Israel: The Please-Like-Us Virus We Seem Unable to Get Over - by Sheri Oz

Israeli society has not yet seen the need for applying Israeli ingenuity to serious study of the Please-like-us virus.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
02 April '20..

At the close of the March 31 episode of Uvda, her weekly news investigation program, Ilana Dayan told the viewing audience that we may soon get news that Tuvia Tzafir has recovered from the Coronavirus. Tzafir is one of Israel’s veteran comedians, and a much loved one. He was interviewed while under quarantine at home.

Seventy-four years old and with other health problems, it is remarkable that Tzafir has overcome the infection in his own home when so many others have to be hospitalized. He and Yael, his wife of almost 50 years, have an easy banter and apparently light-headed approach to life. Perhaps, as they say, ‘laughter is the best medicine’.

Earlier in the program, Dayan explored the new ‘Operations Center’ for the ‘War against the Corona Pandemic’. For the first time, medical professionals were working together with experts from the armed forces, the security industries and the Mossad, one of Israel’s intelligence agencies. Viewers were shown how this new collaboration is enabling Israel to acquire medical supplies that the Health Ministry and hospitals would have been unable to appropriate on their own. Not only that — laboratories that engineer weaponry have now been put to the task of engineering re-usable masks and respirators. Israeli ingenuity at its best.

In an interview with H’, Director of the Mossad’s Technology Department, a highly impressed Dayan suggested that the collaboration may open up opportunities previously unimaginable. She wondered how:

… with respect to Iran, the new enemy may be useful, perhaps, in the war against old enemies. A new world of possibilities may open up for the Mossad. … I am just thinking – this comes from me and not from you — what would an Iranian nuclear scientist be prepared to do today in order that someone would resuscitate his mother?

In this one question, Dayan shows us that there is an infection beyond which many Israelis seem unable, or unwilling, to move. That is the ‘See-what-we-can-do-for-you-so-please-like-us’ Syndrome. And it has afflicted us from our very start as a new modern state.

Much of Israeli hasbara concerns itself with describing new medical and technological inventions each of which improves the lives of so many people around the world. And if we do such good for humanity, the thinking apparently goes, maybe they will stop hating us and maybe the UN will stop passing resolutions attacking Israel’s right to exist.

I doubt that any Iranian nuclear scientist or political leader would change his or her mind about Israel because an Israeli invention was needed to resuscitate his or her mother.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Different but doable. In Europe, Israel needs a bottom-up approach to diplomacy - by Evelyn Gordon

The problem with traditional diplomacy is that it generally focuses on high-level officials, both elected politicians and civil servants. These are people with zero incentive to rock the boat on Israel’s behalf because they would rather spend their political capital on issues that most of their countrymen (and they themselves) actually care about, which rarely include Israel and the Palestinians. And in Europe, not rocking the boat means adhering to the anti-Israel consensus that has long dominated the E.U. Thus while this kind of diplomacy remains essential for numerous issues, it often isn’t effective at generating change.

Evelyn Gordon..
JNS.org..
11 December '19..

For years, I considered Europe a lost cause from Israel’s perspective and decried the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Euro-centric focus, arguing that it should instead devote more effort to places like Africa, Asia and South America, which seemed to offer better prospects for flipping countries into the pro-Israel camp. But the past few years have proven that Europe isn’t hopeless—if Israel changes its traditional modus operandi.

This has been evident, first of all, in the alliances that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed with several countries in eastern and southern Europe, resulting in these countries repeatedly blocking anti-Israel decisions at the European Union level. Previously, Israeli diplomacy had focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe. Netanyahu’s key insight was that conservative, nationalist governments seeking to preserve their own nation-states would have more instinctive sympathy for a Jewish state than the liberal universalists who dominate in Western Europe, and whose goal is to replace nation-states with an ever-closer European union.

But as several recent events show, even Western Europe isn’t a lost cause. The difference is that there, conventional high-level diplomacy won’t work. Rather, the key to change is the fact that most Europeans, like most people everywhere, don’t really care that much about Israel, the Palestinians or their unending conflict. Consequently, small groups of committed activists can exert a disproportionate influence on policy.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Would This Work Better? Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Reactionary, Totalitarian Palestine - by Divest This!

Perhaps it is our general wussiness that keeps us on the course of dialog, discussion, argument, persuasion and compromise, rather than jumping into the sewer with those who have made it their life’s work to see the world’s one Jewish state dismantled. Although given the state of Israel and the Jewish world – vulnerable though it might be – versus the hell on earth Israel’s enemies have constructed for themselves, perhaps hanging on to our humanity is a wise strategic, as well as a moral choice.

Divest This!
Elder of Ziyon..
22 July "19..

It dawned on me that all of Israel’s friends and defenders have been wasting our time over the last several decades.

