Can i24 News change how the world sees Israel?: The New Yorker Timing could not have been more fortuitous for i24 News. Two weeks ago, as the Israel-based news channel was preparing to launch its first broadcast, reports started trickling in that a chain of people had resigned from Al Jazeera in protest of its perceived pro-Muslim Brotherhood bias in its coverage of Egypt. The Israeli venture was pleased with the fraying of its more established competitor and, on Wednesday at 8 P.M., i24 News launched, marking the start of an ambitious twenty-four-hour news station that will air in English, Arabic, and French simultaneously. The channel will dedicate roughly seventy per cent of its coverage to news from around the world and thirty per cent to news from Israel, i24 News's founders say. Its broadcasts are currently streamed live on the Web and will soon be available via satellite in more than three hundred million homes worldwide, including Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It plans to expand to the United States in early 2014. The channel, whose sprawling headquarters are located in the newly gentrified Jaffa Port, outside Tel Aviv, is the brainchild of Frank Melloul, a former French diplomat and media advisor, with the financial backing of the Franco-Israeli communications mogul Patrick Drahi. Despite its multilingual platform, the channel will not broadcast in Hebrew. It wants to reach an international, not domestic, audience. "I want to show the world that there's a place for new journalism from the one democracy in the region," Melloul told me in a phone interview he did in Tel Aviv. So far, Melloul has hired a hundred and sixty journalists, many of who are bilingual Israelis, with others hailing from countries such as South Africa, France, Belgium, Egypt, and the United States. Yet there is something strange about the channel putting itself forward as an alternative to Al Jazeera, a network whose overwhelming success comes mainly from its appeal to the Arab world. It's a little like imagining liberal MSNBC setting as its target audience the conservative viewers of Fox News. No matter how diverse i24 News's composition is, one would be hard-pressed to find a scenario in which audiences from Arab or Muslim countries would choose to tune in to a channel that was based out of Israel. Melloul seemed to acknowledge this when he said, referring to numerous reports in the Arab press about the launch of i24 News, "At least the Arab people are talking about it." He went on, "Of course, they are talking about it as a curiosity at first, but maybe in a few months they will watch and start to talk about the human rights that they don't have in their own countries." Despite declaring that his goal was to "change the point of view about Israel," Melloul insisted that i24 News did not receive any funding from the government and was not at all state propaganda. As if to prove his point, the channel's first English edition opened with embarrassing news for the Israeli prime minister: the European Union had issued a directive prohibiting the financing of institutions in the Jewish settlements. "Will Israel choose peace or settlements," i24 News political correspondent Tal Shalev asked on air. The E.U. has made it clear: it cannot choose both. When I asked Shalev, a thirty-three-year-old Jerusalem native (and former colleague of mine at Haaretz newspaper), about this report and the angle of the stories she is expected to cover in general, she said, "We don't have guidelines from above on anything; we're given complete freedom." That was part of the appeal for her, she told me, as she weighed the decision to move to i24 News from Walla, a popular online news source. The channel's first news program didn't seem all that different compared to other Israeli news networks (after all, every news edition covered the E.U. directive that day). What set it apart, perhaps, was the delivery. For the first time on Israeli television, a prime-time news edition featured an Arab-Israeli news anchor - and a woman, at that. The anchor, thirty-two-year-old Lucy Aharish, is a native Hebrew speaker who grew up in the southern working-class town of Dimona, where over ninety per cent of the population is Jewish. When she got a call asking her to audition for the Arabic-language edition of i24 News, she immediately turned it down. "I didn't want to be labelled; all my life I fought against that," she explained. So instead, she asked the producers if she could audition in English. She said that they were reluctant at first, but at the end of her audition she was offered the job on the spot. (Still, she and others often stumble on their English, as happened when Aharish couldn't pronounce the word "necessary" from the teleprompter on the air. "In other places I would have been eaten alive" for such a slip, she said; I was told that, on the contrary, Melloul finds such language glitches to be "charming.") Asked what makes i24 News different from other media outlets that cover the region, Aharish said, "When people abroad think of Israelis, they think of Jews, whereas in fact there are Arabs, Druze, Circassians, Christians, etc. Within the Palestinian camp, too, there is a division between those from Ramallah, for example, or those from East Jerusalem. We try to bring that extra something. When I asked Frank Melloul what that "extra something" might be, he had a somewhat different definition. "At Al Jazeera, the goal is to excite," he said. I want to bring some serenity. One might question whether "serenity" is really a quality that belongs in hard-hitting news about the Middle East. Melloul told me, with a sense of pride, "I'm not a businessman; I'm not a journalist; I'm a diplomat," perhaps adding credence to the concern that the channel will merely present a watered-down take on current affairs. But so far, at least, skepticism has proved premature. When news broke last week that Israel agreed to release Palestinian prisoners as part of the resumption of peace talks, i24 News held a debate between two parents. Both of them had lost a child in a terrorist attack; one parent believed that the prisoner release was justified if it would help bring about peace, while the other deplored the government's decision. "You would never see that on prime time on CNN or BBC, and not on [Israel's] Channel 2 or Channel 10," Aharish told me. "To show sixteen minutes of unedited, uninterrupted debate - that's something pretty rare," she added. Whether viewers will decide to tune in is, of course, another matter. Photograph: Lauren Tolila.