Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey podcast people, Noah here to tell you a little about what we got planned, podcast wise for the next weeks. Not that what we got planned is necessarily what's gonna happen in the end. Today, as you will hear, we have a very special episode. One of those tears about maybe a person we lost or a thing that happened a round number of years ago. In the event this time 90 years ago on Tuesday ahead of Passover, we plan on having a more or less normal episodel Linda will be with me and the same the following Thursday just after Pesach ends on Mimouna Day or Yisro Hag or Shushan, Last day of Passover. Call it what you will. The reason I say these things are not necessarily going to happen is because, well, to take today for example, it is noontime while I record this and we have already been sent down the street to the shelter under the AD Gordon School nine times since we got up at six in the morning after a couple of times during the night and it makes it hard to get things done. Or more specifically it makes it hard to be confident that you'll be able to get things done when you think you'll be able to get things done. This ballistic fact of life has podcast logical implications and until things settle down, any day or week now, as I'm sure they will, those implications include not knowing we'll get the podcast done until it is actually done. And I know what you are thinking since AI does all the work behind the damn podcast and all it takes to make an episode is for me to type into the dialog window two words, Podcast me. Isn't all this complaining a little unseemly? To which all I can say is yeah, but what you gonna do? I hope that you and yours are well and safe and I hope you enjoy this little show that ChatGPT made for us. It assures me that this episode is a good one and hopefully someday soon I too will myself find some free time down in the shelter up the street to listen to this episode myself. For now, onto the show. This is TLV1. 90 years ago this week on March 30, 1936, a group of British, Palestinian and Jewish dignitaries gathered at a wind and rain swept hillside in Khidikat al Irsal along Omar Al Mukhtar street in Ramallah beneath a nine story high antenna tower newly constructed to exacting modern standards by the Marconi West Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd. The group was there to inaugurate the Palestine Broadcast Service, or pbs, the first official radio station in the land, broadcasting at 449 meters wavelength and 668 kilohertz on the medium wave. AM band in attendance at the gathering, seated in two grand tents were these grandees. Arthur Waukup, the High Commissioner for Palestine Sir Henry Luke, His Majesty's Chief Secretary of Palestine J.B. mcDonnell, Chief justice of Palestine William Hudson, Director of Posts and Telegraphs and Postmaster General of Palestine Dr. Hussein Al Khalidi, the Mayor of Jerusalem Hassan Bey Shoukri, Mayor of Haifa Mayor Diesenghaf, Mayor of Tel Aviv Jewish Supreme Court Justice God Frumkin David Ben Gurion, Chair of the Jewish agency executive Dr. Arthur Rupin, head of the Jewish Agency Settlement Department the Right Rever George Francis Popham Blythe, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem Hajj Amin El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Rabbi Amram Blau of Jerusalem and the Consuls of Sweden, Ethiopia, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland. This was an impressive group and the papers say they were accompanied by as many as 300 other invited guests who, as the Palestine Post put it, quote, sat muffled in greatcoats. Some thoughtfully brought rugs, but others shivered in spring attire, end quote. As they shivered, the 7th Battalion Highland Light Infantry Band, a bagpipe operation associated with the Scottish regiment stationed in Palestine, played what they played. No recording of their performance on that day survives, but here is one of them playing two years and some later. Far from Ramallah, as the Palestine Post wrote, quote. Throughout the country, in the villages, towns and cities, people sat in front of their radios or congregated outside mo musical and radio shops where loudspeakers had been placed, end quote in order to be part of the historic proceedings in Tel Aviv. According to the paper Doar Ayom, the Daily Mail. Quote, hundreds crowded near the amplifiers that were set up on all the streets of the city and listened with great interest, end quote. The first to speak on the day was William Hudson, Postmaster General and Director of Posts and Telegraphs, whose brief extended also to radio, which is why he was there and who told how two and a half years before, on a ship from Port Said to Marseille, he met, quote, His Excellency the High Commissioner on the sports deck. But the conversation we had did not relate to deck games. It related to broadcasting and to the possibility of establishing a service in this country, end quote. After that, High Commissioner Arthur Wo Kup came to the microphone and said, for some years I have been greatly impressed by the benefits that a well directed broadcasting service can bring to the minds and spirits of any people who enjoy its advantages. It was on this account that we determined to establish a broadcasting service in Palestine that will work for the advantage