Andrea Stanton's new history of the Palestine Broadcasting Service represents a unique approach to the history of Palestine. A number of excellent books about British Mandate Palestine have been published in recent years, and Stanton's fresh and original study of the state radio service adds to that collection. Her study carefully balances political and social history, supports and strengthens recent trends in Mandate scholarship, and contributes to the broader history of radio.

In her introduction, Stanton recalls being asked by an audience member at a presentation why she was spending so much time studying “something so unimportant” (p. ix). In a history fraught with interethnic and interreligious conflict, is a book dedicated to radio really essential? Historians have long ignored radio in Palestine, and Stanton clearly feels obligated to offer a justification of her focus. In order to do so, she argues that “it is necessary to resuscitate an awareness of the strangeness of radio” (p. 29), which was a new medium for spreading information and, as a result, had a fairly limited audience, though no smaller, she argues, than the most popular Arabic-language newspapers of the day on which most scholars of Mandate Palestine draw heavily. The fact that one need not be literate in order to hear and understand radio news, combined with the existence of a government program to hand out radios to villagers, bolsters her argument that its reach was at least comparable to that of newspapers.

Stanton makes her strongest case when highlighting the differences between British colonial and Arab nationalist methods of using radio to further political goals. British programming efforts served to create or at least bolster “imagined listening communities [which] reinforced rather than challenged the established division of the country into Arab and Jew” (p. 34). Instead of using this modern medium to encourage Arabs and Jews to join as citizens of a unified Palestine, PBS administrators allotted specific hours for Hebrew programs and other times for Arabic offerings, which only reified notions of a religiously and ethnically divided Palestine. The programs themselves reveal far more about the colonial mindset than the Arabic and Jewish audiences that the British assumed to have distinctive interests. Arabic radio programming was largely devoted to religious services and farming lessons, while Jewish radio played classical music for what the British supposed to be a more educated listenership with high cultural interests.

Conversely, radio sellers around the country (both Arab and Jewish) were originally equal-opportunity salesmen. In the 1930s, Jewish radio sellers advertised in the Arabic press and vice versa, though such practices were halted during the Great Revolt (1936–39). Stanton notes that in some cases identical advertisements written in both Arabic and Hebrew were published in different newspapers, a point that in her view contradicts British assumptions of a divided community.

While the British used PBS as a tool to create separate communities, Zionists and Arab nationalists tried from the late 1930s through the 1940s to co-opt the station to further their own distinct nationalist objectives. In contrast to Algeria, where anti-government forces sought to undermine the French-sponsored Radio Algeria during their fight for independence, Arab and Jewish Palestinians used PBS as “part of each group's broader demand for recognition of theirs as the sole ‘natural’ claim to Palestine” (p. 169). It is here, where the history of radio cuts across the history of the Arab-Jewish conflict, that Stanton's book is most engaging and offers its most important contribution to Mandate historiography. Analysis of radio programming provides fresh evidence of Zionist and Palestinian nationalist uses of the tools of their colonial rulers to express their distinct identities and ambitions. Chapter 5, “Claiming the PBS,” which compares such efforts among Arabs and Jews, is particularly rich. However, some readers may be disappointed that Stanton did not extend that comparative approach further rather than focus largely on the Arab population.

Various elements of Stanton's focus and findings dovetail with those of other recent works. For example, her discussion of women's roles in radio broadcasting builds upon Ellen Fleischmann's work on women in The Nation and its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Similarly, her discussion of Arabs’ use of radio programming to unite Muslims and Christians as Palestinians complements recent analysis of the relationship between religion and nationalism in Palestine found in Laura Robson's Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 2010)—in the same series as this volume, but surprisingly not cited—and my own Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917–1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). All three books insist that some Palestinian Arabs fought to overcome religious divisions through national identification despite British policies designed to further divide the community.

A final contribution lies in the detailed chapter “Selling Radio, Selling Radios,” which surveys radio sales and programming in order to add an Arab element to the rapidly growing field of radio history. Over the last decade and a half, scholars of radio history in the American and European context have produced a number of well-reviewed works, such as Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, edited by Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2001), but coverage of the Middle East has been largely absent. Stanton's work highlights everything from newspaper advertisements for radios, patterns of program consumption, and government regulations, to rates of radio sales. The chapter is a bit too long, but Stanton successfully paints a fascinating picture of a Palestine vastly different from the conflict-ridden society depicted in political histories of the region.

The one disappointment in an otherwise elegantly produced book is the quality of the images, many of which are too small and dark. This critique aside, “This is Jerusalem Calling” is a strong contribution to Mandate history. Stanton has reinforced emerging interpretations of colonial mentalities, the development of Palestinian nationalism, and relations between Palestine's Arab and Jewish communities. Moreover, she has offered compelling evidence of the social and political influence of radio. It is a book that all historians of Mandate Palestine, and, indeed, other regions, must take seriously.