Ghada Zoabi had a dream. The founder and owner of the popular website Bokra (tomorrow in Arabic) wanted to create a news portal for Israeli Arab society which would connect it to the state of Israel and update its readers on what was happening there. For years, the Arab sector has felt absent from the national media, and rightfully so. In most cases, media coverage adopted a negative perspective, covering the community when there was a murder or other criminal activity, or when it was suspected of posing a threat to the country’s security. But what really goes on in the Arab towns and villages? Who are these citizens, who live in Israel, who want to be recognized and who hope to be more involved?  For the most part, the Israeli press takes no interest in such issues.

So Zoabi, a 35-year-old mother of three from Nazareth, decided to take up the gauntlet. But she wasn’t satisfied simply with creating a media channel that serves the more than 1.5 million residents, who make up more than 20% of the country’s population. She wanted to draw them closer to Israeli society. “I will do whatever it takes to connect the two sectors, who live in the same country, but who learn nothing and know nothing about each other. That is the blockage that exists right now,” she said in an interview with Al-Monitor.

To fulfill this goal, she is in the midst of signing an agreement for an unprecedented cooperative effort between Bokra and Onlife, a website for women that provides content on a wide range of topics, including news, the status of women, careers, fashion and style. ‘The whole initiative and my desire to do this started after the Second Lebanon War,” Zoabi recalls. “I spent the war at my parents’ home in Haifa, because I was nine months pregnant. It was there that I learned that 18 Israeli Arabs had been killed in the war, not because they did not follow the instructions of the Home Front Command, but simply because they had not been exposed to their explanations and instructions. That is why they did not follow them.”

The written press in the Arab sector consists of weeklies. There is no Israeli daily Arab newspaper that provides up-to-date information. Furthermore, there is a widespread sense of desperation and disappointment with the existing electronic media. In the past, the Arabic-language Department of Channel One was the primary news provider. The channel was watched in every home in the sector, and its news anchors were familiar and admired celebrities. Over the past few years, however, there has been a decline in the prestige of public broadcasting. The channel’s place on the broadcasting sequence was shifted. It became much more niche-oriented and marginal.