Managing multiple identity challenges and the origins of Israeli national television (in Arabic)

Abstract

This article examines the intriguing decision of the Israeli government in the aftermath of the 1967 War to embark on a national television project that would be dominated by broadcasts in Arabic. Since actual broadcasts quickly ended up switching to Hebrew, this initial rationale has received little academic attention. Based on primary research, the article suggests that the original decision was driven by the desire of the State to address four identity challenges that it faced at the time: the challenge of delegitimation and hostile propaganda by the Arab world, the challenge of dealing with the Palestinian population in the newly occupied territories, the challenge of dealing with Israel’s Arab citizens, and the challenge of dealing with the Jewish immigrants from the Arab world. I argue that the promise of addressing these multiple challenges made the TV project very attractive, even if for a short time, thus leading to its initiation. The discussion is anchored in the literature from the field of International Relations that explores the concepts of soft power and ontological security and consequently the potential role of popular culture in shaping and managing identity challenges

Keywords

identity politics international relations Israel ontological security popular culture soft power television

Introduction

In 1967, the Israeli parliament – the Knesset – abruptly approved the initiation of a national television project. The most peculiar dimension of this decision was the initial plan to broadcast largely in the Arabic language. This article sets to explain the puzzle. I suggest that this television project decision reflected an intention of the state’s leaders to use this medium for political purposes, to manage the underlying challenges to the sense of ontological security facing the Israeli state in the immediate aftermath of its military victory in the Arab–Israeli War in 1967. The explicit and publicly stated desire to use TV broadcasting to reach various Arabic-speaking populations was the decisive factor that shifted the balance in the ongoing debate about creating an Israeli national TV. Once it was created, however, the dynamics of the national TV project acquired a life of its own, and by early 1969, broadcasting shifted to an overwhelming dominance of broadcasts in Hebrew (Oren, 2004: 139). Yet, the article focuses only on the motivations leading to the birth of the television project.

The story of the origins of Israeli national television has already been discussed (Cummings, 2016; Katz, 1971; Oren, 2003, 2004: Chapter 3). This article offers two main contributions. First, it focuses on the central, yet often neglected, role that broadcasting in Arabic played in the initial decision. Second, it explores this case by drawing on the International Relations (IR) literature on ontological security, as well as the literature on popular culture and identity more broadly. This literature highlights two dimensions of the politics of popular culture that are less explored in communications and media studies: It focuses on the role of popular culture in the relations between states, rather than focusing only on the domestic level. And it links the discussion of popular culture, identity, and politics to the issue of security, with a focus on identity-related security concerns. The Israeli case is used to demonstrate how television, as one major form of popular culture product, was seen as a tool to deal with multiple identity challenges – domestic and international – that threatened Israel’s sense of ontological security.

I first examine the literature in IR that pays attention to the importance of identity and representations in understanding states’ interactions at the international sphere, with a particular emphasis on notions of security and insecurity. I then discuss the role that popular culture products, in general, and television, in particular, can play in this context, especially in managing multiple challenges that generate ontological security dilemmas. I then turn to examine the four different ontological security challenges – external and internal – that the state of Israel faced in 1967 and for each I explore the potential role that television broadcasting in Arabic was to play. The promise of national television to successfully deal with an array of multiple identity challenges can explain the final decision to embark on this project.

From soft power to identity politics and ontological security

Early interest in the field of IR in the political role of popular culture emerged with the introduction of the concept of ‘soft power’(Nye, 1990, 2004) which suggested that popular culture can play a role in ‘winning hearts and minds’ and should therefore be conceived of as a potential power resource. This led both practitioners and scholars to consider more explicitly the political use of popular culture in foreign policy, looking at the role of pop culture, including television, in the realm of public diplomacy, as a means of projecting a favorable image of the state and its core values beyond its borders (e.g. Gilboa, 2008; Schwoch, 2009).

This work was challenged by critical IR scholars, who underlined its silence on how the power of attraction actually works, and suggested the need to examine the importance of narrative and language, as well as of the affective underpinnings of soft power (e.g. Hayden, 2012; Mattern, 2005; Solomon, 2014). The soft power literature was also criticized for its focus on the positive dimension of generating attraction. In practice, much of the interactions we see that could be labeled as ‘soft power politics’ are in fact negative interactions – either challenging others’ ‘soft power’ or trying to defend one’s own (Mattern, 2005). So much of the use of ‘soft power’ language seems driven by a sense of insecurity.

