In between conversations with friends and family closest to those now engaged in fierce ground-combat against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip, my itinerary continued. My first stop of the day was at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem. I was invited to attend the first day of sessions for both the incoming cohort of StandWithUs-Israel-Fellows and the program’s Alumni and to deliver a speech to them and Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials and staff in attendance. These StandWithUs-Israel-Fellows constitute an extraordinary group of articulate young ambassadors and activists for Israel from around the country and beyond it who are learning important skills to tell Israel's side of the story in the battle for public opinion against the Arab/Muslim world. They are talented and their cause is just; the training with which StandWithUs is providing them will serve Israel very well. I was asked to address some of the challenges and opportunities facing the larger endeavor of advocacy for Israel in the United States. My talk aimed to touch on, and to spark continued consideration of, several ideas:
(1) WHY FIGHTING THE BATTLE FOR PUBLIC OPINION IS COUNTER-INTUITIVE FOR JEWS AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT: Historically, the great majority of the last 2,000 years of the Jewish experience has been that of a minority community in foreign lands. Quite reasonably, therefore, our tendency has been to engage in backdoor diplomacy with those who control or influence most directly policies or policy-makers that have affected us, including monarchs and their advisors, legislators, and other appointed or elected officials. If one looks at AIPAC, The Washington Institute, The American Jewish Committee, and most other venerable Jewish organizations in North America, one finds that they are born of, and centered on, this very approach. However, our adversaries in the Arab and Muslim worlds today have gained over the last 1,500 years of their historical experience great expertise in managing and manipulating mass-public-opinion, as a means both to obtain and sustain tyrannical rule, more often than not as majority rulers rather than minority subjects.
The worldwide Muslim population alone is approximately 100 times the size of the Jewish population and, given that we live today in an age of mass-media communications, the Arab and Muslim communities enjoy not only the distinct advantages of deeply ingrained leadership cultures and tendencies toward influencing public opinion and expertise in executing this mission, but also the advantage of a greater frequency of opportunity to do so, given the imbalance in our respective worldwide populations. Furthermore, as instantaneous polling indicates evermore to policy-makers in Western democracies the preferences of their constituents, influencing public-opinion becomes evermore a necessity in the endeavor to ensure that those who determine and implement public-policy - the very people that we are accustomed to lobby and rely upon - feel the freedom and strength to vote and implement their conscience. The increasing tendency on the part of elected officials to "vote the polls" not only makes it difficult to conduct more discreet or backdoor diplomacy, but, makes its apparent success difficult to rely upon, given that a policy-maker may well change his or her position at any time, depending upon the polls' indication of their constituents' preferences.
As such, our Israel-advocacy related endeavors, in our era, must include the following: (a) We must complement backdoor-diplomacy and educational approaches to elected and appointed officials with a strategic approach to influencing mass-public-opinion toward Israel’s and the Jewish People’s favor; (b) We must not do so alone. We must build coalitions with anyone and everyone, from the more liberal elements of Western society to those whose leanings are more conservative - and from the most secular to the most religiously inclined, so that we address the imbalance in opportunity to influence public opinion now very much favoring the Arab and Muslim worlds.
To this end, we must develop, articulate, implement, and sustain a carefully crafted message that can highlight a range of compelling reasons why the public must support the Israeli position. However, it is vital that the different reasons work together to form one consistent narrative in Israel's favor, so that what we say to the Right doesn't contradict what we say to the Left. Such self-contradiction risks obscuring the greater truth that, as a freedom-loving and freedom-granting society, Israel is consistently victimized and slandered by tyrants, dictators, and those whom they dominate and influence with their assaults on plain truths; we mustn't be, or seems to be, duplicitous.
(2) THE NECESSITY FOR A CLEAR MESSAGE FOR ISRAEL'S PUBLIC RELATIONS EFFORTS: Unlike the Arab world, whose general aims for its public relations efforts are clear – to help bring about Israel’s destruction – Israel’s aims are not as clear. In large measure, this is because of two factors that work together: (a) Israeli officials are answerable to the Israeli electorate - therefore the audience for their messages is generally that of the Israeli electorate rather than the world outside of Israel; (2) As Israel's democratic and free electorate is diverse in opinion, Israel's elected officials reflect and respond to this diversity with similarly diverse messages and opinions.
