Excerpt:
Ramadan, Islam's holiest month with its dawn-to-dusk fasting, begins this weekend. Though most Muslim clerics urge believers to limit watching television to avoid worldly distractions, viewership this month throughout the Arab world typically surges by as much as 80%. While Saudis watch an average of three hours of TV a day, daily viewing during Ramadan is more than five hours.
What the 400 million Arabs in 22 Middle Eastern and North African countries will see this year when they turn on their TVs will differ from the usual fare. Despite the region's fixation on the war in Gaza, none of the new series premiering during Ramadan focuses on Israel or the Palestinians.
In previous years, almost every Arab TV network has devoted at least one of its Ramadan offerings to the perfidy of the "Zionist enemy" and the suffering of Palestinians. This year there are virtually no ads for TV series about the horrors of Israel's military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion, its virtual leveling of Gaza, or the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. Instead viewers will see series, each between 15 and 30 episodes, that focus on the Arab world's growing poverty and the evisceration of much of the Arab middle class.