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Radio station tries to ease Middle East tension with music

"The station views music as being a universal language that can cross all borders and reach all people, all nations and all religions."

Guy Bar, creative director at Gitam BBDO

Amid the latest flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, there are plenty of raised voices on either side. A new ad campaign suggests a different way to address the divide: Speak, or even sing, to both sides at once.

The campaign is for a radio station, 93.6 RAM FM, which broadcasts from Jerusalem and Ramallah, reaching Israelis and Palestinians in English, rather than Hebrew or Arabic.

The station was set up last year by Issie Kirsh, a South African Jew. The idea came from a similar station, Radio 702, that he set up in the apartheid era, allowing South African blacks and whites to speak on the same call-in and talk shows.

The station underlines its impartiality by avoiding Israeli or Arab songs and featuring the music of American, British and other English-speaking artists.

Some of them, including the Beatles and Bob Marley, are prominent in the ad campaign, which has started to appear on billboards, in newspapers and magazines, and on buses.

The portraits are rendered through a kind of pointillist technique that uses the stamps applied to passports at border crossings to reinforce the idea that music is capable of surmounting such barriers.

Unusual for an ad campaign in the region, the same images were used in Israeli and in Palestinian areas.

Guy Bar, creative director at Gitam BBDO, the Tel Aviv agency that created the campaign, said: "The station views music as being a universal language that can cross all borders and reach all people, all nations and all religions."

A spokeswoman for the station said it was spending about US$400,000 on the campaign. So far, she said, it has attracted only small audiences, but it hopes those will grow so it can start selling ads, too.
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