Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2016
Incorporating descriptions and analyses of sound into Middle Eastern history offers a wealth of opportunity for enriching our understanding of the historical record. But sometimes we need to get back to the basics: the “five w's and one h” of sound studies, so to speak. In what follows I would like to run this simple exercise with radio in the Mandate-era Levant, in order to lay out the basic data and begin to reflect on how it might aid scholars in better understanding other aspects of life in this period. I will do this by first addressing some of these basic what, who, when, where, why, how questions, and then by examining one day's programming of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1937: the day immediately following the release of the Peel Commission Report. What can we learn from examining this day's programming?
1 The first attack came in the form of three bombs placed throughout the station in August 1939; two station employees—a Jewish immigrant from South Africa and an Arab Christian—were killed.
2 Dodd, Stuart C., A Pioneer Radio Poll in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine (Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1943)Google Scholar. The other Arabic-language station broadcasting from Palestine, the Near East Broadcasting Service, was believed by British officials to have become more popular than the PBS in the 1940s due to its Arab nationalist stance, though the station was actually funded by the British Foreign Office.
3 “Wireless Programmes,” Palestine Post, 8 July 1937, 6.
4 “Wireless Programmes,” Palestine Post, 5 July 1937, 6.