Focusing on this negative dimension of a struggle and contention over images and narratives, critical IR scholars emphasized the importance of identity challenges in global politics. With growing interest in the aesthetic dimension of international politics (Bleiker, 2001), they began to re-conceptualize the notion of security, beyond threats to one’s physical survival. More specifically, critical security scholars have adopted Anthony Giddens’ concept of ‘ontological security’ to try to make sense of the behavior of states, rather than of individuals, as collective entities. States, it is argued, are concerned with maintaining their sense of ontological security, that is, their sense of a stable, distinctive self-identity, or the existence of a consistent feeling of biographical continuity where the individual (or entity) is able to sustain a narrative about the self (see Kinvall, 2004; Mitzen, 2006; Steele, 2008, 2010).

The concept of ontological security generates a different logic of insecurity for states (Rowley and Weldes, 2012; Steele 2010: 7). Threats to self-identity can emerge from critical and crisis situations – unpredictable disjunctions that disturb the institutionalized routines of states and that reveal gaps between a state’s self-narrative and its actions. Such challenges can generate a feeling of anxiety and shame, which states seek to avoid (Steele, 2008: 12–13). Such insecurities can be both internally generated and externally generated (e.g. Mitzen, 2006; Rumelili, 2015; Sucharov, 2005: 7). Conflictual situations are particularly likely to generate ontological dissonance – when states may have to deal with challenges to a number of different identities they may hold. They may face a situation whereby the measures that must be taken to resolve threats to one identity may aggravate the threat to another challenged identity (e.g. protecting civil liberties and combating terrorism) (Lupovici, 2012).

In conflict situations, such insecurities are not only internal challenges but are also likely to be traced by the state’s external challengers, who are likely to use various strategies to further exacerbate that sense of insecurity, largely through what Mattern (2005) calls verbal fighting – a strategy of representational force, which threatens a victim’s subjectivity rather than its physical integrity. States thus need to engage in various non-material battles to win hearts and minds and to build and maintain or contest different and alternative narratives – both vis-à-vis their own society and vis-à-vis external actors. Domestically, states may contend with challenges to building a unified or consensual national narrative, but these are often influenced by the international context within which the state operates and may also influence it in turn. This also suggests that the traditional distinction between the domestic arena and the international arena needs to be broken down into a kind of ‘intermestic’ continuum of mutual impact.

Several additional factors raise the potential for ontological insecurity challenges, especially when a state holds multiple identities and hence also needs to manage them vis-à-vis various ‘others’ (Rumelili, 2015: 66–67). Third World states, especially postcolonial states, which are often new states, are more likely to suffer from ontological insecurity concerns because the authority of the state is often challenged by pre-existing socio-political structures. In a new state we are likely to find a population that is undergoing a dramatic transition – political and social (e.g. Migdal, 1988). In a new state that comprises immigrant groups, additional transition challenges emerge. Finally, new states are often more sensitive to how they are perceived from the outside, and at times their very legitimacy is contested from the outside. Zarakol (2011), for example, shows how the foreign policies of non-Western latecomers like Turkey or Japan are influenced by their ongoing concern about international stature and the need to appear ‘Western’, but at the same time she also shows how such identity concerns have both domestic and international dimensions. It is therefore important to understand the more complex dynamics of Self-Other, and the need to engage various ‘others’, transcending the domestic–international divide. Even an externally-oriented strategy of nation-branding can be used also for internal audiences to provide people ontological security through enhancing recognition and raising the sense of self-esteem, and national dignity (Browning, 2015).

Using popular culture to manage ontological security challenges

Thinking about security as shaped and challenged by components of identity and representation led to the growing exploration of popular culture products as sites where politics actually takes place, and where issues of security and insecurity actually play out. The use of media, or of popular culture products more broadly, becomes very relevant in the context of shaping or manipulating identity and narratives. As such it can play an important role in generating the sense of biographic continuity associated with ontological security, in challenging it (e.g. disturbing media reports), and in dealing with multiple challenges to a coherent, stable self-identity. This has been acknowledged by scholars from various disciplines, though not always using ontological security language. Scholars of nation-building have long acknowledged the role of popular culture as a powerful tool of building, sustaining, and protecting (or conversely challenging, undermining, and jeopardizing) citizens’ sense of their national Self (e.g. Billig, 1995). Communication scholars have explored the role of the television medium in shaping national identity (e.g. Price, 1995) and in nation-building processes (e.g. Dayan and Katz, 1992; Katz and Wedell, 1977). They focused on the role of television as a tool of ‘national development’ to build a national identity (e.g. Hallin, 1998; Katz and Wedell, 1977). For instance, television can play a role in creating and re-creating rituals, through the ongoing coverage of special media events, which help integrate society, affirm its common values, legitimate its institutions, and reconcile different elements in it (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Liebes and Curran, 1998).

