Page 107 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

government of the day—the more right wing, the more tolerant. But the re-
ceived wisdom among the haredim is that they suffer relentless persecution, and
they make the point with the customary hyperbole of Israeli political debate.
The Shas MK quoted above declared that the persecution of the pirate radios
reminded him of when the authorities in his native Georgia sent tractors to
steamroller their synagogues in 1953 and the people lay down on the ground to
stop them. The unwillingness of successive governments and parliaments to le-
galize their radio stations is also taken as proof of the discrimination they suffer
at the hands of what they see as a secular dictatorship: the same MK, referring
unashamedly to the pirate stations’ support for his party, said that it was clear
that “they” want to “silence millions who have no other station,” and that the
prime minister (Ehud Barak) “wants to destroy Shas” (which was a member of
his coalition). A broadcaster in the city of Natanya spoke to us bitterly of their
treatment by the Rabin government. Haredim, of course, would never accept
space in what they regard as a godless state broadcasting station, but this does
not stand in the way of routine point scoring: thus the Shas MK did not miss
the opportunity to make the further point that, although the religious popula-
tion comprised 20 percent of the population, religious broadcasting accounted
only for 0.5 percent of broadcasting time on legal channels.
In recent years debates on this subject have been held on March 12 and May
28, 1997, February 18, 1998, October 20, 1999, June 20 and July 23, 2001, and
they convey both the tenor of debate in Israel on and with haredim, as well as
the unwillingness of the political class to regularize the situation. All have a
vested interest in the status quo whereby the pirate radios—mostly religious as
far as the MKs are concerned—are de facto tolerated. Caspi and Limor (1999,
144) con¤rm the same point, although writing at a time when the religious sta-
tions had not become major players in pirate broadcasting, saying that they pre-
serve an “illusion of media pluralism,” and are “not perceived as threatening.”
Today they are perceived as a threat, along with the t’shuva movement as a
whole, by secular Israel, but in practice almost the entire political class has a
vested interest in turning a blind eye. All the Knesset debates have a tone of
polemical banter, and end inconclusively as the participants disingenuously fail
to decide to which committee the issue should be referred. On one occasion the
chair asks how many pirate radios there are in Jerusalem, and a Shas MK re-
sponds “one—the state radio!” In March 1997 the Shas minister of transport
said that when the only pirate radios were those of the Peace Movement (Kol
Hashalom) and the settlers (Channel 7) they were left alone, but as soon as re-
ligious groups started to broadcast they were persecuted. In May of that year a
Shas MK said that the stations might not be “very legal,” but they do express
the views of a “hated and persecuted” section of the population. On another
occasion a member complained that the police leave undisturbed the Christian
evangelical radios, “which propagate a mistaken interpretation of the sources,”
leading gullible Jewish listeners to fall into a trap, while harassing the religious
radios that broadcast “love for Israel and the truth.” Secular parties, namely
Meretz and Labour, intervene little, and when they do it is to complain that the

96 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner