The Palestine Broadcasting Service: Technologies of Transmission, Listening, and Governance

In 1936, the Palestine Broadcasting Service – the government-operated, national radio station of Mandate Palestine – began broadcasting from Jerusalem, continuing until the Nakba split it into two stations, with the PBS operating from back-up facilities in Ramallah. Using government archives, newspapers, technical publications, and memoirs, this paper argues that while these technologies established the constraints by which Palestinians had access to radio broadcasting, they also afforded Palestinians limited but meaningful opportunities to shape broadcasting and listening practices in service of a nascent modern national identity.

First, it discusses the physical technologies of broadcasting: the transmitter(s) required to disseminate the stations’ broadcasts; the studio set-ups where broadcasters spoke, sang, and played gramophone records; and ancillary supportive systems like air conditioning, electricity supply, recording devices, paper, Arabic, English, and Hebrew typewriters, and access to a mimeograph machine. Second, it considers technologies of listening, focusing on the range of radio sets available, whether medium-wave or short- and medium-wave; whether operated via electric current or batteries; whether requiring an external aerial; volume range; size and portability; and language and script of the set’s manual as well as of any pre-set station names. Third, it considers technologies of bureaucracy and governance, including the required annual radio set licenses and their public tracking in government publications and Mandate newspapers. It similarly considers staffing practices, particularly the rotation of station technicians from other British colonial sites, for the purpose of bringing their expertise in India and elsewhere to bear in Mandate Palestine. Finally, it considers local staffing practices, including both the government’s hiring of oppositional figures as full-time station staffers and its reliance on short-term contracts to provide content for individual broadcasts. This paper ultimately shows how radio technology became sites of, as well as grounds for, contestation and negotiation between Palestine and Mandate officials.