For Ashkenazic Israelis, Arabic radio signified difference and fear, not familiarity.

Evidence

A far more common experience for a station-grazer, however, would be to encounter a vast field of Arabic-language stations. Unlike Momik’s father, whose nightly peregrinations through the ether brought familiar, if not entirely welcome, voices and words, Ashkenazic Israelis confronted with Arabic stations encountered difference and strangeness: microtonal music, which they did not appreciate, and Arabic declamation, which they rarely understood, and feared if they did. When the dial reached the robust signal of Kol Yisrael, they might well have felt as though a ray of light had pierced the gloom. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 729

Categorization

• XREF: The soundscape framing — encountering unfamiliar sonic territory as estrangement — parallels the reader’s work on keynote sounds and signal-vs-noise.
• FICTION: A dial-grazing sequence as scene: the sensory shock of microtonal Arabic music on an otherwise familiar medium could anchor a character moment.