bowels a view of the conflict, its actors, and the possible paths that may go towards it.

It is true that the levels of analysis lead us to expressions that cannot be put in one mold, because we are talking here about official media, semi-official, and a third described as private or independent, and it also reminds us of the duality of traditional media and new media, in reference to a high media wave that rides the waves of social networking sites of all kinds and everything new that appears from them day after day.

However, due to the lack of space, we will be satisfied with a word that has expanded in popularity and use nowadays, and we will treat it as a container for everyone and a criterion for classification at the same time, which is content.

War of Narratives:

The media content industry is related to content intended for mass consumption on a large scale, and closely related to what is known as narrative warfare. The new generations of wars say that victory is no longer limited to a field resolution for this or that party, because it needs a vital and even fateful aspect, which is to build the narrative in its two different directions, that is, the past to provide a narrative about the context within which the developments came, and the future, given that that narrative, which resembles a spear that starts from the beginning of events to the station they reached, represents material for creating a certain consciousness, and framing the consideration of any possible future paths.

This bet is an area in which several tools overlap, such as the formulation of political discourse, academic and cultural production, as well as - and this is among the most important, if not the most important - media content.

Israel and its allies are aware of this fact, and do not lose sight of it in the blink of an eye, which is why the brutal and bloody Israeli response continues to coincide with the media coverage of Hamas and the debate over whether or not it is terrorism.

At the Arab level, we find ourselves facing a different path, where the discourse has moved from an open competition in bidding, either to establish political leadership that transcends countries to a wider Arab and Islamic field, or to raise the threshold and accommodate the public anger that is pointed every time at the finger of accusation at the Arab failure to support the Palestinians and save the holy sites.

Within this competition, with limited and timid official normalization in Egypt and Jordan, and another taking place behind the scenes, the official and semi-official Arab media crystallized a tradition of absorbing angry feelings and dividing them into axes on the basis of separation between the humanitarian and the field, and between the immediate and the historical.

With the clinical death of the settlement process and the rise of one Arab country after another to conclude deals with Benjamin Netanyahu, without real consideration for his extreme right, his government's bloody practices and its agenda regarding the peace process and the status of Islamic and Christian sanctities, a new performance has emerged within the Arab media that deals with developments in the Palestinian cause as if they were like any developments in a region of the world.

Therefore, we see this performance today in a number of screens, especially the news ones, and it makes a real difference towards the performance of Al-Jazeera, as well as comparing it to Al-Aqsa and Al-Manar channels on the edge of the arc on which we based this conversation.

Screens that follow countries that have gone in the direction of normalization, recognizing Israel and celebrating the growing relations with it, and reflecting the policies of Arab capitals that bet clearly on economic partnerships from Tel Aviv, and political guarantees for the continuation of their rule after the Arab Spring made them not only apprehensive about its dimensions and future possibilities, but also go far in thwarting it, abusing its symbols, and eliminating all its chances of changing the Arab reality in the direction of freedom and democracy and ensuring the sovereignty of the countries and peoples who own their free decision.

Screens soon focused much more on the military operation against Gaza than on the military and political earthquake caused by the Qassam Brigades' attack on the settlements surrounding Gaza, and later on Israeli cities and towns.

In this perspective, the focus was on the humanitarian aspect, to show the Palestinians in a state of panic and their mouthpiece: "What is our fault in what is happening and why do we bear the heavy price of such wars every time?"

In one of the social media posts of one of the channels, it came to the point of presenting an article that included a clear and direct message that the Hamas operation did Netanyahu a favor and made him stronger at home and abroad, with a dose of reference to the horror that awaits the people of Gaza from the "adventure of Hamas."

On the other hand, other channels led by Al Jazeera presented a different approach, in which the media narrative was built based on old and new contexts, which remind that what is happening within a wider circle is the story of the occupation and its crimes, and that the most important significance remains in the field achievement that confused Israel in an unprecedented way, and the assertion that the bombing of Gaza and the demolition of homes on its residents is not an achievement that any army in the world can be proud of, or consider it an achievement in any way.

You will not find direct phrases like the one you read in these lines, but the spirit of coverage, the choice of angles and the intensification of images paint this gap between an Arab media engaged in the path of normalization and neglecting the Palestinian right for an economic and political price that has nothing to do with the dignity and status of Arabs, and another that adheres to a narrative based on the duality of occupation and resistance, and the slow development of the balance of power in favor of the Palestinian people and their struggling forces despite the enormity of the price.

The thesis and its opposite:

Can we borrow from the Marxist methodological tools the mechanism of dialectics to predict as much as possible the possible outcome of what can be described as the attraction of narratives within the Arab media? It seems difficult for at least two considerations:

The first is that the conflict between the thesis and its opposite requires that the contradiction between them reach the peak where the point of no return, which allows the emergence of counterpoint within harsh and creative historical interactions, while the reality of the case is the contradiction between the two lines referred to earlier in dealing with the "Al-Aqsa flood" is not a radical contradiction, as both are forced to deal with the other side of the picture, in the sense that the sympathy of a channel with the Palestinian cause does not prevent it from hosting Israeli guests, just as the involvement of media platforms in justifying normalization The resistance gun being taken from both an apparent and a hidden side does not prevent it from hosting the leaders of that resistance, showing understanding of its rhetoric and recognizing the extent of its rootedness as a difficult figure in the equation that cannot be bypassed.

The second is that the stage, i.e. the stage arising from the conflict between the thesis and its opposite, is supposed to be an evolution of them to the point of separation and the establishment of a completely new stage.

At this level, reference is always made to the so-called citizenship media, alternative media and social media sites, but this experience is important, because it reflects in different forms the public moods and opinion trends within the broad street, away from the domination of the authorities and parties, despite all this and the overwhelming sympathy it reflected with the Palestinians and their cause in a way that returned it to square one: An Arab-Islamic issue and a conflict with civilizational dimensions steeped in history and geography, but this experience remained mainly emotional, lacking the sobriety of the political mind, and the traditions of journalistic work, including the scrutiny of the news and balance in analysis, so that it seemed closer to reaction than to establishment. Even more dangerous of all, the citadel of this experiment is strongly vulnerable to penetration, whether through the extensions of traditional media, or through organs and pressure groups that exploit social media to guide and manipulate public opinion.

All these data raise the question of the possibility of benefiting from this experience, good and bad, to think about an alternative Arab media project that lives up to the challenges posed to the region and the dangers facing it, led by the Zionist project in its various forms of state, alliances and media arms that crystallized an advanced media experience in form and content, even as it promotes the Israeli falsehood that confiscates Palestinian rights.

A question to which we do not know exactly whether the operation "Al-Aqsa Flood" necessitates a speedy search for an answer. Or may the seriousness of the Israeli response postpone this to a later stage that provides time and a required amount of calm to think with a cold mind about how to deal with hot events related to fateful issues?