Instead of writing thoughtful essays that provide facts and perspectives while making the case for the Jewish state, or organizing talks, educational programs or other campaigns that present arguments in favor of our cause or against our foes, we could all have spent that time doing something much simpler, so simple that it requires almost no thought.

So what could we have been doing, rather than bombarding the world with longwinded explanations based on facts and logic?

The answer is simplicity itself, and so easy to implement. For all it would involve would be to never use the term Palestine or Palestinian without first prefixing it with the string of pejoratives titling this piece.

We would not have to be mindless robots uttering the same phrase over and over again. Certainly whenever we find ourselves in debate, we would make sure the words “racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, totalitarian” precede the use of any reference to Palestine, Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas (and maybe their friends and allies throughout the Middle East). But we could get creative with the ways we slip those words into the discussion over and over and over again. For instance:

Comparative: Yes, there is a difference between the racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, totalitarian, corrupt Palestinian authority and the racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, totalitarian, religious fanatics in Hamas. But the two have important things in common: they’re both racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary totalitarians.

Generous: You are free to support all the racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, totalitarian political movements you like, including the racist, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, totalitarian Palestinian movement. Just don’t also demand to be considered progressive, much less tell us you get to decide who is anti-racist and who isn’t.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Effectively countering the “Palestinian” narrative that still continues to gain adherents - by Ardie Geldman

...Long ago the Arabs were taught that winning people’s support depends on capturing their hearts; their minds then readily follow. This is how they continue to successfully enlist and strengthen supporters who visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Ardie Geldman..
MiDA..
29 June '18..

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian activist groups arrive at Ben-Gurion Airport or cross into the country from Jordan over the Allenby Bridge each year. Understanding who they are and how they are indoctrinated is an important step in getting them to question the misinformation they are fed and challenge their misunderstandings of the issues here.

Israel issued a ban in October 2017 on the entrance of some 20 foreign NGOs whose activities are considered harmful to the country’s security. Despite this, hundreds of others who come to the region to demonstrate solidarity with the Arabs and who even openly declare hostility to Israel, are nevertheless allowed freedom of movement and expression by the authorities of what they claim to be a fascist state.

As founder of “iTalkIsrael,” an Israel advocacy and think tank initiative, I speak annually with some 500 foreign visitors to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This is only the tip of the iceberg. These encounters, on the average of two to three each week, take place in my town of Efrat, a town the majority of these visitors see as situated in “occupied Palestine.”

These delegations come mostly from the United States and are usually of some Christian affiliation, though they are decidedly not Christian-Zionists. The smaller number of European groups with whom I meet are self-defined social justice or human rights organizations and tend to eschew any religious affiliation.

They come to Efrat because they are curious to visit an “illegal settlement” and to have the opportunity to meet with an “illegal settler.” Some come to gather first-hand information about settlements to assist them in their pro-Palestinian activism upon their return home. Some come to confront the settler with whom they meet, elevating this hapless individual into an unwilling spokesman for the nearly half-a-million Jews living over the 1949 Green Line. They solicit his or her response to the suffering inflicted upon the Arabs by the “Occupation.”

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Israel Hiding Evidence of Its Own Innocence is Really Not Helpful - by Evelyn Gordon

...Israel has many valid answers to that question, including the fact that its civilian-to-military casualty ratio is actually lower than that of other Western armies. But these answers are useless if it doesn’t take the trouble to publicize them. Sitting on exculpatory information about a high-profile case for eight years is hardly the way to assuage its supporters’ concerns.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
15 March '17..
Link: http://evelyncgordon.com/hiding-evidence-of-its-own-innocence/

I’m not naïve enough to think that better PR would solve all of Israel’s international relations problems. But there’s no question that incompetent PR makes its situation much worse. As one example, consider Tuesday’s shocking revelation: Within about 24 hours of the most high-profile civilian casualty incident of the 2009 Gaza war, Israel had obtained evidence casting doubt on its responsibility for that death. But it sat on this evidence for more than eight years, finally releasing it only as part of a defense brief in a civil suit by the victims’ father.

The incident in question took place on January 16, 2009, when Israeli troops fighting in Gaza came under sniper fire. The troops fired two shells at an observation post that seemed to be directing the snipers. The observation post was located on the third floor of a building which, unbeknownst to the soldiers, was also the home of a well-known doctor, Izzeldin Abuelaish. Three of Abuelaish’s daughters were killed, along with one of his nieces; several other family members were wounded. Abuelaish, who worked in Israel, maintained good relations with Israelis and advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace, later became famous worldwide when he published a book about this incident and his response to it, called I Shall Not Hate.

Israel was blamed worldwide for the Abuelaish casualties and never publicly challenged the assumption of its guilt. Yet it now turns out that within a day after the incident, it had evidence indicating that its shells may not have caused the carnage.

