By Vic Rosenthal
Despite the vicious and brutal nature of the violent uprising that is under way in Israel now, the rest of the world is either silent or approving. The implication seems to be “they are getting what they deserved.” How did this happen?
This was written by an Israeli graduate student studying at Oxford:
When conversations regarding Israel do ensue, they deal with the disproportionate use of power during the 2014 war in Gaza, the high death toll among Palestinians (statistics which many British students with whom I have spoken can quote), the violent behavior of settlers towards Palestinians documented in videos that have gone viral in the UK as elsewhere, the checkpoints, the economic ruin of the Gaza strip and the continued refusal of Israel to recognize Palestinian independence. There are students who can recite without difficulty Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on Israel’s election day about the need to counter ‘droves’ of Arab Israelis on their way to vote. …
Despite immense efforts, Oxford scholars do not regard Israel as a high tech nation, a gay tourist destination or a model for modern democracy. They remain unconvinced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertions that Israel is the bastion of Western norms, the forefront in the struggle over terror. Nor do they prescribe [sic] to Israel’s moral relativism according to which the world must denounce Saudi Arabia and Bashar Assad before it denounces Israel. In the eyes of Oxford’s students, injustice elsewhere is not a defense for injustice in Israel.
To this international community, Israel is synonymous with bigotry, violence, hate and the oppression of human rights. It is the global spread of this notion that reveals that no public diplomacy campaign, no sophisticated national slogan and no infographic shared online by StandWithUs can counter the impact of the images that arose from Gaza in 2008, and 2012 and 2014, or those that currently emerge from Jerusalem.
His own political leanings and the fact that this was published in Ha’aretz are unimportant. The picture he paints is confirmed by other observers in universities in the UK and the US; you could hear the same things at Berkeley or the University of Toronto. It almost seems as though the more prestigious the institution, the worse they think of Israel. The students at these universities are future leaders of the West in politics, business, law and every other field.
Anyone who knows the truth knows that the ‘evidence’ cited for Israel’s alleged depravity is nonsense. The actual death toll of the last Gaza war was about half the number the students will cite (which came from Hamas sources) and most of those were Hamas fighters; the absurdity that Israel supplies Hamas with food, water, medicines and electricity while it targets Israeli towns with a blitz of rockets is ignored; as is the basic fact that the ‘independence’ sought by the Arabs is the death or dispersal of the hated Jews from their homeland.
The objective of the demonization and delegitimization campaign is to support diplomatic and legal warfare against the state, to damage her attempts to defend herself and to prevent her from realizing political benefit even from military victories. Military strength by itself is not enough to prevent political defeat.
How did Israel allow herself, with all of her alleged intellectual muscle, to get into this situation? How could there have been such a massive failure to tell our story – our true story to the world? Can it be turned around?
Israel is failing at hasbara for two main reasons:
First, the state suffers from a massive oversupply of homegrown critics, who attack it with as much or more vigor than outsiders. I think if we had a way to measure the pro- and anti-Israel output of our media, academics and cultural figures, we would find that the negative far outweighs the positive. Naturally when an Israeli criticizes Israel, a listener is prepared to credit what he says much more than when it comes from an outsider. Anti-Israel Israelis are helped in this by the large fraction of Diaspora Jews who, for whatever reason, are always found among Israel’s most vehement critics. There is no comparable phenomenon among Arabs and Muslims, who maintain admirable message discipline.
Not only is this pervasive self-deprecation damaging to our image, it may be responsible for the fact that we don’t even try to project a positive one.
Second, like the whore in Catch-22 who hits Captain Orr over the head repeatedly with her shoe, our critics are getting paid to beat us up. Molding the way the world thinks about a subject isn’t cheap, and our enemies haven’t spared the expense. Here are just some ways anti-Israel dollars from governments and wealthy individuals (George Soros) are effectively employed as information weapons:
- Direct grants are made to universities to endow chairs and whole departments who naturally share their point of view about Israel. Anti-Israel scholars like Ilan Pappé and Steven Salaita are helped to get positions despite academic incompetence.
- Public figures – e.g., Jimmy Carter – receive contributions to their personal foundations and huge speaker’s fees to espouse their positions.
