How Israel Can Win the PR War

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
19 July '10

In yesterday’s post, I focused on a disturbing incident described by PR guru Frank Luntz in a Jerusalem Post interview — an incident in which American Jewish college students proved utterly unwilling or unable to defend Israel. But Luntz also offered a constructive strategy for how to improve this situation.

Again, he used an example to illustrate his point: a meeting with a group of “high income, high education, politically connected” Brits who were “so hostile to Israel” that “I’d given up … There was no message that resonated remotely well with them. And I finally said ‘to hell with it. We’ll give them the Hamas Charter’” — or, more accurately, a “word for word” version taken from Hamas’s website and then “edited down to one page.”

The results surpassed his wildest expectations: at the end, “28 of the 30 said, ‘How dare Israel negotiate with these people?’”

Luntz’s point is simple: when people have preconceived notions about Israel, it’s very hard to dislodge those notions — to convince them, for instance, that Israel did not wantonly target civilians in last year’s war in Gaza, or has not created a humanitarian crisis there by its blockade. But it is possible to persuade them that no matter how bad Israel is, its enemies are much, much worse — and therefore even someone who dislikes Israel should nevertheless back it against those enemies.

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