The evidence came in the form of laboratory tests conducted on six pieces of shrapnel extracted from the two casualties treated in Israel (the other wounded weren’t brought to Israel, nor were any of the dead, so no shrapnel from the other victims was available). The tests showed that alongside traces of various explosives used by both the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas, at least one fragment contained an explosive called R-Salt, which isn’t used by the IDF but is commonly used in improvised explosive devices in Gaza. Moreover, all six fragments contained potassium nitrate, another substance not used in IDF weaponry that is used in Hamas’s homemade Qassam rockets.

A follow-up report a month later, which compared the shrapnel to the specific type of Israeli shells fired, concluded that four of the six fragments could not possibly have come from those shells; a fifth “may have come” from an IDF shell, and apparently, no conclusions were possible about the sixth.

All of the above indicates that Hamas or a smaller Palestinian organization was using the house as a weapons cache. According to the IDF, there is no other way to account for the presence of non-IDF explosives in the shrapnel.

The Palestinian Authority has never acted seriously against the terrorists, and never will - by Stephen Flatow

...Let's be grateful Israel's security forces have once again pre-empted the terrorists. But at the same time, let's learn an important lesson from this latest episode: the Palestinian Authority has never acted seriously against the terrorists, and never will. The PA regards the terrorists as "martyrs" and "heroes," and it says so every day in its newspapers, radio shows, and television programs. It allows them to operate freely, and sometimes even directly assists them. This week's photograph proves it yet again.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
24 August '16..

It's one of the most disturbing photos from Israel that I've seen in years.

I'm referring to this week's image of the hundreds of Palestinian terrorist weapons captured in Israeli raids. It was enough to send shivers down one's spine. And it revealed more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than all the panel discussions, research papers, and expert analyses with which we are always being bombarded.

Friends of Israel often complain about what they say is the Israeli Foreign Ministry's inadequate effort to make Israel's case to the international community. And those complaints are not entirely without merit. But somebody in the foreign ministry's "hasbara" division deserves credit for coming up with a simple, yet incredibly effective way of demonstrating what Israel is up against: show their weapons.

Telling the world that hundreds of terrorists have been arrested, or thousands of weapons captured is mind-numbing. They're just numbers. The public yawns and turns the page. But recall what the Israelis did after capturing in Jan. 2002 the Karine A, the Palestinian ship seized by Israeli commandos. They didn't just issue a press release about the 50 tons of arms, or the 700,000 rounds of ammunition on board. They actually spread the weapons out, on the ground, for the photographers and television cameras. And they reached as far as the eye--and the lens--could see.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Hasbara: harder and more important than you think - by Vic Rosenthal

...Cognitive warfare is real and dangerous. Defensive hasbara is the necessary response. We can improve our execution of it by adding money and manpower to the effort to counter the enemy lie machine. It’s difficult, but we know how to do it. And we should. Positive hasbara, answering the Palestinian narrative with a persuasive one of our own, is a much harder task, because it requires that we have a consistent national narrative that we feel comfortable asserting. 

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
01 July '16..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2016/07/hasbara-why-its-harder-and-more-important-than-you-think/

Everyone says Israel does a poor job of hasbara, but the question is “what is the job?”

Hasbara is information, propaganda, public diplomacy, clarification of policies, telling the truth about Israel or telling lies. It depends on whom you ask. Folks who don’t like what I write sometimes call me a ‘hasbarist’, which is apparently something like a pederast.

One form of hasbara – defensive hasbara – responds to what Richard Landes likes to call ‘cognitive warfare’. Cognitive warfare is a real thing that nations and ideological activists expend a lot of effort and money on and which can have serious, concrete effects.

Cognitive attacks can be targeted at different populations and intended to produce different effects. It can be aimed at an enemy population to demoralize it, reduce support for its leadership, destroy will to fight, create confusion, or cause the leaders to make mistakes. It can also be aimed at third-party nations, to keep them from supporting the target. Cognitive warfare techniques can also be used to strengthen one’s own population’s identification with particular policies.

Israel’s enemies flood the world’s media and institutions like the UN with descriptions of the IDF’s ‘disproportionate’ use of force, ‘excessive’ civilian casualties, use of prohibited weapons, cruelty and even deliberate targeting of children. Defensive operations are portrayed as unprovoked aggression. These accusations are either exaggerated, presented out of context or made up from whole cloth – sometimes they are based on faked or doctored video, the so-called ‘pallywood’. Documentation is often no more than unsupported statements from Palestinians, laundered via the NGO ‘halo effect’ (“if Human Rights Watch reports it, it must be true”) to give them credibility. Organizations like ‘Breaking the Silence’ spread unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes both in Israel and abroad. A massive quantity of accusations are made in order to overwhelm our capacity to respond.

The campaign gets results: the IDF adopts tactics to reduce collateral damage even further, to the extent that its operational effectiveness and morale of its troops are impacted. Israel is deterred from initiating operations that might result in legal action against its officers and soldiers. Unfriendly regimes in the US are unopposed when they act to turn Israeli military victories into political defeats or cut off deliveries of weapons in wartime. Sympathy for terrorist entities like Hamas and Hezbollah make it possible for them to ‘stay in business’ between conflicts and rearm. Israeli young people may even be influenced by the smear campaign to avoid military service so as not to be involved in what they are told is an immoral enterprise.

