Fundamentally Freund: Thinking Outside the 'Hasbara Bubble'

Michael Freund
JPost
18 August 09

Always on the lookout for a chance to talk up Israel while traveling abroad, I decided to utilize a recent appointment with a physical therapist in Manhattan for more than just a stretch of my stubborn hamstring. As this licensed professional politely twisted me into seemingly impossible contortions, perhaps mistaking me for some out-of-costume comic book hero, I ignored the desire to scream and instead asked what his impression was of the Jewish state.

"Israel? That's near Gaza or something, isn't it?" he said, applying yet another sideways yank to one of my legs, which quickly began to resemble those obtuse angles we had learned about way back in high-school geometry.

"Yes," I practically screeched, while quietly praying that his knowledge of human anatomy surpassed his acquaintance with Middle Eastern geography, "that's correct."

"And aren't they fighting against you, or at least they were?" he asked without any sense of irony as he applied a technique to my lower body that I was sure had originated with the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of the Iraqi insurgency.

In between bouts of occasionally gut-wrenching pulls and stretches, I proceeded to give him a brief discourse on the history and intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict. How effective it was I cannot say, though thankfully it did appear to distract him somewhat, giving my tormented muscles some much-needed relief.

Finally, before parting, he told me that he had always liked Israel and wanted to visit, and truly hoped to make it there someday.

AS I hobbled down onto the busy streets of New York, I began to consider the anecdotal evidence that I had just gathered regarding Israel's status in the minds of Americans, and what lessons could be learned about our efforts at hasbara, or public diplomacy.

Here was a well-educated non-Jewish professional in media-saturated Manhattan, where hardly a day goes by without various media outlets bashing the Jewish state, and yet he nonetheless felt a basic sense of sympathy and even support for our predicament. And while he would apparently have trouble finding Israel on a map, let alone understanding the intricacies of our military, diplomatic and political challenges, he had heard of our little country and thought of it as a place he would very much like to see.

This scene repeated itself - minus the leg stretches of course - in various other conversations that I had with a range of people in the New York metropolitan area. Clearly, there is a lot of general backing out there among the American public for the Jewish state, much more than perhaps many of us suppose.
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