The particular dimension of state control of television broadcasting is a good example of how decision-makers think about the identity challenges facing the nation and how they can use this public medium to manage them. This has been addressed by communications scholars in cases where such challenges are quite obvious – such as the cases of Ireland (e.g. Barbrook, 1992; Watson, 2002) and Israel (Jamal, 2007; Schejter, 2007). Since identity challenges are intensified in the specific context of Third World states, popular culture products like television are of even greater political importance there, as Katz and Wedell elaborate in their work.

A specific reference to ontological security and pop culture/television was made by Silverstone (1993, 1994). He argued that television plays an important role in sustaining individuals’ sense of ontological security. By linking individuals to the world, it generates remote trust – a sense of ontological security without concomitant real-life experience. In turn, when the messages conveyed through television are positive messages about the nation and the state, this helps to generate and maintain social consensus and strengthening state and nation-building. Silverstone (1994) points to the function of television as a transitional object – similar to a toddler’s teddy bear – that the person can hold on to in transitional periods and that offers her the essential sense of continuity, or ontological security, that facilitates the transition. For example, satellite TV plays a role as a provider of ontological security for Muslim immigrants in Europe – a tool that helps them deal with their daily challenges of immigrant life (Georgiou, 2012). In Israel, Arab TV broadcasts served a similar purpose for the Jewish immigrants from Arab states that were forced to detach from their Arab cultural heritage when they arrived to Israel.

While Silverstone focuses on ontological security of individuals, IR scholars have reclaimed the concept of ontological security to make sense of the identity challenges of the state as a whole. IR scholars writing on pop culture argue that popular culture products can help generate an emotional connection between citizens and the idea of the nation, as well as naturalize various understandings about the state and its practices (e.g. Caso and Hamilton, 2015; Dittmer, 2010: Chapters 4 and 5; Dodds, 2008; Grayson et al., 2009; Muller, 2008; Weldes, 1999). This is especially true for the impact of visual images. By their very nature, popular culture products like movies and television can operate at both the narrative and affective levels vis-à-vis their audiences. Thanks to their artistic nature, they can also target directly the audience’s emotions and generate affective impact and investment (see Bleiker, 2015). This is especially relevant when referring to the television medium.

In light of these qualities, popular culture products can be used both to challenge actors’ ontological security and to maintain or enhance it. When the state is faced with challenges of counter-narratives that can threaten its ontological security, and challenges of emerging ontological dissonance, popular culture can play an important domestic role in generating the shared positive imagination among citizens of their society and state, as well as playing a positive international role in dealing with the challenges posed by external audiences to its ontological security. The story of the Israeli national television project demonstrates how television was perceived by the state agents as a potential resource to deal with the multiple challenges to its ontological security. Those challenges reached a climax in face of the intensifying Arab media propaganda on the eve of the 1967 War, and especially with the new realities of post-1967 larger Israel, which had to contend with the forced incorporation of a vast Palestinian population of the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the following sections, I first briefly describe the story of the initiation of the Israeli television project. I then examine the multiple ontological security challenges to the state of Israel, especially in the aftermath of the 1967 war. I suggest that these challenges relate to managing relations with four different audiences, and that for each of them, the TV project in Arabic was seen as a potential, if imperfect, remedy. It was this promise of managing multiple identity challenges that explains the decision to embark on the national television project, in Arabic, at that time. The empirical research is based on a thorough examination of official statements, parliamentary debates, and newspaper reports during the relevant time period (1967–1971). It also makes use of several personal, semi-structured, interviews with people who played important roles in the making of the national Israeli broadcasting in Arabic.