The BDS campaign that is being waged all over the world, including Europe, South Africa, Australia and the US, is a major cognitive offensive. While it is doubtful that it can ever amount to more than an economic pinprick against Israel, that isn’t its primary objective. What it has already been successful at doing, whether or not resolutions to boycott, sanction or divest are passed, is to give currency to the idea that Israel’s behavior is so egregious that decent people are expected to shun it. Even where anti-BDS laws or resolutions have been passed, these are spun as a response by ‘Jewish power’ to justified grass-roots outrage.

Defensive hasbara counteracts these sorts of cognitive warfare. Although the sheer volume of false accusations makes it difficult, they must be refuted before they can be turned into concrete legal or diplomatic challenges.

Any wonder we are losing the information war?

...Naturally when an Israeli criticizes Israel, a listener is prepared to credit what he says much more than when it comes from an outsider. Anti-Israel Israelis are helped in this by the large fraction of Diaspora Jews who, for whatever reason, are always found among Israel’s most vehement critics. There is no comparable phenomenon among Arabs and Muslims, who maintain admirable message discipline.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
26 October '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/10/when-do-we-stop-ignoring-the-information-war/

Despite the vicious and brutal nature of the violent uprising that is under way in Israel now, the rest of the world is either silent or approving. The implication seems to be “they are getting what they deserved.” How did this happen?

This was written by an Israeli graduate student studying at Oxford:

When conversations regarding Israel do ensue, they deal with the disproportionate use of power during the 2014 war in Gaza, the high death toll among Palestinians (statistics which many British students with whom I have spoken can quote), the violent behavior of settlers towards Palestinians documented in videos that have gone viral in the UK as elsewhere, the checkpoints, the economic ruin of the Gaza strip and the continued refusal of Israel to recognize Palestinian independence. There are students who can recite without difficulty Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on Israel’s election day about the need to counter ‘droves’ of Arab Israelis on their way to vote. …

Despite immense efforts, Oxford scholars do not regard Israel as a high tech nation, a gay tourist destination or a model for modern democracy. They remain unconvinced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertions that Israel is the bastion of Western norms, the forefront in the struggle over terror. Nor do they prescribe [sic] to Israel’s moral relativism according to which the world must denounce Saudi Arabia and Bashar Assad before it denounces Israel. In the eyes of Oxford’s students, injustice elsewhere is not a defense for injustice in Israel.

To this international community, Israel is synonymous with bigotry, violence, hate and the oppression of human rights. It is the global spread of this notion that reveals that no public diplomacy campaign, no sophisticated national slogan and no infographic shared online by StandWithUs can counter the impact of the images that arose from Gaza in 2008, and 2012 and 2014, or those that currently emerge from Jerusalem.

His own political leanings and the fact that this was published in Ha’aretz are unimportant. The picture he paints is confirmed by other observers in universities in the UK and the US; you could hear the same things at Berkeley or the University of Toronto. It almost seems as though the more prestigious the institution, the worse they think of Israel. The students at these universities are future leaders of the West in politics, business, law and every other field.

Anyone who knows the truth knows that the ‘evidence’ cited for Israel’s alleged depravity is nonsense. The actual death toll of the last Gaza war was about half the number the students will cite (which came from Hamas sources) and most of those were Hamas fighters; the absurdity that Israel supplies Hamas with food, water, medicines and electricity while it targets Israeli towns with a blitz of rockets is ignored; as is the basic fact that the ‘independence’ sought by the Arabs is the death or dispersal of the hated Jews from their homeland.

The objective of the demonization and delegitimization campaign is to support diplomatic and legal warfare against the state, to damage her attempts to defend herself and to prevent her from realizing political benefit even from military victories. Military strength by itself is not enough to prevent political defeat.

How did Israel allow herself, with all of her alleged intellectual muscle, to get into this situation? How could there have been such a massive failure to tell our story – our true story to the world? Can it be turned around?

In Middle Eastern reality, the nice guy finishes last

...Are we afraid that the Europeans will boycott us if we tell the truth? I have news: the only way to get them to not boycott us will be to give up and die. Then some of them, perhaps, will feel sorry for us as they do for the murdered victims of the Holocaust (although, truth be told, a considerable number of Europeans believe that the fewer Jews, the better). Are we afraid of Barack Obama, a true believer in the Palestinian cause? What will he do, help Iran get nuclear weapons? Are we afraid of the UN? Will they issue another report to buttress the big lies of of our enemies?

