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The team who work on The Lobby with Al Jazeera are well-respected investigative journalists, but for some reason their latest venture hasn't appeared in the public eye
So when am I going to be able to watch Al Jazeera's hard-hitting investigation into Israel's powerful lobby in the United States? Remember Al Jazeera? The tough, no-holds-barred Middle East satellite channel that transformed Qatar into a media empire whose reports frightened dictators and infuriated potentates and presidents alike? Why, George W Bush once wanted to bomb its headquarters in Doha - so it must have been doing something right. It even has an office in Jerusalem.
But something seems to be amiss. Not Al Jazeera's disastrous American venture, which was supposed to break free of the dross on CNN and Fox News and ended up looking just like CNN or Fox. Nor the tragicomedy of its journalists' imprisonment in Sissi's Egypt, banged up by Cairo's farcical laws and the stupidity of Al Jazeera's own management in Qatar.
No, I'm talking about a documentary called
The Lobby, directed by one of Al Jazeera's top journalists, Clayton Swisher, the man whose exclusive (and book) on the "Palestine Papers" blew open the secret and scandalous American-led negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinian authority between 2000 and 2010. But after months of postponement,
The Lobby, which secretly filmed pro-Israeli US activists and Israeli government officials and was completed last autumn, is still no nearer to being shown - and Swisher himself has taken a paid leave of absence. He even chose to explain his frustration in an article for the progressive American Jewish magazine
Forward, which has always maintained a liberal and often very critical view of Israel.
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