This Is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine

Introduction: Tuning in to Palestine’s Radio History

INTRODUCTION Tuning in to Palestine’s Radio History On the penultimate day of March 1936, as Palestine was moving from the pale gray of winter into the lush green of spring, the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) began radio broadcasts from a new transmitter in Ramallah. The mandate state was well into its second decade, with the contours of British governance and Arab and Zionist contestation firmly and clearly established. The territory of Palestine—mentioned in the Bible, central to the three Abrahamic faiths, and ruled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries as part of its “Arab provinces”—was given after World War I to Great Britain to govern under a League of Nations mandate. Like the rest of the Ottoman Empire and the colonial territories controlled by the losing countries of World War I, Palestine was considered currently unfit for self-governance; unlike the African lands, whose mandates were issued almost in perpetuity, Palestine and the other Arab provinces were considered “Class A” mandates—requiring only minimal tutelage to prepare them for self-governance. However, the terms of the mandate for Palestine as ultimately approved at the San Remo conference in 1922 differed in several crucial ways from those for Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. The text of the mandate authorization included that of the Balfour Declaration, an ex of- ficio “declaration of sympathy” issued in 1917 as a letter from Arthur Balfour, British foreign secretary, to Baron Nathan Rothschild. “His Majesty’s Government view with favor,” it stated, “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The text continued, “it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in 2 “This Is Jerusalem Calling” Palestine . . . or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any country.” In the letter that framed the declaration, Balfour noted that it had been approved by the British cabinet and asked Rothschild to forward it to the World Zionist Federation.1 The Balfour Declaration made no mention of the independent Arab state that Great Britain had already promised to Husayn, Sharif of Mecca, and his sons.2 Nor did it mention the political rights of the people of Palestine. Yet the declaration was merely that. The original document had no binding force; its authority derived from Britain’s position as one of the most powerful empires in the world. Once inserted in the San Remo resolution, however, the Balfour Declaration became an actionable part of the mandate; as the text stated, “The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917.”3 With this text, the British government committed itself not only to governing Palestine (which British officials considered desirable for a number of reasons, political, imperial, and religious) but also to supporting the aims of the global Zionist community. In consequence, mandate Palestine suffered not only the two-way, nationalist/colonizer clashes of any colonial state; it also endured the three-way conflict produced by splitting the Palestinian population into Jew and Arab—a three-way conflict that further encouraged the political separatism of the Zionist movement. The result was a deeply contentious environment in which mandate state institutions faced from each community both attempts to discredit them and attempts to claim or co-opt them. The situation was made more contentious by the striking demographic shifts taking place throughout the territory and within each community. As Assaf Likhovski notes, the mandate years “saw accelerated economic and demographic growth that resulted, to a large extent, from the massive influx of Jewish capital and immigration.”4 These interventions did not have an equal impact on all people or across all parts of the territory. They were as much a destabilizing force as a generative one, but they did spur the massive political, economic, social, and cultural shifts already taking place in Palestine. They did so, further , in the context of major population growth: the overall population increased from 750,000 in the early 1920s to nearly 1.9 million by the end of the mandate. Again, the larger shift came from the Jewish population : from about 83,000 to 90,000 in the early 1920s to 530,000 to 550,000 by 1944.5 In other words, within twenty years the number of Jews had increased from roughly 10 percent to roughly 30 percent...