On the October 27, 1959, radio listeners in Iran were treated to special broadcasts celebrating the fortieth birthday of their young monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah.Footnote 1 The shah had been crowned in 1941 following his father’s forced abdication by the Allies. The shah had continued consolidating his rule and personal image after an Anglo-American-orchestrated coup helped quash his opposition in 1953.Footnote 2 Now, as he entered his fifth decade, programming in Persian praised him in the highest terms.
On this day all the residents of Iran and every Iranian in the four corners of the earth celebrates the birthday of the beloved Shah and prays for his peace and health. This happiness and rejoicing are not false, for even foreign people know that the [Shah’s] throne rests on the hearts of 20 million Iranians. It is obvious now to the enemies of Iran that the people shall not be separated from the Shah nor the Shah from the people… to revive the glory of ancient Persia… We pray to God that he may protect the peace-seeking, beloved Shah for the sake of the joy of Iran. May he succeed in executing his reform programmes.Footnote 3
This sort of panegyric was perhaps to be expected within an increasingly authoritarian Iran, where critical media freedoms were ever more circumscribed.Footnote 4 The terms in which the shah was praised are of considerable interest. The polity over which he reigned was spread across the world and the support he enjoyed among his own population was described as being renowned further afield still, beyond both his country and his people. The Iranian monarch was depicted as progressive and powerful in equal measure, even as he was grounded in an ancient Iranian tradition.Footnote 5 Yet what is perhaps most surprising about the above lines is that they were not broadcast from Tehran under the pressure of the Pahlavi establishment, but from the Israeli Broadcasting Authority’s (IBA or Voice of Israel) studios in Jerusalem. Here, since 1958, Iranian Jewish émigrés had been broadcasting daily shows of fifteen (and then thirty) minutes in Persian for the general Iranian listener.
In the first year on air, however, it seems that the exact texture of these broadcasts was still being worked out. Those broadcasting, some of whom were fresh from the Iranian press scene, had to learn to adjust their tone. Shortly after the broadcast, the station’s staff received a handwritten communique from Foreign Ministry official Zvi Rafiah, who was not Iranian, querying their pitch:
These kinds of expressions [about the shah] are certainly befitting of Radio Tehran, but it is very doubtful whether they need to be broadcast on the Voice of Israel… We need to preserve the Israeli spirit and to refrain from this Persian sycophancy, which has no limit. Ultimately, we are Israelis and not Persians.Footnote 6
Rafiah’s letter was not merely an attempt to moderate the projection of his country’s foreign policy; it was an intimation to his newly arrived Iranian colleagues that sought to direct their interests and shape their identity and expression—to be and to become Israeli broadcasters in Persian as opposed to disingenuous Iranians. These Persian-language broadcasts were intended, after all, as a means of Israeli public diplomacy in a developing alliance with Iran.
Studies of radio in Israel have historically noted these dual purposes in its use both in the period leading up to statehood and in the decades following, particularly prior to the introduction of regular television broadcasting in the country from 1968.Footnote 7 Radio has been shown to be an instrument of both cementing a domestic Hebraized Israeli identity and outreach to friendly states, their publics, and Jews abroad. Persian-language radio in Israel, as we shall see, bears the hallmarks of this domestic shift from immigrant to local selves, and to mutual enhancement of Iranian and Israeli prestige. In examining largely unstudied archives, including early programming transcripts, internal communications, listener letters, and press sources on Persian-language broadcasts, this article demonstrates engagement with Iran along these elite and popular lines. The article posits an extension to the literature by noting that, beyond the dynamics of these complementary and sometimes normative state projects, Iranian listeners used broadcasts as sites of transnational connectivity— sites in which Israel was an intermediary rather than a focal point.
Making waves
Early studies of radio’s power situate it squarely within the context of great power contestations during and after the Second World War, noting in particular radio’s potential for international connectivity, propaganda, and ability to avoid censorship or jamming compared to print and (later) television.Footnote 8 More recent studies, including those of Pisarska and others, acknowledge a more complex matrix of relationships between those involved as producers and the targets of public diplomacy. The latter scholars posit a movement away from the mono- or dialogical view, centering a transnational and multiparty negotiation of issues rather than an exclusive focus on unilateral relationships between states or states and their audiences.Footnote 9 By viewing the intended purposes of these broadcasts as part of a public diplomacy effort and acknowledging the different manners in which audiences received and interacted with them, this essay combines these complementary approaches.