The making of the Israeli national television in Arabic

The idea of investing in a national television project was raised in Israel already in 1952 and met staunch opposition (Gil, 1986: Chapter 1; Katz 1971: 253; Oren, 1990: 20; Sofer 1982: 32–33). In 1965, discussions took place with regard to the creation of a national television service, leading to the creation of the educational television. These discussions did not culminate in a government decision (a detailed account appears in Cummings, 2016: Chapter 3). It was only in mid-March 1967 that the government had reached a decision to embark on the television project, beginning with what was called Emergency Broadcasts to the Arab population (Gil, 1986: 40). As events unfolded quickly, after the June war, this notion of an emergency television gradually gave way to a broader notion of a general television end-project, yet it still focused initially on broadcasting in Arabic. On 13 November 1967, this decision was presented to the Israeli parliament (Knesset) for approval. The plan was to broadcast initially for 4 hours daily, three of them in Arabic and only 1 hour in Hebrew (in the spirit of the emergency broadcasting concept) (Galili, 1967: 127). This language balance was to shift in early 1969 in favor of greater broadcasting hours in Hebrew, but this was only after the initial project was approved. A construction team headed by Hebrew University Communications professor Elihu Katz was created and in unprecedented speed managed to put together its first broadcast already in May 1968 (Katz, 1971). The Arabic TV division was headed and staffed largely by Israeli Jews who immigrated from Egypt or Iraq, who knew excellent Arabic, were well-versed in Arab culture, and were genuinely interested in producing high-quality programs. Ironically, even when the Hebrew broadcasting TV was expanded, the television in Arabic led by far in terms of original productions. It invested heavily in original programs that dealt with education, health, and household-related problems. The popular children’s TV show in Arabic ‘Sami and Susu’, was for many years the only local, not imported, children’s program in Israel, and it was also extremely popular among young Jewish Israeli viewers. The Israeli Arabic broadcasts included also dramas based on short stories from the Arab world, as well as religious shows like the popular Ramadan quizzes (interview with Shula Ostwind, 30 June 2013, Jerusalem).

Challenges to Israeli ontological security and their potential remedies through the Israeli national broadcasting in Arabic

Israel in the late 1960s reflected several of the challenges mentioned above – a new, postcolonial state, dealing with national integration challenges of different ethnic populations. Moreover, the Jewish state was born into a highly conflictual environment that threatened both its physical and ontological security. These ontological security challenges were intensified after 1967, as Israel had to contend with new expanded borders, leading to both a new sense of insecurity and a problem of both domestic and international legitimacy, despite an unprecedented degree of coercive power successfully exercised (e.g. Barak, 2017; Segev, 2007: Part IV). The urgency with which the decision to embark on national broadcasting took place can only be understood by considering the major events leading to and following the 1967 war, and how they heightened concerns over ontological security and insecurity. Some of those concerns pre-existed the June war, but combined with new post-1967 concerns they generated enough anxiety that would lead to the TV project decision. Thus, a national television project in Arabic was perceived as attractive in managing and mitigating these various concerns.

In 1967, Israel did not have a national television, yet approximately 30,000–40,000 TV sets did exist in private households. Owners of TV sets were mostly Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis who immigrated to Israel from Arab states. They were watching news and entertainment from TV stations of neighboring states, mainly from Egypt and from Lebanon, and could enjoy them as they knew Arabic. After the war, assessments were that approximately 6000 TV sets existed in the newly occupied West Bank (Galili, 1967: 125, 127). Broadcasting in Arabic therefore had four potential target audiences in mind: neighboring Arab states, the Palestinians in the newly occupied territories, Arab Israelis (i.e. the Palestinian Arab minority that has been living within sovereign Israel since 1948 and who had Israeli citizenship), and the Israeli Jewish immigrants who arrived from Arab-speaking countries (a.k.a. the Sephardi Jews). In what follows, I discuss the type of ontological security challenges presented to the State of Israel by each audience and the interactions with it. And for each challenge, I discuss the potential ameliorating role that television was to play.

Israel’s Arab neighboring states-countering negative propaganda and competing for prestige

Unlike the domestic challenges posed by the other three groups, the interaction with Israel’s Arab neighboring states is explicitly and directly linked to the use of the television medium as a political weapon at the inter-state level. In the months leading to the 1967 war, Egyptian TV and radio have been constantly broadcasting very harsh anti-Israeli propaganda, which was watched in Israel as well, and had a significant negative and depressing psychological impact on the Israeli public (Segev, 2007: Chapter 8). Egyptian TV broadcasts constantly called for and promised the imminent annihilation of the State of Israel and promoted the idea of pan-Arabism. While not threatening Israeli physical security, these broadcasts did pose a dual threat to Israel – by generating doubts within Israeli society regarding the long-term existence of the state of Israel and by reminding Arab Israelis that they were part of a larger Arab nation and encouraging them to hold ground until their land would be freed from the Zionist occupation. Consequently, growing voices both in the government and among the general public called for the need to counter this negative content. Despite the various concerns about a national television project, it was argued that Israel simply had ‘no choice’, as it was unthinkable to do nothing while it was psychologically bombarded by the propaganda of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser (e.g. Rosenblum, 1967). By March 1967, even members of Knesset (MKs) who initially opposed the television project now suggested that ‘there was no choice’ given the demonstration of the (soft) power of TV as used by Egypt (MK Shachor (1967) from Mafdal – The National Religious Party, 13 November 1967).

