Peacock, professor of history at the University of Alabama, examines radio broadcasts to the Middle East from the late 1940s through the Six-Day War of 1967. She focuses primarily on broadcasts from Britain, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and the United States, weaving together existing scholarship with her own archival research. Her work draws overwhelmingly on English-language sources: the BBC, the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), and the Middle East Centre Archive at Oxford University, among others. Several chapters explore the events of the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Six-Day War.
Peacock’s account of the propaganda battles surrounding the summer 1947 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) mission, the United Nations Partition Resolution of November 1947, the Exodus affair, and the 1948 war (which she refers to as the Nakba) conveys Arab anger while paying little attention to the Arab rejection of the compromise represented by the Partition Resolution. Drawing on the inaccurate 1967 broadcasts that declared an Arab victory shortly before the full extent of defeat was revealed for all to see, Peacock casts these narratives as “grand state narratives” that, in her view, “set themselves up for their own collapse.” She further equates the messaging produced by the British, Soviets, Egyptians, and Americans as “always insufficient . . . to describe a ‘truth’ that would sustain popular consensus and belief.” These shortcomings, she argues, constituted an “inherent contradiction, wherein the very language intended to manufacture consensus was no longer able to describe the complex world it inhabited.” Peacock contends that a “widening chasm between propaganda’s vision of the world and the lived experiences of Arab-speaking populations” meant that its inadequacy “ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the state-run audiosphere and the power it supported.” By the end of the Suez Crisis, she concludes that “Western radio’s claims to truth had begun to collapse,” a breakdown that also extended to the secular Communist radio propaganda of those decades.
Deploying the overwrought prose fashionable in recent decades, Peacock argues that “over time, when Arab populations began to imagine for themselves identities beyond the circumscribed parameters of the state’s discursive confines, they challenged the hegemonic connections between sign and reference that the state broadcasters had established for decades. New sounds come from nonstate sources became more important, offering the voice of ‘Islamic counterpublics’ that more accurately reflected people’s experience and aspirations.” In other words, Peacock suggests that the rise of Islamic politics resulted in part from the illusions and falsehoods spread by Arab propaganda during the Six-Day War. She also views the emergence of Islamism as in part a response to the failures of the secular “audiosphere” maintained by Arab states, the Western powers, and the Soviet Union.
Peacock disappointingly neglects the considerable body of scholarship produced in recent decades on Islamism as an enduring factor in Arab rejectionism since the 1930s, including works by Meir Litvak, Matthias Küntzel, Benny Morris, and the present reviewer. Additionally, she neglects the topic of Nazi radio propaganda to Arab and Muslim audiences during World War II, as studied by Küntzel and this reviewer. Similarly, when Peacock incorrectly writes that “many in the [U.S.] State Department believed it would be better to remain silent over the airwaves than to risk highlighting their own allegiance with the Zionist program,” she ignores the detailed account of the State Department’s opposition to the Zionist project found in the reviewer’s 2022 book, Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State.
Peacock offers helpful empirical material on the propaganda wars in the Middle East during the Cold War. But her suggestion that politics articulated in an Islamic key emerged partly as a response to the “deceit” of the contending parties is less convincing.
Jeffrey Herf University of Maryland