By the time Israel declared independence in 1948, radio already had a long history in the region. British mandatory authorities began issuing radio licenses around 1924, with 42,600 sets recorded in the country by 1939.Footnote 10 From 1936, the Palestine Broadcasting Service began broadcasts in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, which continued into the late 1940s, with programming skewed in both content and tone towards the Zionist movement; in 1946, there were twice as many hours broadcast daily in Hebrew than in Arabic.Footnote 11 Underground and paramilitary movements, such as the Haganah and the Etzel, operated their own clandestine radio stations, reflecting the different party political streams of the Zionist movement in Palestine.Footnote 12 Yet while these stations were symptomatic of internal divisions, underground radio stations were also set to a frequency designed to be audible in Europe.Footnote 13 Zionists were aware that wartime radio in Europe and the Middle East constituted a front all of its own, with Nazi or Nazi-sponsored broadcasts vying with the likes of the BBC World Service for influence. One article in the right-leaning newspaper Ha-Mashkif (The Observer) lamented in 1943 that, amid this flurry, “only the voice of the People of Israel goes unheard.”Footnote 14
With the establishment of the State of Israel, the aftermath of the Holocaust and mass migration to the country engendered a simultaneous push for external outreach and the forging of a domestic identity. Radio was once again instrumental on multiple levels. Unlike the more polarized press, the state broadcasting authority that became known as the Voice of Israel had what amounted to a radio monopoly.Footnote 15 Facing the post-war turmoil in the Jewish world, the establishment in March 1950 of broadcasts by Kol Zion La-Gola (The Voice of Zion to the Diaspora) aimed to connect with Jews abroad and inform them about life in Israel. Beginning with programs lasting around three hours in French, Yiddish, and English, these broadcasts included segments on news, learning Hebrew, correspondence with readers and experts, music, and original sketches.Footnote 16 Other programs, including the Search for Relatives (Hipus Krovim), made radio connectivity a meeting place for those seeking to reunite with loved ones lost amid murder and migration in Europe.Footnote 17 Letters to the program’s staff from the late 1940s in English, Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, and German, sent on behalf or in search of Jews from Argentina to Izmir, testified to the newly established Voice of Israel’s international potential.
Within Israel itself, radio would help bring these disparate immigrant communities into a more cohesive polity. In addition to the country’s existing population and migrants from Europe, the first decade or so after Israel’s establishment would see the arrival of around half a million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, including thousands from Iran.Footnote 18 Sometimes-imperious broadcasts for new migrants (including children) aimed to inculcate them with the spirit of their new home in a distinctly “high-cultural” sense. Classical music, belletristic literature, and Hebrew lessons delivered over the radio served the country’s “melting pot” policy, which sought to distance (particularly non-European) migrants from the cultures of their former homelands and create a homogenized Israeli identity.Footnote 19 By 1950, such programs were married with very short broadcasts to Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities abroad in their own languages, initially only around three minutes in length. These were produced under the auspices of the Voice of Zion to the Diaspora in Arabic, Spanish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Italian, Greek, and (as we shall see in greater detail below) Persian.Footnote 20
Foreign-language broadcasts aimed at immigrant and diasporic communities were complemented by programming that targeted those beyond the variegated, multilingual, and transnational Jewish community. Such broadcasts were designed to entrench foreign relations and play a role in public diplomacy with surrounding nations at the popular and elite level. Broadcasting in Arabic, which began later in the 1950s, was directed at Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians within Israel, but Arabic-speaking Jews both in the country and beyond also listened. Jewish immigrants from Arab countries were themselves listening to Radio Cairo and the Egyptian Sawt al-Arab in what Yuval Evri refers to as a “mediation zone” across geographical and political boundaries, which radio helped engender amid conflict and enmity between countries of origin and residence.Footnote 21 As Evri shows, Voice of Israel’s original propaganda purposes became an environment in which Mizrahi intellectuals could continue to engage creatively in an Arabic-speaking space. It is because of its role in shaping these cultural, geographical, and linguistic shifts that Liebes referred to radio as a “transitional object,” acting as a point of mediation between the different realities and collectives Jews were navigating in this period.Footnote 22
As well as reaching out to foes, radio was a means of entrenching and establishing friendships and alliances. Israel’s post-independence relations in the Middle East and Africa were guided by a so-called “periphery doctrine” that sought to forge alliances with non-Arab powers to shore up regional networks against Israel’s adversaries after the 1948 war. The Voice of Israel’s Africa broadcasts began in 1960 and were conducted in English, Swahili, and Amharic, paralleling economic, cultural, and then security relations developing on the ground in the continent’s west and east alike.Footnote 23 Yet Israel was neither the only exporter of Hebrew radio nor its only target. Radio Tunis, for example, had The Hebrew Hour program from 1939 into the 1950s, and there had been Jewish programs on Radio Maroc and the Egyptian State Broadcasting Service.Footnote 24 In the fraught Middle Eastern geopolitical atmosphere that followed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power in Egypt and the Suez Crisis of 1956, Radio Cairo was competing for the attention of similar audiences to Israeli broadcasters. By 1958, there were three hours of daily broadcasting to Israel in Hebrew, and similar amounts of time in Swahili, Somali, and Amharic to East Africa, Ashanti to Ghana, and French and Arabic to North Africa, totaling around seven and a half hours daily.Footnote 25 Though foreign-language broadcasting had long been part of Israeli infrastructure, we see it here in counterpoint with other countries’ efforts as part of a wider geopolitical inflection point.