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
19 June '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/06/in-the-middle-east-the-nice-guy-finishes-last/

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. — Mark Twain

…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility. … the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. — Adolf Hitler

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel’s adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs. — Dr. Joel Fishman (2007)

The big lie and concomitant reality inversion has been a fabulously successful propaganda strategy for our enemies. One common inversion is to accuse Israel of the very crimes and intentions of their Arab enemies. So Zionism is equated to racism, Israel is accused of being an apartheid state, and Israelis are said to be trying to commit ‘genocide’ against the Palestinian Arabs.

And of course there is my personal favorite, “the IDF deliberately targets children,” an accusation reminiscent of the medieval blood libels:

If there ever was an inversion, this is it. No better example can be given than the recent murder of five members of the Fogel family, where one of the perpetrators returned to the house to kill a crying baby, and one said that they would have killed two other children if they had known they were present. There was the recent murder of a child when an antitank missile was fired directly at a yellow school bus. And there have been any number of ‘actions’ like the Ma’alot massacre, the Bus of Blood, the attack on the nursery at Misgav Am, etc., in which the victims were primarily children. — Vic Rosenthal (2011)

There are several reasons this technique works so well. As Mark Twain noted, it’s easy and quick to spread a lie; but refuting one effectively requires time and research, which in itself can be challenged. The paradigm case of the lie that won’t die is the accusation that IDF soldiers shot young Mohammad al-Dura in 2000, as ‘documented’ by the original ‘Pallywood’ video. Even after it was definitively proven that fire from the Israeli position could not have hit al-Dura, it remains a worldwide article of faith that this is the correct interpretation.

Hitler, who incidentally was accusing the Jews of lying in the quoted passage — and thus inverting reality — seems to have understood the technique well. In addition to the credibility a lie gets from its audaciousness, he observed that even when a lie has been refuted, “traces” remain, perhaps a propensity to believe similar lies.

There is also the “when there’s smoke, there’s fire” effect. Anti-Israel propagandists don’t just tell one lie, they tell hundreds. When one is refuted, others pop up. Someone who isn’t aware of the strategy might easily think “there has to be something behind all this.” There is, but it is an orchestrated campaign of lies.

And then we have what I call the “divorce court fallacy.” If the two sides have diametrically opposed positions, an observer is tempted to think that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. But this is not the case if one side is audaciously lying and the other is telling the truth (or close to it).

The Eurovision song contest and what Israel can learn from it

...While peace is obviously a good thing, and it would be nice if Israel could achieve it, it isn’t Israel’s raison d’etre. Israel’s raison d’etre is to create a thriving Jewish state in the Jewish people’s historic homeland – something at which it has been stunningly successful.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
03 June '15..

Israeli PR’s focus on the peace process highlights the country’s failures rather than its successes, and people dislike failures

Commenting last week on Israel’s surprising ninth-place Eurovision finish, achieved thanks to votes from millions of usually anti-Israel Europeans, Avshalom Halutz of Haaretz wrote sarcastically that the dramatic improvement over previous results “seems to validate Israel’s decision…to send its carefree ‘Golden Boy’ party anthem to Eurovision, after years of trying in vain to find favor with the Europeans with apologetic and hypocritical songs about peace and tolerance, and failed gimmicks like candlelight or a duet between a Jewish and an Arab singer.” Despite being an exaggeration, there’s something to what he says. And it’s something that goes to the heart of what’s wrong with Israel’s public diplomacy effort.

Because while most of Israel’s Eurovision entries don’t actually focus on peace (aside from the one Jewish-Arab duet Halutz mentioned), its real-world public diplomacy definitely does. Indeed, public relations experts have told us for years that only by constantly stressing Israel’s desire for peace can it possibly win Western hearts. Yet somehow, this “expert” strategy keeps failing – and this failure shouldn’t actually surprise anyone.

To understand why, consider one of history’s epic PR battles: the American-Soviet one. During their five-decade Cold War, Americans and Soviets fought militarily, economically and diplomatically. But they also waged a worldwide battle for public opinion – just as Israel and the Palestinians are doing (on a smaller scale) today. The USSR, for instance, funded pro-Communist front groups throughout the West, while America created global radio stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

But ultimately, America won on the PR front no less decisively than it did on other fronts. So it’s worth examining how and why.

Clearly, one factor is that America invested heavily in this fight – something Israel, unlike the Palestinians, has signally failed to do. But since the Soviets also invested massively in public diplomacy, resources alone can’t explain America’s victory.

Another factor is that America had a genuinely compelling narrative to tell about itself: one of freedom, opportunity and economic growth. But at least initially, the Soviet narrative – of economic development combined with equality and social justice – seemed no less compelling. Indeed, the Communist vision attracted millions of adherents worldwide throughout the Cold War.

So why did America’s vision ultimately triumph over the equally compelling Communist one? The answer is that America sold a vision it could actually deliver on: America really did provide freedom, opportunity and economic development. In contrast, as the decades passed, it became increasingly clear that the USSR couldn’t deliver on its vision. The Soviet Union ultimately provided neither equality nor social justice nor economic growth. And a failed promise is not a compelling narrative; it provokes deep disappointment that can easily morph into anger and disgust.

