The Israel Broadcast Authority (IBA) aired its very last program on Israeli television on May 14, signaling the end of what was, until the 1990s, the Jewish state’s only regular TV channel. Commenting on the significance of its closing, Liel Leibovitz writes:
IBA saw itself—and made sure others saw it, too—as the indisputable voice of the nation. Its demise, which is the result of complicated political and economic processes that even most Israelis find too exasperating to follow, is a good opportunity to reflect on the many ways in which Israel has changed over the years. . . .
[T]he establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 put all broadcast transmissions under the thumb of the newly appointed government, headed by David Ben-Gurion. . . . Members of the political opposition were routinely denied [radio] airtime. . . When [some] poor creative souls tried, in 1962, to freshen up the format and air a more modern-sounding news program, Ben-Gurion called and demanded they scrap their plans and go back to the Soviet style of reading the official news. Ben-Gurion was not one for change. Which, naturally, meant that setting up a TV station was out of the question.
With Ben-Gurion’s retirement in 1963, the road was paved to welcome in the new medium, but the former prime minister’s spirit still prevailed. When broadcasts finally began, Israeli TV . . . was still tightly controlled from above, but not as heavy-handedly as broadcasting had been under Ben-Gurion. . . . The new lords of the screen looked and sounded like the establishment they embodied. They were almost exclusively male, and they overwhelmingly supported the dominant Labor party. There were hardly any Mizraḥi Jews among them, to say nothing of religious Israelis. They spoke proper, beautiful Hebrew, and they had no patience for anyone whose background was different. . . .
Only in 1993 did Israel get a second channel, but it took until the end of the century for a number of competitive stations to appear. Leibovitz concludes:
The decision to shut the channel down, then, has left some, mainly current and former employees, feeling nostalgic, but most Israelis barely suppressed a yawn. A few critics argued that by shutting down the station, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was simply taking a page out of the old Ben-Gurion playbook and curbing the press, but that criticism failed to resonate in a densely populated, highly competitive, and thoroughly free media landscape. . . . Liberty, in the marketplace of ideas and of commodities alike, has thrust Israel to unprecedented heights, propelling it to prosperity and innovation.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/234343/farewell-israels-state-run-tv