Iran, too, was part of the same calculus for Israeli officials. Even if Iranian immigrants were to be turned into dynamic Israelis, a state-level relationship with Iran itself was seen as extremely valuable under the above circumstances. Iran had been a member of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, and though it had voted against both the UN partition plan for Palestine and (initially) Israel’s admission to the United Nations, it granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1950.Footnote 26 The presence of Zionist organizations in Iran long pre-dated this recognition, however, with the Jewish Agency officially arriving in the country in 1943. There had been extensive activity, too, by the Palestine-based company Solel Boneh in Iran from the beginning of the 1940s in various construction and oil-related projects.Footnote 27 After statehood, secret business ventures were established to allow the nations to grow more economically and strategically linked from the late 1950s, with ties that would only deepen as the two powers courted the favor of the United States in the following decades.Footnote 28 Indeed, between the mid-1950s and late 1970s, more than ninety percent of Israeli oil imports came from Iran.Footnote 29 During this time, especially in the early 1960s, Israel was keen to push the shah further towards official recognition, grounded in shared economic and geopolitical interests.Footnote 30 Elite connections were thus seen to be mutually beneficial for both the states’ coffers and self-image as developing, modern, and technologizing nations in a turbulent region.Footnote 31
As in Israel, radio in Iran was both part of nation-making and a site of contestation for influence. Radio infrastructure in earnest began under Reza Shah (father of the monarch celebrated above) in the 1920s, and a Tehran radio station debuted with the latter’s coronation in April 1926 as part of a wider project of statist institution-making.Footnote 32 In 1939, there were around 3,000 radio sets in Tehran.Footnote 33 By 1965, the country would boast an estimated ten million regular listeners.Footnote 34 During the Second World War and its aftermath, foreign powers entered the radiophonic fray, with the BBC’s Persian Service programming beginning in 1940. In its first broadcast, this station also gestured towards an international polity in “Iranian and Persian listeners, wherever in the world they may be.” Though early broadcasts were sometimes critiqued for being too friendly to the elder shah, the BBC’s Persian Service is remembered for being instrumental in agitating against him, securing his abdication, and enabling the accession of his son.Footnote 35 BBC broadcasts were joined by those of the Voice of America—founded by the Truman administration and continued under Eisenhower—at the end of March 1949, when the stations were part of an influence operation that led to the coup that reaffirmed Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule in 1953.Footnote 36 Inveighing against them was the Azerbaijan Democratic Station, backed by the Soviets and putting out a distinctly anti-American line.Footnote 37 In May 1960, it appears there was suspicion in Israel, based on Arabic press reporting, that Lebanese radio would also be launching a Persian-language service to counter “negative Israeli propaganda.”Footnote 38
As the BBC broadcasts already noted, radio stations were addressing a much more transnational Iranian polity by the time of the shah’s 1959 birthday. One product of rapid (if uneven) economic growth in Iran was a rising trend of upwardly mobile Iranians studying abroad to serve the country’s increasing demand for skilled workers. Though Iranians had been studying abroad in Europe since the nineteenth century, the 1960s saw a significant uptick in student migration. By 1965, there were over 30,000 Iranian students outside the country, up from 4,000 in 1957 and rising to 100,000 by 1978.Footnote 39 This uptick coincided with the expansion of political movements in Iran critical of the shah and his close ties to Israel and the United States, which resonated among students abroad.Footnote 40 Iranian Jewish migrants to Israel told a slightly different story, as an overwhelming majority were under forty-five years of age and from poorer backgrounds.Footnote 41 Many new migrants faced significant unemployment or low-status work, were forced to live in temporary transit camps (known as ma‘abarot), and were granted only reduced educational opportunities.Footnote 42 Despite this, many were adamant about continuing to be politically and creatively active in Persian. Newspapers such as Kurosh attempted to bring the community together, keep in touch with Iranian Jews in Iran, and establish solidarity with other non-European migrants. Other publications, such as Setareh-ye Sharq, toed a more stringent line, close to the dominant ruling Mapai Party, and may have had the tacit support of the shah.Footnote 43 Both experiences were earlier seeds of a much larger diaspora that was to join these migrants in Europe, Israel, and the United States after the 1978–9 revolution.
When Israel’s first Persian-language broadcasts went out in March 1949 (coinciding with the festival of Purim), they were thus joining an already developed and sometimes fraught radio environment. Managed by the country’s Foreign Office, as opposed to some of the other state bodies noted above, Israeli broadcasts ran around fifteen minutes twice a week through the early 1950s, but were phased out in the middle of the decade. The period after their relaunch and extension in April 1958 paralleled an expansion that included the Arabic and Africa services discussed above, which is the focus of this article. The Israeli Broadcasting Authority’s Persian broadcasts reflect patterns at the Voice of America, the BBC, and other Israeli foreign-language radio services, where native speakers were managed by local bureaucrats. Instructions at the top of the chain came from the likes of Rafiah, who gave editorial direction akin to the perspective noted in the introduction. Oversight was permitted through the rendering of Hebrew translations or précis of reportage from Persian. This allowed granular commentary that sometimes went down to the level of advice about how to answer specific listener questions sent in from Tehran.Footnote 44 Below Rafiah, Meir Ezri—a long-standing Iranian Zionist activist turned Mapai official—provided intermediary advice. Ezri also served as Israel’s unofficial ambassador to Iran in the 1960s and produced Setareh-ye Sharq.Footnote 45
The bulk of these broadcasts’ content was edited and generated in the early years by two key figures, Manuchehr Omidvar and Amnon Netzer, both of whom held a dual sense of belonging sought by their employer. Omidvar was an experienced Zionist activist who had written for Iranian Jewish publications in Iran, such as ‘Alam-e Yahud and Isra’el, in the 1940s and continued to write for mainstream Iranian newspapers, such as Ettela‘at, upon his arrival in Israel, promoting the new country in his writing.Footnote 46 A letter of recommendation stated that “everything Zionist and Israeli” in Tehran was down to Omidvar and his comrades, and that he “not only has a very good command of Hebrew but is also steeped in Persian culture and literature, a not negligible matter in the country.” There is a sense of the Israelization of Omidvar’s Iranianness in this letter, as it concluded, “I hope he will join…our Iranian Palmakh,” referencing the elite pre-state Zionist paramilitary units formed during the Second World War in Palestine.Footnote 47 This letter might be said to imply, in militarized language, the mobilization of Omidvar’s Iranianness in the service of the young state through radio.Footnote 48 Amnon Netzer, meanwhile, a native of Rasht in northern Iran, arrived in Israel in his teens and would go on to become one of the foremost scholars of Iranian Studies in Israel and Iranian Jewish Studies more generally.Footnote 49 As such, both these men were deeply engaged with their Iranian identity and affinity for Israel, and the broadcasts bear these marks accordingly.
