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Marketing Nationalism in the Absence of State: Radio Haifa during the 2006 Lebanon War Danny Kaplan and Orit Hirsch Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 2012 41: 495 originally published online 12 April 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0891241612439607 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jce.sagepub.com/content/41/5/495

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Marketing Nationalism in the Absence of State:  Radio Haifa during the 2006 Lebanon War

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41(5) 495­–525 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0891241612439607 http://jce.sagepub.com

Danny Kaplan1 and Orit Hirsch2

Abstract Following privatization reforms in Israeli media, we explore local and global factors beyond the state that may promote national identifications. In an ethnographic study of commercial Radio Haifa during and after the 2006 Lebanon War, we describe how the local radio replaced state and military functions in the home front as local residents came under attack by Hezbollah rockets. The radio station gave warning of incoming rockets, guided residents during their stay in shelters, engineered the collective mood, and promoted civic welfare. By subscribing to a Zionist-heroic discourse, the station attained legitimacy and commercial success and transformed into a player in the national field, well beyond its regional mandate. Against claims that global-commercial pressures undermine both state structures and national sentiments, this study suggests that commercial and peripheral actors present new ways for promoting nationalism in lieu of the state. Keywords radio, emergency, nationalism, privatization, Israel

1

Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel

2

Corresponding Author: Danny Kaplan, Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israel Email: [email protected]

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In the course of the July 2006 War between Israel and Lebanon, the second author, Orit Hirsch, visited her family in Kiryat Bialik, a town at the outskirts of Haifa in northern Israel, which came under attack by Hezbollah rockets. One of the first notes in Orit’s field diary read: “As soon as I arrived my mother instructed me to follow four guidelines in preparation for a possible attack: (1) keep away from the northern windows; (2) never shut your room door; (3) in case of an alarm go to the family mamad (protected apartment space) and turn on the fan; (4) listen at all times to Radio Haifa.” Almost unnoticed, this newly formed regional-commercial radio became one of the “protective” items in the family’s self-assigned emergency kit. Similar to the ventilator regulating the air in the sealed space of the mamad, the radio was deemed essential for regulating the collective mood during these times of emergency. Following a short-term ethnography under fire conducted by Orit, we ask in this article how a regional and commercial radio played such a central role in addressing the needs of the local community during wartime and its aftermath. Applying an extended case method approach (Burawoy 1991), we situate this study in the broader context of media globalization and its effect on privatization reforms in the organizational field of Israeli radio. We explore how Haifa radio integrated marketing strategies with active involvement in civic welfare, engaged in the production of national identification, and literally assumed some of the functions of state institutions during the war, which was characterized by a partial retreat of government authorities and services. The particular dynamic of this localized case may help problematize recent theorizing on globalization and nationalism. On one hand, in this work we demonstrate how global transformations can take place inside the national environment and affect state authority from within (Sassen 2006). On the other hand, we argue against the often taken-for-granted assumption that such transformations contribute to the disintegration of national identities (Beck 2000; Sassen 2006; Strange 1996). We begin with an overview of media and globalization scholarship and problematize the alleged contradiction between global processes and national identity, highlighting the role of mediated civic nationalism as well as commercialism in the production of national sentiments. Next, we provide an overview of the Israeli radio field in light of global privatization reforms, some background on Radio Haifa, and a description of the northern home front during the war, known locally as the Second Lebanon War. Next, we spell out our methodology and present our findings. We elaborate on both the expressive and operational agendas pursued by Radio Haifa in the war, discussing their significance for national identification. Although our prime

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concern is with radio production and the taken-for-granted worldview held by radio staff as they attempt to engineer the public mood, we also examine select audience responses to these efforts during and after the war. In conclusion, we reexamine the interrelations between local, state, and global dimensions of national identification. In contrast to the presumed opposition between globalization and nationalism, we suggest that even as state institutions give way to privatized forms of electronic media, a globally induced and institutionally legitimized “commercial logic” of market economy offer alternative methods for advancing and sustaining national identification in lieu of the state.

Media, Globalization, and Nationalism In this study, we aim to reexamine global processes of media privatization and its impact on national identity through an ethnographic, extended case method approach. Whereas in the United States radio broadcasting was managed by private, commercial corporations almost from the day it was first introduced in the 1920s (Lippmann 2007), in most countries throughout much of twentieth century, radio (and later television broadcasting) was run directly by the state or state-related public authorities and was guided by national considerations (Katz and Wedell 1977; Schudson 1994). Since the 1980s, however, production models of commercial radio gradually spread from the United States to Western Europe and subsequently to other regions, following neoliberal deregulation reforms in local public or state broadcasting systems (Forsman and Stiernstedt 2006). Scholars have drawn on these transformations to suggest that the national function of mass media is increasingly losing ground in favor of heightened consumerism endorsed by superpowers and transnational corporations (Rantanen 2005, 84; Schudson 1994). For example, Katz (1996) argued that pressures of global economy led to fragmentation in television channels, increasing the separation between the electronic media and the nation-state and in turn weakening the common core of national identity shared by local viewers. Scholars envisioned similar outcomes in Israeli society following the reform in Israeli radio and television in the early 1990s (Katz 1996; Liebes 1999, 97). This assumption is rooted in a wider debate on the political and cultural effects of globalization. For the most part, globalization is interpreted as a process of homogenization between nation-states, whereby national institutions subordinate to transnational powers, such as global media corporations (Gordon 2008; Held et al. 1999; Ritzer 2000). Some have discussed this

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process in terms of the retreat of the state or its transformation from within. They note that shifts in locus of authority to a world of private powers undercut state sovereignty and lead to denationalization (Sassen 2006; Strange 1996), deterritorialized identities, and cosmopolitan citizenship (Beck 2000). Other scholars have discussed globalization in terms of divergence and resistance, describing how global pressures often invoke the national as a form of local reaction (Ram 2005; Rantanen 2005, 97). Still others have underscored how the accumulative social pressures of both global and local actors lead to hybrid power structures and create a space of indigenization (Featherstone 1996; Lull 1995). Common to most of these approaches is the conception of global transformations as antithetical to the articulations of national identity. Against this prevalent assumption, we argue that processes of globalization can form a joint trajectory with national identification. In particular, we underscore two significant factors typically associated in current debates with global pressures, but which may also facilitate national identification: grassroots civic popular culture and commercialism.