- Front organizations – e.g., J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace – are created and funded to channel particular types of anti-Israel expression. These sometimes work to infiltrate other groups not normally concerned with the conflict to support BDS, pass anti-Israel resolutions, and so forth.
- Worldwide satellite channels like Al-Jazeera receive massive governmental support (there are thousands, in many languages, many from Middle Eastern countries).
- Contributions are made to the major ‘human-rights’ NGOs, like HRW and Amnesty International, which provide the raw material for anti-Israel UN reports and resolutions.
- Money is funneled to smaller NGOs inside Israel like Breaking the Silence, B’tselem, and others. They give legitimacy to accusations of racism and war crimes, engage in ‘lawfare’, and spread the anti-Israel message far and wide.
- Last, but not least, the huge financial resources of the UN are employed to create and disseminate anti-Israel propaganda (e.g., the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People).
And what does Israel have? Its poorly funded Foreign Affairs Ministry, many of whose officials disagree with government policy. There is no Ministry of Information, and no government-supported worldwide satellite channel. Israel’s academic establishment is permeated by radicals who, when they go abroad (and are not boycotted – an irony which is wasted on them), present papers attacking the state of Israel. International Jewish solidarity, despite what the antisemites think, is a joke.
No wonder we are losing the information war – we are barely fighting it!
Of course Israel does not have the financial resources that its enemies do. Saudi Arabia has been spending millions to buy influence in the US and Europe for decades. Qatar, a tiny country with the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas and its highest per capita income, was able to launch and support al-Jazeera in a way that few countries could.
But Israel has leveraged technology and brainpower before to overcome its lack of resources. Maybe Israel can’t make grants of $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown as the Saudis did a few years ago, but it could license potentially lucrative patents to universities in lieu of cash.
Israel could also take steps to shut down the flow of money to anti-state NGOs at home, and even clean up the sewers of extremism that some academic departments in our universities have become. We can act more aggressively against provocateurs – both Israelis and foreigners – that create incidents for propaganda purposes. The Ha’aretz newspaper – or rather, its English website, because few Israelis read the paper – is an anti-Israel organ of major significance outside of Israel. I don’t advocate limiting freedom of the press, but maybe there is some way to neutralize or counteract Ha’aretz.
A satellite channel in English and Arabic isn’t impossible. There is a natural attraction to what is considered challenging to authority; if done intelligently and with scrupulous regard for truth, I think it could be successful. Israeli musical talent alone is world-class.
Enemy propaganda gets a boost from pre-existing anti-Jewish attitudes. If we did a better job in presenting Jewish belief and history (and I don’t mean belaboring our Holocaust victimhood) then we might defuse some of it.
Every once in a while there is a flurry of activity (the oft-derided “Brand Israel” initiative is an example). Unfortunately it’s not as simple as blowing a few hundred thousand shekels on fancy consultants. A beginning would be to create a well-funded Ministry of Information which would deal only with these issues. We need to study what our enemies are doing, and turn it around. It may take years. But it will never happen if we don’t start.
@ babushka:
With some careful qualifications as to what exactly you mean by “Gentile culture”, I’d have to say we are on the same page. With the additional careful qualification that I am myself Gentile.
Let us observe together that one of the things characterizing Gentile culture at the moment is antisemitism.
Gentile is defined as anyone who is not Jewish. This is typically applied to Europeans and even that can get complicates.
Gentiles fear and resent what they (accurately) perceive as Jewish superiority. Jewish culture produces better educated and more talented humans than does Gentile culture. Ergo, it must be destroyed.
The Palestinians are an artificial construct invented to be used as an implement of destruction against Israel. A phony group with phony grievances.
Only the sell-outs.
babushka Said:
It is you who is inverting the argument in a very strange way.
I say, “The world hates Jews because of lies told about the Jews” and you say, “The world lies about the Jews because the world hates the Jews”.
But these are not contradictory statements. Obviously somebody hates Jews, else it wouldn’t lie about them. The rest believe the lies and the lies become why they hate the Jews.
What are the lies that you think are told about the Jews? Do you think Palestinians represent a legitimate ethnic identity?
Do you really believe that Jews have ever represented a privileged part of the world?
