The Arab-British publication condemned both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu for setting the Middle East ablaze, immediately calling Trump the “madman-in-chief”.
Over a month later, the US and Israel show no sign of backing down, and neither does the Iranian regime. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent an economic shockwave around the world.
The New Arab continues to provide a space in which mainstream Western narratives about the war can be criticised, platforming Iranian writers in response to the conflict.
Iranian expat commentator Trita Parsi, well-known for his criticisms of American Mideast policy, denounced the US-Israeli attack, calling it “an illegal, unprovoked war of choice”, doomed to failure.
The New Arab has consistently backed calls for democracy across the region, honouring the legacy of the Arab Spring while lamenting its failures. That’s why the publication took the side of the uprising in Syria.
The publication has an Arabic sister newspaper, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, which targets the Arab diaspora in European countries, from Belgium and France to the Netherlands and the UK.
Both The New Arab and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed are run out of the same West London office. Although they are British companies, their corporate parent is the Qatari Fadaat Media Group, which also owns the Al Araby TV Network.
Palestinian Israeli politician Azmi Bishara, a former member of the Knesset now living in Qatar, oversaw the launch of The New Arab in March 2014. He hoped the publication would provide a space for dissident voices from across West Asia.
During his political career, Bishara was a member of Balad, a secular Palestinian nationalist party fighting for social change in Israel. He stepped down from the Knesset amid accusations of giving information to Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon.
Few Israelis could have imagined Bishara would make a comeback as a media entrepreneur. Within two years of its debut, The New Arab had offices in Beirut and Doha, as well as its London headquarters, with a combined staff of more than 150 people.
In 2017, Bishara stepped back from “direct political work” to focus on research at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies in Qatar. But he appears to have maintained a strong connection with The New Arab.
Just as Al Jazeera English absorbed a lot of Asian British talent, The New Arab has hired Arab journalists who couldn’t operate freely in certain countries.
For example, after General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized power in Egypt during the July 2013 putsch, ending its brief experiment with democracy, the publication provided a refuge for the country’s independent journalists.
Promoting Democracy in West Asia
The New Arab’s coverage of the Iran war aligns with its founding editorial agenda: support for democracy and human rights, and opposition to dictatorship and theocracy.
The Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 remain a touchstone, both for the hope they briefly kindled and the frustration that followed in their wake.
Much like Al Jazeera, The New Arab ran sympathetic coverage supporting the Syrian rebel forces alongside scathing reportage on Russia’s intervention in the country’s civil war.
A close adviser to Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, Azmi Bishara was reportedly involved in efforts to support the creation of the Syrian National Coalition. The SNC was the major rebel umbrella group backed by Qatar during the civil war.
The conflict eventually resulted in the defeat of the Ba’ath dictatorship, just when many Western governments had given up on the hope for regime change.
After Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda militant, seized power in Syria, The New Arab pivoted to criticise the new leadership in Damascus.
Socialist intellectual Joseph Daher, who was born in Aleppo, penned a radical critique in the publication, excoriating the regimes of both Bashar al-Assad and al-Sharaa for their authoritarianism.
Far from talking up the new government, Daher has covered protests and strikes against al-Sharaa’s bid to conjure up an economic miracle through neoliberal shock therapy. These protests have received little attention in the West, which cheered the fall of Assad.
Daher was a principled opponent of the Assad regime, as well as a critic of Western and Russian intervention in his country. He has consistently favoured building a secular democracy in Syria.
Although it would be inaccurate to conflate The New Arab with its corporate parent, the publication has still played a role in translating Qatar’s massive wealth into soft power. In this regard, the publication is similar to Al Jazeera, which began operations in 1996 and expanded with its English-language version in 2006.
The New Arab takes a secular, pan-Arabist line, positioning itself on the centre-left. This is easy to discern in the publication’s coverage of Western politics.
For example, its last editorial in 2025 highlighted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and British Green leader Zack Polanski as progressive figures who “make hope normal again”.
Showing its cards in British politics, The New Arab followed Hannah Spencer’s campaign in Gorton and Denton, in which the Green Party trounced Labour and the populist Reform UK.
This may seem a shift in gears from when The New Arab was running criticism of Jeremy Corbyn, arguing that his foreign policy line was too soft on Bashar al-Assad. But the values underlying the publication’s editorial stance have remained consistent.
Nobody Tells Us What To Say
Although The New Arab’s ties to Qatar are real, it has demonstrated considerable independence in its reporting. But its ownership has still presented challenges.
Azmi Bishara, for example, was spied on. The United Arab Emirates targeted him and many others as part of Project Raven, aiming at Qatar-linked news media.
“Nobody tells us what to say,” Bishara said in an interview with Reuters, adding that “sometimes the newspaper might be sensitive about what not to say because you are not there to provoke the people that finance you.”
Every good journalist knows how to work their beat regardless of political and commercial pressures. In this regard, working for The New Arab isn’t that different from working for a paper owned by Western billionaires like the Murdoch family or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Because the journalists running The New Arab are more independent than most other reporters in the region, they offer an alternative to the play-it-safe coverage of the BBC and other major Western outlets.
This autonomy means The New Arab can publish a mix of newsroom reporting, alongside exclusive interviews and commentary by its correspondents working in multiple countries.
The platform gets Mideast stories you rarely see elsewhere, such as when its Iranian correspondent, Saber Gholanbari, recently interviewed the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who set out the Islamic regime’s terms for a ceasefire.
There couldn’t be a more important time for a publication like The New Arab.
The Israeli-American war on Iran is a great test for The New Arab to prove its worth. And it’s rising to the occasion, targeting the warmongers who have tipped the world into crisis.
Photograph courtesy of the Foreign Office. Published under a Creative Commons license.