Civic Mediated Nationalism Ever since Anderson’s ([1983] 1991) discussion of the newspaper-reading community as a vehicle for imagining the nation, scholars have explored the constitutive role of media technology in reproducing people’s national identifications. Moving away from top to bottom, authoritative aspects of “nation building” (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1982) toward a broader, civic understanding of “nation making” (Foster 1997), recent studies examined how nationalism is conceived bottom up as people engage with variable representations of the nation. Nation making does not privilege state-led processes of integration and directs attention to popular culture and grassroots practices of consumption, following Billig’s (1995) ideas of “banal nationalism.” Foster (2002) demonstrates the utility of this approach in his ethnographic work in Papua New Guinea, a case of a “weak state” lacking centralized infrastructure and undeveloped in its administrative and ideological apparatus. Focusing on media and popular culture, he shows how civic involvement with nation making unfolds through mundane engagements with radio talk show programs and in consumption of commodities ranging from locally made tinned meat to globally marketed soft drinks. Both Foster’s (2002) focus on a “weak” nation-state and Billig’s (1995) focus on established Western countries center on the idea that the workings of banal nationalism occur with minimal “flagging,” or explicit reminding of the national ideology, as opposed to periods of wartime that invite the

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conscious mobilizing of patriotism by “hot” flag-waving. Frosh and Wolfsfeld (2007) examined the challenge of banal nationalism during “nonbanal” circumstances, namely, in times of emergency. They explore how in the Israeli case, a state perpetually in a state of emergency, a conspicuous display of seemingly autonomous, grassroots social affinities, independent of state initiative and control, is central to national identification. In crisis conditions, such as following a terror attack, media representations “from below” transform everyday public activities into a demonstration of collective resilience. Frosh and Wolfsfeld (2007) redefine this nonbanal manifestation of noninstitutionalized nationalism as “mediated civic nationalism,” embedded in the everyday activities of the civic population and mediated by the mass media. By examining televised news coverage of a Palestinian suicide bombing, they demonstrate the central role played by the media in assembling from below the representations of civic solidarity and ultimately in reinforcing civic nationalism. Contrary to the rich body of literature on the continuing involvement of print media and television in negotiating national identity, there are relatively few studies on the ways that radio evokes national meanings (Smith and Phillips 2006). Of these, some focused on the explicit role of radio as a state apparatus committed to nation building (Hayes 1996; Scannell and Cardiff 1991), while others offered a nuanced analysis of the national culture through radio listening (Douglas 2004; Spitulnik 1999) and attended to developments among nonstate grassroots radio actors (Kunreuther 2010). Building on previous scholarship, our study engages with a particular question: in what way, if any, does commercial radio differ from state radio in its production of civic mediated nationalism?

Commercialism and Nationalism A central effect of globalization in the field of communication is the shift from public to private ownership of electronic media channels and their commercialization through advertisements and mass distribution of imported programming content (Foster 2002; Held et al. 1999). The introduction of a market-based model of management in the electronic media driven by corporate interests has led scholars to reflect on the superficial and repetitive content of the globalized commercial programming, which does little to reflect the voice of the viewers (Gordon 2008, 18). For instance, Herman and McChesney (1997) argue that the strong commercialization process in the media encroaches on the functioning of the public sphere. As the “new missionaries of global capitalism,” the electronic media are compelled to favor

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content that guarantees high ratings such as entertainment in place of content that may stir political debate and controversy. Privatization is thus expected to weaken civic participation in public affairs. A related assumption in much of the globalization literature is the apparent antithesis between consumerism and nationalism, especially in circumstances of violent conflict. Typically, advertising specializes in marketing well-being, pleasure, and peaceful prosperity, as means to promote the selling of goods. As such, it is considered averse to conditions of warfare and terrorism (Frosh 2007). However, Frosh (2007, 480) underscores how national conflict and consumer culture are deeply intertwined through “the complementary nationaffirming dynamics of military sacrifice and commercial regeneration.” A good example is Young’s (2005) study of American advertisements during World War II, which employed the rhetoric of national sacrifice and of civic consumption simultaneously. Citizens were asked to make daily sacrifices through limited forms of rationing and at the same time behave as active consumers and invest in purchases that would contribute to the war effort and the national economy. We explore how such dynamics of marketing nationalism play out in the Israeli radio field undergoing privatization reforms.

The Israeli Radio Field Israeli radio was founded soon after state independence in 1948 and as in most countries was run by government authorities. As a legacy from the British Mandate era, the state radio Kol Israel (the Voice of Israel) was modeled after the BBC as a state apparatus committed to nation building (Scannell and Cardiff 1991). Together with the military radio it enjoyed near-exclusivity in the local radio scene. The radio played an explicit, official role in shaping the national culture by socializing the public to the values of the Zionist national revolution, which combined a modern-secular lifestyle with Jewish heritage, military prowess, and civic solidarity. This was done by measures such as educational programs for the general public and new immigrants, dissemination of vernacular Modern Hebrew, and advancement of Western-oriented pop music (Katriel and Nesher 1987; Liebes 2006; Penslar 2003). During the 1980s and 1990s, Israel’s socialist political culture has undergone a gradual change toward liberal reforms and a free market economy. Accordingly, the legislators aspired to privatize and decentralize the electronic media and declared the need for “open air” in the field of communication, accompanied by a rhetoric of globalization (Shinar and Moshe 1997). In 1995 the government authorized a limited number of privately owned radio stations chartered on the basis of a geographical allocation of radio frequencies and

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regulated by the Second Authority for Television and Radio. The bid process enabled competition between various corporate groups that were interested in entering the radio market. The reform was accompanied by a rhetoric that promised greater diversity in favor of neglected audiences. The public legislation directed the new stations to explore new niches that would provide “adequate representation of distinctive topics that would cater for the local residents and their special needs” (Second Authority for Television and Radio 1990). In practice, however, most regional stations have followed the public networks in presupposing and targeting a relatively homogenous secular or quasi-traditional Jewish audience within their designated region. By 2010, only five of the seventeen new regional stations focused on differentiated audiences, such as the Palestinian community of Northern Israel, the Sephardic ultra-orthodox community, or the Russian immigrant population. The continual ignorance of marginalized subgroups in both the public networks and the new regional stations has resulted in a proliferation of pirate radio stations, particularly among the Arab and Jewish ultra-orthodox communities (Limor and Naveh 2008).

