Aerial Terrorists or Cultural Bellwethers? Illegal Radio and the Fight for Israel’s Airwaves.
In June of 2007, pirates forced the closing of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. Over the course of two days that month, traffic on the airport’s runways ground to a fitful halt. As tensions rose, airport workers threatened to strike. The bureaucracy shuddered. Ministers made speeches, police made arrests. By the evening of the second day, takeoffs were back to normal.
A pirate raid in Israel in 2007? Well, not quite. These weren’t your average peg-legged swashbucklers. Rather, the latter-day Blackbeards were radio pirates – operators of illegal unlicensed broadcast stations. Their cheap transmitters had apparently drifted from their intended frequencies, up into the range used by the air traffic controllers.
In the days following the disruption, news outlets blamed no less than three different pirate stations for the interference. A high figure, but not a surprising one. According to a June 21 2007 article in Haaretz, over two hundred pirate radio stations currently operate in Israel. Whereas radio piracy in America and England is generally the province of fringe anarchistic stick-it-to-the-man types, Israel’s pirate stations play an integral role in the country’s media landscape.
Over the past year, members of the Knesset and the Israeli Police have publicly declared war on illegal stations, claiming they endanger public safety by interfering with air traffic control. In 2007, radio piracy was declared an “economic crime,” officially carrying up to five years jail time if station operators are found to have interfered with aircraft communications. The minister of transportation called pirate radio “aerial terror.” Nonetheless, for all of the government posturing, there has actually been a decline since 2005 in the number of actions taken against pirate stations, which continue to operate with impunity.
A Thriving Gray Market
A good rule of thumb: whatever people are after in the Middle East, there’s never enough to go around. The airwaves are no exception.
Israel moves to the rhythm of the broadcast cycle. Shops, busses, and taxicabs turn up the volume each time the hourly news broadcast’s intro music plays. Pop stations cater their playlists to the day’s political atmosphere, opting for slow, melancholy sounds following a terrorist attack or on a day of mourning.
Yet the radio market is surprisingly restricted. Not only does the Israel’s small geographic size make the available bandwidth crowded from the get-go, but the state didn’t allow commercial radio until the 1990s.
While licensed radio has always been strictly controlled, illegal radio has a pedigree stretching back to the days of the British Mandate, when underground militant Jewish movements disseminated propaganda and recruited new members over pirate stations. After the inception of the State of Israel, many staff members of the underground station run by the Haganah, the paramilitary organization that would become the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), joined the staff of the new nation’s official state radio network, Kol Yisrael
Statehood brought regulation to the broadcast industry. Until the mid-nineties, all radio stations were either operated either by the government, the military, or the Israeli Broadcasting Authority, a BBC-like public radio system. Commercial radio was introduced in 1995, but there is currently no process by which a company can apply for a license to operate a commercial station. The government puts the occasional radio permit up for grabs, but there are always more broadcasters than available frequencies.
The result is a thriving gray market of unlicensed radio stations. Some are small-time operations, often run by high school techies. Others are full-fledged commercial stations broadcasting advertisements and music, usually targeted at specific ethnic groups. The oft-publicized minority are political and religious stations, many of which are aimed at members of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
The Voyage of the MV Peace
The most influential and well-known of the illegal stations was the Voice of Peace. Operated by a media-savvy peacenik named Abie Nathan, the station was broadcast from the MV Peace, an old ship anchored off the coast of Tel Aviv. Beginning in May 1973, six years after the Six Day War and Israel’s subsequent appropriation of the West Bank, Golan, and Gaza Strip, the station played Top 40 music, regular advertising, and mostly English-language chatter by British DJs. The programing shared an underlying ethos of goodwill and openness towards Israel’s neighbors. Unlicensed by the state, Voice of Peace was the first commercial radio station in Israel’s history.
Nathan was imprisoned several times, although not for running an illegal radio station. Instead, he ran into trouble for meeting with what Israel considered “enemy countries.” Nathan was much beloved in Israel. The Labor party at one point even sought to make his station legal. The station’s success forced the State to recognize that official broadcasting wasn’t meeting the demands of the nation, leading to the creation of the IBA’s pop station, Reshet Gimmel.
The Voice of Peace broadcast for nearly twenty years, until November 28, 1993, two months after the signing of the Oslo accords. After signing off with a final spin of Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome”, Nathan sank the MV Peace, declaring, “The goal has been achieved.” Despite such dramatics, financial woes and health troubles likely had a role in the sixty-six year old Nathan’s decision to sink his radio fiefdom.
Settler Radio
Nathan launched the Voice of Peace in part as a response to Israel’s refusal to enter into negotiations with her enemies. However, the new political climate that allowed Oslo to come about was also a source of ire for the political right, which now looked to pirate radio for a reflection of their brand of political ideology on the airwaves. The first and most prominent right-wing pirate radio station was Arutz 7, a right-wing religious-Zionist outfit that began broadcasting from international waters in 1988, toward the end of Voice of Peace’s reign. Bearing witness to the state’s leniency towards Abie Nathan and his radio operations, the early operators of Arutz 7 initially floated their ship in proximity to the MV Peace, as a sort of “I dare you to raid me” gesture. Arutz 7’s supporters demanded that the eye of the state be equitably blind to transgressors of all political persuasions.
Nonetheless, many efforts were made to shut down Arutz 7 during the nineties. A government raid of Arutz 7’s boat in August 1995 outraged the broadcasters. Baruch Gordon, Arutz 7’s Director of English Media, called the raid “possibly the most anti-democratic act committed by a democratic government,” claiming that police confiscated and destroyed their equipment in an act that essentially aimed to “smash the voice of the opposition.” In 2003, Arutz 7 was shut down by court order and made the full-time transition to Internet broadcasts, a move which ended the station’s legal troubles.
Professor Yehiel Limor, head of the School of Communications at the Ariel University Center of Samaria, has been tracking pirate radio stations in Israel since 1995. He argues that the government has used pirate radio as a pawn in a game of parliamentary politics. Limor, author of Pirate Radio in Israel (The Hebrew University, 1998), says that the government’s attitude towards pirate radio is inconsistent, and depends on who is in the government coalition at any given time. Currently, the Minister of Communications is a member of the Shas party, whose constituents are some of the most avid patrons of pirate radio. It is therefore not surprising that there have been fewer crackdowns on illegal stations.
According to Limor, the state generally adopts a laissez faire approach to pirate radio stations, so long as they don’t interfere with air traffic control. Despite being branded as ”
aerial terror,” the overwhelming majority of stations never actually interfere with air traffic control frequencies. Thus, he says, the Department of Communications generally sees the cost of taking action against pirate stations as more trouble than it’s worth.
Limor believes that the current status quo between the state and the illegal broadcasters is a reasonable arrangement. A degree of free expression is preserved, as in most cases radio operators are able to broadcast. While Limor admits that the Israeli airwaves have not quite met their saturation point, he says that a larger number of licensed stations would only mean a larger number of stations available for acquisition by big media companies. The resulting uniformity in broadcasting would betray the democratic intentions of such an initiative. Further, he believes that legalization would not diminish the number of pirate stations. Rather, he says, “the more legal stations there are, the greater the desire will become to create stations,” and therefore the number of pirate stations would actually increase.
Whether or not Limor’s concern is justified, it’s clear government policy towards the stations won’t change any time soon. So, the stations will continue—mainstream radio rebels, adrift in a sea of politics.
