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Voice of Peace DJ: We wanted Arab listeners to feel we were talking to them too
By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Abie Nathan, radio, Israel 

The captain was Dutch, the small crew was Filipino and the cook was Irish. The food was terrible - there were cockroaches in the cornflakes, and the cook had no idea how to make French fries. Nevertheless, former staffers of the Voice of Peace radio station remember their time aboard the ship as one of the most significant periods of their lives. Most were young Britons who had come to Tel Aviv in the hope of gaining radio experience. Abie Nathan, who owed the station, gave them that opportunity.

"It was fun," said Tim Shepherd, one of the station's presenters, as he recalled those days. "You didn't do anything but radio. There was no mortgage, no income tax. You slept on board, and every few hours, you broadcast. Only in winter was it a bit unpleasant."

Shepherd spent a year on the ship, in 1986-87. He had finished university in Britain and was a "peacenik" - to use his own term - but did not understand much about politics. Nathan, who used the radio station to advance his own political views, excluded his staff from that realm.
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"We had no understanding of what was happening in the news, because most of us didn't speak Hebrew," Shepherd recounted. "That was Abie's field. Every once in a while, he'd call and say he had to go on the air, and then we'd stop everything and he would broadcast."

Originally, Nathan had planned to remain on the ship non-stop "until there was peace between us and the Arabs." However, he eventually abandoned that idea and started managing the ship from a small office in Tel Aviv.

The decision to broadcast in English stemmed mainly from the fact that most of the presenters spoke no Hebrew. But it was also meant to give the station an international cast. "The station broadcast to every country in the Mediterranean," said Gil Katzir, one of the few Israelis who worked there. "It wanted to give listeners in Arab countries the feeling that it was broadcasting to them as well."

And apparently, it did: Katzir noted that letters and postcards would arrive at the station's mailbox in Cyprus from countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Almost every winter, Nathan would warn that storms were liable to sink his decrepit ship and threaten to close the station. But despite occasional serious problems - broadcasts ceased for several weeks in 1982 because the ship's generator was removed, and in 1986, the station's broadcast engineer died of electrocution when he tried to repair a broken
transmitter - the Voice of Peace broadcast almost continuously for 20 years, from 1973 to 1993.

In its final years of existence, the station's political identity weakened and it became a commercial station in every respect. Nevertheless, until the very end, it dedicated a minute of silence every day to victims of violence in the Middle East and worldwide.

"This was before the days of [pop music station] Galgalatz and regional radio, and the idea of a station that broadcast almost nothing but music was very popular," said Katzir, who worked for The Voice of Peace in 1985.

According to Katzir, the division of labor at the station was never clear. "Everyone did what they could. The presenters worked in shifts - two three-hour shifts per day. The work was very personal: Every presenter would enter with a pile of records and, as he was broadcasting, edit the program, choose the songs, the jingles and the ads that maintained the station."

On Saturdays, Israeli yachtsmen would approach the ship and throw chocolate at the staff. But Nathan, despite his well-known bohemianism, drew certain red lines. "Abie insisted that there be no alcoholic beverages or girls on the ship, because he knew what sort of disaster that could cause," Katzir said. "He knew that a ship-based radio station could easily deteriorate and become something else entirely.

There were several presenters, Katzir noted, but none lasted long. He himself left the ship after a year. "It was a small ship, about 70 meters long - and at some point, you started yearning for shore and feeling claustrophobia," he explained.

But Katzir argued that Voice of Peace's influence on Israeli radio was no less significant than its political legacy. "The radio was a way of achieving his goals and gave him political power," said Katzir, referring to Nathan. "But it also left a legacy in the field of radio: It taught Israeli radio to be like radio overseas.

Related articles:
  • Israeli peace pioneer Abie Nathan dies aged 81
  • Gideon Levy / The last of the dreamers of peace
  • Voice of Peace, signing off
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