The Case of Radio Haifa Radio Haifa is a representative case of the regional-commercial reform in Israeli radio. It was established in the early 1990s as a private pirate station broadcasting from offshore and catering to a young, secular audience. Following the 1995 reform, the station applied for the regional bid and was chartered to operate as the official-local station for the Haifa metropolitan area. The station established itself as a talk-and-music station offering a mixture of regional and national news reportage, diverse talk shows, and a musical repertoire of mainstream Western and Hebrew pop songs. In the face of growing competition from television, internet, and music players, Israeli radio stations have experienced in recent years a systematic drop in audience ratings. Radio Haifa is one of a few stations that retained its popularity. In fact, it almost doubled its ratings in 2006, the year of the war in Lebanon (from 9.5% to 17% in a survey of regional exposure; Second Authority for Television and Radio 2006). The rise in the station’s popularity was not limited to the period of the war. Whereas other radio stations, particularly the state news stations that covered the war enjoyed higher ratings at the time but returned to their average figures after the war ended, Radio Haifa managed to preserve its success and presented in 2007 another increase, of around 25% in audience ratings (in a survey of national exposure; Averbach

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2008). It is therefore interesting to explore the role that the station played both during and after the war and how it won public appraisal. From the outset, the structural circumstances of Radio Haifa can serve to illustrate some of the intricacies involved in media globalization and nationalism. The station’s former structure as a “pirate ship” broadcasting from beyond Israel’s territorial waters underscores its independence from state sovereignty and symbolizes the tension between globalization and nation making. Even as the ship “set ashore” and the radio began its legal operations, the owners chose to locate the station at the heart of one of Haifa’s fashionable shopping malls, a bubble of privately owned market space isolated from the local surroundings and an epitome of global consumerist culture (Ram 2005, 46). At the same time, however, the very fact that this nonsovereign media agent was legalized through the privatization reform and integrated into the regional-commercial system embraced and regulated by the state requires a deeper exploration of its engagement with national identification. Haifa is a “mixed” city where Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens live in proximity. City residents often take pride in the “coexistence” between the two communities and in the relative integration of the Arab minority in city life. Nevertheless, Radio Haifa directs its broadcasting exclusively to the Jewish audience. When we interviewed the station director, Dan Nishlis, he made a fleeting comment on this point, mentioning that local Arab listeners prefer the Arabic-speaking radio stations. The exclusion of Arab citizens (most of whom speak fluent Hebrew) is systemic of Israeli media and reflects a long-standing political and cultural conception of Israeli nationalism as pertaining exclusively to the Jewish population, accompanied with a growing, albeit ambivalent identification of Arab citizens with a separatist Palestinian national identity (Migdal 2001).

The Retreat of the State from the Home Front during the Second Lebanon War Israel is a far cry from a “weak state” as in Foster’s (2002) work on Papua New Guinea discussed earlier. It maintains high levels of social control through centralized sources of authority and administration, a conscript army engaged in continuing military conflict, a strong civic society, and a deeply elaborated national ethos (Migdal 2001). State authorities are particularly expected to intervene in civic life during wartime, as in the Second Lebanon War. Yet as Israel’s northern home front came under attack by Hezbollah rockets, some sources of state authority have withdrawn and left the community to its own devices. This effect was perhaps most pronounced in the port city of

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Haifa, located some 30 kilometers from the Lebanese border. Whereas other localities closer to the borderland had been the target of shelling for many decades, this was the first time that a major Israeli city came under a continuous rocket strike for more than thirty days. Hezbollah systematically targeted densely populated residential areas in Israel (Guardian 2006), although the actual number of civilian casualties was relatively low compared to the Lebanese side, partly because of the greater availability of shelters and an electronic warning system.1 Thus, although substantial state resources were still available to Haifa residents compared to their Lebanese counterparts, from the perspective of local public opinion, state authorities utterly failed to deal with the needs of the residents under fire. What emerged is a crisis of confidence in government. In the early stages of the war, media reports tended to support government policy and its military moves, and over time it began to voice criticism of the government’s mishandling of the home front and its abandonment to rocket attacks. Solidarity with the population on the home front became the focus of public opinion more than the coverage of military activities on the Lebanese front and its outcome in terms of Lebanese casualties. The home front was first heralded as heroic and resilient and later on as a victim of government neglect (Liebes and Kempf 2007). Moreover, a careful analysis of local journalism during the war underscores its critical stand against government actions or its lack of actions, often accompanied with a general support for the cause of the war and its national justification. Thus, even as media outlets applied the journalistic tool of critique they rarely attended to local voices of opposition to the war but chose to echo patriotic sentiments (Neiger, Zandberg, and Meyers 2008). Government withdrawal in the war was corroborated by a report by the State Comptroller, which found severe flaws in the conduct of the military Home front Command and identified failures in the supply of public services by government ministries to local residents, such as readiness of the rescue forces, maintenance of alarm sirens, transportation, health, and welfare services (State Comptroller 2007). This critique was expanded by the government’s self-appointed Winograd commission of inquiry, which found that the failings in the defense of the civilian population was due to flawed decisionmaking in government and military leadership and to inadequacies in strategic and operative planning (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008a). In what follows, we probe the impact of state withdrawal on the ground from the point of view of Radio Haifa and its involvement with the local community. We explore how the station’s ability to mobilize and nourish national sentiments in times of emergency is mediated by its regional and commercial makeup, actively filling the vacuum left by state agencies.

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Method Research Outline This study is part of a larger research project on Israeli radio during a decade of privatization reforms and its translation of global radio models and music genres (Kaplan 2009, 2012). Between 2004 and 2010, Danny Kaplan conducted fieldwork on state and regional radio stations. Focusing on organizational practices performed by the persons behind the radio broadcast— specifically deejays, music editors, and station directors—we examined their taken-for-granted worldview as they attempted to engage with national sentiments among their listeners. To this end, the research design covered the use of popular music in daily schedules and during events of national significance. It consisted of (1) eighteen interviews with music editors, deejays, and radio directors in stations catering for the Hebrew-speaking audience; (2) visits to selected stations for in situ observations of everyday activities and interactions among staff members; (3) live listening sessions to music broadcasting during Memorial Days and participant-observations in selected public ceremonies of commemoration covered by the radio; and (4) review and analysis of local journal reports and internet forums addressing changes in radio practices since the advent of the commercial reforms in 1995. Orit had been involved in the project for two years as a research assistant, when the Second Lebanon War broke. During a visit to her family at the home front, she was struck by the extent that local residents were listening incessantly to the live broadcasting of Radio Haifa and we decided on the spot to turn her visit into a short-term “accidental” ethnography, engaging with violent events as they emerge on the ground in uncertain times (Pieke 1995; Robben and Nordstrom 1995). Orit conducted participant observations on audience behavior during the war among family members and people in the surrounding community, observing when and how they listened to the radio at their homes and in public spaces, in-between siren alarms, stays in shelters, and the mundane activities of everyday life in wartime. Orit also visited the radio studio and interviewed the broadcasting personnel, musical editor, and director. A year after the war, she returned to the area to resume her observations in the same community and held follow-up interviews with radio staff. We also reviewed the radio’s website and other internet sources referring to the station.2 In contrast to audience research in more relaxed and predetermined settings, ethnography under fire is often confined by the pressing circumstances to preexisting allegiances. Informants with whom the researcher underwent the emergency events provide a rich yet limited scope for interpretation, and coverage of alternative audience perspectives is not always possible (Pieke

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1995). However, such an accidental ethnography in wartime offered a unique opportunity to extend our research questions, asking not only how radio producers make sense of their ability to elicit national sentiments but also how such sentiments are experienced by some, albeit selected, audiences.

