Israel’s image needs improving

By Adam Dalgliesh

In my last column, I pointed out that Israel’s extreme unpopularity in the world is one of the reasons why Israel is reluctant to take the decisive military and other measures that are necessary to resolve its security and demographic problems, which are closely linked with each other.

The Israeli government fears international sanctions, not only diplomatic, but perhaps even military, will be imposed on Israel if it were to undertake these decisive steps. Are the government’s fears realistic and reasonable? I believe that while they may be exaggerated and are in any case only one of the reasons why Israel’s ruling, unelected elites refuse to act decisively against the nation’s enemies (the other being their own bizarre sympathy for these enemies), this fear that any decisive action to end the aggression will lead to international retaliation against Israel does have a rational basis.

Israel has faced not only endless diplomatic harassment whenever it has attempted any military operations in self-defense (see below) but also more extensive economic and even legal sanctions than most Israeli and American-Jewish patriots realize. The “BDS” movement has scored more success than the Israeli government and media have been willing to admit. Many banks and corporations have disinvested in Israel. American corporations have felt it necessary for their “business plans” to move their industrial plants out of the “occupied territories” of Judea-Samaria. Many European banks and corporations, under pressure from their governments, have divested from Israeli companies and bonds. European vigilante “activists” have forced some supermarkets to withdraw Israeli products from their shelves. Some liquor stores have become shy about stocking Israeli wines on their shelves.

On the legal front, both Britain and Spain have repeatedly attempted to indict high-ranking Israeli military officers for “war crimes,” which has repeatedly forced such officers to decamp from these countries in haste, or even prevented them from deplaning in the first place.

In order to answer that question, we must first conduct a brief survey to assess just how bad Israel’s image has become. Then I want to suggest some possible remedies. iBefore we propose a plan for improving Israel’s image, we need to briefly survey just how bad that image has become.

The United Nations General Assembly has passed well over a thousand anti-Israel resolutions since the state’s independence in 1948. Other UN organs, such as the “Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” UNESCO, UNICEF (supposedly a completely apolitical organization devoted to helping children), and the notorious UN Human Rights Commission have adopted hundreds more. The UN Security Council has adopted a score of resolutions over the years, and ten or more score of such resoltions have only been defeated by a United States veto. But the United States has either abstained or voted “yes” on some of these resolutions, which is why some of them have been passed by the Council. What is most significant about all these resolutions is that their authors can count on most non-Muslim as well as all Muslim states endorsing them. At the very least, they can count on the non-Muslim states which cannot hold down their nausea long enough to vote “yes” for these resolutions, abstaining rather than voting “no.”

The UNGA’s recent resolution condemning Israel for “using excessive and disproportionate force” in its response to Hamas’ latest invasion-and terror “protests” is a case in point. Only eight countries had the guts to vote “no” on it. Four of those countries (Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, and Nauru) are tiny Pacific Island nations with no Muslim population to speak of, no Muslim neighbors for hundreds or thousands of miles around, and the assured protection of US military bases on their soil. This is what it took to persuade four UN member states that it was safe for them to vote “no.” The other four votes came from Israel itself, the United States, Australia, and a little-known, impoverished African nation called Togo—the only African nation to vote “no.” No Latin-American or Caribbean state voted “no,” no European country, and no Asian country.

A massive propaganda campaign, conducted not only by the Islamic block of states, but with the active participation and financing of the entire EU block, the UN, and numerous private “non-profits and “NGOs” (“non-governmental organizations” that often are actually funded and controlled by governments and/or the UN) has succeeded in indoctrinating most of the world’s people into hating Israel and supporting the Arab terrorists and aggressors waging war against it.  By financing and participating in this anti-Israel propaganda war, many non-Muslim governments have succeeded in brainwashing their own people into hating Israel, and have thereby made themselves prisoners of their own efforts to curry favor with the Muslim world.

Recent polls have shown that in Europe, more than 50 per cent of those polled throughout the continent think Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. This is utterly absurd, even ludicrous, totally out of touch with reality. But however appalling, this is apparently what the majority of Europeans with any opinions at all about Mideast politics think. Numerous renowned European cultural figures, among them several Nobel prize winners, regularly make public statements and sign petitions denouncing Israel. As for the Muslim countries, those who profess hostility not only to Israel, but to Jews in general, are at the 99 percent mark in nearly all of them. Polls in nearly every other country in the world where such surveys have been undertaken, except for the United States, reveal similar results.

