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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
Western observers have considered the Israeli press for the
most part to be highly independent and a reliable source of
information. The press has reflected accurately the range of
political opinions in the country and played a leading role in
investigating and uncovering many scandals involving official
corruption and mismanagement. It has also covered developments in
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In addition to providing news and
information, Israel's press, television and radio, in effect
constituted an "extra-parliamentary opposition," according to
William Frankel, a British Jewish journalist who is an authority on
Israel. The influence of the press is considerable; 1988 estimates
are that on a daily basis more than 75 percent of all adult
Israelis read one daily newspaper and that about 11 percent read
two or more.
As of 1988, most daily newspapers were published in Hebrew;
because Israel is a nation of immigrants, others appeared in
Arabic, English, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, and
German, with weeklies adding more languages to the list. Many of
the country's daily newspapers, particularly the English-language
Jerusalem Post and those printed in Hebrew, were founded by
Zionist political parties during the prestate period, and they have
continued to be politically affiliated with such parties. Since
independence, however, the "party newspaper" has declined as
political alignments have changed. For example, the consolidation
of Israel's Socialist parties led to the demise of some papers
affiliated with the former parties. In addition, the management and
editorial direction of some papers, such as the Jerusalem
Post (circulation of 30,000 on weekdays, 47,000 on weekends),
has become increasingly independent, production costs have risen,
and party supporters have turned to rapidly growing independent
dailies. Such papers have included Ma'ariv (Afternoon --
circulation of 147,000 on weekdays, 245,000 on weekends), Yediot
Aharonot (Latest News--circulation of 180,000 on weekdays,
280,000 on weekends), Hadashot (News), which was founded in
1984, and the influential Ha'aretz (The Land--circulation of
55,000 on weekdays, 75,000 or weekends), an independent morning
daily. Israel's two leading and politically liberal dailies have
been Davar (News--circulation of 39,000), the official organ
of the Histadrut, and Al Hamishmar (The Watchman--
circulation of 25,000), published by Mapam.
In 1953 the Editors' Committee, whose prestate name was the
Redaction Committee, was officially registered as an independent
association serving as a channel between the government and the
press, and as a "voluntary partner" in carrying out the military
censorship code--an arrangement that involved the exchange of
confidential information with the general staff of the IDF. This
arrangement functioned relatively smoothly as long as there was
consensus over national security issues; relations between the
press and the IDF became more strained, however, following the 1982
invasion of Lebanon. Another organization concerned with media
oversight, the Israel Press Council, came into being in 1963. The
press council is a professional association responsible, among
other matters, for administering the code of ethics binding
journalists.
The Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA), established in 1965
and modeled after the British Broadcasting Corporation, controlled
the country's radio and television networks. It was subject to the
general supervision of the Ministry of Education and Culture. The
IBA, however, operated autonomously under a self-governing board of
directors whose discretion over content and presentation, with the
exception of a stormy period during Begin's prime ministership, was
rarely limited. The two leading radio stations were the IBA and
Galei Tzahal (Voice of the IDF), the highly popular IDF
broadcasting station. In 1968 Israeli television began broadcasting
in both Hebrew and Arabic.
According to two polls conducted in 1988 by Public Opinion
Research of Israel, a plurality of Jewish Israelis (42 percent)
considered television news programs as their "best source" of
international news, followed by newspapers (27 percent) and radio
(25 percent). Only 3 percent of Israelis relied on magazines to
keep them informed. These figures revealed a dramatic shift from
1986 figures that indicated reliance on newspapers as the best
source for news coverage (46 percent), followed by magazines (26
percent), and television (19 percent). The poll attributed the
sharp increase in reliance on the broadcast media to the strong
visual impact of the Palestinian uprising on Israeli society.
As of 1988, Israeli Arabic language daily newspapers were led
by the Jerusalem-based Al Anba (The News), with a
circulation of about 10,000. Rakah also published an Arabic paper,
Al Ittihad (Unity). An increasing number of Israeli Arabs
also read Hebrew dailies. Al Quds (Jerusalem), founded in
1968 for Arabs in Jerusalem and the West Bank, resulted from the
merger of two veteran Palestinian dailies founded on the West Bank
following Jordan's annexation of the territory in 1950. By 1988 the
paper had largely transferred its operations to Amman. In the early
1970s, additional Palestinian papers appeared, including Al Fajr
al Jadid (The New Dawn), with a circulation of about 3,000 to
5,000, and Ash Shaab (The People), with 2,000 to 3,000
readers. Weekly and monthly magazines and periodicals published in
Arabic include the literary monthly Al Jadid (The New);
At Taawun (Cooperation), published by the Histadrut Arab
Workers' Department; and the Mapam party's Arab organ Al
Mirsad (The Lookout). Israeli Arab and Palestinian newspapers
have relied on Israeli and international sources for their reports
on Israeli government decisions and actions concerning Israel's
Arab community and Palestinian communities on the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip.