Modes of Analysis As in the larger research project on Israeli radio, this study integrates a neoinstitutional perspective to the study of change in an organizational field with interpretative, phenomenological methods of analysis (Czarniawska 1992; Zilber 2008). Neoinstitutionalism underscores how organizational practices are shaped by normative considerations of legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Accordingly, we attended not only to the structural factors that propelled Radio Haifa to assume practices traditionally held by state agents but also to the emic concepts that radio personnel assigned to this organizational change (Bate 1997) and to how they aimed to achieve institutional legitimacy (Johnson, Dowd, and Ridgeway 2006), which translated into a dual commitment to commercial success and national patriotism. In line with a bottom up grounded-theory analysis (Strauss and Corbin 1990), we identified recurrent themes through a cyclic reading and rereading of the data derived from the interviews, field diaries, and internet sources. Sources with rich narrative content were further analyzed according to Giorgi’s (1975) proposal for phenomenological research adapted into a five-stage procedure: a free reading of each source; dividing it into separate sequences according to natural “meaning units”; rereading each unit with the research questions of commercialization and nationalism in mind; collecting nonredundant themes from each source; and gleaning dominant themes from the entire selection in order to derive a theory of nomothetic value. Applying an extended case method approach, we read the findings from Radio Haifa against the backdrop of the privatization reforms in Israeli radio as well as the scholarly discussions of media and globalization in order to make sense of the localized findings by reference to social forces external to them. In this way, we were able to “elaborate the effects of the ‘macro’ on the ‘micro,’” and in turn to bring to light and problematize instances where the local situation presents an “anomaly” and a challenge for existing theory (Burawoy 1991, 9).

Findings Zvi, a member of Orit’s family who listened constantly to Radio Haifa during the war, summed up his understanding of the radio’s tasks under fire with the following slogan: “alerter, informer, consoler.” He explained that as the radio

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staff understood that no one else was in charge, they took upon themselves the tasks of alerting the public against the rocket threat, informing of rocket strikes, casualties and damages, and consoling the residents during their prolonged stay in shelters, as well as in the course of their everyday life. By this interpretation, some of its steadfast listeners perceived the radio as a source of both operational and expressive aid: radio provided information, mediated between various authorities on the ground, at times even carrying out emergency tasks on its own accord, and in addition provided emotional support for its audience, a sense of constancy and belonging. These two aspects echo Carey’s (1989) distinction between the instrumental role of media communication in transmitting concrete information and its expressive role in drawing people together. We elaborate on both these operational and expressive aspects of wartime broadcasting as they relate to the daily schedules in the lives of local residents. In some points in time, particularly during rocket alerts and the stressful waiting in shelters, the radio broadcast came to the forefront of their attention, as is evident from our opening vignette on the use of radio in the family’s self-assigned emergency kit. But even when the broadcast remained in the background during the listeners’ routine activities, we show how it offered to contain, accommodate, and naturalize the meaning of emergency, precisely by straddling between these two modes of wartime broadcasting.

Inside the Shelters:The Local Radio as “National Consoler” From Orit’s field notes: The radio’s broadcaster was like a virtual presence for us in the mamad, as he began to talk right after the shrieking sounds of the sirens stopped. He had a bass, fatherly voice, relaxed and poised. He kept talking in the plural: “as you have noticed, the siren has just been sounded . . . we will all get inside the mamad or other shelters; we will stay calm; we will get updates shortly. Please behave responsibly, get inside the mamad and do not forget that we are under a war attack. Please don’t be apathetic and don’t become indifferent to these repeated situations because then you might get hurt.” During these spells of rocket attacks, Radio Haifa employed a special wartime broadcast modeled after a similar practice formerly used by the state’s radio stations. In previous wars, which involved massive exposure of civic population to missile raids, such as during the First Gulf War in 1991, Kol

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Israel and the military radio aired jointly a breakthrough special broadcast by the military authorities. The Chief Military Spokesman played an official role in announcing rocket attacks, calming the population, and providing instructions for proper behavior in the shelters. This role, known as the “national consoler,” was absent in the current war, reflecting yet again the withdrawal of state and military agencies from the home front. Instead, the State Comptroller noted that the most reliable reports during the war came from the local police, emergency medical services (Magen David Adom, Red Shield of David), and Radio Haifa (State Comptroller 2007). Indeed, following each rocket strike Radio Haifa put on the air by its own initiative the Haifa District Chief Police Officer who would deliver by phone an authoritative announcement from the local police station or from the site of rocket attack on the ground, providing instructions for proper behavior under fire and calming the population. This cooperation between local media and district police officially replaced, in effect, the previous role of the military as national consoler. It seems that even as wartime national consoling shifted from state actors to local actors its two central functions have remained intact: it provided operational, instructive information on what has happened and it provided emotional support by drawing people together in a joint ritual (Carey 1989). As people came under attack and were confined to their private apartment shelters, the Radio offered its steadfast listeners certainty and continuity, mediating between their isolated position and the sounds and sights of the outside world. Moreover, as part of the wartime model adopted from Israeli state radio in the First Gulf War, Radio Haifa borrowed its second radio frequency—customarily used as a substation with separate programming— as a “quiet channel” that aired only the alarm sirens and subsequent emergency announcements. People could thus lead their lives undisturbed and refrain from listening to radio but still rely on the quiet channel to alert them when needed. In this sense, the radio was not simply an item in the family emergency kit but, to use Silverstone’s (1994, 15, 21) suggestion, a “transitional object” that is always there and offers a sense of constancy and stability. Silverstone argued that when broadcasting schedules interweave with quotidian habits or else denote interruptions from the routine their permanent presence in everyday life may provide a sense of “ontological security” (Giddens 1990, 92) and trust in surrounding social and material environment. Although Silverstone did not refer to times of emergency, one can only assume that in such instances the existential significance of the broadcast becomes even stronger. Ultimately, Radio Haifa’s activity as national consoler served to reconfirm the social order and, in so doing, marked the radio

