Egyptian TV’s Message Lost in Israel

If a television show broadcasts across a sometimes-hostile border but hardly anyone is watching, does it have any impact?

That may be an odd twist on the point that befuddles children--whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound when no one’s around. But it’s a question some Israelis are raising about Egypt’s latest public relations effort. State-owned Nile Television International for the first time has begun broadcasting a Hebrew-language news show into Israel.

Egyptians say their goal is to help bridge the gap in understanding between Arabs and Israelis. But it appears that the broadcasters have fallen into that gap, by assuming that Israelis get their television the same way as do Egyptians, or at least wealthy Egyptians: via satellite dish.

Israel is wired for cable.

“This is not a system we use in Israel,” said Arad Nir, foreign editor of Israel’s Channel Two News. “Virtually no one has seen this show.”

Nadov Cohan, first secretary of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, agreed.

“Right now, no one sees this,” he said. “You need a satellite dish, and most of the people in Israel use a cable network.”

Egypt, like many other countries, including the United States, broadcasts a range of foreign-language radio shows around the world to promote its agenda. The Arab nation first started its Israel radio broadcasts in 1954 with a program called “Voice of Cairo.” That was changed to “Voice of Peace” in 1979, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a treaty with the Jewish state.

The idea to expand into television came amid the violence between Israelis and Palestinians over the last 15 months. As the bloodshed became commonplace, Arab governments were criticized by their citizens for doing virtually nothing substantive to support the Palestinian cause.

The Egyptian public at times has seemed paralyzed and depressed, caught between a desire to help the Palestinians and a reluctance to go to war. Indeed, President Hosni Mubarak has taken no harsh actions against the Israelis, short of recalling the Egyptian ambassador.

Enter “Nile TV,” or “Aroots Ha Nilos” in Hebrew.

From studios here on the seventh floor of the state media building along the Nile, Hassan Ali Hassan, the head of the station’s Hebrew section, was the first to introduce the show to would-be viewers. The broadcasts are half an hour long, though the goal is to produce a two-hour show of news and culture.

“Happy New Year,” Ali Hassan said Tuesday during the first show. “We hope that every Israeli citizen will have his hopes fulfilled in the new year, and that it will be a good and blessed year.”

Cohan, the Israeli Embassy official, has not seen a broadcast, though he has a better chance in Egypt, where it is shown daily on regular television from 6 to 6:30 p.m. Nevertheless, he said he is willing to give Egypt the benefit of the doubt and to accept that its intentions are positive.

“In principle it could be a good thing,” he said. “How it will be operated in the future, we have to wait and see. My opinion is it is more positive than negative.”

Yet even if the reception were crystal clear for all Israelis, it is unlikely many would watch the show, or take it very seriously. Egyptian media are regularly hostile to Israel, acting as an extension of the public psyche in a land where people accept the cold peace but are still piqued about the Jewish state’s existence.

The government newspaper, Al Ahram, for example, referred Thursday to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “criminal attacks on the Palestinian people.”

In the new show’s second broadcast, while the language was more moderate, the message was pretty much the same. “We gave an account of the Israelis’ continued blockade of the Palestinians even though the Palestinians are now quiet,” Ali Hassan said. “There is still no Israeli response to let the Palestinians get back to a normal life.”

Israelis are already expressing their skepticism about the show’s credibility.

“We actually regard it as mere propaganda,” said Nir, who broadcasts a nightly foreign affairs program on Channel Two. “It has a ‘nostalgic’ flair to it. During the Six-Day War in 1967 the Egyptians were broadcasting [by radio] in Hebrew. They said things like, ‘We are conquering Tel Aviv, you better run.’ This reminds people of that.”

From the Nile Television International offices, where young people rush around, chatting and preparing the day’s show, many staff members said their goal is to confront Israel with truths that they maintain it refuses to accept. They want to tell Israel that it must abide by United Nations resolutions that call on the Jewish state to withdraw from occupied territory.

“The Israelis don’t understand the basics,” said Hala Hashish, vice president and director of the station. “If you deprive someone of his freedom, his identity and his existence, there definitely will be a reaction. . . . The Israelis want to be safe, but how can you be safe when you are an aggressor? If you want to be safe, don’t be an aggressor.”

The idea behind the show is to present this message in a more nuanced way, Hashish said. But one person’s nuance is another’s club.

Hashish and her crew talked Thursday about using an article from the Egyptian daily newspaper Al Wafd on their show. The headline was: “Israel will help the United States in a plan to beat Iraq. Israeli military commanders gave their experience to assassinate Saddam Hussein.”

“It’s critical, it’s critical that we have permission,” Hashish said to one of her staffers during a phone conversation a few hours before broadcast. Moments later a staff member strode into the office, a bit shaken. “He yelled at me and said bad words to me,” the man said to Hashish, paraphrasing the unnamed higher-up to whom he had spoken: “How can you translate such an article, on a 2-day-old show? This is a political decision.”

“That’s it,” Hashish said, abruptly reversing course. “We aren’t using it.”

With all the work going into the show, with six broadcasters and a crew of technical and executive people, not to mention the message Hashish is so passionate about delivering to Israel, the television executive didn’t seem the least bit concerned that very little of her target audience would be able to see the show. Though some Israelis receive satellite feeds, few pick up the station’s broadcasts. Most who do, Cohan said, are Arab Israelis.

“If they are interested,” Hashish said, “they will get it.”