The concern over external Arab propaganda was clearly put forth as the official rationale for Israeli TV broadcasting and framed in terms of security concerns. The Israeli General Security Service (‘Shin Bet’) discussed in April 1967 the security implications of the broadcasting of Arab TV (Cummings, 2016: 76). The minister in charge of the TV project was Israel Galili, who was in charge of Hasbara, a Hebrew term that can be translated into Public Diplomacy, or Information, or Propaganda, but which literally means ‘explaining’ (for a thoughtful account of this concept, see Cummings, 2016).

Initially, the founders of the Arabic broadcasting in Israel made a strategic decision to avoid explicitly political issues or negative broadcasts about the Arab world. They were concerned about the negative impact of any broadcasts that would appear as Israeli propaganda, and they believed that the best way to win the hearts and minds was through building on common civil society fields of interest such as family matters, health, and well-being. The language used was very much the language of the current soft power and public diplomacy literature (interview with Salim Fattal, 15 July 2013, Moshav Ora).¹ The decision was not to use this venue in order to demonize neighboring Arab regimes, but rather to focus on broadcasting programs that addressed common human interests (Katz, 1971; Galili, 1967: 126). While Israelis were aware of their limited capacity to actually compete with Arab state broadcasting, meetings with Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian Arabs revealed the profound misconceptions they had about Israel and therefore pointed to the potential of the Israeli television in Arabic as an efficient tool for both Israeli ‘positive’ propaganda and for countering Arab ‘negative’ propaganda (Peri, 1967).

To this was added a secondary consideration about international prestige. Minister Galili also chose to stress in the Knesset that Israel was among the last of the regional states to embark on a national television project (Galili, 1967: 125). This was important as Israel was positioning itself as a modern Western state, and a national television was perceived as one example of such progress. Zarakol (2011: 248–249) describes how non-Western states strive to westernize not only in order to compete vis-à-vis established Western states but also vis-à-vis their regional neighbors to establish themselves as more advanced; this was also the case here. Indeed, Israel and Jordan were competing with each other in the launching of their respective television projects (Lavi, 1967).

The international competition dimension was evident in the perceptions of and reactions to the Israeli broadcasts in Arabic within the Arab world. Despite its limited hours of broadcast, many of Israeli programs became very popular among citizens of neighboring Arab states, a fact that generated concern and frustration among the Arab political elites. A Syrian newspaper warned that the Israeli television has proved to be a real new danger, invading into people’s homes and planting seeds of separation among Arabs, while preaching for false peace (cited in Halamish, 1969a). A Lebanese journal described the tremendous impact of the Israeli broadcasts in Southern Lebanon, especially in one village where the locals have become enchanted by these broadcasts and consequently began fighting the Palestinian fedayins in their village. It suggested that programs showing Arabs in Israel who were well and content would demoralize Arab liberation fighters (Halamish, 1969b; Reicher, 1969). The greatest frustration was voiced in Jordan, where thousands became loyal viewers of the Friday night ‘Arab’ (Egyptian) film (as it was commonly referred to) that was aired on the Israeli television every week. Jordan raised the issue with the Arab League Boycott Bureau, which initiated an investigation to try and determine how Egyptian films made their way to Israel (Lavi, 1970). These examples suggest that these identity challenges were part and parcel of a political struggle involving Israel and its Arab neighbors. For Arab regimes, the ‘Palestinian question’ and the struggle against Israel were considered a central component in the regimes’ raison-d’étre, so a grass root, popular interest in Israeli broadcasts was considered as a real security threat (in ontological terms).