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itself as the guardian of order and of the nation. The local has become a signifier of the national. The radio’s local orientation offered some concrete operational advantages during the war. Because of military censorship, the standard procedure practiced by all Israeli media is to avoid real-time reporting on the exact locations of rocket hits so as not to assist the enemy in its subsequent targeting trials. Although Radio Haifa complied with these regulations, its broadcasters attempted at times to hint to the local audience on the exact location of rocket hits in ways that would not be intelligible to foreign ears. For instance, immediately to the north of Haifa is an urban-industrial sprawl consisting of several large municipalities, each beginning with the term Kirya (city or campus). When the radio reporter broadcasted live from the ground that “a rocket hit a carpentry workshop at an industry zone” in “a northern Kirya” residents could put two and two together and figure out that the rocket hit Kiryat Bialik, one of the more northern Kiryas that is also more likely to have a carpentry workshop in its industrial zone. In this manner, the local radio’s instrumental effectiveness was based on intimate familiarity with the shared knowledge of its audience. Gradually, Radio Haifa took over operational functions that are typical of an executive body rather than a media agency. On the first rocket raid, the radio staff contacted the municipality and notified them directly of malfunctioning sirens. After a few days of shelling, the staff realized that in many instance residents could not hear the sirens, especially when driving or when staying in noise-free office spaces. Consequently, they decided to turn the station itself into a siren alarm. Bazak Guy Bazak, Radio Haifa’s senior musical editor, recalled how a staff member on duty would watch out for the siren and notify the others: “folks, there’s a siren, and someone would dash to the computer and play the siren recording.” In fact, this improvised “radio-siren” served not only the local residents but also audiences from other parts of country. The state media operating from central Israel did not air the sirens and did not always provide live coverage of rocket attacks. Radio Haifa received feedback from many listeners in the center who tuned to Radio Haifa on the internet in order to find out what was going on up north, among them many Northern residents who evacuated their homes. Another example of the station’s civic aid in wartime, which had little to do with actual broadcasting, was its collaboration with the city authorities in sending radio personnel to neighborhoods abandoned by the residents in order to safeguard against looting. Bazak relates: People who stayed in Haifa knew that they could trust us with what was happening, that things are taken care of. The Homefront command

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didn’t take command? OK then Radio Haifa and Haifa municipality took over the command. The religious people fled Haifa, and only later we found out that all the religious neighborhoods in Hadar [lowincome area at the city center] had been instantly evacuated. . . . We placed our own people and municipality people there to prevent incidences of looting. The radio’s ability to demonstrate operational effectiveness based on intimate familiarity with its audience acquired long-term expressive significance. After the war, when Orit visited an elders’ home in the nearby kirya of Kiryat Motzkin she could discern a fusion of instrumental needs and expressive affect in the way that local residents related to the station. For instance, when a military helicopter flashed in the sky and stirred fresh war memories among a group of residents, one woman reflected on the radio’s “charming” reporting: “I had the radio tuned on Radio Haifa all the time. Yosi Fisher was their leading reporter. He was charming in the war and reported all the time.”

Outside the Shelters: Engineering Everyday Mood Haifa Radio became a daily source of support for its listeners and a venue for letting out steam during the routine hours that people spent outside the shelters. Listeners wrote personal emails to the broadcasters, chatted on the radio’s internet forum, or went on air to share in public their feelings and experiences. Bazak described the stations’ programming during the war, laying out hour by hour how the radio practically attempted to engineer the mood of its listeners: “In the morning we had this [news and talk] show that screamed how come nothing was being done [by the government] and why hadn’t they declare the city of Haifa a warzone . . . screams and interviews [with residents] whose small businesses were collapsing.” This was followed at 9 a.m. with another talk show whose anchor was the wife of the mayor of Kiryat Motzkin. Bazak remarked that her broadcasting style was much more emotional and soothing: “she would calm down the people from the krayot [plural for kirya], speak to them from the heart. She communicated more emotionally.” And finally, in the subsequent slot: Between 10 to 12 a.m. we broadcasted a retro party, the message being that we will go on dancing alongside the alarm sirens. We would play dance music and often the alarm interrupted. So we’d give a 15-minute news update and went back to our party, until the next alarm.

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Many of the rocket attacks occurred during noontime. One of the station deejays recalled how he would sometimes go on air after the siren had just sounded in a middle of his broadcast and would joke: “Ok fellas, once more they don’t want to let us all enjoy our lunch break, so we will run to the shelters and soon get back to our lunch again.” In this seemingly trivial manner, radio broadcasters served to normalize the state of emergency by reducing it to a temporary, recurring, and banal interruption in people’s daily routine. In doing so, they reinforced once more the expressive aspect of the broadcast as a transitional object, accompanying people with a sense of constancy and stability as they shift back and forth from daily routines to moments of alarm and anxiety. Radio music operates in more subtle ways than news and talk programs but can likewise become a powerful vehicle for mobilizing national identification through the systematic management of collective mood. Elsewhere Danny Kaplan (2009) analyzed how a logic of “mood shifting” in Israeli radio is borrowed from commemoration rituals to times of emergency, and in both cases consists of fluctuations between musical genres or rhythms that signify the development in events on the ground. Radio Haifa applied this logic when editing its musical playlist during the war, purposely attempting to manage the morale of its audience. In the words of Bazak: “we provide the mood and we can change it. I can make a person cry in a second.” As soon as the war broke, the radio switched to airing almost exclusively Hebrew popular music, as opposed to its routine playlist, which mixes English and Hebrew pop songs. But it did so not in the spirit of the solemn, downbeat songs associated with the “commemorative mode” employed during Memorial Days or fatal terror attacks (Kaplan 2009). Rather, immediately following the newsbreak the music editor would make a point of airing upbeat Hebrew songs. Bazak explained: “we didn’t air sad songs because we are not depressed. We wanted to keep the morale high from the moment people left the shelters and returned to ordinary life.” Thus, radio music schedules become another source of ontological security, holding a permanent presence in everyday life and conveying a sense of endurance. How did radio advertisements figure in this routine? In general, commercialregional stations play between 9 and 12 minutes of commercials per hour. When radio Haifa shifted to emergency broadcasting during spells of rocket attacks or false alarms it suspended all ongoing broadcasting schedules and accordingly refrained from airing any commercials. At all other times during the war, commercials were transmitted as usual. But this did not necessarily convey a message of “business as usual.” Rather, it served to link commercialism with the state of emergency. Indeed, some quick advertisers produced