of the people both in town and country. The broadcasting service in Palestine will not be concerned with politics. Broadcasting will be directed for the advantage of all classes, of all communities. Its main object will be the spread of knowledge and of culture. Nor, I can assure you, will the claims of religion be neglected. As in all our activities, we shall start on a small scale. But, God willing, we shall advance step by step until we have a service worthy of the vivid and varied life of Palestine. We shall try to stimulate new interests and make all forms of knowledge more widespread. I will give you two examples in both of which I have a deep interest. There are thousands of farmers in this country who are striving to improve their methods of agriculture. I hope we shall find ways and means to help these farmers and assist them to increase the yield of the soil, improve the quality of their produce and explain the advantages of various forms of cooperation. There are thousands of people in Palestine who have a natural love of music, but who experience difficulty in finding the means whereby they may enjoy the many pleasures that music gives. The broadcasting service will endeavor to fill this need and stimulate musical life in Palestine so that we may see both Oriental and Western music grow in strength side by side, each each true to its own tradition. End quote. After that, the High Commissioner read a cable he had gotten from Sir John Reith, soon to be Lord John Reith, the chairman of the BBC, which cable said, among other things, I welcome this opportunity of sending greetings to the Palestine Broadcasting Service on the occasion of its inauguration. No modern science has greater potentialities than broadcasting for promoting unity amongst the widely scattered peoples of the world. It is a pleasure and a privilege for those broadcasting organizations which are already firmly established to assist in the development of a new venture in this field. After that, the band played again and then the High Commissioner said into the microphone and over the airwaves, hello, hello, this is Jerusalem calling. After that, Amin Bey Abd el Hadi, the Arab standing member of the Palestine Broadcasting Service program's advisory board, said into the microphone, Hakuna Al Qudst. Hakuna al qudst id ha@philistine. This is Jerusalem. This is Jerusalem, the Palestine Broadcasting Service. After that, Dr. Avraham Katzenelson, the Jewish standing member of the Palestine Broadcasting Service programs advisory board, approached the microphone and said, achai Betzion shomim ivriim B' asher hatem sham Shalom Uvracha M Yerushalayim. My brethren in Zion, Jewish listeners, wherever you may be. Peace and blessing from Jerusalem. The references by three men standing in Ramallah in three different languages to Jerusalem was not happenstance. The Palestine Broadcasting Service, or pbs, started in two stations, the one in Ramallah and another in Jerusalem. The Ramallah station would be the main headquarters of the Arabic service of the pbs, while the Jerusalem station would be the main headquarters of the English and Hebrew services of the pbs. Though each broadcast station was available to serve each language, and the transmission towers in both places broadcast identical broadcasts, all the programming in each of the languages. What the High Commissioner had said about how the broadcasting service in Palestine would not be concerned with politics, but rather would be directed for the advantage of all classes of all communities, the main advantage being the spread of knowledge and of culture. This was easier said than done in Palestine in 1936. Looked at one way, the Palestine Broadcasting Service was a kind of classical colonialist enterprise. And in fact, it was patterned on All India Radio, the news station that the British had just set up not long before in New Delhi. Also in broadcast studios and transmission centers built by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd. Broadcast radio had taken hold of Europe and the United States in the decade before Great Britain began building stations in the colonies. The BBC was set up in 1927, the same year as CBS in America. NBC had started one year earlier, in 1926. The Reichsrunfunk Gesellschaft took shape in Berlin in 1925, the same year, Polsky Radio started with Ente italiano per le audazione Radio Phoenicia, coming into existence in 1927. By the mid-1930s, the great power of radio to unify a country, to advance this or that political agenda, to sell soap, to keep people at home at night instead of out in the streets. The great power of radio to shape a society by shaping the thoughts, opinions and behaviors of radio listeners was very much discussed in papers and on panels and in seminar rooms. Discussed most anxiously of all, maybe, was radio's apparent power to stir up national pride with stirring music, stirring speeches, stirring poetry, and stirring drama. Hitler and Mussolini were in these years both showing special talent for using radio. And Already, by the mid-1930s, you did not need to be prescient to see that this might soon mean trouble. Also, of course, it was not lost on nations eager to strengthen their grip on colonies. The U.K. italy, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and others, and to keep up the spirits