The Israeli Arab press has faced the same censorship
constraints as have Jewish newspapers, namely, the Press Ordinance
of 1933. This regulation was first enacted by the British mandatory
authority. In 1948 it was adopted by Israel and administered by the
Ministry of Interior to license, supervise, and regulate the press.
The IDF had responsibility for administering censorship
regulations, and, under an agreement with the Editors' Committee,
most Hebrew-language newspapers could exercise self-censorship,
with the censor receiving only articles dealing with national
security matters. This arrangement, however, did not cover
Palestinian publications in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose
editors were required to submit items for publication to the
military administration on a nightly basis. Failure to abide by
these regulations has resulted in warnings and newspaper shutdowns.
As a result of these regulations, many West Bank newspapers have
preferred to publish in Jerusalem, which has less rigid civilian
legislation and courts. In late 1988, Israeli authorities,
suspecting Palestinian journalists of involvement in the
intifadah, censored and shut down many Palestinian
newspapers and magazines in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and
arrested Arab journalists, including several members of the board
of the Arab Journalists' Association.
* * *
The literature on the Israeli political system is extensive.
Useful bibliographies and bibliographical essays on Israel include
Gregory S. Mahler's Bibliography of Israeli Politics; Joshua
Sinai's "A Bibliographic Review of the Modern History of Israel;"
and Books on Israel: Vol. I, edited by Ian S. Lustick.
Comprehensive studies on Israeli government and politics
include Yonathan Shapiro's HaDemokrakia Be Yisrael; Asher
Arian's Politics in Israel: The Second Generation; Michael
Wolffsohn's Israel, Polity, Society, and Economy, 1882-1986;
Bernard Reich's, Israel: Land of Tradition and Conflict;
Howard M. Sachar's two-volume A History of Israel; William
Frankel's Israel Observed: An Anatomy of the State; Bernard
Avishai's The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in
the Land of Israel; and Mitchell Cohen's Zion and State:
Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel.
Aspects of Israeli government and politics are covered in a
series of volumes on the Knesset elections of 1969, 1973, 1977, and
1981, edited by Asher Arian; Israel at the Polls, 1981: A Study
of the Knesset Elections, edited by Howard Penniman and Daniel
J. Elazar; The Roots of Begin's Success: The 1981 Israeli
Elections, edited by Dan Caspi, et al; Israel in the Begin
Era, edited by Robert O. Freedman; Nathan Yanai's Party
Leadership in Israel: Maintenance and Change; Samuel Sager's
The Parliamentary System of Israel; Local Government in
Israel, edited by Daniel Elazar and Chaim Kalchheim; and Yoram
Peri's Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in
Politics. Two leading books on the Labor Party are Peter Y.
Medding's Mapai in Israel: Political Organisation and Government
in a New Society and Myron J. Aronoff's Power and Ritual in
the Israel Labor Party. The religious parties are covered in S.
Zalman Abramov's Perpetual Dilemma: Jewish Religion in the
Jewish State; Norman L. Zucker's The Coming Crisis in
Israel: Private Faith and Public Policy; Gary S. Schiff's
Tradition and Politics: The Religious Parties of Israel; and
Ian S. Lustick's For the Land and the Lord: Jewish
Fundamentalism in Israel.
Foreign relations are discussed in Michael Brecher's The
Foreign Policy System of Israel, Decisions in Israel's
Foreign Policy, and Decisions in Crisis: Israel, 1967 and
1973; Bernard Reich's Quest for Peace: United States-Israel
Relations and the Arab-Israeli Conflict and The United
States and Israel: The Dynamics of Influence; Shlomo Aronson's
Conflict and Bargaining in the Middle East: An Israeli
Perspective; Gideon Rafael's Destination Peace: Three
Decades of Israeli Foreign Policy; Dynamics of Dependence:
U.S.-Israeli Relations, edited by Gabriel Sheffer; and Aaron S.
Klieman's Statecraft in the Dark: Israel's Practice of Quiet
Diplomacy. The Arab-Israeli peace process is discussed in
William B. Quandt's Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics and
Harold H. Saunders's The Other Walls: The Politics of the
Arab-Israeli Peace Process. Finally, materials on various peace
proposals include the Brookings Institution's report Toward
Arab-Israeli Peace. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1988
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