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designated wartime commercials for the local audience, such as a supermarket chain that offered special prices during the war and emphasized that all its facilities provided shielded public spaces for shopping. In this manner, consumption linked with civic endurance and resilience, as have been found in other studies of war advertisements (e.g., Young 2005). Perhaps the best illustration of this linkage between marketing and emergency can be found in the way Radio Haifa advertised itself during the war. It produced a short jingle with a simple message: “Radio Haifa strengthens you!” During a follow-up interview after the war, the station deejay noted that this jingle ran not only during daytime but also during the night. At first, we did not understand the point of this comment, but then we recalled that rocket alarms were frequent only at day time, while during the night Hezbollah forces refrained from launching rockets because the flares could be spotted by the Israeli military. As local residents learned of this day–night distinction, their lives became rearranged around these two separate spheres, staying alert during daytime and trying to lead relatively normal lives at night. But because the local radio purposefully played the jingle during both periods, telling the people that Radio Haifa will be there for them, it effectively expanded the emergency situation from the actual moments of attack to all other times, and at the same time offered to contain, accommodate, and naturalize the meaning of emergency by linking it to everyday practices of marketing. Taken together, these examples of everyday programming during the war—from talk and music programs to advertisements and jingles—can be deciphered in light of Israel’s ongoing cultural institutionalization as an “interrupted system” (Kimmerling 1985), a system that is accustomed to shifting back and forth from times of routine to emergency. As the various radio broadcasts accompany and guide the listener during the unfolding of events and systematically signify the fluctuations between times of routine and emergency, instances of violence may not be experienced as exceptionally disruptive, nor are they simply neutralized. Rather, they become “cyclic interruption,” chronic disturbances that are naturalized and incorporated into the very fabric of the community (Kaplan, 2009).

The Radio as a War Hero Radio Haifa received international recognition for its activities during the war and its aftermath. In 2007 it won the international broadcasting excellence award by the American National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) for its support of the community in times of crisis. The judges noted the station’s dedicated coverage of the rocket attacks and everyday life under fire and

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commended its contribution in establishing money-raising programs for small businesses that collapsed during the war (NAB 2007), another rehabilitation effort that is primarily a responsibility of the state. During a visit to her parents in Kiryat Bialik a year after the war, Orit noticed that the radio held a special day of programming marking the first anniversary of the war, which was highly popular among local listeners. A quote from her field notes reads: I’m leaving my parent’s home and walk to the nearby shopping center. The streets are busy and lively and give no clue of the desertion and sense of terror that haunted them the previous year. As I wander between the shops, I notice that most shopkeepers play Radio Haifa on the store hi-fi system or on their personal transistors. At the local pet shop I find the shopkeeper, a middle-aged woman, sitting at the cashier and staring at her computer. As I gaze on the screen I can detect the live video image of Radio Haifa studio, the deejay sitting on a chair and talking to us. She listens carefully and I ask her about the extensive listening to the station today. She smiles at me, stands on her feet and asks me enthusiastically: “Are you connected to Radio Haifa?” Before I can answer she adds: “Tell them they’re so good! I’m crazy about them! We would have never made it through the war without them!” I’m telling her that I’m studying the station and she proceeds: “Everyday during the war I listened to Radio Haifa (counting with her fingers), not to galgalatz, not to galatz (popular military stations), not to reshet bet (main Kol Israel news station).” “Why?” I ask. “Because Radio Haifa is ours” she says and points at herself. The circumstances of the Second Lebanon War directed public admiration not to soldiers or political leaders but to civilians such as this pet shop owner who came under attack, remained in the city, and prevailed. This brings up the dilemma of how to represent such nonheroic displays of heroism embedded in the ordinary activities of ordinary people during those extraordinary times of emergency. The shop owner’s identification with Radio Haifa provides an interesting twist for this question of mediated civic nationalism (Frosh and Wolfsfeld 2007): if “Radio Haifa is ours” and represents the peo-

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ple’s endurance in the war, then it can become a source of heroism by its own right. Thus, during the first few years following the war the subtitle “our radio is a war hero” appeared in the “about us” section in the station’s website. Its special day of programming marking the anniversary of the war consisted, among other things, of special items on each reporter and broadcaster recollecting their intensive work during the war and describing their feelings at the time. Rather than putting on the air soldiers and war heroes from actual fighting in the Lebanese front, the station celebrated its own deeds at the home front. Together with the attaining of the NAB award, these experiences were heralded as an authentic representation of heroism. In a war that was clearly mishandled by the government and was not clearly won by the military, the media could gain public appeal by turning to its own small victories and celebrate them as an emblem of civic heroism.

Implications for Postwar Broadcasting The war gave the local station leverage to position itself as a carrier of nationalism through its civic and emotional aid to the community and its tales of heroism. Accordingly, its everyday programming schedules following the war retained and sustained an endorsement of national Zionist values. First, in line with the extraordinarily preoccupation of Israeli society with its missing soldiers (Kaplan 2008), the station launched a daily corner reminding of the two missing soldiers abducted by Hezbollah in the event that led to the outbreak of the war. Listeners were invited to call and dedicate songs to the soldiers’ families, who happened to be local residents. The music editors prepared in advance a list of appropriately solemn Hebrew songs to be played during these brief moments, forming a shift in collective mood that is borrowed from the commemorative mode during Memorial Days and likewise compelling the listeners to commune with the memory of the missing soldiers. This musical corner provided a daily rehearsal of the shift from ordinary life to the sacred mode of national commemoration, continually reaffirming collectively shared values (Carey 1989; Durkheim 1915). Another illustration of the engagement of Radio Haifa with national sentiments is a coproduction with other regional-commercial stations of a radio series in preparation for Israel’s sixtieth anniversary. It consisted of 60 oneminute items on Israel’s biggest historical moments, in order to show, in the words of station director Dan Nishlis: “the positive things that happen in this country for a change, the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor [in 1981] . . . Maccabi Tel Aviv [leading Israeli basketball team], things that raise national pride.” In an internet interview, Nishlis further noted that “it seemed only