Yet a failed promise is precisely what Israel has been trying to sell the world for 20 years now. For two decades, the main story Israel has told about itself is that it wants peace. And since peace is clearly an attractive value, this story initially generated global enthusiasm.

But 20 years later, Israel still hasn’t achieved peace – which means that judged on its own terms, Israel is a failure. And a failure is the opposite of a compelling story: It provokes disappointment, anger and disgust.

(Excellent) The Theory and Practice of Hasbara

...Finally, there is a fourth, dual audience that makes hasbara obligatory. It is the past and the future. As George Orwell wrote in 1984 about the Party's compulsion to revise history, tossing inconvenient truths down the memory hole: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." Those who hope to prevent the delegitimization and destruction of Israel and intellectual-political reghettoization of its supporters have no choice but to insist on an accurate description of the present, over and over, as long as necessary.

Eric Rozenman..
inFocus Quarterly..
March 2015..

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

—Andre Gide

Does pro-Israel hasbara (Hebrew for information) matter?

It was early in the first intifada, the 1987-1992 Palestinian "uprising" against Israel. News media coverage featured images of rifle-toting, helmeted and mask-wearing Israeli soldiers fighting stone-throwing Arab teenagers trying to ward off tear gas. The frequent calls went something like this: "I've been a supporter of Israel for years. But these pictures! They make us look so bad! How can I criticize the media? What can I tell my children?"

I was editing Near East Report, the weekly newsletter published in conjunction with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "Tell them the demonstrations aren't spontaneous but have been taken over by the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and that terrorists fire from among the children," I said. "Tell them if this were happening in an Arab country, the security forces would massacre the rioters." "That'll just sound like pro-Israel propaganda," callers lamented.

Having fought the 1975 Soviet-inspired, Arab League-promoted UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism and lost, Israelis and some American supporters of the Jewish state adopted a "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" approach. They forgot that all war is preceded, accompanied, and followed by psychological warfare. Now, finding objective truth to be an insufficient, even abstract response to subjective, emotion-laded images and their simple but pernicious storyline—Israelis as new Nazis, Palestinian Arabs as new Jews—they sought a hasbara silver bullet.

That none was at hand could be seen in the choice of the winning entry in a 1988 European editorial cartoon contest. It was a simple, obscene inversion of the iconic Holocaust-era photograph showing a frightened, cap-wearing Jewish boy, his hands in the air, a German soldier's rifle pointing at his back. The cartoonist merely replaced the child's cap with a kefiyeh and transformed the soldier into an Israeli trooper.

Bingo! The decades'-old Soviet campaign to tar Zionism—Jewish nationalism—as fascist bore fruit among European intelligentsia. When the nationalisms of Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein with their pan-Arab claims failed and their Kremlin sponsor collapsed, competing versions of Islamic supremacism—sponsored by the Iranian government, wealthy Saudis, and others—seamlessly adopted the Israeli-as-Nazi, Palestinian-as-Jew political pornography. The mold was set for right-thinkers in academia, the media, and even show business to peddle soft-core scenarios with Zionists as imperialists, Jews as colonialists, and Palestinian Arabs as oppressed, indigenous people. This hardened into "the Palestinian narrative," the media's default filter.

(Continue Reading)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
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And Now Introducing the Paligandist Who Peddles Paliganda

Yisrael Medad..
Green-Lined/JPost..
26 January '15..







With a little help from friends, I will attempt to introduce some new terms for your use.

The detractors of Zionism and those who denigrate Israel have been employing “hasbarist”.

Here is a use:

There are thousands of hasbarists, official, covert and volunteer, who leap with zeal on any comment that might be seen to contradict the official Zionist party line.

It’s used as a hashtag on Twitter.

Already in 2007, anti-Zionist Matthew Duss, now with FMEP, wrote the phrase “peddling hasbarist myths” and in 2009, it was used by a hateful, duplicitous and prevaricating Jewish anti-Zionist so “N.Y. Times Publishes Hasbarist’s Dream Op Ed on Iran”. Border-line nazist, Max Blumenthal, uses it regularly. And it was used in 2008, too. A friend of mine was called a ‘hasbarista’, a spiteful play on barista. You can find this: “Israel Mad Machine of Hasbarists” and Abe Foxman was described as “the Anti-Defamation League's hasbarist-in-chief”. It can get linguistically nasty: “You stupid Askenazi. There are lies, damned lies and hasbarist propaganda”.

Well, there may be now a counter-term.

Pasbara was one suggestion (I would use Palsbara as I employ ‘Pals’ instead of “Palestinians”).

The Ministry of Extraneous Affairs by Mordechai Kedar

Dr. Mordechai Kedar..
Middle East and Terrorism..
22 March '13..