The Palestinian Arab Community in Israel-loyal citizens or an internal threat? The challenge of managing internal security and democracy

The danger of ontological dissonance: Since the end of the 1948 war, the Israeli governments had to deal with the challenge of the Palestinian Arabs who remained in their villages during and after the war, or were dislocated but remained within the sovereign borders of the new state, becoming ‘Arab Israelis’. In 1948, Arabs consisted of 14.9% of Israel’s population and in the aftermath of the massive Jewish immigration to Israel in the early 1950s this community decreased to about 11% (Bauml, 2007: 19; see also Cohen, 2000). The issue of integrating Arab Israelis also reflects the difficulty of separating domestic and international politics, as this minority was perceived by the Israeli state as part of a regional majority of Arabs in the Middle East (see Reiter, 2009). Israeli leaders, especially Ben-Gurion, and the public in general were concerned about the potential security threat they may pose as a fifth column (Benziman and Mansour 1992: Chapter 1). Consequently, Israel placed its Arab population under a regime of military government. Since the early 1960s, growing domestic opposition emerged to the military rule system, and calls for its dismantling were voiced. This internal debate, which reached its peak in the mid-1960s under Prime Minister Eshkol, was centered on the security merits and faults of the continued military rule over the Arab population within Israel. It also reflected a concern regarding its normative underpinning and the challenge it posed to Israel’s identity as a democratic and liberal state (Benziman and Mansour, 1992: Chapter 5). Eventually, the military administration system was abolished by the end of 1966. The abolition of the military administration did not mean, however, the abolition of state control over its Arab minority (see Lustick, 1980: Chapter 6), who remained largely excluded from the broader Israeli Jewish society, as they were considered an ‘other’ from within (Lustick, 1980: Chapter 4; Pappé, 2011: Chapter 3). Yet, the debate over the military regime did sharpen the dilemma of how to uphold Israel’s self-proclaimed democratic principles while also providing effective physical security for its citizens.

In the aftermath of the 1967 war, as the onus of security and control problems shifted to the newly occupied territories, final restrictions on the internal movement of Arab Israelis were removed. The common perception after the war was that now that Israeli Arabs have seen how better off they were socio-economically compared to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, their identification with the state would grow. This led the government to officially adopt a policy of promoting co-existence, and it officially declared its goal of integrating Arab Israelis in all spheres of life and offering them full rights (Benziman and Mansour 1992: 73–75). The concern over the Arab minority, however, did not disappear. It is in this context as well that the national television project in Arabic and its perceived implications about how to manage ontological challenges need to be assessed.

Already in the early 1960s, the potential impact of Arab broadcasts on the political inclinations and motivations of Arab Israelis seemed ominous. In 1963, concerns were raised regarding the potential negative impact of Nasser’s speeches on Arab unity, which were watched by the Arab Israeli population. Egyptian and Syrian TV regularly broadcasted programs directed to Israeli Arabs, addressing them as ‘our dear brothers, sons of a robbed Palestine’, and promising a coming attack of Arab forces that would free them from their ‘Zionist captivity’ (Oren, 1999: 29).

One defensive move was the attempt to pass in 1962 a regulation requiring each person purchasing a TV set to register in the post office and to present proof of citizenship. This problematic regulation clearly was aimed to discriminate against Israeli Arabs. It was highly criticized, and in practice it was not implemented (Oren, 2004: 49–50). This episode highlights though why dealing with the Arab minority also posed a challenge to Israel’s identity as a democratic state.

In the late 1960s, the Israeli government was struggling about how to shape and reshape the complex interactions between the Arab–Israeli minority and the Jewish Israeli majority, in the context of democratic domestic institutions and an ongoing complex regional conflict. Television broadcasts in Arabic seemed significant as an integrating cultural platform of Arab Israelis into the Israeli society. In his Knesset presentation of the TV project, Galili made this link by stressing the importance of the Arab Israeli citizens, and emphasizing the fact that many of them were watching TV, either in private or as a form of social activity in local coffee shops (Galili, 1967: 126). Over time the tension between Israel’s self-perception as a liberal democratic state, on the one hand, and the security concerns about the loyalty of its Arab minority in the Jewish state, on the other hand, became a permanent component of Israeli identity struggle and dissonance, and a constant threat to its sense of ontological security (Sucharov, 2005). In the late 1960s, this tension was in its initial stages, but already evident, and the TV project did appear as a potentially useful integrating tool to manage and mitigate those challenges. Moreover, it became clear that the integration (or lack of) of Israeli Arabs into Israeli society was also important in face of the external de-legitimization efforts of Arab states.

