Kol Yisrael in Arabic

Origins and early years

The service had roots in the Arabic broadcasts of the Haganah's clandestine radio between 1945 and 1948, which were for a time headed by Shaul Bar-Haim, an immigrant from Iraq who later became director of Israel Radio's Arabic service.

The new state's official Arabic broadcasts were initiated by the diplomat Eliyahu Sasson during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. According to historian Yuval Evri, the service started that year as a division of the Hebrew-language Kol Yisrael, and its stated purpose was to promote Israel's standing and to shape public opinion both in the Arab countries and among Arab citizens of Israel. It went on the air for about an hour and a half a day, and its hours grew over the following years.

According to Shaul Menashe, who edited the station's programme Lies and Facts from 1959 to 1973, David Ben-Gurion said at the service's founding that while Kol Yisrael in Hebrew mattered for information and education, its Arabic counterpart mattered for security. Menashe describes the tasks assigned to it as working for peace, deterring war, making Israel present in Arab public awareness, and in the event of war serving as a mouthpiece of the Israel Defense Forces. Until the 1956 war the service was poorly resourced, with a staff of six or seven, all from Arab countries; its first director was Shaul Bar-Haim, followed by Yaakov Hazma, Tzadok Ben-Meir and David Sagiv. After 1956 Ezra Danin took charge of its policy for eleven years. He obtained a larger budget and staff, which numbered about fifty by 1960, and expanded Arabic airtime from three to seven and a half hours a day, alongside half an hour in Persian. A steering committee that included the prime minister's secretary Yitzhak Navon and representatives of the Foreign Ministry and military intelligence met weekly to set the station's information lines.

After the Sinai campaign of 1956 it was decided to split the Arabic service off from the Hebrew one, and it became known in Arabic as "the Israeli Broadcasting House". In 1958 it began operating as a network of its own, Reshet Dalet, on 737 kHz with a 100 kW transmitter.

Most of the staff were Jewish immigrants from Arab countries for whom Arabic was a native language, above all Iraqi and Egyptian Jews. Arab citizens of Israel joined in growing numbers over time. Several broadcasters appeared under pseudonyms or invented radio personas, among them Eliyahu Nawi as the storyteller "Dawud al-Natur" and Salman Dabi as "Ibn al-Rafidayn"; their programmes were very popular and ran for many years. Beyond news and commentary, the station aired drama, satire, music, and programs on agriculture, medicine, law and history. Its house orchestra, which had operated on a small scale from the start, took its best-known form after the arrival of the Egyptian-born musician Zuzu Musa and became one of the station's most popular features. By the late 1960s the station was on the air 14 hours a day with a staff of about 150, and some of its people went on to launch Israel's Arabic-language television broadcasts.

Wartime broadcasting

According to Menashe, the wartime task of serving as the army's voice was carried out most fully in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Danin, who directed its policy, wrote in his memoirs that credibility was his guiding principle but that he occasionally departed from it, as during the Yom Kippur War, when the station aired inaccurate reports and its credibility suffered for a time. During the 1982 Lebanon War civilians across Lebanon tuned in to learn where Israeli forces were advancing, and the service broadcast official announcements and calls to surrender to PLO fighters, Syrian troops and the Lebanese population; the head of the Arabic service, Edmond Zehayek, said these were explicitly attributed to the Israel Defense Forces rather than to the station, in order to protect its credibility. It also aired greetings to their families from Syrian prisoners of war held in Israel until 1984.

Transmitter

By the late 1970s Reshet Dalet was transmitting on 738 kHz with 1,200 kW, and in 1984 The Christian Science Monitor described the Arabic service as having the most powerful radio broadcasting operation in Israel at its disposal. The transmitter stood at the "Hillel" broadcasting site near Kadima, and its signal reached deep into the Middle East. The community of Tzoran was later built close to the site, and after pressure from residents worried about electromagnetic radiation, the antennas were taken down at the end of 2003. The Reshet Aleph transmitter at the same site was closed at the same time.

Later years and closure

The Broadcasting Authority Law of 1965 required the IBA to broadcast in Arabic both for the needs of the Arabic-speaking population and to promote understanding and peace with neighbouring countries. The political scientist Amal Jamal has criticised the law for speaking of Arabic-speaking residents rather than Arab citizens, and for aiming to secure their loyalty and serve the state's needs rather than meet theirs; Arnon Gross, a member of the station's staff from the 1970s, acknowledged that the clause was meant to give legitimacy to propaganda work. After the peace treaty with Egypt the station's attention turned increasingly to Arab citizens of Israel, and during the peace process of the 1990s it dropped the name "Israeli Broadcasting House" in favour of "Kol Yisrael in Arabic", a shift that, according to the historian Mustafa Kabha, was halted by the Second Intifada in 2000. The station also remained available for military and political use: the IDF used it extensively for psychological warfare during the 1991 Gulf War, and in 1997 the communications minister asked the IBA's director-general to use its broadcasts to jam the Palestinian Authority's Voice of Palestine over complaints of incitement.