of their citizens from back home, making their lives and fortunes in these colonies, that radio might help. Radio Addis Ababa brought Italian language and fascist ideology to Ethiopia. Radio Algier brought French language and culture to Algeria. If you'd asked the men who ran these operations in the 1930s why they did what they did, you'd get an answer that sounds idealistic and was probably sincere, if also awarely partial. They would say that the purpose of their radio station was to elevate the locals by bringing them culture, music, poetry, and by bringing democratic discourse and by bringing science and by teaching them how to grow their crops better. This is what you heard in the High Commissioner of Palestine, Arthur Wylkopp's speech in Ramallah, how radio would teach Arab subsistence farmers to get more from their land and more from their efforts, and how radio would bring everyone music that they love, or in any case, music that they ought to love and would love once they gave it a chance, which they would have no choice but to do once it was coming out of speakers in the street. The Mandate government equipped villages, mostly Palestinian villages, with waterproof receivers in public squares so that everyone would hear the broadcasts. And there were speakers, too, in cafes where people met to play Shesh be more and more people with each passing month. There were receivers as well in their living rooms that their kids had harangued them to get. There were, it is true, special challenges to setting up radio in Palestine in 1936. Because there were in Palestine in 1936, three nations. There were the British, who took seriously the role the League of Nations had given them as conservators of the place meant to civilize the Arabs and Jews over whom they'd been given a mandate. And there were Palestinians and there were Jews who took seriously the 1917 declaration by Lord Balfour and sought in time to establish in Palestine a national home, whatever that might come to mean. If, as many suspected, radio was the most powerful tool people had ever invented for forging collective identities, it remained an open question just what collective identity the Palestine Broadcasting Service could and ought to forge. Among Jews and Arabs both. The need to create new, durable national identities was great. The number of Jews in Palestine under British rule would grow from about 85,000 when the mandate started to about 550,000 not long before it ended most of the gap between those two numbers. 465,000 people came from all over Europe and the world, speaking dozens of languages, comfortable with all sorts of diverging customs and ways of being in the world. The success of the Yeshua depended on making for this multitude something like a shared identity. It is equally true that over the same years, many Arabs, too migrated to the region, the Arab population more than doubling from 670,000 at the start to 1,350,000 not long before the Brits left, meaning that there were 680,000 more Arabs in Palestine near the end of the Mandate than near the beginning. Many of these people, probably most, were kids lately born as families, had more children as the region grew more prosperous during the Mandate. But many of these people were themselves immigrants too, mostly from Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Egypt. These people spoke different dialects of Arabic than the locals, and they had different customs too, and they believed different things. Leaders of both Jews and Arabs living under the Mandate looked for ways to take their very diverse communities of communities and somehow fix them into something more unified and of a piece. This was something they thought maybe radio could do. There was then, a paradox to the whole Palestine Broadcasting Service operation. Like the chairman of the BBC wrote in his cable, no modern science had greater potentialities than broadcasting for promoting unity among diverse peoples. It was Arthur Wylkopp's hope that the unity that would be promoted would be a unity amongst and between the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, Baha', I, and all the others in the land. But of course, these people did not even have a common language each among themselves. And surely there was no common language shared across religions and across ethnic divides. What would a broadcasting service that served all of them even be? The answer that Arthur Woukup found for this question was that it would be a sort of Christian trinity of a radio station. Three that are one. On the standing program committee, there would be an Englishman, an Arab and a Jew. Each broadcast day would be divided into three broadcast days, one in English, one in Arabic, and one in Hebrew. That this would not be an easy arrangement became clear from the very start, when the question arose. How would the station identify itself on the air? In English, it was called the Palestine Broadcasting Service, which was straightforward enough because Palestine was the word the British used to describe the whole deal. There was Jewish Palestine and Arab Palestine, both situated in, well, Palestine for Arabs. The radio could also be called ID hat Philastin, but in Hebrew, the Palestine Broadcasting Service, translated to Shrut hashidur be' eretzer el eret Yisrael, the Land of Israel, being Hebrew