I wasn’t aware of this and it’s an interesting bit of political nonsense that had a technical work-around if not solution.
Israel’s War Against Color TV
If you go through the somewhat technical description of the (NTSC) color video signal, there really were (are) parts called the “front porch” and “back porch” on each side of the horizontal synchronization pulse. It can seem a bit strange, but that is sort of what the signal looks like on an oscilloscope trace.