The Ship That Would Not Stay off the Air

In October 1988, Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed helped launch a radio station with no legal broadcasting license, transmitting from the ship MV Eretz HaTzvi anchored in international waters off the Israeli coast. The station took its name, Arutz Sheva, meaning Channel Seven, and its founding purpose was explicit: to counter what its founders saw as the one sided, pacifistic voice of the existing pirate station Voice of Peace, and to give religious Zionism and the movement to settle Judea and Samaria a broadcast voice the Israeli state media of the era was not providing.

Broadcasting from a ship kept Arutz Sheva technically outside Israeli jurisdiction, a workaround other pirate stations had used for years, but it did not keep the station out of Israeli politics or Israeli courts. In February 1999 the Knesset moved to grant Arutz Sheva a broadcasting license, an attempt to bring the operation into legal compliance after more than a decade on the air. Israel's Supreme Court nullified that license in March 2002, and in October 2003 ten station employees were convicted of illegal broadcasting covering the years 1995 to 1998, receiving fines and community service. Arutz Sheva's radio broadcasts ended in 2003, closing a fifteen year run that had made it one of the most recognized pirate broadcasters in Israeli history.