for Palestine, a name that goes back to the Hebrew Bible and the use of this term for the place, the same term that refers in the Bible to the land that God promised to Jews and Jews alone. This made Palestinian leaders mad. They did not want Palestine referred to over the radio waves as the Land of Israel and this is how the station came to the compromise of announcing itself as the Voice of Jerusalem, with broadcasts begun in each language by saying, this is Jerusalem calling. After the common opening for radio broadcasts in those days around Europe. This is London calling. This is Paris calling. This is Berlin calling. This is Moscow calling. This compromise disappointed many Jews of the Yishuv, and it made some angry protest letters arrived to the High Commissioner and ads ran in the papers like one in Haaretz that read, quote, the insult of the Land of Israel, the Land of Israel affair on the radio. We propose a listener boycott of the station, end quote. There is no record I can find of a boycott actually taking shape, though we cannot know if there weren't some Jews who refused to listen in their own living rooms to a station that refused to say it was the Voice of the Land of Israel. After the speeches in Ramallah on that day 90 years ago this week, the broadcast was given over to Arabic language programming, music and speeches that are now lost to history. And then in the early evening, the broadcast switched to Hebrew, and over the air came this. Listen to the Voice of Jerusalem. We are inaugurating this evening the first Hebrew broadcast. After that, there was this. Listen now to Chana Rovina's reading of Bialik's scroll of Fire. All night long seas of flame seethed and tongues of fire stretched upward above the Temple Mount. Stars were smashed from the trapped heavens and fell sparkling ember upon sparkling ember. Down to earth did God kick his throne and shatter his crown to pieces. Scroll of Fire was Bialik's poem about the Kishinev pogrom a wrenching thing. Chanarobina was maybe the most revered actor in the Yishuv in Jewish Palestine, famous since her rapturous and rapturous performance as Leah in Shin an Ski's the Dybbuk at the Habima Theater in Moscow in 1922. The first host of the Hebrew Service of the PBS was Hamda Feigenbaum Zinder, who was selected after an exhaustive search to turn up a person able to speak an authentic, unaccented true Hebrew, though no one really knew what authentic, unaccented and true Hebrew might sound like. And finding the right voice of Hebrew was especially hard in 1936among a population of mostly immigrants with tongues thick and heavy when they spoke in Hebrew. After Chana Ruvina's long reading of Bialik's long, sad poem, Chemda Feigenbaum, Zinder said, we present to you tonight Eccles Cello Sonata with the soloist Thelma Yelein, end quote. Thelma Yelein being one of the Yishuv's greatest musical sensations, a student of Pablo Casale's at the Royal College of Music in London, who used her fame and connections to found the Jerusalem Musical Society. Sam, In this first Hebrew broadcast of the Voice of Jerusalem, already you sense the efforts of the Jews behind the program to use the radio to bring the right Zionists culture to the people listening. The right Hebrew accent, the right passionate actress, the right high baroque culture of Henry Eccles. This would be part of the Hebrew service of the PBS for as long as it survived. It was thrilling for many here just to hear Hebrew over the airwaves. Doar Hayom wrote that in many places in Tel Aviv, in streets and cafes, the audience received the Hebrew artistic broadcast with cheers and applause. An issue of a Hebrew kids weekly called Our Paper came out with its cover filled with a big picture of the Ramallah station and radio antenna, above which was a poem called radio by a 23 year old writer named Elhanan Indelman that went. There is radio in the village, there is radio in the city. The radio can talk, the radio sings songs. Hello and hello. This is new. Listen children, hello. Rush, rush, rush. Hello. Listen child, hello. Listen father and mother. Hello Tel Aviv, hello Jerusalem. Much of the excitement was about simply hearing Hebrew coming through a speaker over radio waves, which was I think maybe a little like the excitement I felt on my first trip to Israel, a 12 year old yeshiva bacher, when I saw McDonald's in Hebrew and Kosher. This thing of the world now in this language that always somehow seemed to be not of this world. But part of the excitement for some people anyway was also for the possibility of what the head of the BBC wrote in his cable about how the thing could bring together all the peoples of this place. A writer and lawyer named E. David Goitein wrote a series of eager essays in the Palestine Post ahead of the launch of the pbs, insisting that, quote, our parochialism may be broken down by wise broadcasting and a larger patriotism may spring from the microphone, end quote. This larger patriotism would be one that binds Jews and Arabs despite the fact that they speak different languages. Quote, there are matters of common interest and in spite of what the politicians say, there are hundreds of such matters. And if the broadcasting Corporation does its duty, there will every year be still more of the same. A great service to progress of Palestine could be supplied by