I begin with a full disclosure: a few months ago the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent me to an Asian country to advise its government in understanding a difficult matter regarding the Islamic population of that state, and how to deal with this matter. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized the event perfectly, in both the professional and logistical aspects, and the Israeli ambassador of that state personally accompanied me in my meetings with the local professionals.

These days, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is preparing a promotional film on Israel, and in the leading role is Bar Rafaeli, whose participation in the film arouses a wave of objection, because she did not serve in the military. Some official sources also objected, especially the IDF itself, because her participation in an official film produced by the state of Israel could be interpreted as sending a message of leniency towards people who have not served in the IDF. These days, when "sharing the burden equally" has become a political mantra on the level of "It is better to die than commit certain sins", the IDF expects the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to act in a way that whitewashes the evasion of military service in the IDF. But it seems that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not think it's a problem.

This case - in my view - is an indication of the way too many people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs think. The employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are public servants, not appointed by the minister, and most are graduates of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' cadet's course. This was supposed to provide the state of Israel with a working staff that is professional and relevant, and executes the decisions of the government professionally and faithfully, and without dispute.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs Reflects an Obsolete Social Model

In fact, the reality is totally different. The social profile of workers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is fairly suitable to the model of the "Akhusalim" - coined by the sociologist Prof. Baruch Kimmerling, who described the state of Israel of the 1970s as being governed by an elite group of people who were Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent), secular, members of the old guard, socialist, and nationalist, forming the Hebrew acronym Akhusal. In general, one can say that the political, social, diplomatic and cultural agenda of the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs resembles that of the Labor party (and perhaps also Meretz) much more than it resembles that of the Likud, despite the fact that since 1977 there have been more than a few governments led by the Likud. The proportion of religious, ultra-Orthodox, and Arabs who are staff members of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is significantly lower than their proportional representation in the population of the state of Israel.

As a result of this, Avigdor Leiberman, a minister from the Right, found it difficult to impose his political agenda on his subordinates because of the simple reason that he could not appoint staff that suited him. The political echelon (the prime minister and minister of foreign affairs) can appoint no more than eleven people in the ministry, from the level of ambassador to the person who serves tea, and a minister who cannot place his people in key positions will find it difficult to control what is done in the ministry. My sense is that Leiberman was "persona non grata" in the eyes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff.

Some may view this as a bit of hasbara heresy

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
19 March '13..

Complaining about Israel's hasbara, or public diplomacy, has become a favorite national pastime of pro-Israel activists.

Whenever I speak to Jewish or Christian audiences in Israel and abroad, there is inevitably someone who feels it necessary to launch into a harangue about just how terrible the Jewish state is at explaining itself.

Jews are among the most successful marketing and public-relations executives worldwide, the questioner might ask, and excel at promoting a variety of consumer products. Why, oh why, can't Jews do as good a job at selling the Jewish state? Having been involved in hasbara in one form or another for more than two decades, I certainly share the sense of frustration.

I remember well how, in the mid-1990s, when I served as deputy communications director in the Prime Minister's Office during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term, we devoted countless hours to tackling just this issue.

Is it the hostility of the media that stands in the way? A lack of appreciation on the part of various government bodies for the importance of PR? Or perhaps it is Israel's fractious politics, and the mixed messages that often emerge, which truly complicate things.

Whatever the true cause of our troubles, there is no doubt that our standing in the eyes of international public opinion remains a matter of grave concern. Amid rising calls for boycotts and sanctions from radical anti-Israel forces, and the hurling of slurs such as "apartheid," it seems imperative to redouble our efforts at explaining the justness of Israel's cause.

Nonetheless, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps our heightened focus on what is wrong has led us to overlook a lot of what is right.

Yuli Edelstein - The Consummate Public Diplomat

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
23 November '12..

Many Israelis think that Hasbara (public diplomacy) is a good speech in flawless English by Prime Minister Netanyahu, accompanied by colorful audio-visual aids, at the United Nations. They’re right, but that’s only a small part of this country’s ramped-up effort at presenting its case to the world.

What truly shined over the past week of warfare with Hamas in Gaza was Israel’s human infrastructure in public diplomacy. Everyday citizens of Israel and supporters of Israel around the world, especially young people, took to the airwaves and Internet bandwidth to defend Israel. Through new media and social media and from any and every home-based computer station, Israel’s case was well-broadcasted and backed-up.

Colorful, easy-to-comprehend graphics and snappy videos were produced quickly produced and shared on Facebook and Twitter and other web-based platforms in the millions.

Even The New York Times and The Guardian were forced to take notice and run (not-completely-hostile) stories on the pro-Israel social media blitz.

A good deal of the credit for this new and welcome phenomena goes to the Minister for Public Diplomacy, Yuli Edelstein, who early-on understood the growing importance of non-official publics in public diplomacy and equipped Israel accordingly. What we saw this past week is partially the result of three-and-one-half years of quiet preparation and training under his leadership.

