{"id":60843,"date":"2015-07-13T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60843"},"modified":"2015-07-11T19:41:35","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T18:41:35","slug":"if-the-product-is-wrong-a-rebrand-wont-help-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/if-the-product-is-wrong-a-rebrand-wont-help-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"If the \u2018Product\u2019 Is Wrong, a Rebrand Won\u2019t Help Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jonathan<\/a>

Jonathan Cook<\/p><\/div>\n

6 Jul 2015 – <\/em>The Israeli government believes it is locked in an epic struggle to save Israel from the growing movement calling for an international boycott. Benjamin Netanyahu warns that Israel must \u201crebrand\u201d itself to avoid pariah status. Ordinary Israelis are therefore being conscripted into an army of spin doctors in a campaign termed \u201chasbara\u201d \u2013 Hebrew for \u201cpublic diplomacy\u201d or, most literally, propaganda.<\/p>\n

In the latest offensive, the education ministry has launched a compulsory hasbara course for students travelling abroad. All youth delegations are now required to learn how to justify Israel\u2019s policies in the occupied territories to outsiders. According to officials, the students must challenge those who \u201cseek to delegitimise Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is yet more evidence that hasbara has become a national obsession in Israel \u2013 and that the line between support for one\u2019s country and support for the subjugation of another people has been erased.<\/p>\n

Some 85 per cent of Israelis say they are keen to become hasbara ambassadors. A hasbara ministry already targets the international media with good news, while cultural events abroad,\u00a0from food fairs to Israeli entries at film festivals, are designed to prove that Israel has another side.<\/p>\n

For years the Israeli government has relied on paid workers \u2013 and thousands of volunteers \u2013 to surf the net posting pro-Israel comments. At Israel\u2019s international airport, Israeli holidaymakers are offered brochures explaining the importance of persuading those they meet that Israel is misunderstood.<\/p>\n

And yet the latest hasbara drive is unlikely to reverse Israel\u2019s slow slide into ignominy.<\/p>\n

The hasbara industry\u2019s chief flaw, as Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon observes, is its assumption that \u201cthe merchandise is fine, and only the packaging needs to be replaced\u201d.<\/p>\n

But rapid developments in information technology mean Israel has less control over manipulating its image than ever before. First it was 24-hour news, then the internet. Now, smartphones make every Palestinian a potential documentary-maker, ensuring that moments of cruelty and oppression are captured and available for anyone who cares to look.<\/p>\n

Palestinians post online videos of their everyday abuse: from demolition of homes to stone-throwers being shot with live ammunition.<\/p>\n

Last week, Zaki Sabah, 56, a cake vendor in Jerusalem\u2019s Old City, starred in one such video. Bystanders filmed him being savagely beaten by Israeli police on a busy road. Denied a permit for years by the occupation authorities, Sabah has been repeatedly fined and jailed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, another video exposed Israel\u2019s deceitful account of its supposedly peaceful interception of a boat trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. As more than a dozen passengers were held captive over the weekend, footage was smuggled out showing that Israeli commandos had electrocuted some of them with tasers.<\/p>\n

Troubling imagery is not restricted to the occupied territories. Film of the charred interior of a historic church next to the Sea of Galilee highlighted last month the latest hate crime by Jewish extremists against Israel\u2019s large Palestinian minority.<\/p>\n

The futility of trying to stem the tide of evidence damning Israel on media old and new was exemplified last week by Moshe Yaalon, the defence minister.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no humanitarian distress in Gaza,\u201d he averred, while the media illustrated reports of his speech with pictures of mountains of rubble and children still homeless a year after Israel\u2019s assault on the enclave.<\/p>\n

Mr Yaalon\u2019s sophistry may placate Israel\u2019s supporters but the rest of us are more often incensed by such insults to our intelligence.<\/p>\n

The hasbara offensive is doomed for another reason.<\/p>\n

With the Palestinians\u2019 case substantiated by evidence, rather than Israel\u2019s, the evangelists of hasbara have only one recourse: to blame the messenger. Critics of Israel, it is implied, are either inveterate dupes or unabashed anti-semites. Either they have been deceived by the Israel-haters, or they are haters themselves.<\/p>\n

As the hasbara industry moves into overdrive, such slurs are becoming common \u2013 including against those Israel needs to cultivate as allies.<\/p>\n

Judith Nir Mozes, the wife of interior minister Silvan Shalom, himself a Netanyahu confidant, possibly reflected high-level thinking in Israel when she tweeted last month a racist \u201cjoke\u201d about President Barack Obama. \u201cDo u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak,\u201d she wrote, ridiculing the leader of Israel\u2019s most important ally.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the Israeli foreign ministry mocked foreign journalists, even though they are hasbara\u2019s target audience.<\/p>\n

In a short animated video, a naive reporter is shown claiming that the people of Gaza simply want peace as militants fire rockets just behind him. Next the reporter misidentified Hamas\u2019s tunnelling as the \u201cfirst Palestinian subway system\u201d. The video ends with a warning: \u201cOpen your eyes, terror rules Gaza.\u201d The video has since been removed.<\/p>\n

Michael Oren, Israel\u2019s recently departed ambassador to the US, has joined the fray too, castigating American Jewish journalists as \u201cself-haters\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hasbara\u2019s cartoon version of reality is not only unconvincing but, in alienating friends as much as foes, self-defeating. Mr Netanyahu may hope to repackage Israel, but his product \u2013 continuing oppression of Palestinians \u2013 is one few can be persuaded to buy.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of: <\/em>Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); <\/em>Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008); and <\/em>Disappearing Palestine: Israel\u2019s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize<\/a> for Journalism.<\/em> The same year, Project Censored<\/a> voted one of Jonathan\u2019s reports, \u201cIsrael brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank\u201d, the ninth most important story censored in 2009-10.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jonathan-cook.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Netanyahu warns that Israel must \u201crebrand\u201d itself to avoid pariah status from the growing movement calling for an international boycott. Ordinary Israelis are therefore being conscripted into an army of spin doctors in a campaign termed \u201chasbara\u201d \u2013 Hebrew for \u201cpublic diplomacy\u201d or, most literally, propaganda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}