If you are uncertain as to the extent of the confusion regarding Israel's external public-relations aims and messages, consider the following: Is the aim of Israel's externally directed public-relations efforts to portray Israel in narrative and with images that move "beyond the conflict," encouraging multiple perceptions of Israel as a technological marvel, a contributor to the fight against hunger in Africa, and a free society, etc.? Is the aim to respond to charges leveled against Israel by its detractors, point by point or issue by issue? Is the aim to build bridges to other minorities in the region? Is the aim to ensure, in particular, the continuity of American diplomatic support? Is the aim to discredit neighboring Arab and Muslim regimes and unmask their horrific Human Rights abuses? Is the aim to deliberately ignore these abuses in order to ensure that Israel has some viable partner for peace, less awful than the other neighboring alternatives?
To ensure that Israel's message is understandable and that its representatives are working as little as possible at cross-purposes, it is vital that a clear meta-aim for all public relations be developed, articulated, implemented, and sustained and that most, if not all, subordinate goals for Israel's public-relations fit reasonably under the umbrella of this meta-aim internally - within Israeli society, externally - among the organized Jewish communities outside of Israel and within their institutions, and outwardly to the entire world - via the media. This is a difficult undertaking in a free society, but, it is in this time of media-related siege a very necessary one for Israel's survival;
(3) POSITING TWO META-AIMS FOR ISRAEL'S PUBLIC RELATIONS ENDEAVORS: Two possible meta-aims might be articulated as follows (and I would advocate for the adoption of both simultaneously): (a) To encourage the world to understand and identify with Israel as the only free-society in the region. Under this umbrella, the various audiences noted above would be educated regularly, in word and in image, to understand Israel as a democratic entity who elects its representatives and conducts its affairs in a most admirable, humanitarian manner, despite being surrounded and terrorized by those who seek its destruction. Furthermore, the message might be expanded to then suggest that Israel therefore has every right to determine solely whether to engage in diplomacy with its adversaries, to disengage from such diplomacy, to adjust its diplomatic aims or approaches, or to utilize or suspend armed defensive initiatives to protect its citizens and further its aims to achieve peace with security; (b) To ensure that the world and its media understand that the uniform voice emanating from Arab and Muslim states is a consequence not of uniform agreement among the populations of these states or territories, but, rather of the intolerance of any dissent in these societies. To this end, a relentless unmasking of the human rights abuses in the Arab and Muslim world must be placed before the world's eyes, using the established media, blogging, YouTube, viral-marketing techniques and any other means to communicate this perspective. In this regard, it is high-time that the Arab and Muslim worlds, from the Palestinians to the Iranian, be placed on the defensive in their interactions with the media.
Once these or other aims are adopted and articulated as broad-umbrella-aims under which all public relations might be understood and against the backdrop of which all public relations is articulated and, later, measured, then the strategies and methods to achieve these aims can be considered, developed, agreed upon, implemented broadly, and sustained over a lengthy period of time, adjusted only as necessary to maximize Israel's public-relations efforts.
(4) ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF THE GROWING, ANTI-ISRAEL-BIASED MUSLIM MEDIA BASED IN ARAB AND MUSLIM COUNTRIES AND SIMILARLY MORE COMMON AND OFTEN EQUALLY BIASED MUSLIM REPORTERS AMONG THE WESTERN MEDIA: It is vital that strategies are developed to ensure that Muslims throughout the world are not mistaken for objective third parties in their analyses of the mid-east conflict and in their advocacy for particular approaches to its resolution. It is vital that the conflict itself be reframed from "The Palestinian/Israeli Conflict" toward its greater truth as both the evolving conflict of “Radical Islam against the West” and the longstanding “Arab / Israeli Conflict,” with a sophisticated approach to determining the applicability of either message to specific circumstances and specific audiences. Additionally, such reframing of the conflict will serve Israel’s and the Jewish People’s interests in a number of other ways.
The questions posed informally by those StandWithUs-Israel-Fellows who gathered around at the conclusion of the talk reflected a considerable depth of understanding on their part of the nuances of the difficulties and challenges involved in encouraging a shift in the area of mass-public opinion. However, they also understood intuitively many of the implicit or explicit opportunities that accompanied each of the challenges presented. My time with the StandWithUs-Israel-Fellows was most encouraging; great job, StandWithUs!
Rabbi Isaac Jeret
Spiritual Leader
Congregation Ner Tamid of South Bay
www.nertamid.com
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