Hasbara 2.0: What Is Effective Hasbara?

Eldad Tzioni
www.newsrealblog.com
09 February '11

We have already defined hasbara as promoting Israel’s message, but we need to go a little bit further than that: we need to define what effective hasbara is.

I would define effective hasbara as having two critical components:

1. It improves public opinion of Israel

2. It is accessible to a large audience

The first part, improving public opinion of Israel, is actually easier than it sounds.

Zionists have over the past couple of decades acclimated themselves to being on the defensive — to arguing that Israel is not the evil entity that it is portrayed as. We have lost the forest for the trees. We are so stuck in the arguments on the haters’ frameworks that we never come up for breath and show them Israel as it is.

Step back, forget being on the defensive, take the conflict out of the picture for now, think about everything you know about Israel from personal experience — and tell the world about that.

Recently, someone sent me some photos he took at a supermarket in Gush Etzion. It is an ordinary scene of people shopping, that just happened to be in one of those notorious “settlements” that everyone hears so much about. And in the center of the scene we could see this:

A religious Jew, a “settler,” was smiling and apparently joking with an Arab woman who was also shopping there.

Scenes like this take place thousands of times every day in Israel. However, the rest of the world is clueless about it. They think of Israeli Jews as monsters, and no one is showing them the truth.

After I posted this photo on my blog, a number of sites in Europe copied my post — an ordinary photo of people shopping became news!

(Read full "Hasbara 2.0: What Is Effective Hasbara?")

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