Page 106 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

lowers. Of¤cial radio in Israel is heavily oriented to high culture and educational
themes, plus an endless diet of news, and this narrowness opens a space for more
popular—and therefore more Sephardi—modes of communication and enter-
tainment. The entertainment stations on of¤cial radio certainly lack any appeal
to a public at once popular and interested in religious themes and traditions.
From another point of view, it could be said that by their use of Oriental-
style music the stations are joining the Israeli mainstream, just as by promoting
a Sephardi religiosity Shas is trying to create an Israeli mainstream Orthodoxy
in the religious ¤eld. Israeli popular music is distinguished by continual mixing
of styles, combining either the “indigenous” tradition originating with the for-
mative period of Israeli Jewish culture with rock and other cosmopolitan forms,
or the Oriental style with those forms and with the indigenous ones (Regev
1996). Although there was for a time a prejudice against both cosmopolitan and
quasi-Arab music, this has now given way to postmodern syncretism, but both
kinds of music are acceptable if they catch on. The pirate radios, then, which
to some might appear as beyond the mainstream, may be ¤tting very nicely into
this nonelite mainstream.
Today, at least in the Jerusalem area, many, if not most, of the pirate stations
are religious, and although they sometimes like to call themselves “Holiness
channels” (arutsei kodesh), they are happy to be known as piratim. There are
also pirate stations devoted to popular music, and serving the West Bank settlers
and the million-strong Arab population. But the religious stations, whose cen-
tral theme is t’shuva, are now so numerous that people ¤nd themselves listening
almost by accident as they turn the knobs on their car radios or in their kitchens,
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and as a welcome alternative to the of¤cial stations. During 2002 it has been
noticeable that they are going beyond their core audience and penetrating the
secular world, and they are also becoming the subject of debates on the main-
stream channels’ chat shows and political discussions. Their number and pro-
portion are matters for speculation. In a Knesset debate on October 20, 1999, a
Shas member (MK) stated that there were 150 between 1996 and 1999 of which
only 14 were religious. Yet he also said that in 1999 the authorities closed down
90 stations, of which 48 were religious, and that, in the two months prior to the
debate, 21 out of the 28 stations that closed down were religious. Any conclu-
sions drawn from these numbers should keep in mind that stations routinely
reopen after being “closed down”—a blatantly illegal procedure that has never
been followed by a prosecution or conviction (leading in theory to a sentence
of three years’ imprisonment or a ¤ne of up to U.S.$330,000).
The pirate stations play a game of cat-and-mouse with the government, op-
erating under the constant threat of having their equipment con¤scated. They
do not like to give out their address, and they say that not infrequently they
have to bundle their equipment out of a location in the face of a possible police
raid. Although insiders mention links between particular stations and religious
organizations or prominent rabbis, they do not publicize these links. The de-
gree of indulgence or repression by the authorities varies with the color of the

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