Even in the United States, one of the very few countries in the world where support for Israel remains solid, there are some worrisome signs. Most deeply concerning are the dominance of anti-Israel, “pro-Palestinian” groups, most of them with Muslim students and faculty at their core, which dominate the conversation about the Islamist-Israel conflict over “Palestine” on American college campuses. Many young American Jews have been won over to the anti-Israel, “Palestine” cause, as is evidenced by the invitations extended by many Hillel student chapters to the treasonous Israeli “Breaking the Silence” group of anti-Israel propagandists. Other Jewish students on college campuses who do support Israel, are subject to constant intimidation and threats.

Leaders of the Reform and Conservative Jewish religious movements in the United States have increasingly taken the “Palestinian” side in the Islam-Israel conflict. The notoriously anti-Israel “J-Street,” an organization headed by a former executive of a public relations firm that represents Arab interests in the United States, and that conducts Arab-government-funded anti-Israel propaganda campaigns on American college campuses, has actually been admitted to the “Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations,” the group that represents the American Jewish community in its relations with the U.S. government. Numerous well-known American Jewish writers and journalists are openly hostile to Israel and supportive of the Palestinian terrorists.

While support for Israel by American politicians had been bipartisan in nature since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, there has now been very serious erosion of this support within the Democratic party. The dominant Obama faction of that party is more or less hostile to Israel. While support for Israel remains solid among Republicans, polls show that Democrats are divided about 50-50 between supporters of Israel and supporters of the “Palestinians.” Support for pro-Israel resolutions by Democratic members of Congress has been diminishing.

Fear of terrorist, diplomatic and economic reprisals from the 57-nation Muslim bloc of states (organized as the OIC, or “Organization for Islamic Cooperation”) are not the only reason why so many non-Muslim nations are willing to support the Islamic world against Israel. This present-day anti-Israel propaganda builds on centuries of the “preaching of contempt” for Jews and Judaism by the Christian churches and the Islamic ulema (clergy), which makes hundreds of millions of people in both the “post-Christian” and Muslim countries predisposed to believe anti-Israel propaganda.

There are also some more pragmatic reasons why so many of the world’s governments and private corporations are hostile to Israel. Nearly all of the non-Muslim countries of the world desire the friendship of the 57 Muslim states. They have at least one fourth of the world’s population, control even more of the earth’s surface, and have vast natural resources, including but not limited to petroleum. The vast oil wealth acquired by the Gulf States and Iran makes them very important players in international financial markets, and extremely valued customers for Western exports of all kinds, whose purchases provide vast profits for Western corporations.

One cheap, seemingly risk-free way of currying favor with the Arab and Muslims is to support them against Israel. Israel has no one to turn to for support but the Western nations, and so they believe they can humiliate and condemn Israel at will without risking its friendship and loyalty whenever they may need Israeli help. Supporting the Arabs and other Muslim states against Israel also helps to distract them from other policies of the West, as well as Russia, that are distressing to the Muslim world. And it distracts Muslims from the resentment they feel towards the West as a result of Western economic and political influence in their countries, the past history of Western colonial rule in many of these countries, and the frequent military interventions by the United States, Britain, France and other Western nations Muslim lands. At least, that is what the foreign offices of many Western and other non-Muslim nations believe.

While much of this international hostility is beyond Israel’s control, by no means all of it is. One obvious and essential way in which Israel could persuade the world to take a less hostile view of it, and especially its efforts to defend itself from Arab-Iranian-Turkish terror and aggression, would be to engage in a massive public information and counter-propaganda campaign (I prefer these expressions to “public diplomacy,” which to my mind has a somewhat weak sound. The traditional Israeli name for this kind of communications self-defense is hasbara, or “explanation” in Hebrew). Yet in its seventy years of existence, Israel has done almost nothing, and spent almost nothing, to defend itself against the massive, sophisticated, clever and extremely well-funded propaganda campaign being waged against it, throughout the entire world, every day. How can we explain this shocking Israeli passivity and inaction, its ignoring of the propaganda armies relentlessly battering it? And more importantly, what can be done to change this outrageous, suicidal non-policy?

