Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

Tzvi Fleischer

Al-Jazeera in Australia

This month's AIR cover story deals with the myths and realities of al-Jazeera televison, the Qatari network that undoubtedly helped to bring about the "Arab Spring" and re-shape the Middle East political and media environment over the past decade. And in its English language incarnation, it has been moving out of the Middle East into the wider world for a number of years now.

As the cover story demonstrates, while it's clear that the English language version of the channel does not contain the blatant radical political agenda that the channel often features in its Arabic incarnation, it is also apparent that, even in English, it is not simply another public broadcaster. Unlike the ABC, the BBC, Israel's Channel 1, Canada's CBC, or the American NPR, this is not a truly independent, publicly-funded broadcaster. Not only does the Qatari absolute monarchy pay for it, al-Jazeera's Chairman is a member of the al-Thani royal family and so is the current Director-General. There is never any coverage of anything that might reflect poorly on the Qatari Government, and coverage is at least partly shaped based on Qatar's perceived political interests - lots of coverage of unrest in Libya, Egypt and Syria, little on Bahrain, nothing on Saudi Arabia. Some of its journalists provide stories that meet international standards and would not be out of place on the BBC or ABC. Others do not - especially in covering Middle Eastern issues or the US, where apparently, the network has decided to largely avoid employing American journalists as anchors at its Washington broadcast centre, possibly for political reasons.

I point all this out in detail because it raises serious questions concerning the degree to which al-Jazeera English, in addition to being available here on cable, is being employed by Australia's own public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS. SBS uses the channel's products extensively in its own news bulletins, as well as broadcasting a separate half-hour program of al-Jazeera news every day. The ABC has more of its own journalists, but still uses al-Jazeera frequently when they need an outside news source.

This is likely being done primarily because rights to al-Jazeera material are very cheap, but it seems obvious that this is potentially problematic. Qatar is not a democracy, despite some moves in the right direction in recent years. It is currently rated "not free" by Freedom House, and its media is also rated "not free". Al-Jazeera does not meet the criteria of independence that would normally apply to any material coming out of the ABC and SBS. Would the ABC and SBS similarly use large numbers of stories from Russia or China's propagandistic state broadcasters, if they made them available in English, or from Iran's Press-TV, which already does?

At the very least, if they are going to use stories from al-Jazeera English, SBS and ABC should be making it clear what safeguards they have in place to ensure that the blindspots and biases of the network, as well as the sometimes sub-par journalism, are not imported as well.

All Wet Water Claims

One of the claims always levelled against Israel by those seeking to squeeze its control over the West Bank into the paradigm of "colonialist" exploitation is that Israel is supposedly monopolising the region's water. In a particularly extreme example, a French Parliamentary report released in December caused a stir when it accused Israel of "Water Apartheid." A frequently heard assertion is that Israelis use four times more water than Palestinians, and it is often claimed that Israel is "stealing" the water in the mountain aquifers which lie under "Palestinian territory" in the West Bank.

Now a new report written by Professor Haim Gwirtzman, Professor of Hydrology at the Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University, and published by the Begin-Sadat Centre at Bar-Ilan University, shows that almost all the claims on which such condemnations rely are baseless. Among other things, Professor Gwirtzman demonstrates that:

• Per capita Israeli and Palestinian use of natural water - that is, excluding recycled water and desalinated water, neither of which is a limited resource - is actually almost the same. Israelis on average consume 150 cubic metres of natural water per year versus 140 cubic metres for Palestinians. That is, the limited available natural water is being shared pretty fairly.

• Under Israeli occupation, Palestinian per capita water consumption has increased greatly, while Israeli consumption has fallen. Palestinian consumption was 93 cubic metres per capita per year in 1967, and, as noted, is now 140 cubic metres per year.

• Between 1967 and 1995, Israel increased the number of Palestinian towns connected to a modern water supply system from 4 to 309. Today 96% of Palestinians have access to running water, much more than in neighbouring Arab countries.

• Not only is Israel exceeding the supply of water it promised to deliver to the Palestinians under the Oslo Accords, it is already supplying as much water as those accords envisioned for a final status agreement.

• Despite Palestinian claims that the water in the mountain aquifers are rightfully theirs, Israel was already using the vast majority of the water in these aquifers before 1967, because the water naturally emerged in springs within Israel. Moreover, under international law, existing water use is an important parameter for deciding allocation of water. The Israeli conquest of these areas in 1967 did not significantly affect usage patterns for this water - except that Israel began supplying more and more Palestinian communities with water largely extracted from the aquifers.

There is further discussion of Professor Gwirtzman's findings here in the ‘Fresh Air" blog on AIJAC's website. His full paper can be read online at tinyurl.com/Gwirtzman-report