Kol Israel in Arabic

Kol Israel in Arabic (, Sawt Isra'il bil-'Arabiyya), also known as Reshet Dalet (, "Network D"), was the Arabic-language radio service of Israel's public broadcaster Kol Yisrael. It began in 1948 as a department of the Hebrew service and became a separate network in 1958. The station was aimed both at listeners in the Arab world and at Arab citizens of Israel. It went off the air with the closure of the Israel Broadcasting Authority in May 2017 and was replaced by Radio Makan, run by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation.

History

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 Israel, 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.

David Ben-Gurion is reported to have said at the service's founding that while Kol Israel in Hebrew mattered for information and education, its Arabic counterpart mattered for security. The tasks assigned to it were to work for peace, to deter war, to make Israel present in Arab public awareness, and in the event of war to serve 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 the orientalist 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. Palestinian citizens of Israel joined in growing numbers over time. Several broadcasters became household names in the region under on-air pseudonyms, among them Eliyahu Nawi ("Dawud al-Natur") and Salman Dabi ("Ibn al-Rafidayn"). Beyond news and commentary, the station aired drama, satire, music, and programs on agriculture, medicine, law and history. Its house orchestra, set up after the arrival of the Egyptian-born musician Zuzu Musa, became one of its best-known 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.

Intelligence use Because the signal was strong and could be picked up on ordinary receivers, Israeli intelligence used the broadcasts to send coded messages to agents in Arab countries. In the best-known 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 a prearranged song played on the station.

"Lies and Facts" The station's best-known propaganda programme, Lies and Facts (), 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 Menashe, 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 Israel regularly, he had begun arguing with it on air.

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. The station's reach in the Arab world was visible during Anwar Sadat's 1977 visit to Jerusalem: The Christian Science Monitor reported that Libyan diplomats in Beirut, planning to burn a flag in protest, followed the station's coverage to learn when Sadat's plane had landed. 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; its chief, Edmond Zehayek, said these were explicitly attributed to the Israel Defense Forces rather than to the station, in order to protect its credibility. After the war it aired greetings from Syrian prisoners of war held in Israel to their families.

Transmitter By the late 1970s Reshet Dalet was transmitting on 738 kHz with 1,200 kW, which made it the most powerful radio transmitter in Israel. 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.

Editorial policy Unlike the Voice of America, Kol Israel was not a direct organ of the government, and in 1984 Zehayek told the Monitor that the Arabic service received no routine guidance on content and none at all on its hourly news, the main exception being wartime 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.

Critics and later accounts have framed the same output differently: the 2023 documentary about the station presents it as an instrument of propaganda and psychological warfare, and notes that rival Arab stations mocked its presenters as a "propaganda orchestra".

Audience While its signal still reached the Arab countries, the station had a large audience there and a reputation for reliability. In 1964 the Saudi newspaper Al-Bilad quoted listeners who said Kol Israel exposed facts that Arab stations tried to hide, and that it covered news from the whole Arab world in a single bulletin while each Arab station focused on its own country. In 1984 the head of the Arabic service told The Christian Science Monitor that he received about a hundred letters a day from Egypt since the peace treaty, and around a dozen more from other Arab countries through a post office box in Switzerland. Its core audience was in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, along with hundreds of thousands of listeners in Israel and the West Bank.

Even in its last years, with the transmitter gone, the station kept a following among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world, increasingly through its website. In a 2009 article in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the Palestinian writer Tawfiq Abu Shomar put this down to well-timed and well-ordered news bulletins that ranked items by importance rather than opening with the head of state, to strong headlines that drew listeners into the full bulletin, and to weather forecasts he considered more accurate than those of Arab stations.

Later years and closure 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 Israel in Arabic could be received in every Arab population centre in Israel.

Kol Israel's radio networks went off the air on 10 May 2017 with the closure of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, and the new public broadcaster took over on 15 May. Its place was taken by Radio Makan of the new corporation, which addresses mainly the Arab public in Israel. 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.

In film The 2023 documentary ''Radio Propaganda'' (Hebrew: ''HaTizmoret'', "The Orchestra"), directed by Ofer Pinchasov and premiered at Docaviv, tells the story of the station and its staff, including its role in propaganda, psychological warfare and the activation of agents.

Kol Israel in Arabic

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