Before Israel, Al Jazeera was first attacked by free speech champion US

Citing alleged national security threats, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government shut down Al Jazeera earlier this month. Accusing the network of being a “mouthpiece for Hamas,” Israeli authorities closed the news outlet’s offices in Jerusalem and confiscated equipment. Israel’s Ministry of Communications announced that it had stop Al Jazeera’s broadcasts on cable and satellite and also blocked the media outlet’s websites.

This authoritarian action, which the United Nations condemned, will leave Israeli citizens less aware of the situation in Gaza and increase their country’s international isolation.

Shutting down Al Jazeera fits into a wider effort by Israel’s government to restrict freedom of speech and civil liberties amid this war. Netanyahu’s government wants as many Israelis as possible to live in an echo chamber in which they are fed state-endorsed narratives with basically no room for any counter-narratives.

“This far-right Israeli government is trying quite hard to provide a one-sided narrative to the unfolding catastrophe in Palestine—a catastrophe of unprecedented scale and genocidal proportions that is the Israeli authorities’ own making,” said Dr. Bader al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University, in an interview with TRT World.

“Having journalists and networks that provide alternative views and unmask hidden facts and atrocities undermines the Israeli government’s war machine—a war machine that utilizes media and (dis)information as one of its tools,” he added.

This action is not at all unprecedented, especially for a country at war.

“This is not the first time media was restricted in a war zone, and always by the side that didn’t want its war crimes exposed and sympathy extended worldwide to the victims of their war crimes,” Dr. Nabeel Khoury, the former deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Yemen, told TRT World.

“This is not the first time for Al Jazeera either, which was closed down and its offices attacked both in Iraq after the U.S. invasion and in Afghanistan. In both cases, the Bush administration, and specifically Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, branded the Al Jazeera reporters as enemies, even though Centcom was still hosted by Qatar, the owner and funder of the satellite station,” explained the former US diplomat.

The Bush administration’s problems with Al Jazeera reached the point of George W. Bush wanting the US to carry out military action against Qatar. According to a Downing Street memo which Daily Mirror reported on in November 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair had to persuade Bush that bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha would be unwise.

“Al Jazeera has a history of extensively covering war zones, especially but not exclusively in the Middle East. In Gaza, this amounted almost to a blow-by-blow description of the fighting and attacks on Palestinians homes, schools, and hospitals. The live coverage of Israeli attacks on civilians in particular has damaged Israel’s reputation in the Western world and among the youth in the US—the result of which has been obvious in public opinion polls and on university campuses,” Dr. Khoury told TRT World.

Attempting to control the narratives surrounding Gaza

Israel’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera fits into a wider agenda that concerns any news organisation challenging the talking points and version of events in Gaza which Netanyahu’s government wants Israelis to accept seven months into this war on Gaza.

“Israelis are living in an echo chamber at the moment where they’re being fed with government-approved narratives with very [few] images and counter-narratives allowed, which distorts the perception by Israelis of what’s really going on, how the war is going, and what is actually happening in Gaza. As a consequence, many Israelis, if they’re not actively seeking to find alternative [sources of] news, are basically left in the dark about what’s going on in Gaza, which is extremely dangerous,” explained Dr. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, in an interview with TRT World.

Dr. Steven Wright, an associate professor of International Relations at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, believes that Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera is about much more than the shutting down of this one network.

“It’s a clear message to all international media that the Israeli government wants to control the narrative and suppress any journalism that contradicts its official line,” he told TRT World. “Silencing Al Jazeera is a way to intimidate other journalists and create a chilling effect on the press.”

Qatari diplomacy and Al Jazeera’s reputation

This year, Netanyahu and other politicians in Israel have been lashing out at Doha. These Israeli figures, along with many neo-conservatives in Washington, allege that Qatar is not putting sufficient pressure on Hamas to release hostages taken on October 7 because of Doha’s foreign policy agenda in support of the Palestinian group. This move against Al Jazeera needs to be partly seen within this context.

“I believe Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera is part of a calculated campaign to undermine Qatar's role as a regional mediator and censor international media coverage of the Gaza war. Israel is attempting to deter Qatar from its diplomatic efforts and restrict the flow of information about the conflict’s devastating human impact,” said Dr. Wright.

Yet, some analysts do not expect the Israeli government’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera to necessarily have any significant impact on Doha’s diplomatic efforts vis-à-vis the Gaza war, nor on Al Jazeera’s reputation. To the contrary, the network’s popularity stands to benefit from this oppressive move by the Israeli state.

“Qatar is a rational actor that has long mastered the art of mediation and conflict mitigation to a point it can absorb the closure of Al Jazeera in Israel and not link it to its stellar mediation efforts alongside Egypt. If anything, Israel provided Al Jazeera with even more credibility and free PR with its move,” Dr. al-Saif told TRT World.

“Censuring a channel, a person, a product enshrines it. They have even led inadvertently to supporting intra-Gulf ties by enabling an unprecedented move: the Abu Dhabi-stationed Sky News Arabia hosted Al Jazeera personnel to talk about the closure. More of these missteps by Israel can be seen as a blessing in disguise and will go against its own intended objective of blocking alternative views,” explained the Kuwaiti scholar.