Omidvar and Netzer’s broadcasts were aired seven evenings a week via radio, with fairly reliable reception according to most accounts, sometimes even more so than Radio Tehran. Each program (once expanded to a half hour) began with a ten-minute news segment. After a short musical interlude timed to two minutes, a six-minute segment turned to a brief topic such as “a review of the Israeli press,” “global perspectives on the Middle East,” or song requests. The final twelve minutes were dedicated to a more in-depth discussion that usually related to Israel and/or Iran, including “literary selections from Israel,” “a window into the Israeli economy,” “Israel in the family of nations,” or “chapters in history.” Alongside these more factual topics, space was also put aside for letters from Iran, responses to listeners, and eventually a weekly program dedicated to students abroad.Footnote 50 In line with both countries’ outward-looking postures, regular programming sought to center the Middle East in world affairs by reviewing foreign press commentary on regional politics. Quotes in The Manchester Guardian, TIME magazine, Le Monde, and The Christian Science Monitor were designed to support the countries’ own nationalist narratives while buttressing a sense of global relevance and an expanded political perspective. With these frames of reference in mind, the next section turns to the role of the IBA’s Persian broadcasts in international elite and public diplomacy and internal negotiation of identity before looking at their reception and the transnational connectivity they engendered.
Changing frequencies
In mid-December 1959, a group of Foreign Ministry officials met to outline the purpose of the Voice of Israel’s Persian broadcasts. Omidvar and Netzer do not appear to have attended, as they did not participate in forming editorial policy, although they were certainly expected to follow it. The meeting’s minutes stipulated that broadcasts were aimed at Iranians in Iran and Persian speakers in other countries, namely “Iraq, the Gulf Principalities, Afghanistan, and Pakistan,” with Europe and Israel going unmentioned. The “broadcast is political and not entertaining,” the minutes stressed. Overall, the broadcasts were to convey “the position and significance of Israel in the Middle East without bias,” that “functional relations between Israel and Iran do not contradict Iranian-Arab relations,” and “highlight the negative in the Arabs and in Arab unions…[placing] a special emphasis on exhibiting Israel’s economic and agricultural development…crude oil in the Middle East…[and] Arab activity and its significance for Iran.” One question remained unanswered at the end of the meeting, left for future discussion: “whether and how to highlight Israel’s democratic and parliamentary character.”Footnote 51 Creating political networks with Iran meant controlling how Israel was framed and aiming broadcasts at a particular and powerful audience without causing friction. Promoting a particular image of Israel and its relationship with Iran on this elite level was key and was a tool of foreign policy in its ability to radiate a particular set of messages across Iran. Israeli investment in producing Iranian programming was a gesture, in its very existence, that drew the approval of key actors in the world of Iranian politics. This section looks these efforts at the top level before proceeding to the way they were received by regular Iranians and the press both inside and outside of Iran.
The international public and propagandistic elements of the broadcasts were key. While Iranian immigrants to Israel would undoubtedly listen to the broadcasts, they were clearly not the primary intended audience, although Persian-language print publications from various quarters did directly target them. Apart from the above, multiple pieces of archival correspondence emphasize the need to appeal to Iranian audiences, including by moving broadcasts to later in the day so they would not air when Iranians were out of the house.Footnote 52 Part of this, of course, was a matter of technological limitation in radio itself. In 1961, three years after the broadcasts were relaunched and expanded, the Union of Iranian Immigrants in Israel wrote to Omidvar attaching letters of complaint about poor reception inside the country. This poor reception was the result of broadcasts being sent out over shortwave frequencies only, which allowed them to travel the long distances required for international listeners. These elements point to the broadcasts’ distinct direction, whether or not we regard the decision not to cater to Persophone Israeli audiences as intentional.
The diplomatic brass at the above meeting clearly placed a premium on this high-minded vision of the broadcasts and their purpose. Elite connections were forged quickly as programs grew increasingly popular with Iranians across at least five countries and a dozen cities. The studios received good wishes from the likes of Asadollah Alam, one of the Pahlavi establishment’s most senior politicians and a prime minister and court minister.Footnote 53 Nosratollah Moeinian, deputy prime minister and supervisor of the country’s publications and broadcasting directorate, was in continued contact with the likes of Ezri in Tehran, providing informational booklets and even records to play on air. A top-secret telegram from the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, encouraged the development of ties with Moeinian and organizing for him to visit Israel, alongside affirming the agency’s willingness to cooperate with Persian broadcasting.Footnote 54 Iranian authorities, meanwhile, clearly conscious of Israeli radio broadcasts’ potential in granting credence to government data, were equally keen to make use of them. In a 1961 meeting with Ezri, the former head of Iran’s Economic Planning Organization (and then ambassador to Belgium) Khosrow Hedayat, requested that the Voice of Israel assist him in advertising the achievements and activities of the recent Seventh Economic Plan.Footnote 55 Broadcast officials and on-air staff from Iranian networks were, for their part, frequently in touch to send good wishes.
