Acoustic space: the role of radio in Israeli collective history

Abstract

Television in the land of the People of the Book made its debut only in 1968, two decades after the founding of the Jewish state.1 During the first, crucial, twenty years of Israel's existence, the dominant electronic medium was radio. And it was to radio that the task of inventing the new Jew who would build the Utopian Altneuland prescribed by Zionist ideology was assigned. Fortunately, Kol Yisrael, the station that was founded following the establishment of the new state, did not have to start from scratch. The infrastructure of Hebrew radio was already laid out, thanks to the policy of the Mandatory British government of allowing the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine air space of their own, in which (according to government expectations) the two would let off steam; they would talk rather than conspire against the authorities.2 Thus, the process of reconstituting national and cultural identity for the Zionist entity preceded the birth of the state. Within the framework of the "Hebrew Hour" of The Voice of Jerusalem,3 the medium's most effective characteristics came to the fore, perhaps most importantly, its ability deeply to etch the experience of certain kinds of event onto the collective memory. In hindsight, looking over the three decades (1936-1968) in which radio had a monopoly over electronic mass communication and the next decades in which television replaced radio as the medium around which the nation united at historic moments, one may suggest that television has been associated with live spectacle, festive or ceremonial event (Sadat's visit, Rabin and Arafat's handshake, pre-election de bates, the Eurovision Song Contest, football). Television has been there for celebratory moments; radio has transmitted and, so, "mediated" threatening and confrontational events, for example, the uncertain vot ing on the partition of Palestine at the United Nations (1947); Prime Minister David Ben Gurion 's defiant declaration the following year of the State of Israel (de facto this also meant announcing a state of war); the national revenge against Nazism represented by the Eichmann trial