Jason Koutsoukis, Jerusalem
July 4, 2009 (first post)
ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's communications chief, Ron Dermer, has admitted that Israel faces a serious public relations problem.
In his first interview since the Netanyahu Government took office in March, the Prime Minister's director of policy planning and communications has told The Age that it's time Israel switched its PR strategy from defence to offence. "We have to break out of the straitjacket," Mr Dermer says. "We have to defend our own right to defend ourselves. It's not for other people to do it for us."
Despite launching a broadside at the way the foreign media and other organisations report events in Israel, Mr Dermer acknowledged that successive Israeli governments were also to blame for presenting a narrow argument.
"It is not enough for Israel to say that it wants peace. You must also say that you are not a thief. We did not steal another people's land. That is the core of this conflict," he says.
Six months after Israel launched a 22-day offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip that killed more than 1400 Palestinians, the country has faced one of the worst public relations crises in its 61-year history.
In the last week alone, Israel has been forced to defend itself against harsh criticisms in reports published by the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Revelations that French President Nicolas Sarkozy had pressured Mr Netanyahu to dump his Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, because he was an embarrassment to Israel caused more headaches.
"I could go on for another half an hour," says Yigal Palmor, spokesman for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Bar-Ilan University professor Eytan Gilboa, Israel's leading public diplomacy expert, says Israel will have to spend 10 times its current PR budget if it really wants to change international perceptions.
"We need to be spending $US100 million ($A124.7 million) a year on information campaigns abroad — primarily in Arab countries and then in Europe, where there is a complete lack of knowledge of what Israel is and what Israel does," Professor Gilboa says.
The power to persuade and shape understandings, what he calls "soft power", is a concept that Israeli governments have never properly understood.
"In terms of power, a properly organised information campaign can be worth several brigades," Professor Gilboa says.
Modern media tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, must also become part of a properly organised public diplomacy arsenal.
Others disagree, rejecting the notion that Israel's image abroad is the issue.
"I think Israel has a policy problem, not a PR problem," says Uri Dromi, who was director of Israel's Government Press Office under former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
"The biggest problem is that Israel should not be in the (occupied) West Bank in the first place. Who cares what people write about us?"
With the new Government's basic policy framework laid down, Mr Dermer, an American-born Israeli who has worked closely with Mr Netanyahu over the past decade, says his main focus will nonetheless be on what Israelis call "hasbara" — a word that roughly translates as "explanation".
In pursuing a strategy that will centralise the Israeli Government's responses to issues raised by the foreign media into a kind of war room, and make better use of public opinion research, Mr Dermer says Israel has to start shaming those countries and organisations that hold Israel to a different standard.
"(People) who get together to call for a boycott against Israel, are they also calling for a boycott against North Korea, the world's largest concentration camp? Against Iran, where they hang homosexuals?" Mr Dermer asks. "When you hold Israel to a standard that you won't hold another country to, what are you doing? You are being anti-Semitic."
Mr Dermer says the combined narratives of Israel as a Jewish state, the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths, and the Middle East's tremendous oil reserves make a compelling world story that Israel must try to influence.
"Within this story is this narrative that has grown much stronger in recent years that is essentially false: people who see us as colonialist invaders.
"But once the Palestinians accept that we, the Jews, are here by right, that we are not foreign colonialists and we're not invaders — even if they say it (the land) is 1 per cent yours and 99 per cent ours — then we're in real negotiations."
Comment: This blog has for years indicated it was necessary to be pro-active with regards to PR-fact isthis is what we do. finally the Israeli government has acknowledged the importance of PR-now let us see whatthey do.
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