Plosker - How the Mavi Marmara Sank Israel’s Public Diplomacy

Simon Plosker..
The Times of Israel..
13 June '12..

That State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss report into the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident has pointed to a severe shortfall in Israel’s public diplomacy comes as no surprise.

For those of us involved in Israeli public diplomacy in the non-governmental sector, the weaknesses were only too apparent at the time. For hours after the news broke, we were glued to Internet sites, Israeli TV and international news stations. Conflicting casualty reports were thrown around and the only thing that was clear in the confusion was that Israel was facing a potential catastrophe from a PR perspective, not to mention the other ramifications.

Torossian - Syria Slaughters, Hamas Terrorizes: Public Relations Firms Advance their Cause

Ronn Torossian..
The Cutting Edge..
12 February '12..

In recent days, we have seen an intensification of the Syrian regime’s attacks on its own people. If reports are correct, more than 5,000 Syrian civilians have been slaughtered on President Bashar al-Assad’s command since the effort to bring the so-called Arab spring to Syria began late last spring. The dead include hundreds of women and children, people who just wanted freedom from a tyrannical regime. Supply lines have been cut; medical supplies are running out, and the United Nations admits that it can neither provide a reliable accounting of the number of dead, nor stop the killing.

This regime is the extension of one begun in 1970, when Hafez al-Assad seized power and which was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrian, including one of the most gruesome massacres in Middle East history, the destruction of the Sunni rebel stronghold of Hama, in which between 10,000 and 20,000 people were killed by government forces. Bashir al-Assad has ruled since his father’s death on 2000 and has been able to maintain his stranglehold on Syria’s people largely because of world indifference, lack of commercial resources, and because of its proximity to Israel.

Curiously, perhaps, Israel has consistently received much worse media coverage than Syria. The Jewish State’s every move is scrutinized, while human rights violations have occured every day in Syria since the al-Assad family took the reins of power. Yet, until very recently you would never know that from the media reports and international proclamations. Only now, with Syria in the midst of a revolt, do we see extensive media coverage of the country. Even so, the world continues to be more exorcised by Israelis pouring concrete in the West Bank than by Syran soldiers raining deadly shells onto the people of Homs.

Marquadt-Bigman - All this terrible Israeli incitement

Petra Marquadt Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
16 February '12..



Over at The Arabist, Issandr El Amrani announces happily that the PA is “finally” kicking “back against Israel’s Hasbara.” As it turns out, the story is about “a new initiative by the PLO Delegation to the United States to track anti-Palestinian incitement in Israeli media and society and publicize it to American journalists, officials and politicians.”

Apparently, this is intended as “retaliation” for Israeli efforts to monitor Palestinian incitement, which has long been seen as a crucial but neglected problem.

Amrani reproduces an e-mail that contains a “Monthly Report on Israeli Incitement” for January 2012. According to the e-mail, the report “seeks to highlight major incidents of Israeli incitement in public, media, and governmental spheres that occurred in January, in an effort to urge the Israeli government to condemn and redress incitement against Palestinians.”

Except for two “price tag” incidents that resulted in property damage, the “major incidents of Israeli incitement” that are listed in the report include a letter by Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin conveying New Year’s greetings to the Jordanian Parliament speaker, who took offense at a reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Another example for “major incidents of Israeli incitement” provided by the report is a statement by Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, where Lieberman expressed the view that it was crucial to “manage” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as long as it could not be solved.

Talking Point Combat: The Seven Percent

Matt
Huffington Post Monitor
11 May '11

http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/05/talking-point-combat-seven-percent.html

I'd like to address an anti-Zionist talking point that was used a lot recently on multiple threads and talk about how to combat it. Here's a post that exhibits it, we're interested mostly in the first sentence:

Anti-Zionists love to talk about how the Jews "only" owned 7% of the land in Palestine and then talk about how ridiculous it is that they ended up with so much after the dust settled. Any time one of them posts this talking point, just ask them the following: How much of the land did the Arabs own? The answer is about 10% of the land. 80% of Palestinian Arabs did not own any land at all. The rest of the land was government mandated, and therefore up for grabs when the British departed and the war the Palestinian Arabs started began.

So don't let the anti-Zionist revisionist history get away unchallenged. The Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine were approximately equal in terms of legal land ownership, and if the Palestinians didn't want to lose the land they were getting for the first time, they shouldn't have tried to take land from the Jews.

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(Video) What Did You Learn Online Today?

Matt/Zach
Huffington Post Monitor
27 April '11

And now, the Huffington Post Monitors proudly present, What Did You Learn Online Today?, based on "What Did You Learn In School Today?" by Tom Paxton. Music by Tom Paxton, lyrics by me and Zach, and vocals by my beautiful and talented girlfriend. I know we don't usually ask you the readers to crosspost, but we encourage you to share this video around, as I at least think it's pretty good.



If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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