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fitting to me that the radio, the media through which state independence was originally declared, would also be the first to initiate the celebrations of the state’s sixtieth anniversary” (Kam 2007). What goes unacknowledged in this gesture is the fact that while the radio still conducted the celebrations, its bearers were no longer the state but rather commercial stations in local framing. We noted a similar approach when Nishlis conveyed to us the topics chosen by his commercial station for primetime broadcasting during Independence Day. At first, we failed to notice any peculiarity in the list of topics he described: Two years ago it was favorite songs from Israeli movies. The listeners had a list of 150 songs in the website to choose from. At another year it was favorite commercials of all times and at another year it was favorite Israeli comic sketches. The advertisement for Neka7 [soap company] won [the advertisement contest].” At a second glance, however, we observed how this list placed commercial advertisements on a par with products of Israeli popular art such as Israeli-only movies, songs, and comic sketches. Broadcasting the latter material, a pantheon of sorts, has become a popular tradition on Israeli radio and television during Independence Day. By incorporating favorite advertisements into this national pantheon and celebrating the achievements of marketing on this particular day, the station transforms the mundane consumption of commodities into a national performance, thus illustrating how commercial agents play an active, if subtle, part in nation making (Foster 1997). Another way that the war experience gave the local station leverage to present itself as a bearer of nationalism is through a geographical repositioning of sorts. On a few occasions, Radio Haifa expanded its official mandate for covering exclusively regional affairs and extended its news coverage to other localities beyond Haifa and the north. In one such case in 2008, the southern border town of Sederot underwent repeated spells of rocket attacks from Gaza, gradually becoming a symbol of the new military conflict with the Hamas. Radio Haifa aired a few live broadcasts from Sederot, one of them in conjunction with a visit of Haifa Mayor to the local shopping mall to hold conversations with residents under fire, inadvertently linking once again commercial interests with emergency circumstances. The next year, Radio Haifa made a similar appearance in the city of Ashkelon, which came under Hamas rockets for the first time, following Israel’s military invasion to the Gaza Strip in January 2009. In a follow-up interview, Bazak explained that the aim of these special broadcasts was to arouse identification among Haifa residents and “to remind

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them that similar to the outbreak of war in the north there were people in the south that were experiencing war on a daily basis.” By that time, Radio Haifa refrained from referring directly to the Second Lebanon War because northern listeners “felt bad when hearing voices from the war again.” Nevertheless, providing them with repeated reminders of civilians under fire elsewhere in the country enabled the station to preserve its public image as a mediator of emergency as well as its ability to contain it. Moreover, by taking up coverage of national crisis in localities well beyond its official broadcasting zone, Radio Haifa unequivocally assumed a role typically held by state radio stations, transforming into a national actor also in the geographical sense. Finally, another indirect outcome of the war is a revision in the station’s musical format and programming. The intensive interactions with local listeners during the war gave the music editors a better sense of their main audience, which turned out to be older than they previously imagined. In order to sustain its peak ratings beyond the war period, the station had to come up with musical programming that would replace the sound of the sirens and still attract the newly discovered listeners. Consequently, the station reformulated its main musical format based on a French model of “Radio Nostalgie.” It targets an older, more established audience, with a playlist consisting of a high portion of Western pop and Hebrew songs from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The station’s commercial success in attracting and maintaining a loyal audience was heavily linked with a national-patriotic stand. Bazak summarized how the two developments surfaced and merged following the war: [During the war] The young people went on listening to their iPods. They didn’t care so much about the war . . . but the people who went on air and reported to us and assisted were the older people. So, if they used to be listeners of Kol Israel or the military radio, we took them and brought them over to us. This is the commercial market we were looking for. The young guys don’t bring in money and commercials, and this is a commercial station. . . . The older audience responds better to commercials. They like to keep track of places that offer sales. [Older] listeners who didn’t know us and came to stay, stayed because we bought them with reports, with language, with talk, with caring. People [from the radio staff] slept here in order to help in case of a siren alarm at night. This last sentence by Radio Haifa’s senior musical editor is central to understanding the commercial logic underlying the station’s involvement in civic and national affairs: the station “buys the listeners” through a

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demonstration of care and patriotism, linking national sacrifice with the principles of consumption.

The Radio as a Global Agent of Nationalism In February 2008 the station expanded its reach beyond state level and signed a cooperation agreement with CNN International, the first journalistic cooperation of its kind in the Middle East between a local agency and a global actor. Station Director Nishlis explained that as part of the lessons of the war, the station concluded that our listeners have not received sufficient information about the occurrences on the other side of the border. The link to CNN will enable their reporters in Beirut, Damascus, Teheran and Washington to report directly to Radio Haifa in times of emergency. . . . In exchange, viewers of CNN International across the world will receive real time coverage from the area of Haifa from Haifa Radio reporters. (Krayot on the internet 2008) This development shows how a regional radio can cross not only local boundaries but also state boundaries and partly operate as a vehicle of transnational global media. Nishlis noted that his listeners did not receive sufficient information of events in Lebanon, possibly hinting on the limited visibility of Lebanese casualties in Israeli media during the war. However, he refrains from discussing how the information relayed to his listeners by CNN reporters in Lebanon might affect their national identification. A central characteristic of media globalization is the flow of information across borders, resulting in McLuhan’s (1967) famed metaphor of the “global village.” In theory, this implies that local audiences could identify more easily with neighboring groups on the other side of the “same village” in a way that may potentially reduce particularist, nationalist tendencies. But as the flow of information facilitates the visibility of foreigners and enemies, it can also be used to purposely fortify in-group national identification understood, following Weber, as “a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups” (Gerth and Mills 1991, 172). Given Radio Haifa’s positioning well within the bounds of an IsraeliZionist national consensus, it is less likely to pursue the former approach of identifying with enemy casualties as it is to fortify national identity. In other words, underlying this partial cooperation with a transnational news machine is not a drive toward denationalization, but on the contrary, an act of public

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relations directed inwards. By joining forces with a leading media agency that covers primarily conflict events between nations, Radio Haifa simply reinforces its market positioning as a media actor at the top level of national concerns, as opposed to its preliminary position as a mere regional radio.

Discussion There is limited research on how national sentiments could be nourished by commercial agents in instances when state institutions lose ground. Situated in an organizational field undergoing extensive privatization reforms and facing a collective crisis of war, our ethnographic study of Radio Haifa can shed light on some of the localized dynamics involved. We found that in order to attain public legitimacy, the radio staff took an active role in consoling residents under fire, assuming operational functions, promoting civic welfare, and sustained a broader Zionist-national discourse, roles traditionally promoted by state authorities and state media. Similar to state actors, it positioned itself as a mediator of emergency, one that could contain, naturalize, and incorporate the emergency events into the very fabric of the community. Several observations surface in this example of civic-mediated nationalism in times of war. First, we consider its commercial basis. The case of Radio Haifa presents a nation-affirming dynamics of heroic sacrifice complemented with the promise of commercial regeneration. Scholars have already noted the linkage between national consciousness and economic growth during competition between nation-states (Crane 1998; Takeshi 2004), as well as the strong affinities between military conflict and consumerism (Frosh 2007; Young 2005). Nor is there anything new in the observation that war boosts up the mass consumption of news. Indeed, the very birth of the newspaper industry may be linked with the prolonged circumstances of conflict during the Thirty Year War in seventeenth-century Europe (Thompson 1995, 66). Nevertheless, in light of the growing interest in the challenges that contemporary global commercialization pose to state sovereignty and nationalism (Sassen 2006; Strange 1996), scholars should be more attentive as to how these global pressures could still nourish national sentiments by promoting local commercial actors in lieu of the state. Although such marketing of nationalism was most pronounced in Radio Haifa during wartime, it is important to note how it also transferred to the post-war period. The station offered ongoing programming that addressed national themes combined with a display of civic solidarity and at the same time continually celebrated its commercial basis— its dependence on audience ratings and its reliance on the perpetual transmission of 9 to 12 minutes

