This Is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine

Conclusion: The Multiple Afterlives of the PBS

CONCLUSION The Multiple Afterlives of the PBS The mandate for Palestine officially ended at midnight on May 15, 1948. What did this mean for the Palestine Broadcasting Service? Like other government institutions, it had a postmandate plan intended to provide administrative continuity and uninterrupted service—a plan soon overtaken by events. The station’s footprint remained: the buildings and transmitter were still there and continued to broadcast on the same frequency, but the station’s name, identity, and personnel changed. Physically, the station split: the broadcasting house, located in West Jerusalem , ended up in Israeli hands; the Ramallah transmitter, which had been taken by the Arab Legion, came under Jordanian control. In Jerusalem, Hebrew section personnel provided the technical and administrative continuity that the PBS’s postmandate plan intended. But the station’s identity changed. Almost immediately it was renamed Kol Israel—Voice of Israel—one of the on-air station identifications prohibited by the mandate government and the name that the Haganah had used for its clandestine station. Since the PBS transmitters were in Jordanian hands, Kol Israel began by broadcasting from an emergency transmitter located in Tel Aviv until new ones were built. At the same time, the nascent Israeli state also began short-wave broadcasting, a project aimed at attracting Jewish audiences overseas. Like the name change, this development marked a significant break from the mandate era. British officials had consistently refused Yishuv requests for shortwave broadcasting, fearing that broadcasts to Jews abroad would put increasing pressure on Palestine’s immigration quotas. The uncertainty that prevailed during this period is evident from the disjuncture between various period documents. Readers of the Palestine Post might have concluded that the PBS ceased broadcasting before 196 “This Is Jerusalem Calling” the mandate ended: an article published May 14 announced that “the first broadcast of the Jewish State’s Radio, Kol Israel,” would occur that afternoon.1 Yet while in Jerusalem the PBS morphed from a mediumwave , mandate institution to a short- and medium-wave, national institution , Falastin continued to publish the PBS’s Arabic program schedule through July 1949 with no mention of any changes, either in the station’s wavelength or in its name. How did readers interpret the paper ’s silence on the dramatic changes taking place on the ground with respect to radio broadcasting in Palestine? Were these programs relayed through Kol Israel’s transmitters in Jerusalem? Were they broadcast from the former PBS transmitters in Ramallah? The few documents that remain from this period give no indication; nor do they indicate whether the two sections of the former PBS continued to cooperate in any way. This ambiguity disappeared in 1949: first in April, when Falastin began to publish “Ramallah Radio” programs , and more definitively in August, when it began to publish those of the “Hashemite Jordanian (Palestine) Station.” Both stations broadcast from the PBS’s Ramallah transmitter and used the same frequency as the PBS. The new station operated with former PBS staff but with fewer broadcasting hours and a much-reduced budget—and it broadcast only in Arabic. Although the Palestine Post and Falastin offer some sense of the changes taking place on the ground in Palestine, neither tells the full story. Did the PBS cease to exist when Kol Israel came on air? Did it cease to exist when Ramallah Radio began broadcasting on its medium-wave frequency? Or did it end when the International Broadcasting Union recognized the Israeli station? When juxtaposed, the different narratives of the PBS’s end highlight the ambiguity of what “end” meant in this case, and the importance of recognizing that the PBS’s influence did not end in 1948 or even 1949. Understanding “and then what happened,” whether as a recounting of the station’s aftermath or its afterlife, is integral to understanding the PBS’s long-term impact on Palestinian and Jordanian (and Israeli) broadcasting. What these multiple narratives highlight is the degree to which the PBS in its organization and operations had reinforced the separatism that characterized mandate governance as a whole. In the immediate aftermath of the mandate, Israelis and Palestinians alike appear to have chosen to draw no connection between later stations and the PBS. This would appear to support a Fanonian argument that the PBS functioned primarily as a colonial institution—an in- The Multiple Afterlives of the PBS 197 authentic and unrepresentative voice...