Published on Monday, December 20, 2004 by the Associated PressDeepti Haleja
The studio is in East Jerusalem, the transmitter in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Half the staff is Israeli, the others Palestinian. Some on-air programs are in Hebrew, others in Arabic.
From its founders to its employees to its musical offerings, the mission is equality and peaceful coexistence at All For Peace radio, the only jointly run Israeli-Palestinian radio in the Middle East.
The station started broadcasting music and talk radio over the Internet in April, and says it gets up to 10,000 hits a day. A few weeks ago, a radio transmitter was put in place to send its signal out over FM radio.
In many of the 18 to 21 hours each day the station plays music, at least one Arabic song and one Hebrew song are played. On talk shows, 30 hours throughout the week, newspaper headlines in Hebrew are read in Arabic, and vice versa. Interview subjects run the gamut, from members of the Israeli parliament to representatives of the militant group Hamas, said station co-directors Shimon Malka and Maysa Baransi-Siniora.
The point is to help Israelis and Palestinians know each other. "We're not doing this work for people who are with us," said Baransi-Siniora, 28. "We want to reach the people who don't know where they stand."
Malka and Baransi-Siniora visited the United States this month to raise funds. They launched the station with a grant from the European Union that covers about 80 percent of the budget, but that money will run out soon. They say they need about $750,000 a year to run the operation.
"We started with no clue about what we were going to do," said Malka, 37, an Israeli whose prior media work was in television. "Every day we're climbing a bit higher, a bit deeper."
The station is a joint project of the Jewish-Arab Centre for Peace at Givat Haviva and the Palestinian organization Biladi, which publishes The Jerusalem Times. The organizations have previously partnered to put together Crossing Borders, a youth magazine.
In a region where the other side's perspective is often drowned out by inflammatory words, All for Peace wants to teach listeners to disagree respectfully. Even in the interview, Malka and Baransi-Siniora had different opinions on why a radio transmitter they bought worth thousands of dollars has been tied up for months in Israeli customs.
The Palestinian thought the Israeli government was trying to discourage their effort to bring the sides together. The Israeli thought that because the overall situation is so tense, the bureacracy doesn't want added complications from a joint Israeli-Palestinian radio station.
Malka criticizes the Israeli and Palestinian media alike as one-sided. "People are consuming media almost as a bible, 'If it's on television, it must be true,'" he said.
He and Baransi-Siniora are committed to covering the day's events, but also providing perspective from both sides. They point with pride to their handling of the recent death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
People "were just amazed at how we covered it," Baransi-Siniora said.
The station runs with a small staff of 14 people, Israeli and Palestinian, plus volunteers. Its founders have faced skepticism that the station could ever get off the ground, and sour responses from some relatives and friends.
Malka said his mother "can't believe this is what her only son is doing."
But he and Baransi-Siniora are determined to keep on, and to reach as many hearts and minds as possible.
"I want my kid to be raised in a secure, democratic place, to recognize herself as a Palestinian and to understand and accept that there are Israelis as neighbors," Baransi-Siniora said.
Malka echoed the thought, describing how he and his family never travel together to avoid all being caught in a bombing or other violent event. He said working at the station was a way to take responsibility for making things better.
"I could keep working in Israeli television; I choose not to," he said. Through the radio station, "I can leave something behind me by taking more people to see the other side as equals."
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