Radio was not merely a one-way street; between friendly nations, there clearly existed a notion of mutually enforcing broadcasts. A 1958 letter from Ezri, who was working at the Israeli delegation in Tehran, to Israeli Foreign Ministry official Emanuel Tzipori discussed the prospect of supporting a reciprocal Hebrew broadcast on Radio Tehran.Footnote 56 It appears that Tzipori and the ministry objected to the proposition, highlighting the fact that Iranians could be tempted to use Hebrew content from Arab radio stations already broadcasting into Israel. Ezri evidently saw such broadcasts as useful for precisely the same reasons that Iranian authorities were keen to leverage Israeli broadcasts. “We need to make contact with all Iranian institutions and to give them information about goings on in Israel,” he wrote, emphasizing the “positive attitude” Israel would likely receive from Iranian radio, in contrast to its Arab analogues. Although nothing came of the suggestion, it is notable that some in the Israeli administration were open to cultivating potential public diplomacy directed at their own population.
Israel and Iran had shared interests against some Arab powers, Egypt in particular, which worried Tzipori. Beyond the Suez Crisis mentioned above, enmity between Egypt and Iran had mounted since the latter joined the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact—which initially included Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and the UK—and continued with Iran’s de facto recognition of Israel.Footnote 57 On-air discussions of foreign policy in the post-Suez context of the Middle East reflected these overlapping foreign policy interests. News scripts struck out at Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “two-facedness” and tended to depict Arab leaders as arbitrary, unproductive, and in continual discord. Cairo, one segment stated in December 1959, was opposed to “any plan of public utility for the raising of people’s standard of living,” and added that there were “Nazi criminals” managing Egypt’s propaganda operations.Footnote 58 This extended to editorializing on the issue of Palestinian refugees as well. Bulletins described “boredom in the UN because of this needless debate,” commenting:
We stressed that the Arabs raise the [refugee] issue every year not in order to solve it but rather to benefit themselves…We asked how the Arabs dare to compare Israel with apartheid states and to call it such names as “fascist.” We raised the Holocaust…and asked: “How can you accuse a people that has suffered from prejudice through all generations of following these same policies?”Footnote 59
Israel’s tolerance and progressiveness in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust were identified in the fact that members of the Druze minority group were integrated into Israeli society and served in the military. Israel itself, meanwhile, was portrayed as a “center for science” that boasted leading universities and unique ways of cooperative living, including the agricultural collectivizing Kibbutz.Footnote 60 Listeners whose interest was piqued could write in to request booklets for additional information on topics such as the development of the Negev Desert, universities in Israel, agriculture, and the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.Footnote 61 Israel was to represent innovation, legalism, and an aspirational modernity.
There was a desire not to overload the average listener with this sort of political material, once again emphasizing the broadcasts’ foreign audience. Following a lengthy segment on a speech by Foreign Minister Golda Meir in mid-1961 entitled “Israel’s Foreign Policy,” Rafiah wrote to Netzer criticizing the amount of time dedicated to the speech. Though he did not doubt the significance of the topic, Rafiah noted: “Let us not forget that the listener is not Israeli but Iranian, and that such a long discussion is likely to bore him.”Footnote 62
The language and framing of these political tensions were adapted to an Iranian religious and cultural framework. Shi’a Islam, clearly recognized by broadcasters as a pillar of Iranian national identity, was mobilized to solidify ties.Footnote 63 Consequently, an unsigned script from June 1962 was set to be broadcast to Persian-speaking audiences around the world on the “disaster of Ashura.”Footnote 64 On this day of commemoration, Shi’a Muslims mourn the death of the third Shi’a Imam, Hussein, at the hands of Umayyad Caliph Yazid. In the decades prior to the 1978–79 Iranian revolution (and, indeed, during it), this narrative served as a mobilizing rubric for activity against the shah.Footnote 65 Indeed, on the very same occasion the following year, revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini used the charged atmosphere to deliver a speech excoriating the shah and his relationship with the United States and Israel, part of a chain of events that led to his exile from the country.Footnote 66 The broadcast’s framing of Imam Hussein’s death, however, was designed to reflect Israeli policy and be divisive in its description of the wider Muslim community, praising the imam as a “monotheist and humanitarian”:
He realized from the tortures [of] the Arabs [taziyan] and the transgressions of the newly ennobled Arabs towards Muslims…that the holy religion of Islam was a plaything in the hands of the uncivilized and godless [koday-na-shenas] Arabs.
Hussein’s “freedom and courage and brotherhood and equality and truth,” the script claimed, were overtaken by the “perverted ignorance of the Arabs.“Footnote 67 As in the case of programming on the shah’s birthday, Iranian Israeli broadcasters proved themselves highly adept at employing the appropriate (in this case, religious) vocabulary to evoke their admiration for hallmarks of Iranianness while advancing their own anti-Arab outlook.
The appeal to Iranianness was not merely geopolitical, showing as it did local appreciation for Iranian civilization and culture. Programming addressing this Iranian heritage was sometimes pitched at an academic level, playing into the elite image of the country established in the previous section rather than a demotic one. Towards the end of 1959, broadcasts featured an interview with German-born Professor Uriel Hed (also Heyd), introduced as the head of the Middle Eastern Studies Faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Conducted in Persian, the interview was an opportunity for Hed to show off his credentials.
I studied the sweet Persian language at universities in Israel, Istanbul, and London, specifically at the University of London’s Ancient and Middle Persian faculty…Fortunately, I had the privilege of traveling to Iran, a country in whose language and literature I had always been interested, in the summer of 1954…[and] became familiar with the land of roses and nightingales [gol o bolbol].Footnote 68
Hed’s interview, which also touched on the gradual expansion of Persian Studies at the Hebrew University, concluded with him reciting a couplet by the iconic pre-modern Persian poet, Hafez.Footnote 69 A European-educated Israeli professor was tasked with proving high-cultural ties to Iran, carrying with him the authority of the academic institution and the normative transnational prestige of Iranian culture. Choosing Hed over a member of the local Iranian Jewish community gave Iranian culture a sense of credentialized prestige at the academic level.