the PBS were to give Arabic lessons for Jews and Hebrew lessons for Arabs. The failure of one people to understand the tongue of the other has been the cause of much unnecessary misunderstanding and the wireless lends itself magnificently to the teaching of languages. I have heard from a Swiss station, I think Bern English lessons of genius. He would be a fool who listened in regularly and failed to master the in exactly the same way. If one or two first rate pedagogues were to be found who could impart their knowledge of the language to listeners, they would receive the thanks of every lover of Palestine. End quote. On the day the station was launched, Haaretz devoted most of a whole folio page to a long poem called hello, here is Radio Jerusalem by the poet, novelist and playwright Avigdor Hameiri, the founder of the famous Kum Kum theater. And he wrote, among other things, quote, hello, here is Radio Jerusalem, hello here, city of justice, tower of light and spire. Here a nest of men like eagles who awake to hover over those who have fallen. Here every messiah will blow a blast of the shofar. Here the fate of nations will be cast together for generations. Here the God of eternity stands on watch. Hello, here, Jerusalem is calling. Hello, here is the radio of the holy city proclaiming let hatreds melt away and vengeance let evil cease. Here in the heart of Jerusalem beat waves of splendor and upon wavelength 449 the tidings of salvation will come. Away, peoples of the world, from your bloody nightmares the abundance of God's blessings will flow to all his children. Come, you who are thirsty for love and drink your fill from the visions that will flow from Jerusalem. Listen, people of the world, and hear, O Israel, the message of peace and happiness will break through the fog. Hello, hello, hello, here is Radio Jerusalem, End quote. And we gotta admit that this vision of a radio for all of us who live from the river to the sea, from which we will learn each the language of the other and each the music of the other and each the poetry of the other, until the other is no longer other. This vision of Radio Jerusalem, it was never something that was very much likely to happen in the event. Less than three weeks after the Palestine Broadcasting Service was founded in Ramallah and Jerusalem on April 19, a general strike was declared by Hajj Amin Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the same Hajj Amin Al Husseini who was in Rama to celebrate the start of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, which general strike launched three years of violent and bloody revolt of Palestinians against the British first, then the Jews as well, and among Arabs and Jews alike. Militias were formed and strategies were strategized. And the idea of this place being the national home both of Jews and Palestinians grew that much harder to see happening. And the idea of a radio station amplifying and creating and celebrating common ground between Arabs and Jews here came to seem more. More like a fantasia than a realistic plan. And when the British Mandate finally ended at the midnight dividing May 14 and May 15, 1948, the Palestine Broadcasting Service operation in Jerusalem went from being the voice of Jerusalem to being the voice of Israel. And the Palestine Broadcasting Service operation in Ramallah became part of Radio Amman, the broadcast service of Transjord. But this did not have to happen. It was not the only way that things might have gone. Of all the dismal things about our dismal times, one of the most dismal is the fact that we seem to have blasted and bombed and blustered out of ourselves. The ability to see that things could be very different than they are today. 90 years ago this week, leaders of all the peoples of this land gathered together to set into motion something that would be shared. Today it seems impossible, but 90 years ago it did not. At least not for everyone. And 90 years is a long time, but then again, it is not. And what's more, it was less than 20 years ago, in 2008, that EOD Olmert handed Mahmoud Abbas a map the two men's teams of negotiators had worked out for a country of Palestine on 96% of the land Israel captured in 1967. The other 4% filled out with land swaps. The peace that Olmert's and Abbas people had agreed to did not happen, of course, and maybe it could not have happened, and maybe it should not have happened. But my point is, it was not long ago that we still had the capacity to see that things could be different. The fact that we cannot see it now is not because things cannot be different. Because if there's one thing that history shows us more than anything else, it is that things not just can, but always will develop different than what we expect. Thousand year Reichs last a dozen years and end mandates, end cold wars destined to last forever. They're over all of a sudden. Things change. They always change, and sometimes for the better. 90 years ago this week, a poet could see in a radio shared by Arabs and Jews a new and better future for all of us. It has not come yet, but I do not see how that makes him wrong. I anyway think that he was right. Time will come and a message of peace and happiness will break through the fog. It will not, I guess be at 449 meter wavelength and at 668 kilohertz, but we will know it when we hear it. Sa.