Turmoil Brings Success to Arabic Broadcaster, but Debt May Silence It

Until Arab Israeli protests erupted across the nation three weeks ago, Radio 2000, the first Arab-owned radio station licensed to broadcast inside Israel, was a dismal failure. Mismanaged and deep in debt, the easy-listening Arabic music station had few listeners and gloomy prospects for survival.

But when thousands of Arab Israelis took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinian protesters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Radio 2000 became the voice of the Arabs. Overnight, the station became the only medium many Arab Israelis felt they could trust as towns and villages were swept up in the worst communal violence inside Israel in 52 years.

Now, with Radio 2000 facing the loss of its broadcasting license at the end of October because of mismanagement and financial problems, its fate has become enmeshed in the delicate efforts of Arab and Jewish Israelis to reconstruct relations.

“If we have to close, there will be a huge intifada here,” said Naim Musa, administrative director of the station.

Radio 2000 found its voice Sept. 30, the day that anti-Israeli protests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip spilled over into Israel. Enraged by the large number of Palestinians wounded in clashes with Israeli troops, Arab citizens blocked roads, threw stones at passing cars and confronted riot police across Israel. Police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and conventional ammunition in what many Israelis--both Arabs and Jews--have denounced as an excessive use of force. Before the clashes subsided, 13 Arab Israelis had been killed and dozens injured.

Basseem Damouni came to the station to host his Top 20 program that Saturday morning. But he recalled that when the reports of rioting started flooding in, “I said to myself: I can’t do Top 20 today.”

Instead, the disc jockey went live and began reporting on the events, interviewing people who called on their cell phones from towns where clashes were erupting. He stayed on the air three hours instead of his normal two, and was replaced by the sports anchor, who also abandoned his program plan.

Since then, Radio 2000 has become the place for Arabs to find out where riots were happening, how many police were responding, whether sharpshooters were being deployed and who had been injured or killed.

Thousands of Arab Israelis tuned out the Voice of Israel, the state-run radio and television, whose broadcasts they dismissed as government propaganda, and turned to Radio 2000.

“The Voice of Israel is controlled by the security apparatus,” declared Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, from Nazareth. When the riots erupted, he said, Radio 2000 “was the only one that expressed the local mood and reflected events from the Arab viewpoint.”

Sports reporters who normally covered local soccer matches became war correspondents. Damouni and the station’s other disc jockeys interviewed Arab and Jewish lawmakers and the bereaved families of Arabs killed by police. Three staffers were injured covering the disturbances.

“This fell on us like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky,” said Nabil Salameh, the station’s program director, who doubles as a sports anchor.

On Yom Kippur, when Israeli media stopped broadcasting for 24 hours in observance of Judaism’s holiest day, Israeli political leaders violated religious prohibitions to give live interviews in Hebrew on Radio 2000 after tensions flared between Jewish and Arab communities.

Among those interviewed was Matan Vilnai, the minister of science and culture, whom Prime Minister Ehud Barak has assigned to try to rebuild relations between Arabs and Jews and implement a four-year, $4-billion development plan for Arab Israeli communities.

“He felt that it was an emergency time and that he had to talk to Israeli Arabs and calm them down,” said Tal Segev, Vilnai’s spokeswoman. Arab Israelis have told Vilnai that they heard his interview, and some said it made them feel that someone in the government was listening to them, she said.

But the riot coverage might have been Radio 2000’s curtain call. Even before the unrest, the station had been told it would lose its license because it owed more than $1 million to the public broadcasting corporation that licensed it, and to various creditors. Now, it also has been accused of inciting violence by reporting on police movements and broadcasting live reports of shootings.

Staff members vehemently deny the charge of incitement.

“We tried to quiet the atmosphere,” Damouni said. In the midst of the unrest, he said, he angered listeners by broadcasting a peace song in Hebrew, “Children of Life,” performed by Arab and Jewish singers.

“Listeners called in, furious: ‘Why are you playing a song in Hebrew? We hate them! We don’t want to hear that language!’ ” he said. “I told them, ‘Listen carefully to the words; it is a song of peace.’ ”

After two Arabs from the village of Sakhnin were shot and killed by police, Salameh said, the station interviewed two Jewish soccer players who play on the Sakhnin team who visited the homes of the bereaved families--showing that there were Jews who cared about what was happening to Arabs.

But no matter how good a job Radio 2000 did during the crisis, its four-year license expires Oct. 31, said Nehama Laor, spokeswoman for the public broadcasting corporation, the Second Authority for Television and Radio. The Second Authority has no intention of renewing it, she said.

Although the broadcasting authority sent a letter to the station’s management, saying that it had received complaints that the radio was inciting rioters, Laor denied that Radio 2000 was being taken off the air for political reasons.

“We had complaints from listeners, but we have listened to tapes and have so far heard nothing that was illegal,” she said. “But we faced many, many, many problems with this radio station in the past four years. They didn’t pay for their license; they never made it possible for us to monitor their broadcasts, as they are required to do. The owners had many quarrels between them. Five months ago, the authority decided not to renew their license.”

Israel’s Arab minority, which amounts to 20% of the population, needs an independent Arabic-language radio station, Laor said, “but they deserve a better station than this.”

Radio 2000’s staff members insist that they now have proved themselves to be serious broadcasters, and argue that they should be given another chance to show that they’ve not only learned to be better broadcasters but better managers.

“If we lose this station, the Arabs will lose the only station in Israel that does not talk down to them but talks with them as equals,” said news editor Rola Abed, who worked round-the-clock for two weeks during the unrest. “As an Arab, I need a radio station to speak with me, not to me as the Voice of Israel in Arabic does. It gives me orders. We are close to the people, and it is very far from them.”

“This radio station was born now, not four years ago,” Salameh said. “It has turned into the asset of more than 1 million people, because it reported the truth, because it interviewed people across the spectrum and because it didn’t incite.” Whatever happens to Radio 2000, Salameh said, “a radio station of the Arabs, for the Arabs has to exist. There is no way around it.”