The Palestinians in the newly occupied territories – the challenges of a ‘benign’ occupation

While the Arab Israeli minority was a natural target for Israel’s new television broadcasts in Arabic in 1968, earlier concerns about its loyalty or the potential risks it posed to the Jewish State were not sufficient by themselves to prompt such broadcasting. The dramatic change in 1967 was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which created a new, unexpected challenge of dealing with over a million Palestinians who were considered to be hostile to Israel.

The public discourse in Israel and official Israeli statements at that time suggest that, from the outset, the Israeli government was hoping to use the television broadcasts to build a better image for Israel among this population that came under Israeli occupation. In a press conference held in August 1967, Galili claimed that once a decision was made to remain in the areas occupied by the Israeli army, Israel had to prepare for its long-term interaction with this vast Palestinian population, and that this required the use of the television medium because it enabled the ‘intrusion into the viewer’s intimate space’ (cited in Davar, 1967). He repeatedly emphasized this point and the potential of the new TV broadcasting to both serve the cultural needs of the population in the territories, as well as a tool to build understanding with Israel. Another Labor party MK, Aharon Yadlin, argued that while this population emerged alienated from the initial shock of defeat, there was a chance to rid them of the dream of destroying the state of Israel if they would be able to generate for themselves, through a direct encounter with Israel, ‘a real and true image of the Israeli society and become a bridge for peace’ (Yadlin in Knesset meeting, 13 November 1967, pp. 132–133).

In practice, the broadcasts did not differentiate between the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the Arab Israelis. Ostwind recalls how Israeli TV journalists who traveled around Israel and the West Bank looking for interviewees, did not really distinguish at the time between residents in the post-1967 territories or those who became Israeli citizens after 1948 (Shula Ostwind, 30 June 2013, Jerusalem). The news section of the Israeli broadcasting included also political discussions and documentaries. Palestinian politicians were frequently interviewed there and, lacking their own television medium, this was their stage to communicate with their local constituencies. Through their consumption of Israeli television a process of the routinization of Israeli control emerged. For the Jewish population, this was also a tool to mitigate the unease stemming from the reality of military occupation, which clashed with Israeli self-image as a liberal democratic state.

The challenge of the ‘Oriental’ Jews and Israel’s national cultural identity

Israel during the 1960s also faced significant challenges to its domestic project of creating and enhancing a unified national identity within its dominant Jewish community. By the mid-1960s, nearly half of the Jewish population in Israel consisted of Jews who emigrated from Arab-speaking states. This large population of new immigrants, or Mizrahi ( ‘Oriental’) or Sephardi Jews, as they were called, was very different from the previous old majority of Jews of European origins in terms of cultural background, tastes, and mentality. The old elites held patronizing, at times racist, attitudes toward these new immigrants, assuming they had little to contribute culturally to the building of the new state. Their Eastern, ‘uncivilized’, ‘barbaric’ Arab cultural practices were seen as threatening to the development of Israel as a modern Western state. These perceived wide gaps between European and Middle Eastern Jews created a new serious challenge for the cherished founding myth of an inclusive, fair, and harmonious Jewish national homeland, so it created significant challenges to the state’s ontological security. These gaps and the growing ethnic tensions and frustrations of Sephardi Jews were thus perceived as a real challenge to Israel’s survival. Issues of a unified national culture took a profound political significance and the project of healing the ethnic divide was conflated with the project of cultural integration. This, at the time, meant a paternalistic Western culture that must push the ‘tradition-bound’ Orientals forward. The violent uprising in Wadi Salib of the Israeli Moroccan community in 1959 came to represent the ruptured dream of unity, became a symbol of national shame, and made it impossible to further ignore these ethnic tensions (Oren, 1999: 29). In other words, ethnic (or intra-communal) tensions and divisions became a challenge to Israel’s ontological security because they fleshed out the serious gap between the self-narrative of a new and unified Jewish society in Israel and the actual reality of ethnic divides if not blatant racism.

In the context of Israel’s ongoing regional conflict with its Arab neighbors, a second identity challenge emerged. The state’s leaders found troubling the situation, whereas a large segment of its citizens appeared to feel a greater cultural affinity to the culture of the state’s enemies than to that of the state itself. Ben-Gurion himself was cited saying, in reference to the immigrants from Morocco, that ‘we do not want Israelis to become Arabs’ (cited in Massad, 1996: 57). Historian Tom Segev (2007: Chapter 2) describes the open concern voiced by many intellectuals in Israel in the mid-1960s regarding the growing ‘levantinization’ of Israeli society and culture. This posed a threat as it blurred the identity fault lines between the Israeli (Jewish) Self and the Arab Other, at a time when Israel’s ability to sustain the regional struggle was based upon a successful achievement of a coherent and safe national Jewish identity.