In 2010 the director-general of the Prime Minister's Office, Eyal Gabbai, instructed the Broadcasting Authority, as part of a planned reform, to strengthen the radio transmitters so that Kol Yisrael in Arabic could be received in every Arab population centre in Israel.

Kol Yisrael's radio networks ended regular programming on 10 May 2017 as the Israel Broadcasting Authority was wound up, and carried only music and hourly news until the new public broadcaster took over on 15 May. Its place was taken by Radio Makan of the new corporation; in a 2020 survey for the Government Advertising Bureau it was the second most-heard station among Arab citizens, behind the regional station Radio a-Shams.

Music and drama

Music and drama filled much of the schedule. Thousands of new musical works, mostly by Iraqi- and Egyptian-born Jewish musicians, were composed for and aired on the station, and its entertainment department, headed by the Egyptian-Jewish writer Maurice Shammas ("Abu Farid"), wrote and produced hundreds of radio plays; the tales told on air by Nawi and Dabi were later collected in books in Hebrew and Arabic. Like other Arabic stations, it opened its broadcast day with a reading from the Quran. Evri notes that it also had a large Mizrahi audience in Israel, which listened to it alongside the Egyptian stations, and argues that treating the station purely as an instrument of propaganda misses its place in the history of Arabic radio and culture in the region.

"Lies and Facts"

TThe station's propaganda programme Lies and Facts (الأكاذيب والحقائق), was conceived after the 1956 war against the background of Nasserism. It set recorded statements by Arab leaders and commentators, Nasser above all, against the facts as the station presented them, on the reasoning that a recording of a leader's own voice was hard to deny. It ran twice a week with a repeat the following day, and three times a week after 1967, drawing on an archive of some 40,000 recordings. According to David Karon, an intelligence officer who interrogated Egyptian prisoners after the 1956 war, the idea came from a captured Egyptian officer who complained that the station lost credibility when its presenters tried to match the invective of Cairo's Voice of the Arabs, and argued that sticking to facts would serve it better.

The station also abandoned literary Arabic for colloquial dialects so as to reach listeners who could not read, with presenters assigned to the dialect of each target country, such as Salman Dabi ("Ibn al-Rafidayn") for Iraq. Its producers stopped using belittling terms for Arab governments and referred to Nasser by his title of president. Nasser responded to the station in his own speeches on several occasions; in 1959 Maariv reported that, having admitted he listened to Kol Yisrael regularly, he had begun arguing with it on air.

Intelligence use

According to the 2023 documentary Radio Propaganda, the broadcasts were also used to activate agents in Arab countries through codes embedded in the programming. In one documented case, the Mossad told Munir Redfa, the Iraqi pilot who defected to Israel with his MiG-21 on 16 August 1966 in Operation Diamond, that the operation was a go by having the song "Marhabtayn Marhabtayn" (مرحبتين مرحبتين, "Welcome twice over") played on the station as a prearranged signal.

Editorial policy and staffing

Unlike the Voice of America, Kol Yisrael was not a direct organ of the government, and the ''Monitor'' reported in 1984 that the Arabic service was generally left to decide its own content, with its hourly news bulletins free of any outside direction; the main exception came in wartime, when it carried military announcements. Its twice-daily political commentaries were presented explicitly as Israeli opinion. Because it also served hundreds of thousands of Arab listeners in Israel and the West Bank who had access to other news, Zehayek said the station aired items unfavourable to Israel, though he chose not to lead bulletins with them as the Hebrew service would; he described this as a form of self-censorship. At the time the service broadcast 18 hours a day and competed with some 52 other Arabic-language stations.

Daskal and Shwartz Altshuler, drawing on the media scholar Dan Caspi, write that the security establishment took part in vetting staff for the IBA's Arabic departments, that senior management posts were held by Jews, that Druze applicants were preferred over Christian Arabs and Christian Arabs over Muslims, and that the political and military correspondents' posts were filled only by Jews. A former staff member, Salim Shehadeh, told them that editors and presenters received no instructions from the army and that management did not censor the news, but that the station avoided terms usual in other Arab media, calling attackers "saboteurs" (mukharrib) where other stations said "gunmen" (musallah).