Israel Hayom
19 October '11
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=1496
Four years ago, after a year and a half of media silence, and the sense that Gilad Shalit was starting to be forgotten, Noam Shalit enlisted the help of a public relations firm • That is how the abducted soldier became "everyone's son."
U.S. Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was kidnapped by the Taliban exactly one week before the third anniversary of Gilad Shalit's abduction by Hamas. Both Bergdahl and Shalit are the same age, but the similarities between them end there. While Shalit has returned home, the U.S. soldier is still in captivity in Afghanistan and nobody seems to care, not even after the Taliban has released five video clips of the soldier, the last one being in May. "It is no accident that most Israelis do not know this story and even that most Americans do not know this prisoner exists. And this is despite the fact that in the video clips released of him, he appeals, at the height of emotion, to his family and the U.S. government to release him in exchange for the release of prisoners from Afghanistan," says Prof. Gabriel Weimann from the Department of Communications at the University of Haifa.
"Here enter the differences between the 'people's army' which exists in Israel and is loyal to the doctrine of never leaving a soldier behind, and the U.S. Army which is certainly not what we would refer to as the 'people's army.' In the U.S., serving in the army is a profession, people earn a salary and volunteer for army service as professionals, and therefore it makes sense that the Americans are less willing to intervene emotionally in the fate of a captured soldier. This is very unique to Israel, especially when you take into account that, rationally, the prisoner swap deal was not a good one. A deal in which 1,000 terrorists are released in exchange for a single man cannot be good, no matter how you choose to view it. Therefore, it becomes clear to us that it is impossible to take the rational approach here, and that the campaign for Shalit's return appealed to the emotions of Israeli citizens."
The family's decision to turn to the media
About four years ago, after year and a half of silence in the media and the sense that Gilad Shalit was beginning to be forgotten, Shalit's father, Noam, enlisted the help of a public relations firm. Until that moment, the Shalit family had operated without the close help of media consulting. Noam was determined to change the public discourse and offered to pay Tammy Shinkman, of the public relations firm Rimon-Cohen-Shinkman, as much as it took. "At first, they [the Shalit family] offered to pay us, and we of course, without second thoughts, said 'no chance.' We insisted that we would do it voluntarily," says Benny Cohen, a partner of the firm who ran the operational strategy and work behind the scenes of the Shalit campaign.
Immediately after the firm began working for the Shalit family, the media was flooded with countless messages and news items calling for Shalit's release. Meetings were held with newspapers and broadcast media in attempts to convince them to cover the soldier's struggle on their front pages and in their top headlines; politicians were asked to join the campaign; and celebrities decided to lock themselves in a makeshift jail cell, believed to be similar to what Shalit was kept in under Hamas captivity, in solidarity with the soldier.
The country was filled with billboards, flags and stickers, and pictures of the kidnapped soldier printed in the nation's colors - blue and white - became an iconic symbol. The Shalit family's struggle made headlines and brought crowds of supporters out into the streets. The change marked an unprecedented and historic shift.
"It is connected to the empowerment of emotions. The strategy was to make everyone empathize with the terrible fear that his or her child could leave and never return," Shinkman once said in an interview with the Globes newspaper. "The codes of communication are clear: You get a response when you reveal a personal side. The Shalit family had a hard time exposing itself to the public. They were an introverted family, and Noam himself is a bereaved sibling. And yet it was important to facilitate emotional involvement, to highlight the fact that every parent would expect this kind of public solidarity if it happened to them, and this was done by massively amplifying the dose of the family's exposure to the public."
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