Al Jazeera Office in Israel Raided and Channel Taken Off Air

Let’s get more now on the Israeli government decision to close down the Al Jazeera TV channel in Israel. This has been happening throughout the day, and Sebastian Usher is our Middle East analyst at the BBC World Service. And we’ve had some news in just in the last half an hour or so, Sebastian from Frank Gardner, our security correspondent in Jerusalem, who says that Israeli police have already raided the offices of the Qatar-based channel. And that was just within hours, wasn’t it, of that decision?

That’s right.

To shut it down. It seems very, very swift.

It is. It’s swift, but it has been building for some time, and this is something that the Israeli government, now this far-right government, has very much pushed for, and especially in the context of the Gaza war, events since October the seventh, Hamas attacks on Israel then in which Al Jazeera, which Israel has accused for a very long time of being anti-Israeli. It’s acted against its journalists. Journalists have been killed.

(01:05)
I mean, most famously, two years ago, Shereen Abu Akleh, the star correspondent of Al Jazeera for the Arab service that they run in the occupied territories was killed. Al Jazeera accused Israel 100% of having carried it out. Since then, Israel has said that the chances are that it was an accidental killing. So this showdown between Al Jazeera and Israel goes back a long way. But really this has become much stronger during the Gaza war. And Al Jazeera has been really the only international media outlet which has been able to keep its reporters on the ground there. They’ve been reporting essentially 24 hours a day on its Arab language channel and its English language channel. And again, that’s something which the Israeli government is very much against and believes is essentially acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas. And they’ve said that explicitly. They’ve even accused Al Jazeera staff of collaborating with Hamas.

(02:09)
So this announcement today, which was made by the Prime Minister Netanyahu, was followed very swiftly by the communications minister saying he’d signed it. And as we’ve seen actually, the communications minister posted video of the raid within a couple of hours of this happening. So the powers that Israel has over Al Jazeera to confiscate its broadcasting equipment, to close its offices and to block access to it on satellite and its websites. Now what we’re hearing from Israel is that that has happened, that it’s no longer obtainable by satellite or cable in Israel, but there’s other ways of doing it. And again, as Frank was saying, you can get it on Facebook now. Very difficult in this day and age, obviously, to completely close down access to a network like Al Jazeera.

I wonder in your analysis, what do you think this means in terms of people’s views of Netanyahu? We have seen more protests, haven’t we in recent months, but for the people in Israel in particular, what do you think their perception will be of this? I’m thinking more in terms of free speech.

Yes. No, I understand that. I think in terms of the critics of Netanyahu date back before October the seventh, who basically went on the streets in hundreds of thousands every Saturday to protest against what they saw as a move by his government to close down the ability for the judiciary to take positions against what the government wanted to do. They would say, this is another attack on free speech.

(03:39)
I think many Israelis though would see it as this is a time of war. Al Jazeera, I think many people, if they do watch it, would see it as some kind of propaganda. They would see it as taking too strongly a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli position. So I don’t think it’ll change particularly the way that Israelis see Netanyahu if they already see him as someone who’s opposed to free speech, who’s opposed to democracy in Israel, then they will see this as another sign of it. But for many others, it will be mixed up with this feeling, which this is a time of war. Just as you have many Israelis who are very much against the way. But the war has been fought by the Israeli government of Israeli military and the casualties on the Palestinian side. They’re not necessarily against the fact of the war in the first place because of what happened in October the seventh.

Okay. Sebastian Usher, thank you very much.