This framing of the Iranian–Jewish connection to serve an Iranian–Israeli connection was borne out in attitudes towards Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage highlighted in praise of the shah. In a segment entitled “Stories of Israel,” which compared linguistic exchanges between Hebrew and Persian (including, for example, words such as bustan, meaning “orchard”), the key figure of the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus was reframed. Cyrus, who is often exalted in Jewish and Judeo-Persian texts for freeing Jews from Babylonian captivity and in wider Iranian culture for representing an Iranian tradition of tolerance and legalism, was recast in narrower, more nationalist terms.Footnote 70 Rather than being a bridger of nations and cultures or an early humanitarian, Cyrus became the one who “conquered the Middle East including Israel, and the Kings of Iran ruled this region for two hundred years.” The opportunity to echo earlier depictions of Cyrus as a joint symbol were instead used to minimize Iranian influence on Hebrew (which stretches well beyond the days of Cyrus).Footnote 71 The segment added that, given the lengthy period of Achaemenid rule, “a countless number of Persian words should have come into Hebrew,” but only “a few tens” actually did.Footnote 72 Cyrus’s military might between reified Iranian and Israeli entities became his greatness as a political figure, with the main narrative being an intimated Hebrew resilience to Persian influence. Like the Shi’a Imam Hussein, symbols with a previously broader moral and ecumenical significance were recast into a mold that served Israeliness rather than the more syncretic political posture common among Iranian Jews outside of Israel.Footnote 73
What was being negotiated here was therefore not merely the relationship between Israel and Iran, but Israel’s relationship to the Iranianness in its midst. The transnational logic that had allowed Iranian Jews to span ideological and national movements in Iran through the adaptation of these shared symbols was to be curtailed within this more state-centric logic. The bridging function that Iranian Jews were serving was more instrumental for Israeli public diplomacy. This much is evident in Rafiah’s reminder to broadcasters of their being Israelis as opposed to Persian sycophants. This tension was equally evident in the work environment itself, before matters even reached the airwaves. A Foreign Ministry memo from November 1962 criticized the sense of conviviality among Iranian workers. Broadcasters—including Omidvar, Netzer, Albert Ezri (a relative of Meir), secretarial staff, and a number of contractors—were described as all sharing one small room. The memo complained that this made holding meetings with Omidvar and others difficult over the “ticking of the typewriters,” but its writer’s quibble was also a cultural one. The work room, the memo noted, had “become a social space for Persian speakers who ‘feel at home there.’”Footnote 74 The letter arguably intimates an aversion to creating a Persophone space that served staff, who were ultimately (in line with Rafiah’s earlier communique) supposed to be functioning as Israelis. A change was being sought among those producing the radio programming through the process of broadcasting, even as they themselves were working to shift visions of Israel abroad.
Improving reception
Documents at the Israel National Archive reveal that the various imaginaries of Israel being transmitted via radio were welcomed to varying degrees among both regular listeners and the press in Iran. The Persian service did much to try and win over its listeners, spending dedicated time answering their questions on air, sending them informational booklets and tapes, and corresponding with them directly. The service sent out Nowruz (Iranian new year) cards to listeners in Iran, and international listeners themselves sent postcards to Jerusalem in return. Many of these reviews and pieces of correspondence were collated and translated into Hebrew for the benefit of Foreign Ministry officials such as Tzipori or Rafiah. Though there is therefore an unavoidable degree of selection in some of these holdings, considerable texture nevertheless exists among them. Even three years after the relaunch of the broadcasts, letters from the Foreign Ministry declined to entertain extending broadcasts to an hour because it had “no clear picture” of listener opinions and suggested conducting data collection—i.e., a questionnaire—on the ground in Tehran and provincial cities.Footnote 75 Comments themselves reveal a mixture of trepidation and skepticism, genuine constructive feedback for the programs, and a whole-hearted buying into the mutually reinforcing Iranian–Israeli alliance. Others, however, went beyond this logic of states, using the radio to occupy an increasingly transnational Iranianness.
Some regular Iranians, at least, were rather taken with the idealized image of the two states being broadcast into their homes. Jalal Raf‘ati, a student from Göttingen in central Germany, perfectly reflected the narrative outlined above in an undated letter to the Persian service:
As an Iranian man, I bow my head before you in thanks for your contribution to elevating the name and honor of Persia. You, who until a short time ago were a wandering people, became permanent residents at the top of the world. There are two reasons that the world looks at you with appreciation: the justice in your words and your suffering. It is no doubt as a result of this that there are many generous people among you. It is very important that foreigners appreciate you…I have decided to write a book entitled “the victims of Israel” — could you translate it into Hebrew? I would ask you to send me leaflets and books on crimes against the Jews. I would like to highlight Israel’s power and justice before the world.Footnote 76
In the wake of the Holocaust and success in its development, Israel is seen here as a universal symbol of justice. Simultaneously, Raf‘ati appreciates the notion that this is paralleled by reciprocal services to the prestige of Iran along similar lines, as seen in the introduction. One Hushang in Abadan (in southwestern Iran) echoed this sense of closeness and wrote in to say that “the news of the successes of your small country allow me to feel that I am a friend of Israel,” and requested pictures of the country’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.Footnote 77
This Israeli reputation for technological and economic progress led many listeners to request information about the prospect of studying technical subjects at the country’s higher education institutions, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute for Science. A number of Iranian students, already at the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Izmir wrote a combined request in 1962 asking to undertake their professional practicum in Israel.Footnote 78 Many others wrote in to request Persian-language guides for advanced study in Israel in similar sectors. Yet Foreign Ministry officials preferred to keep this direct human interest at arm’s length, instructing broadcasters to respond: “we suggest that you continue to study in your country and do your best to be useful to your nation and country.”Footnote 79 The goals officials sought were apparently more to do with perception and elite connectivity than a direct relationship with Iranians themselves, however welcome and effusive their feedback.
Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Raf‘ati, and the Iranian press chiefly viewed the broadcasts with a degree of suspicion. Newspapers acknowledged the large number of listeners, with one publication estimating them in the thousands. However, the Iranian press saw Israel’s attempt to use radio as a means of gaining official recognition from Iran to be transparent, with some repeating that the results of the Persian service’s activities had “not yet borne fruit” and others saying that its efforts to date had met with “disappointment.”Footnote 80 Press colleagues who knew Omidvar from when he worked in Iran wrote in Omid-e Iran that they hoped his influence would bring about greater “variety and innovation” in Israel’s Persian radio offerings.Footnote 81 Even if they did not win over every listener, Israeli radio broadcasts were clearly generating significant interest.
Some listeners shared the newspaper’s dismissal of the broadcasts’ (sometimes) propagandistic tone. In the spring of 1959, the IBA director received an impassioned letter in English from one Eliyahu Avrahami. Introducing himself as a “Persian Jewish student spending a few days in Israel before continuing my journey to Europe,” Avrahami wrote that although he found much interest in the daily broadcasts, he was dismayed by the lack of music, finding them:
too political, too serious, and on too high an intellectual level. In addition, the language itself is too literary and is too difficult for the ordinary listener to fully understand, and thus he tends to find the programmes rather boring. On the other hand, the very fact that the language is on such a high level, grammatical and literary, gives added prestige to the broadcasts in the eyes of the intellectual…Footnote 82
Rafiah’s previous comments were thus proven to be prescient, even if the Foreign Ministry had insisted that the broadcasts were about politics rather than entertainment. Avrahami warned that “the Iranian” is “by nature inclined to be an individualist, rather suspicious and somewhat pessimistic,” and cautioned against “exaggeration or subjective news interpretation.”Footnote 83 Avrahami acknowledged the sense of high-culture Iranianness that the broadcasts generated, even though his use for them as a traveling, international, and educated Iranian Jew reflected a broader and less political audience demand. Listeners thus joined the press in seeing past the programs’ elite tones, determined to shape and use the broadcasts for their own purposes, which sometimes decentered the Israeli–Iranian geopolitical calculus altogether. This echoes the insight of White and others on the importance of listeners’ de-facto reception of public diplomacy efforts and their use of radio as proof of a more agentive and transnational positionality facing these state-based projects of policy and influence.Footnote 84
To demonstrate this, it is worth noting the geographic spread of listeners who wrote to the broadcasters. While not a full quantitative breakdown, they are certainly instructive of the shape of this audience within and beyond Iran. Listeners wrote in from the country’s capital, Tehran, as well as from Ahvaz and Masjed Soleiman in the southwest, Tabriz and Khoy in the northwest, and Nahavand, Hamadan, Kermanshah, Iranian Kurdistan’s Sanandaj and Bijar, and further afield. One Mrs. Badri D[?] even wrote in from the clerical city of Qom, but requested that her name not be read out on air because “she lives in a very religious and conservative city.”Footnote 85 Listeners in Europe and elsewhere covered further ground still, writing in from at least a dozen cities across the continent, including Ankara, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Geneva, Graz, Göttingen, Hamburg, Istanbul, Kiel, Marseilles, Munich, Portsmouth, Stuttgart, and Vienna. Their professions varied too, from Mohammad Golchin in Gorgan who listened daily with “all the laborers and farmers in the area” to students, university professors, teachers, and military officers abroad for training.Footnote 86 Listening to broadcasts of these letters, locations, and names being read aloud on air confirmed to readers the spread of an Iranian and Persophone identity beyond the borders of any single country. Foreign Ministry officials sometimes needed more information than what they were able to glean from translations of listeners’ letters into Hebrew. In one communique to Rafiah, Omidvar noted that he had marked the names of Muslim listeners with an “X” in one letter with multiple signatories.Footnote 87 Other correspondents’ names were sometimes simply marked “not Jewish.”
