Arab Media Reform For Middle East Peace
For the many people of good faith in the Middle East and beyond who would like to see our region overcome its fractures and strife, there is some good news to report.
The essence is this: The moral victory of peace and coexistence is, at least in the abstract, now finally won. No serious people still deny the overriding virtues of national reconciliation or underestimate the dangers of a culture of exclusion. This new, hard-earned awareness has been born of great suffering that has yet to fully abate—note war-torn Libya, Yemen, and Syria; and internal sectarian strife even in Egypt. But these ongoing tragedies only sharpen the overarching truth that the price of false pride and fevered illusion is too high to continue paying; and the debt being inflicted on our children is too heavy to bear.
This new dawn of understanding is now shared by senior figures in many media outlets and, as befits our role, we are ready to speak out. We understand the pivotal role that media messaging—in addition to the importance of reform in schools and religious platforms—must play in promoting a culture of reconciliation.
In Egypt, we have the benefit of a leadership that supports deep attitudinal reform and understands the media’s role in affirming and propagating it. President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has urged media to assume a major role in “restoring the fabric of Egyptian social life,” and his frequent calls for a new, broader and deeper settlement in the Middle East demonstrate his commitment to reconciliation and inclusion.
Despite this good news, entrenched sectarian and ethnic loyalties are still often manipulated to short circuit forward-looking enterprises of many kinds. We see this in the unrelenting demonization of Jews and Israelis in media across the region, but hate-drenched broadcasts also target the sectarian “other.” As political programming manager for Sada El Balad, one of the Egypt’s leading TV channels, I saw how Egyptian media, from Ahmed Sa’id on Voice of the Arabs to productions like Horseman without a Horse, have been complicit in sharpening the fangs of war and later poisoning the promise of peace. The warped souls behind these incendiary enterprises have yet to be fully uprooted, but a great many, especially younger, voices want to finish the job. The tide has finally turned, and this is very good news, indeed.
Egyptian media professionals now need to transform this new tide into a wave of sustainable media reform. We can best do that by helping to fulfill the unredeemed promise of peace between Egypt and Israel, and thus being a bridge to a full settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
We know that no narrowly defined diplomatic process can achieve a full Palestinian-Israeli peace unless the populations on both sides accept it. Only Israeli and Palestinian societies can shape their infospheres to embrace peace, but we in Egypt can help them. As a community of channels and outlets, we can adopt a set of commitments that will move the Egyptian body politic away from being a source of pressure against a complete Arab settlement with Israel to one in which they become its loudest cheering section.
We must do that in tandem with an effort to redeem the promise of the March 1979 Treaty of Peace. We must consistently call for normal relations between the Egyptian and Israeli peoples, for by rejecting rejectionism we in Egypt can demonstrate the benefits to all of future Palestinian-Israeli peace.
The core requirements of such an Egyptian media reform project are threefold:
Foundational content: Accurate information about Jews, their history, and Israeli society and politics are not readily available in Egypt. Nasserist and then Muslim Brotherhood propaganda have poisoned generations of minds, and urgently require a corrective. We need therefore to form an international working group of scholars on Jewish and Israeli history, culture, and politics to help Egyptian and other Arab media develop the foundational content for future programming.
Improved professional standards: We as Egyptian media professionals must adopt a code of conduct for the content we develop that would exorcize the poisons of incitement and conspiracy mongering from our midst. Employers must hold their broadcasters, veterans and young professionals alike, accountable to a new code of objectivity, and government broadcast regulatory bodies must enforce that code from the highest levels to the lowest in our media companies.
Desegregate the infosphere: A new commitment to a “peace between peoples” requires modelling it on screen. Guests of every nationality in our region—including Israelis—should participate in our political programming. Merely allowing Israelis and Jews to speak for themselves would constitute a powerful corrective to their long-time demonization.
Better foundational content, improved professional standards, and the desegregation of the infosphere are specific steps we can take now to magnify the good news at our doorstep, and shrink what remains of the self-defeating illusions that have harmed us for so long. With the support of our nation’s leadership at our backs, we can do this. We must do this.