British radio policy in mandatory Palestine 1936-1948 : international causes and colonial effects of a new media

Abstract

This study examines the inter-locking features of British radio policy with regards to Arabic broadcasts from three British controlled stations between the years 1936 and 1948. British policies regarding radio stations in the period in which Palestine was a British Mandate (a legal device created after the First World War and the dissection of the Ottoman Empire, in which Britain and France acted as controlling political powers through much of the Middle East) are used as a way of viewing intersections between great power politics, aspirations for (and the control of) national identities, and the development of the concept of a ‘correct’ usage of a new technology – for example the location of the new device in either a home or a public space. The twelve year period between 1936 and 1948 was a period of unprecedented social shift in Palestine. The way in which Britain conceptualised its policies in the region and its official view on how its personnel should interact with the population of the Mandate were the defining features of this shift. That this region in the same period and through the same policy stance saw the birth of both the BBC World Service and the official state broadcasting station of Israel, is worthy of interest in and of itself. This study contextualises three individual stations, and in particular their formation and demise. This provides a basis to attempt to answer the question of how much international influence effected the listening patterns and policies of Palestine. It does this by taking a critical view, informed by the canon of British official documents on the subject, as well as by contemporaneous English language newspaper reports. Emerging from the question of how important, and in what way, international factors were to the formulation and revision of official attitudes towards Palestine more generally, and radio more narrowly; this thesis shows that different approaches were taken towards the aims of airwave control during this period. These were based on dif