Given these ontological challenges, television broadcasts from Arab states, to which these immigrants were exposed, posed an additional serious threat. The Arab broadcasts were seen as undermining this national effort at assimilating (i.e. Westernizing) this large population. This concern came across quite clearly in the newspapers of the time, which warned about the pernicious effect of the fact that a resident of a development town, who, at the time, was probably a Sephardi Jew from an Arab country, would find his only entertainment and relaxation outlet in Arab TV stations (Justus, 1967). This population, it was argued, was the most potentially vulnerable to such foreign broadcasts, as they spoke Arabic and enjoyed popular entertainment shows that were offered only on Arab channels. It is easy to understand the attraction of watching these Arab broadcasts for the new immigrants from the Arab world, as they served a function akin to Silverstone’s (1994) notion of television as a transitional object to hold on to in transitional periods. The Israeli State, however, viewed this as an ontological threat. Hence, the national TV project was considered as an efficient tool to deal with it.

Conclusion

While there is no doubt that broadcasting in Arabic was the initial rationale that enabled the national Israeli TV project to come to fruition, the main unintended consequence of this project was later on the creation of the general television in Hebrew. Growing skepticism since 1970 regarding the actual impact of broadcasting in Arabic further pushed for the neglect of the original goal of the TV broadcasts. By then, the ‘soft power’ motivation that led to the start of the TV project was portrayed as very naïve. This article showed how the initial decision to embark on a national TV project was directly and clearly linked to the pre-1967 war anti-Israeli images and propaganda broadcasted into Israel by Egyptian television. The initial goal was thus a defensive reaction based on an understanding of the power of the television medium. To this initial reaction, three additional motivations were added, which were more internally oriented: using the Israeli broadcasts in Arabic to co-opt the newly occupied Arab Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, using these broadcasts to co-opt/integrate the Israeli Arab population within the state of Israel, and using the broadcasts to promote the integration of the Jewish immigrants from the Arab world. These were all driven by a desire to protect Israel’s sense of ontological security, or coherent identity, in face of different challenges: the very challenge to Israel’s right to exist and survive, as challenged by Arab broadcasts; the inherent tension between Israel’s self-perception as a liberal democratic state and its ongoing security concerns regarding the loyalty of its Arab citizens; the threat that the sense of alienation of Israeli ‘oriental’ Jewish citizens presented to the founding narrative of a new Jewish Israeli unified national identity; and the tension of preserving a liberal democracy while occupying a million Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Thus, this case illustrates the complexity of managing self-identity when the state has to engage with various ‘others’ – within and across its borders – and the promise seen in the television medium as an effective tool for doing so. The ability to depict the TV project as a potential remedy to these multiple challenges can explain the decision to embark on the project.

These findings point to several future avenues for research. First, there is a need to enrich studies of soft power and public diplomacy by focusing on the political motivations behind such policies, which often stem from a sense of ontological insecurity, and of the omni-directional nature of the targets of such policies, which are both external and domestic. Second, the case also demonstrates the gap between elite belief in the efficacy of using the television as a tool for strategic purposes and its actual impact. Additional unintended consequences emerged, illustrating that the consumption of popular culture artifacts has a social–political dynamics of its own, well beyond government control, and in different, contradictory directions. The unintended consequences of the original television project were not explored here but open additional avenues for research. Fourth, as public television competes nowadays with multiple television and other media outlets, local, and transnational, the potential power of national TV services has been undermined. Still, the questions related to television and ontological security challenges remain as important as 50 years ago. Transnational TV actually raises the potential for challenging broadcasting for the national narrative, and therefore the discussion of strategies to deal with such threats remains as pertinent and worth exploring. Finally, the focus of the article on the lure of television as a tool to deal with identity challenges, security, and international politics should offer interesting avenues for future research on the role of media and popular culture more broadly in contested states and states in conflictual regions, bringing together similar research agendas from the field of International Relations and Communications.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article benefitted greatly from the thorough and wise assistance of Shani Bar-Tuvia. I also wish to thank my colleagues Oren Barak, Amir Lupovici and Arie Kacowicz who read and commented on various drafts of the article.

Funding

This project was facilitated through the generous financial support of the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF), Grant no.1616/12.

Notes

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