Page 120 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

1.“The major Zionist camps—the socialist camp, itself composed of several parties,
the Zionist National Religious Party; the mainstream, liberal General Zionist Party; the
right wing identi¤ed with Jabotinsky—all developed their own autonomous organiza-
tions in the various ¤elds of Zionist activity: agricultural settlement, schooling, youth
movements, banking, housing, employment, health, and defense” (Swirski 1999, 88).
2.Since Cabinet members vote and the votes are published, the Cabinet can be seen
as Israel’s de facto Upper House.
3.Technically this is on a par with Muslim and Christian control over family law as
well, following the pattern established by the Ottoman Empire. On the Muslim side of
the equation and the general framework, see R. Eisenman 1978 and G. Barzilai 2003.
4. T’shuva literally translated means “return” or “repentance.” Estimates based on
social surveys and the census show that the ultra-Orthodox population in 1995 num-
bered 280,000 and accounted for 5.2 percent of the total Israeli population (including
Arabs); but their very high fertility plus t’shuva will bring those ¤gures to 510,000 and
7.7 percent, respectively, and possibly higher by 2010 (Berman 2000).
5.Tamar El-Or (1994) describes how the leader of the Gur Chassidim (Chassidim
being the more mystical wing of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox community) decreed
that in order to extend their in®uence in Israeli society young married couples should
live away from their parents for at least ¤ve years. The result was that they created the
same inward-looking communities, but as islands in a secular sea. The Chassidim, de-
pendent as they are on very thick and impermeable boundaries to protect their ever more
severe stringency, have not developed the method of concentric circles that serves Shas
and the t’shuva movement, and many other social movements, so well.
6.The Israeli term is “regional,” but it is better rendered as “local” given the small
spaces involved.
7.Schach died in November 2001 at the age of 107 (or thereabouts).
8.There are seven of¤cial stations: two belong to the army, one of which is a news
and current affairs channel and the other transmits mostly music—in both cases with an
eye to a highly secular, youthful audience, especially soldiers; Programme 1 consists
largely of high culture; Programme 2 is made up mostly of news and politics; and Pro-
gramme 3 concentrates on Israeli music of all sorts; Network 88 broadcasts jazz and
“world music,” and Kol Hamusika (the Voice of Music) specializes in classical music. It
is not hard to see that this leaves plenty of room for alternative stations.
9.An additional sub-controversy concerned air safety, since it is widely believed that
the radios interfere, or could interfere, with air traf¤c control (hence the involvement of
the minister of transport, who, however, seemed more concerned to make a political
point than to ensure air safety!) On September 2, 2002, several ®ights had to be canceled
because the pilots could not communicate with the control tower, apparently because of
the pirate radios, and there was talk of a protest strike by air traf¤c control staff.
10.“Not surprisingly” because of the elective af¤nity between movements of reli-
gious renewal and the New Age culture, given their interest in healing, and in the case
of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, an uneasy attitude to medical manipulation of the body—
especially of women’s bodies.
11.Even the history of television provides an example of this. The Second Television
Channel started to function as an “experiment” in 1986 and continued to do so for seven
years before the authorizing law was ¤nally passed. This was partly because of the need
to “seize” frequencies before other countries in the region did so, but also to meet public
demand for an alternative to the only other channel available (Caspi and Limor 1999,
153). An article in Ha’aretz (Kim 2002) explains how West Bank settlers, despite the lack

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