opinion

If Israel’s PR is lousy, why is country so popular?

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The first mention in JTA of the Hebrew word hasbarah was in 1988, at the height of the first intifada. The article focused on Israeli and American Jews’ concern that the media were showing the Israeli military in a bad light.

The answer, interviewees agreed, was better hasbarah — a word, explained the author (OK, it was me), “whose meaning falls somewhere between information and propaganda.”

“Israel has never actually looked at hasbarah as an integral part of policymaking,” said Dan Pattir, former press secretary to Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin.

Fast forward 30 years. Writing last week in the Los Angeles Times, Noga Tarnopolsky makes a convincing case that Israel’s public diplomacy efforts are flawed and out-of-touch. Critics say Netanyahu relies too much on social media videos to defend Israel and that its military spokespeople are ill-prepared to answer questions about controversial events, like May’s deadly riots on the Gaza border.

““There is … no single authority that coordinates and supervises these various activities,” complains Michael Oren, who is (wait for it) Israel’s deputy minister in charge of public diplomacy.

The critics, however, don’t make a convincing case why any of this matters.

Complaints about hasbarah are as regular and ritualistic as the Jewish holidays. Without answers from a strong PR campaign, the theory goes, anti-Israel charges gain traction.

But among whom? Israel remains hugely popular among the American public. According to Gallup, 64 percent  of the U.S. population sympathizes with Israelis over Palestinians, with only 19 percent saying the reverse. Congress remains firmly pro-Israel. Yes, a Pew survey in January showed a wide partisan divide, with 79 percent of Republicans and only 27 percent of Democratic sympathizing more with Israel than with Palestinians. But poll questions forced respondents to choose between Israelis and Palestinians (why not both?), and the results may have reflected only the partisan nature of American politics — not something you can hasbarah away.

Despite wide publicity and Jewish consternation, the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement hasn’t taken root outside the far left. As of June, 25 states have enacted anti-BDS laws. In fact, the whole point of BDS is that Israel has a positive image that needs to be undermined. You wouldn’t know about BDS if celebrities didn’t regularly include Israel on their world tours.

The charge of “pinkwashing” —  that Israel touts its relatively progressive record on LGBT rights to distract the world from the occupation — targets what BDS folk think is effective hasbarah — otherwise, why would they bother? Paradoxically, every charge of pinkwashing only reminds the casual reader of Israel’s strong LGBT record.

Two kinds of critics, often overlapping, criticize Israel’s hasbarah.

The first is convinced that the media have in it for Israel. Such critics also mistakenly beliebe that the media tell a story as they would have it told. Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hardly perfect, and examples abound of stories becoming stories only when Palestinians are the victims, or headlines that ignore cause (a terror attack) for effect (the Israeli response). In general, however, Palestinians have a point when they complain that the media often shape the narrative from an Israeli point of view. If you want to see coverage that looks otherwise, read a pro-Palestinian website like Electronic Intifada or a far-left Israeli site like +972. It’s nothing like the Israel coverage you see in the mainstream media.

The other kind of critic blames unpopular policy on bad hasbarah. Good hasbarah, they insist, could presumably have forestalled the brouhaha over the Israeli nation-state law (a brouhaha, I’d wager, that most Americans never heard about). That story got legs not because of a bad marketing rollout, but because the law was a policy decision that fed directly into a perception that Israel’s right-wing government was growing less democratic and more nationalistic.

Passage of the law capped a week in which the Knesset allowed the education minister to bar groups critical of government policies from speaking in public schools, made it harder for Palestinians to win land disputes and blocked single men and gay couples from having children through surrogacy. More broadly, Netanyahu’s close ties with Trump may be understandable and justifiable, as is his outreach to European nationalists, but there is a political and PR price to be paid for such embraces.

Netanyahu has good instincts for English-speaking audiences, and he knows that a positive pitch only gets you so far. In the past few weeks, left-wing activists have complained that Israeli airport security have detained them and asked specifically about their activism and their political beliefs. On Monday, after the liberal Zionist writer Peter Beinart said he was stopped and interrogated, Netanyahu issued a statement saying it was an “administrative mistake,” adding that “Israel is the only country in the Middle East where people voice their opinions freely and robustly.”

The latter statement is a staple of pro-Israel hasbarah. It’s a terrific policy, as long as it has the added benefit of being true. But when actions prove unpopular, PR won’t save you. The root meaning of hasbarah is “explanation,” not “alchemy.”

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor of JTA.