@ppksky
You should re-read what I wrote because you have inverted the meaning.
@dove
Scrambled or fried?
I agree that for the most part the world hates us because of the propaganda machine.
1. We are Christ Killers
2. We rejected our Messiah
3. We are a reincarnate of the holocaust Jews and our only mission is to ‘get even’.
4. We are cheap
5. We are snobs – thinking that we are better than everyone else
6. We are cold hearted and uncaring and not thankful
7. We are rebelling against the true G-d
8. We are supposed to be born again Christians
9. We are the devils children
10. We eat arabs for breakfast
People really believe the above bunk – or at least most of it!
babushka Said:
“The world has a compelling reason to hate the Jews.”
No it doesn’t. You don’t know what you are talking about. In fact, you are citing the lies being told about Jews as being true. They aren’t true.
If you, like the antisemites, are to claim Jewish dominance as the source of antisemitic values, then you need to cite context. Which means not only do you have to show how Jews occupy these privileged positions, but you must also cite who occupies the rest of the positions and how they got there. And also you need to carefully show how these people are actually Jewish. Many people cited as Jewish are not Jewish at all. What percentage of the billionaires are Muslims? What percentage are Catholics?
In the end you are left with the most obvious part of the falsehoods that you share with the antisemites, which is that the Jews represent only a small percentage of any population anywhere outside of Israel. Even if all the Jews everywhere were billionaires, it still wouldn’t mean much. Being a billionaire is not what everyone imagines it to be. Power in the global economy is not run by billionaires and it certainly isn’t run by Jews.
It remains,
The Jews are innocent.
Israel is innocent.
The world hates the Jews because powerful people with false beliefs need the world to hate the Jews.
The world has a compelling reason to hate the Jews. Throughout history and despite relentless persecution, Jews have always risen to the top of society. Whenever presented the opportunity – even in the face of discrimination – Jews have dominated. Jews are 2% of the American population, yet comprise more than 50% of the billionaires. Jews win a phenomenally disproportionate percentage of Nobel Prizes even though the Norwegians are world class anti-Semites. Israel turned a desert hellhole into a prosperous paradise. From the Gentile perspective, this is all annoying as hell.
More likely it is the other way around: the world is steeped in lies about Jews because the world hates Jews.
@ babushka:
babushka, the catch is that the world has no reason to hate the Jews. The world hates the Jews because the world is steeped in lies about the Jews. The world is taught to hate the Jews so that they will not hate those who deserve to be hated. And those that advance the lies about the Jews deserve our hatred.
Think of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a well known fraud that continues to be a respected artifact, proof of a Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world. Think of the antisemitic cult of Palestinian nationalism and ethnic identity, funded and promoted beyond all perspective by the UN, a global locus of geopolitical power.
The Jews are innocent and do not deserve to be hated. Israel is innocent. The liars are a plague and richly deserve our loathing, contempt and hatred.
Folks, there’s an extremely interesting article on the Gates of Vienna site. I encourage all to read it carefully:
The Longest Running Crime Family
is that the world hates Jews. Until that changes – and it will never change – you can shit can the brilliant ideas for a public relations campaign that will alter the status quo.
The problem that Israel has regarding its public image is that it will not confront the fact that its chief detractors are liars. It is a ghetto mentality that says that if only you give your aggressors some dignity, then they will restrain themselves. That Israel’s enemies are antisemites is obvious. But it is not necessary to explain that they are antisemites, it is only necessary to show that they are liars.
It’s like the current responce to the current stabbing pogrom in Israel. The acceptable thing to say is that the problem is incitement. But the problem really is that all of Palestinian society is carefully engineered to inculcate these violent acts and that Palestinian ethnic identity has no other purpose than to wage violent acts against Jews.
The role of universities is a broader issue. The resurrection of antisemitism on campuses, like life elsewhere, has two basic sources: An increase of Muslim students and declining intellectual standards.
In other words, it’s far easier to target Jews for so-called injustice than it is to target others, such as Arabs or Pakistanis.
This attitude is commonly known as “cowardice,” and in terms of self-preservation it beats the mask of intellectualism – of which these people are really proud – hands down.