Introduction Television simply scared them. How do you harness such a creature from the start? In 1952, NBC president David Sarnoff sent word to David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the four-year-old nation of Israel, offering to help the new Jewish homeland--and its army--establish a television broadcasting system.1 The leading U.S. broadcast network even offered to help fund-raise for the endeavor in exchange for a hand in future programming. Ben-Gurion''s reply was terse and unequivocal: Israelis were people of the book, the prime minister fired back. They had no use for television. In light of the near-global rush to television that would characterize the Fifties, such a blunt refusal may have taken the Americans by surprise, but it typified an approach to the new technology by those Israelis who had bothered to notice it.

2 For them, television was an anti-intellectual and antieducational pursuit that would corrupt the socialist state and interfere with its emerging national culture.3 As one Knesset member would later offer, "Television is an expression of a consuming, passive man, a man who buys his life, . who needs only to receive."4 Sixteen years would pass between this short correspondence and the introduction of a general-television service to Israel. In these years, the new nation would be transformed from an eccentric collection of refugees, fervent idealists, and seasoned guerrilla fighters to a powerful state riding a wave of international admiration, with its own refugee camps and a legacy of pride and shame that would dominate its politics and shape its future. Television''s place in this history, however, has rarely been explored. My aim in this book is to provide, not a full and comprehensive history of Israeli television in total, but rather an Israeli history through television. In what follows, I take up specific moments as case studies in television''s formative two decades to argue for the medium as a central force in shaping discursive formations and popular knowledge, not in its representational capacity but in its role as an object of fantasy and projection.

This approach yields a kind of reciprocal dialogue among different cultural and political discourses, a multivocal conversation that reveals broadcast history, as Michele Hilmes has argued, to be a social practice grounded in culture rather than in electricity.5 Although the state of Israel came into existence a mere twenty years before its first national television broadcast, the medium''s relatively late arrival was galling to many commentators who watched as, one by one, Arab nations erected television broadcasting transmitters all around Israel''s borders.6 This was not just a matter of pride and technological competition: Arab broadcasts could be received in Israel and were watched regularly by Arab Israelis and Arabic-speaking Jews. More than any other, this concern would ultimately tip the scales in favor of television as Israel emerged from the Six Day War a Middle Eastern powerhouse and an occupying force. Yet, television in Israel has a long, convoluted, and often perplexing prehistory. The phantom of television haunted public and political debates for a full decade before Israeli television''s inauguration, then continued to be the focal point of debates over representations of the nation and its history for a decade more. During this turbulent period--and through political shake-ups, social and economic transformations, two major wars, ongoing hostilities with their Arab neighbors, and the devastating outcome of the 1967 occupation--Israelis, ostensibly arguing over a communication technology, were in fact debating the very foundations of their national project. First as an imagined technology (what I will call "telespeculation") and then as the "real" of a domestic broadcast service, the idea of the medium facilitated a unique form of public discursive engagement that served to define official priorities, articulate ephemeral values, and debate an ongoing national transformation.

How does a broadcasting system fit into a nation''s history? What is its relationship to the forces and ideas that shape a self-defined society? In its representational capacity, textual production, and cultural intervention, television is obviously a central cultural mechanism whose conventions, narratives, and industrial norms become part of a national, and increasingly global, currency. But what of television as an institution? As a technology? And, perhaps most pressingly, what about television as a mode of information and a way of thinking? In beginning with a "prehistory" here, I want to trace the path of Israeli television to its very source: back beyond the point of origin of the first transmission, where a particular media system begins, to a moment when it is first conceived as a possibility. As I will show, this path is neither isolated nor fortuitous but stretches along well-traveled ground. More than a history of a single institution, what results is a trek through intersections that reveals the development of television as formed in the convergence of various political and social forces. Further, it demonstrates the bidirectionality of such a construction: First imagined by and for ideological and political forces, television also served to define and shape such forces, along with public ways of knowing and understanding them. Since discursive analysis and cultural critique operate primarily within a process of textual interpretation, I take up policy debates, government discussions, and official correspondence about television, as well as press coverage and public and industry responses to these debates, as a semi-unified textual entity. As we shall see, each series of debates was brought about by particular sea changes in Israeli politics, and with each new current, the idea of television was swept up in a fresh wave of predictions, hopes, and anxieties. As a broadcast history, this work sets out to examine these waves, both as discrete discourses about television and as complex historical moments that implicated television in a larger struggle--accounting for the forces that animated the course of television''s history, and that ultimately "invented" it.

With official and popular texts as my primary informants, the book''s focus is on the conversations, arguments, fantasies, and conceptual understandings television has facilitated throughout this period. In gauging which and how such notions were expressed and popularly received, absence is of equal import--not only in terms of the absence of "actual" television, but also in the absence of particular voices from the debate. As we will see, Arabs and Eastern immigrants consistently occupied a central place in much of the television discourse (as primary target audiences, as particularly vulnerable would-be viewers, and as threats to a unified national culture). Yet, in the public sphere of radio and newspapers or in the official sphere of law and policy discussions, their voices were rarely heard. It is in these pronounced absences in the context of struggle and transformation that television history emerges as a lens through which social, ideological, and cultural patterns reveal themselves with a particular clarity. In one of the earliest critical engagements with television, Raymond Williams urged against an artificial separation between technology and the society in which it develops, calling on historians to restore an account of intention into the narrative of technical development so that it is understood as institutionally embedded, and fostered within preexisting purposes and practices.7 Recent historical engagements with television, as well as with other technologies, have widely taken up this approach, exploring media technologies not as forces that spring up unexpectedly to reshape their surroundings but as calculated responses to existing conditions and particular aspirations. Scholarship informed by cultural studies, policy research, and the recently emerging field of Internet studies has further emphasized that historical accounts of technology are incomplete without the examination of such developments as dynamic and ongoing processes forged at the meeting place between innovation, official intent, economic and political realities, and popular practice.

The process that brought Israeli television to life offers an exceptionally cogent example for such an intentional, translucent technology, since television''s ability to address specific national and social needs was the sole impetus for its consideration, evaluation, and institution. Indeed, the Israeli government''s central role in television''s introduction and the relative absence of profit-motivated industries from the process makes this approach an (initially) ideal.