ISRAEL GIVES OBAMA A PASS: DAVID ISAAC
http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=859
“Thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee” — Isaiah 49:17
Last month, Barack Obama released a campaign commercial, “America and Israel: An Unbreakable Bond.” The seven-minute video proposes that Obama is the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.
Helping add substance to this risible claim are none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who also appears in the video, says: “I can tell you in a very categoric way, and I believe also in an authoritative way, that we have not had a better friend than President Obama.”
The Obama campaign gleaned these clips from various interviews. The Israelis didn’t actually sit for the ad, though they might as well have. By praising Obama and covering for his obviously anti-Israel policies, Israel’s leadership has essentially become part of Obama’s re-election run.
It’s hard to find a worse example of just how bad Israel’s public diplomacy efforts have become than this campaign commercial — aiding a president who enters office determined to put “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, insists on an unprecedented Israeli settlement freeze, bars Israel from obtaining offensive weaponry, embraces the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, thwarts Israel from undertaking its efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb, and bows to a Saudi king.
Shmuel must be rolling in his grave. For decades, he kept up a steady drumbeat on the need for a Ministry of Information. He always considered himself an “information man.”
When Mr. Begin became prime minister, he wisely chose Shmuel to go to the U.S. to dispel the notion that the new PM was a “fanatical, intransigent, illogical, uncompromising” ex-terrorist. This distorted image of Begin had been spread by Israel’s Left, who had a long tradition of slandering its opponents.
Shmuel did a highly effective job. Within 10 days, the press stopped its attacks on Mr. Begin. For those who are interested, they can hear Shmuel tell the “miracle tale,” as he jokingly called it, in his own words here (http://shmuelkatz.com/ministryvideo.htm). Begin had promised Shmuel before he left, and in fact, had made it a campaign promise, to set up a separate Hasbara, or information, ministry as part of the new government.
Indeed, [Mr. Begin] had repeatedly pointed to the vital importance of establishing this ministry, a view that had crystallised in his mind over the many years during which he had observed the inadequacy and the failures of the Foreign Ministry. (“The Hollow Peace,” Dvir & The Jerusalem Post, 1981, p. 64)
Unfortunately, and to Shmuel’s bitter disappointment, Begin reneged on this promise. Over the ensuing years, Shmuel continued to point to the desperate need for such a ministry. In “Time to say ‘enough!’” (The Jerusalem Post, October, 29, 1982), writing in response to a smear by Abba Eban, Shmuel wrote:
I have incessantly promoted the theme that Israel, for a variety of good American (and Western) reasons, both political and moral, has a vast constituency of friends, large enough to provide a security belt against built-in tendencies in U.S. administrations that are inimical to Israel.
Hence my incessant criticism of the Alignment government and more emphatically, of the Likud, for failing to establish adequate machinery to mobilize and activate that tremendous heterogeneous constituency. This complex purpose cannot be achieved except by a powerful, authoritative government information ministry.
Ten years later, Shmuel’s theme hadn’t changed. In “It’s Time to Start Fighting Back” (The Jerusalem Post, April 3, 1992), Shmuel writes:
Put down starkly on paper the facts seem incredible. At least since 1967, a propaganda war has been in progress against Israel — growing in scope and intensity from year to year. Its content deals with every facet of Jewish life and history, and with Israel day by day.
It is the meat of Arab information, spread by every Arab medium and institution, every non-Arab Moslem medium, every Arab education system. It is spread inter alia by media throughout Europe and a large section of the American media. Whole volumes have been written to describe the propaganda war against Israel.
In this war, the victim — Israel — plays very little part. It conducts a completely different campaign — adequate for a small nation at peace. It finds that the unrelenting blast of hatred, denigration and mendacity can be met by a department inside the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem with, of course, a small budget to boot.
Now, the Foreign Ministry is not built for the task, any more than it is built to conduct the military defense of the country. It is as though an Israel threatened from the land, the sea and the air, were to prepare its defenses by a handful of plans, a platoon of tanks, two artillery pieces and half-a-dozen fishing boats — all manned by highly efficient warriors from a Foreign Ministry department. Yes, a caricature.
In March, 2009, Israel finally did create a Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs, now headed by MK Yuli Edelstein. It is still a caricature, without the resources to do the job. To counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s “Israel Apartheid Week,” in 2011, the ministry sent a handful of ambassadors to the U.S.
When asked if they would make a difference, MK Edelstein frankly admitted ‘probably not.’
This situation is identical to what it was in 2001, when Shmuel wrote in “Curse of the Tongue-Tied” (The Jerusalem Post, November 6, 2001):
Israeli hasbara efforts have consisted, at moments of crisis, of sudden sorties of two or three emissaries who spend a few weeks in the United States and, as Israeli consul-general in New York Alon Pinkas has wittily hinted … what they achieve is to increase the consumption of bagels and smoked salmon.
Shmuel blamed the difficulty in setting up a separate information ministry on the Foreign Ministry, which like all foreign ministries, resisted the idea of anything that poached on its turf. It was at least partly for this reason that Mr. Begin backed out of his campaign promise to set up one – he encountered opposition from Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan.
Shmuel is no longer with us, but others continue to point out the absurd state of Israel’s hasbara efforts. In a recent two-part series in The Jerusalem Post (Comprehending the incomprehensible), Dr. Martin Sherman, who writes often on Israel-related issues, analyzes the reasons behind Israel’s pathetic public diplomacy efforts. The conclusion he draws is startling – Israel doesn’t want to win. “Or to put it differently: The people charged with the nation’s public diplomacy have a worldview that prevents them from adopting a winning strategy,” he writes.
Dr. Sherman argues that “civil society elites” are decisive in determining the nation’s strategic agenda. These elites support the creation of a PLO state abutting Israel. But in order to wage a public diplomacy war effectively, Israel would need to portray Palestinian Arab society as it truly is — “a cruel, violent society that suppresses its women, oppresses it homosexuals, represses its political dissidents.” The elites cannot permit this, Dr. Sherman writes, because to do so would make nonsense of their worldview.
“As a result, Israeli endeavors are inevitably reduced to defensive tactical responses, chasing events rather than preempting them, and doomed to failure. This — far more than international animosity, global anti-Semitism or George Soros — is the underlying reason for Israel’s abysmal performance on the public diplomacy front,” he writes.
Dr. Sherman’s remedy? No less than “fundamentally transforming the elite structure of Israel’s civil society and the discourse it generates. It requires empowering and emplacing new counter-elites.”
That’s a tall order. But it may be the only answer.
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