For years, Israeli and diaspora Jewish journalists and public relations specialists, even the occasional politician, have called attention to this tragic neglect, and called on the Israeli government to defend itself before the court of world public opinion. According to several sources, including columnist Dr. Martin Sherman, Israel spends, and for the past seventy years has on average spent, about the same amount of money per year on international public relations as a middle-sized Israeli candy company spends on advertising each year. Until very recently, Israel was unique among the nations of the Middle East in having no Ministry of Information—and this despite having perhaps thirty ministries in all! Recently, it is true, a ministry of “Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs” was just recently established in Jerusalem—as if the only people Israel had to communicate with abroad were diaspora Jews. As of yet, however this newly-created ministry has almost no staff and almost no budget, and almost no lines of communication with the other ministries that foreign journalists and diplomats look to for responses to their questions. Jews. Last year, the Knesset did provide a modest supplemental budget to finance public advocacy abroad in opposition to “BDS.” Spending this supplemental PR budget was entrusted to the Prime Minister’s office—which according to the Israeli press, has only spent about one-third of it during the entire one-year budgetary period.

The IDF’s “Spokesman’s Office” has attempted to pick up some of the slack dropped by the other government agencies that should be leading the counter-propaganda effort. It has done some useful work revealing the terrorist activities of Israel’s enemies, such as posting on YouTube examples of the terrorists’ murderous acts, use of Arab civilians as human shields, etc., and by documenting on the same venue the extraordinary measures, unprecedented in world history, that the IDF takes to protect noncombatant civilians when it is compelled to take limited military actions against the terrorists. But the Spokespersons’ Office’s obsession with careful, meticulous, and slow-moving research, in order to learn the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth behind the allegations of atrocities and human rights violations made against the IDF whenever it conducts an operation, means that it tends to respond to these allegations as long as two years after they are made. Of course, the spokesperson’s eventual response, while always very accurate, balanced and fair, receives very little attention from the international and even the Israeli press, and is given no credence, while the wild, false accusations made by Hamas, Fatah and their shills, which are made immediately after any IDF action, are widely heard, read and believed. This confirms Winston Churchill’s saying that lies travel twenty times around the world while the truth is still struggling to get its pants on.

Even if there were absolutely no other factors involved, this total neglect of public relations by Israel, when set against the hundreds of millions of dollars spent every year on anti-Israel propaganda by the Arab states and their allies, the disaster would be bad enough. But the reality is that this silence and passivity on the part of the Israeli government is not even the worst element in Israel’s response to the international hate propaganda campaign. Many Israeli journalists, academics, writers and politicians have themselves become sophisticated and extremely injurious anti-Israel propagandists. Worse still, the Israeli government has repeatedly awarded its prestigious Israel Prize to anti-Israel Israeli and diaspora Jewish writers, artists and scientists—enabling them to denounce their own country and praise its worst enemies before the entire assembled Knesset while accepting their prizes.

As for the Israeli news media, which one might expect to provide pro-Israel perspectives in reply to the foreign media’s hate propaganda—much of it has become instead an internal mouthpiece for the Palestinian terrorists and their claque of international media cheerleaders. Haaretz, Israel’s oldest, and once its most prestigious, newspaper, has become little more than the Hebrew edition of al-Jazeera. Maariv, Yediot Ahranot and its English language edition ynetnews follow closely behind in disloyal infamy.

So why is it that so many of the tens of thousands of journalists, public relations people, writers and intellectuals belonging to this most talkative of all the world’s peoples, these authors of so many hundreds of thousands of books, fall dumb when they are confronted with the blood libels directed against their own people? And why do so many other Jewish intellectuals internalize the false accusations against them, and even become effective anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propagandists themselves?

Some of the reasons have deep roots in Jewish history, just as the Christian and Muslim hostility to Jews has deep roots in world history. But obviously, examining these historical roots will have to await later columns in this series.

In my next column I will (finally) lay out my program for improving Israel’s international reputation, and hopefully also my suggestions for improving Israel’s security and possibly even its demographic situation. Stay tuned!