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Pi|« U THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE July 14, 1978
Liberation
Israel goes 11 days without ‘idiot box’
by Abe Kramer
UrMt Di|M
Israel had a great awakening
recently. A strike blacked out
radio and television for eleven
days—and an astonishing thing
happened. After initial consterna
tion—“What on earth are we
going to do?”—suddenly it was as
if people had emerged en masse
from darkened caves rubbing their
eyes in the light!
A rash of articles appeared in the
newspapers describing how people
were doing things again they had
all but forgotten. They found
themselves reading books, going to
the cinema, strolling in the streets
in the evenings, visiting and being
visited, even making phone calls,
without having to worry about
breaking into somebody’s
watching the Mabat Newsreel,
“Baretta” or “Starsky and Hutch.”
Israelis rediscovered the art of
conversation, or at least of
communicating on a direct
personal basis. They went to bed
earlier, to catch up somewhat on a
decade of lost sleep! There even
were predictions—with glee from
religious sources—that nine
months from now will see a baby
boom!
To this writer, as a fairly recent
immigrant from America, it was all
so "deja vu", it fairly made my
hair—or should I say antennae?—
stand on end! We must remember
that Israelis have just experienced
their first decade of being enslaved
by the tube, sometimes also called
the idiot box. In the U.S., we went
through it all in the '50s—the first
decade of T.V.; the initial
fascination with that miracle in our
Along with the garbage there is
much that is good—educational,
cultural, informational as well as
entertainment. For the great news
and sports events alone, there as
here, television can claim that it
justifies itself.
Still, I always felt that T. V. was a
terrible intrusion in the home and
still do. Back in the U.S. in the 'SOs
I resisted as long as I could. I even
wrote a piece for a local paper
about ours being “the last family
on the block” to get a T.V.
I could therefore later empathize
with David Ben-Gurion. I thought
he was 100 percent right when he
resisted the introduction of
television in Israel as long as he
could. Moreover, I was privileged
to have had the opportunity to tell
that to him personally.
I was working on a story about
Americans who served in the
Jewish Legion with him during
World War 1.1 wrote to him to ask
if 1 could possibly come to see him
on my next visit to Israel to talk to
him about that experience. A few
weeks later 1 received a reply.
Characteristic of the great man he
was, he had sat down in his cottage
at Sde Boker and had written me in
his own hand on a sheet of
ordinary lined pad paper inviting
me to come see him when I came to
Israel. That document is one of my
greatest treasures.
Accordingly, when we had our
conversation—it was in July 1972,
in the completely floor-to-ceiling,
book-lined study in his home in Tel
Aviv—I made the remark to him
that I had thoroughly agreed with
him about no T.V. in Erelz Yisrael.
By then, of course, the battle had
already been lost. He said nothing,
just shrugged resignedly, a gesture
that spoke more eloquently than
any words.
Well, the tube is back in its full
glory in the living rooms of Israel.
All we can do now is—shrug
resignedly.
living rooms, with anything on
that small screen just as long as it
moved! (The same process, no
doubt, that our grandfathers went
through with the early movies.)
We watched the monster
develop, grow and spread, were
swept along in the big push to get 3
T.V. set in every home. We saw it
take over and change living,
cultural, thinking, even eating
habits. We saw the viewing hours
stretch into ever later “late shows”
and ever earlier “morning shows,”
and as a result we went to work
bleary-eyed and drowsy. Here too
this has been happening. While as
yet Israel does not have round-the-
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clock T.V. broadcasting, the
evening viewing hours have been
extended far past midnight—and
that is late here where the day
starts early for most.
In the U.S. in those first years,
movie attendance declined and
theaters went out of business.
People lost contact with friends,
lost the habit of visiting,
convening, reading, going out
evenings. All this has repeated
itself in Israel's experience in its
first decade of television. In the
U.S. we had strikes tgo.
breakdowns, blackouts and we
experienced the same sense of
liberation as the Israelis just did—
until things went back to
“normal."
The insidious thing about T. V. is
its availability and its attraction,
whether what is on is good or bad.
Is color T. V. on the way ?
JERUSALEM—Knesset Finance Committee chairman
Shlomo Lorincz said he would voice the committee’s opposition to
the introduction of color broadcasts on Israel TV.
MK Danny Rosolio raised the issue at the committee meeting,
claiming that the change-over from black-and-white would cost
SI.5 million rather than the S3.5 million quoted by Authority
director-general Yitzhak Livni.
Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin added his voice against
color TV. He told reporters that despite the social and economic
plight of many citizens, they would sell all their possessions to
purchase color sets when the time came.
Aliza Tamir of the Histadrut Central Committee expressed the
same sentiments in a letter to Secretary-General Yeruham Meshel.
She said the economic conditions in the country do not make this
the right time to introduce color TV, and she asked that Meshel
raise the matter at the next meeting of the Committee.
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March 15, 1978
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