Will Israeli/Palestinian Pop Station RAM-FM Become a Platform for Reconciliation?
In the course of reporting this story, I was assured by Issie Kirsh that RAM-FM is not a pirate station. Turns out the Israeli government doesn’t agree with him.
Can commercial radio bring peace between Palestinians and Jews? Issie Kirsh thinks so.
Just over a year ago, Kirsh launched RAM-FM, a radio station with offices in both Ramallah and West Jerusalem. Marketed to a joint Israeli and Palestinian audience, the programming is conducted in English and broadcast from a transmitter in the West Bank. The station airs Anglo pop songs you’ve heard ten thousand times, plus news and call-in shows. It’s as commercial-sounding a station as they come, but it’s a commercial-sounding station with a mission.
RAM-FM is not Kirsh’s first foray into reconciliatory radio. A South African media magnate, Kirsh hit it big with the 1980 founding of Radio 702, an AM station which served black and white communities near Johannesburg and Pretoria. Located in Bophuthatswana, an independent “homeland” created by the South African apartheid government as a means of separating the black population from the white minority, Radio 702 was able to broadcast a diversity of opinions not allowed in the rest of the country. It is widely thought to have played an important role in building a national dialogue in the years leading up to democratization.
With RAM-FM, Kirsh hopes to translate Radio 702’s success into the Israeli context. He plans to bring Israelis and Palestinians into conversation over the airwaves, providing a space for interaction between the two populations that have less and less daily contact. But, in Israel’s already-crowded political landscape, can one English-language station hope to carry enough cultural weight to make the kind of difference that Kirsh hopes it might?
At the time of its launch, Radio 702 was the only commercial music station available in South Africa. The state-run South African Broadcasting Corporation held a tight monopoly over the broadcast media, running a range of stations in a number of different languages. No commercial competitors were allowed. Years before, a Top 40 station had beamed in a signal from neighboring Mozambique, but it was shut down after a communist coup resulted in the end of Portuguese rule there in 1975.
Kirsh found a similar solution in 1980 by securing a broadcast license from Bophuthatswana. Although the territory’s independence was subject to the whims of the ruling National Party, Bophuthatswana was not subject to the laws of South Africa. So, while gambling was prohibited in the rest of the country, Bophuthatswana had a casino. Similarly, the broadcast media in Bophuthatswana did not need to answer directly to South African press controls.
As a pop station, Radio 702 turned a profit in its first year. There was nothing else like it on the air, and listeners and advertisers greeted it with enthusiasm. The honeymoon didn’t last, however. By 1985, the South African Broadcasting Corporation had launched a competing pop station, which it broadcast FM stereo. Radio 702 broadcast on AM, and couldn’t compete with the superior fidelity of the new station. Says Kirsh, “A person who loves music is always going to listen to the best signal.”
Deprived of its original niche, Kirsh sought a new format for 702. Shrewdly, he chose talk.
In that last decade of apartheid, as the country geared up for democratization, forums for open debate were sparse, according to Benjamin Pogrund, a senior journalist throughout the apartheid era and one of the most well-known opponents of the regime. There was no television, and radio was entirely controlled by the state. “I never once, ever, set foot in the headquarters of the Broadcasting Corporation,” says Pogrund. “I wasn’t asked to broadcast, I wasn’t invited there, I would have been really nervous to have gone there. They would have put the dogs on me.” The print media, Pogrund says, wasn’t much better. “There was the English language press and the Afrikaans language press,” he says. “And the Afrikaans language press, for many years, were also tools of the government. In fact, several of them were the official organs of the ruling National Party. The English language press was basically against apartheid, but to varying degrees. We subject to a very wide range of laws. And there were all sorts of things we could not publish, or were too scared to.”
In such an atmosphere, it didn’t take much to make a difference in the discourse. It wasn’t that Radio 702 was extremely radical. “You weren’t getting a major alternative station,” says Pogrund. The news content wasn’t much different than what was being printed in the Rand Daily Mail, the anti-apartheid paper where Pogrund worked. Rather, it was the discussion programs and the commentators that made Radio 702 a significant addition to the public arena.
“We created a platform for people from all different sides of the political spectrum to talk on the issues of the day,” says Kirsh. “We had politicians on our radio station, and we took calls from listeners. That dialogue took place with all the leaders in South Africa, from the State President at the time, F.W. de Klerk, to Nelson Mandela, to people on extreme left and extreme right. It was actually most exciting radio.”
Pogrund is skeptical as to the extent that a station built on the model of Radio 702 can play a role in Israel. He notes that Israel’s media landscape is a near opposite of that which was maintained by the apartheid regime. “You have a very vigorous press,” he says. “You have really vigorous debate and dissent.” He acknowledges that there situation is a bit different in the West Bank. “You have to be careful in the Palestinian Authority,” he says. “It’s the Wild West. You go to far and you get your head knocked off.”
In fact, Kirsh seems to have set his sights a little differently this time around. He doesn’t picture RAM-FM as a place for debate between the major political players. Rather, he sees it as a place where normal Israelis and Palestinians will be able to interact with each other. “I got the feeling that there was no chance being created for Israelis to talk to Arabs and Palestinians,” Kirsh says. “There was dialogue at the political level, but that’s all. I felt that was not the right way to go, that there should be a platform that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to speak to each other.”
For now, RAM-FM looks more like Radio 702 in its pop era than in its talk era. Tuning in to the station’s webstream over the course of a week turned up snippets of ABBA and Amy Winehouse, among others. The station recently undertook a major music-themed advertising campaign, complete with billboards in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv bearing the station’s tagline, “Music has no boundaries,” which seems to say as much about its generic playlists as its bi-national character.
Kirsh says that RAM-FM is not an entirely capitalistic venture, but that it’s not a philanthropic one, either. “The primary objective of Radio 702 was to make money,” he says. “The primary objective of RAM-FM is to establish the opportunity for dialogue, but at the same time to generate sufficient advertising to support the station.”
For Kirsh, the lesson of South Africa is as clear as it is universal. “Don’t you believe dialogue can solve all problems?” he asks. “You can’t solve the problems any other way. It’s just not possible.”