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of commercials per hour. Moreover, in our broader research project we found that the link between commercialism and nationalism was practiced even by stations placed in localities where emergency events were rare, such as Red Sea Radio, which operates in the secluded resort town of Eilat. Similar to Radio Haifa, and despite its peaceful surroundings, the regional-commercial station fashioned its strategic market positioning by engaging its local audience with national Zionist themes both in everyday programming and in commemorative events (Kaplan, in press). It thus appears that beyond the times of war national sentiments are ubiquitous in the privatized Israel radio, not because privatization in and of itself produces nationalism, but because across the organizational field commercial stations now compete for public legitimacy and attention by engaging with popular national sentiments shared by a majority of their audience. The last example brings us to the second aspect of civic mediated nationalism emerging in our study, namely, its localized, periphery-based appeal. During the war residents of the north occasionally used the term “State of the North” to indicate their discontent not only from the retreat of central state authorities but also from the sense of indifference they experienced from state media and public opinion in central Israel who carried on undisturbed with their daily schedules. This discontent and sense of isolation should not be taken as an example of a separatist local identity, as sometimes argued by globalization scholars who envisioned that local and commercial factors would dissolve the unifying ethos of the nation-state (Ram 2005, 15). Rather, the northern residents considered themselves true bearers of national patriotism, celebrating their resilience under fire as part of the wider national struggle and as an act of civic solidarity. Precisely because Israel’s periphery is recurrently subjected to borderland security threats, it easily becomes a palpable signifier of national values.3 In the face of competition from other media actors in the field, Radio Haifa’s marketing strategy leveraged this regional tendency by emphasizing national content and values. Moreover, by extending its coverage to sites of national conflict beyond its regional scope—whether in Israel’s southern frontier or in the greater CNN-mediated Middle East—it could present itself to local audiences as an actor at the top national level. In analyzing how commercial logic and peripheral positioning figure in national identification promoted by radio broadcasting, we have focused on emic perceptions held by radio staff and on the views of selected audiences. This is not to say that other audiences may not have formed different interpretations of these broadcasts. Further studies of media are called for to examine how commercial versus state and regional versus center dynamics play out in

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other settings and in other national contexts. For example, a study of Indian television in Bangalore presents a similar emphasis on the role of regional, private television networks in articulating national identity through profitable hybrid programming (McMillin 2001). Although limited in scope, this study serves to problematize recent theorizing on the effects of globalization. Media scholars provided variable accounts for these effects, from homogenization of media institutions and products (Gordon 2008; Held et al. 1999), through pressures toward divergent and fragmented broadcasting systems (Katz 1996; Liebes 1999), through assemblages of hybridized formations (McMillin 2001). A related claim considers globalization as responsible for foundational transformations that take place mainly inside the national environment and affect state authority from within (Sassen 2006). Indeed, our study coincides with this latter tendency, underscoring how even in times of emergency state institutions may withdraw from the public arena in favor of globally induced commercial actors. However, our findings also challenge the prevalent assumption common to most of the aforementioned studies. These often take for granted that globalizing dynamics imply also denationalization dynamics, such that globally induced structures necessarily transform—if not undermine—national sentiments among local audiences (Katz 1996; Liebes 1999) or disintegrate national identities more broadly (Beck 2000; Sassen 2006). In contrast, the structural changes in our study from state to private radio ownership and from state to substate agency did not undermine or transform the production of national sentiments. Radio Haifa’s programming did not offer new interpretations of nationalism. In the face of competition among multiple media agents, it simply attempted to stimulate national sentiments more “efficiently” than the single state-run media monopole has had in the past. In this sense, the seeming anomaly of our finding could be taken as an exemplar and inform existing theory, in line with the extended case method approach (Burawoy 1991, 10). It suggests that as global pressures advance the commercialization of an organizational field, local agents gain new ways to market, advertise, and promote culturally available sentiments of nationalism, particularly when facing times of emergency. Ultimately, as global processes permeate the nation-state, they may weaken the state but not necessarily the nation. Acknowledgment We thank the staff at Radio Haifa and all the interviewees for sharing their experiences with us. Thanks to Saskia Sassen and the participants of the 2009 Cities and New Wars Projects at Columbia University for their valuable exchange of ideas.

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Avner Ben-Amos, Paul Frosh, Haim Hazan, Yagil Levy, Edna Lomky-Feder, Oren Meyers, Ronen Shamir, as well as JCE editor Marybeth Stalp and the anonymous reviewers provided us with constructive comments on earlier versions of this work. A preliminary version of this study was presented at the Annual Conference of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2008.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is part of a research project approved and supported by the Hammer Scholarship of the Second Authority for Television and Radio.

Notes 1.

Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanese infrastructure resulted in more than a thousand dead, mostly Lebanese civilians, and led to the temporal displacement of an estimated one million Lebanese. Hezbollah attacks resulted in 163 Israeli dead, of them 44 civilians, and a displacement of 300,000–500,000 residents from Northern Israel (Guardian 2006; Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2008b). 2. Additional interviews in state radio stations were conducted with the assistance of Noa Bergman. All source material was translated from Hebrew. Interviewees chose to be identified by name. 3. The image of peripheral Israel as patriotic and national is often contrasted with images of the metropolitan center as globally oriented, sometimes nicknamed, “State of Tel Aviv.” Similar dynamics were found in another study of Israeli radio (Neiger, Zandberg, and Meyers, 2011) and in a study of the social and ethnic stratification underlying civic participation in military service (Levi 2007).

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Bios Danny Kaplan is a senior lecturer at the department of sociology and anthropology and directs the men studies track in gender studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. His research interests focus on the politics of friendship and national solidarity through the prism of media and popular culture. Orit Hirsch is a doctoral candidate in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Her ethnographic research focuses on the negotiation of local and global identities in a Greek island in times of economic crisis, particularly through the prism of human-animal relations.