Interactions with the radio frequently had little to do with Israel itself and simply represented a means to connect to other Persian speakers in an increasingly mobile polity, with some leveraging broadcasts to reaffirm their own transnational identities and networks. Manuchehr Alfasbegi wrote from Austria to say that he had lost the address of a friend studying in Germany and requested that the broadcasts help him get back in touch.Footnote 88 Family connections, too, needed maintaining across national borders as well as religious ones. Ja‘far Sarrafi wrote from Tabriz to enquire about relatives in Israel who had migrated twelve years prior to his undated letter, asking for information on their whereabouts. “They are Jewish and I am not,” he wrote. In December 1963, a mother who had requested a song be played for her son explained:
I waited with bated breath for that day and that moment when I would hear my son’s name and that song. I could hardly describe the feelings of joy that overtook me at this moment. I thank you in the name of all the mothers whose sons study at universities in Europe…Footnote 89
Though musical programming featured both Iranian and Israeli songs, they were in themselves a means of letting someone know they were in one’s thoughts. Those requesting songs gave the names and addresses of those to whom the dedication was being made so that they could be notified of when “their” song was to be aired. This ephemeral access to people and popular culture abroad was, for many, the programming’s primary resonance, even if they had nobody in particular in mind. Mahmud H. wrote from Hanover to say that after eight hours packed full of work and interactions with Germans, he turned on the daily broadcasts:
All my weariness dissipates. You may not know enough of solitude, [being] far away from family, to justify [my words], but when I hear the Voice of Israel I feel as though I am sitting with members of my family and speaking to them. I am all ears, especially on Sundays when you broadcast special programs for Iranian students.Footnote 90
Iranian students in Europe and elsewhere did not merely seek an education and advancement abroad, they were becoming a major contingency of critique against an increasingly oppressive shah. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, both Israel and Iran were at key junctures in the shaping of their international images. Whether we speak of the shah’s plans for literary, land, and cultural reform or Israel’s attempt at building a more cohesive domestic identity, both were undercut to some extent by other global currents.Footnote 91 Iran would begin to see the rise of a new wave of engaged anti-imperialist, Marxist, and Islamist movements by the early 1960s, while growing concerns over Palestine undermined Israeli outreach to the Third World.Footnote 92 By the end of the decade, groups of Iranian students abroad made ties with thinkers including Jean-Paul Sartre, pressed international advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, and organized protests against the shah, including during his visits abroad.Footnote 93 These groups were thus important hubs of transnational thought and mobilization that would become instrumental to toppling the monarch in the coming decade. These Iranian students sought alternative means of gaining information about goings-on in the country without the mediation of authorities. Correspondence with the Voice of Israel suggests that there were mixed views on its ability to serve this purpose, but that it was being consulted anyway. One student in Germany writing in 1961 stressed that he listened to the broadcasts “not only because the voice that comes out is of an Iranian migrant but mainly because of the truth that permeates your words. And I appreciate that greatly.”Footnote 94 Thus, an alternative source of information perceived as more truthful (even if it frequently drew on official Iranian sources), as well as the authentic Iranian voice behind it, helped support a sense of a transnational Iranian identification.
Others had a desire for international Persian-language media that would serve an Iranianness more geographically and politically at odds with the Pahlavi state. Foreign Ministry officials were aware that many of their listeners were students in Europe who were either unable to listen to Radio Tehran due to technical difficulties or chose not to because of their political orientations. A communique from the Israeli embassy in London at the end of 1963 summarized London-based Iranian students’ comments on the programming made to an Israeli member of their cohort:
Almost all of [them] are united in their hatred for the existing regime in their country; they expressed to him on various occasions their disapproval of the content of the Israeli broadcasts to Persia which, to their mind, exaggerate in their support for the existing regime in their country; the broadcasts sound as though they were dictated by official propagandists and it is jarring to them that this is done by a country that declares itself to be advanced.Footnote 95
In the students’ response to these broadcasts, then, we find a barometer of different kinds of transnational Iranian public opinion to which Israeli officials were attuned. Though many of the preserved comments are complimentary of the broadcasts, it is evident that there was texture to be gained in the reception of and interests in different discourses on Iranian politics in these crucial years.
Continued resonance
Though falling beyond the scope of this article, it is worthwhile noting that Persian-language radio in Israel continued far beyond its relaunch in 1958, in ways presaged by these earliest developments. The Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (Kan) continues to offer weekly broadcasts in Persian (as well as a number of other languages, including Russian, Ladino, Yiddish, Georgian, and Amharic), extending a tradition that survived the 1978–79 revolution in Iran and the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War.Footnote 96 Menasheh Amir, who succeeded the likes of Omidvar and carried the programming through these turbulent decades, continues to appear on diaspora radio and television channels to discuss Iranian affairs. Listeners in Iran tuned in at both the elite and non-elite levels throughout the post-revolutionary period, even as relations between the two countries deteriorated.
A 1988 letter from Amnon Netzer assessed that the Voice of Israel’s Persian broadcasts had a “decisive influence” on public opinion in Iran, including among members of the Majlis and academia. Akin to some of the cases above, he suggested the broadcasts were perceived as more reliable than the BBC or Voice of America and “did not offend the [Iranian] people’s religious or national feelings.”Footnote 97 An article in the daily Ma’ariv, meanwhile, cited reports that Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini was himself an avid listener to the Voice of Israel’s Persian broadcasts. Not only Khomeini, but Iranian students abroad (including at Hunter College in New York) during the post-revolutionary years continued to listen to these programs as a source of alternative and reliable information, particularly as the war brought anxieties around the welfare of their families. Students noted the speed with which the Voice of Israel’s anchors were able to announce news coming out of Iran, forcing Radio Tehran to deny or confirm reports in turn.Footnote 98
Listening to the Voice of Israel’s Persian broadcasts allowed different audiences distinct points of connectivity and critique that were both related and unrelated to the purposes for which Israel launched the service. Listeners sought interpersonal ties with friends and family and networks of solidarity, as more and more Iranians were living outside and becoming vocally critical of the country. They were in search of accurate and trustworthy information as well as integration into technologized forms of development at the heart of contemporary Iranian and Israeli policy at the time. Israel was sometimes the object of these desires and hopes, while at other times its services were merely an intermediary for relationships that had less to do with geopolitics.
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