The Idea of Israel (46 page)

Soon after, the separate efforts of the various organisations and individuals were put under one management. This was an operational decision taken by the foreign ministry’s first-ever Brand Israel Conference, convened in Tel Aviv in 2005, which officially kicked off the campaign. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appointed Ido Aharoni to head the brand-management office and gave him a $4 million budget, in addition to the $3 million established annual budget for
hasbara
(propaganda) as well as the usual $11 million for the Ministry of Tourism’s promotional efforts in North America.
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Funding was also earmarked for work in Europe. It is noteworthy that the politicians in Israel decided to focus on the United States, where they sensed that delegitimisation had become particularly ripe and successful. One might have thought that the Israelis saw the US as a safe, long-time bastion of pro-Israeli bias, but apparently not. As we shall see towards the end of this chapter, the academics would try to convince politicians that the plague was rampant in the United Kingdom, which they saw as the preferred main target for the Brand Israel campaign.

Aharoni recruited top people in the advertising world. It included the Saatchi brothers (reportedly they did the work for free) and PR experts such as David Saranga, the former consul for media and public affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York. Saranga told the industry’s major publication,
PRWeek
, that the two groups Israel was targeting were ‘liberals’ and sixteen- to thirty-year-olds (hence
the posters of the minimally clad Miss Israel and the fit gay men in bathing suits). In 2005 Aharoni’s office hired TNS, a market research firm, to test new brand concepts for Israel in thirteen different countries, and also funded a billboard pilot program in Toronto.
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At the centre of the team were members of Brand Asset Valuator, or BAV, the world’s largest brand database, working alongside the best publicists and marketing people. BAV specialised in exposing the target community’s emotional attachments to brands. Fern Oppenheim, an advertising and marketing consultant and a member of the Brand Israel group, said that the BAV data would be part of a long-term strategy that would also include ongoing research and evaluation: ‘We want to be a resource everyone can benefit from, the way a corporate management team would manage a brand’.
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Another expert, David Sable, who was connected to Young & Rubicam, told the diplomats that Israel had not ranked among the well-liked countries because, at least in the United States, people ‘know a lot about Israel, just not the right things. They think of Israel as a grim, war-torn country, not one booming with high-tech and busy outdoor cafes’.
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So, in 2005 the orientation was to sell Israel as, in effect, a branch of American society. This task was handed to Young & Rubicam. David Sable again: ‘Americans don’t see Israel as being like the US’.
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Israel, as a brand, was already strong in America, but ‘it is better known than liked, and constrained by lack of relevance’. He went on to say that Americans ‘find Israel to be totally irrelevant to their lives, and they are tuning out, and that is particularly true for 18- to 34-year-old males, the most significant target’.
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Brand Israel intended to change this by selecting aspects of Israeli society to highlight, and then bringing Americans directly to them. They started off with a free trip for architectural writers, followed by one for food and wine writers. The goal of these efforts was to ‘show Americans that there was another Israel behind the gloomy headlines’ and convey an image of Israel as a ‘productive, vibrant, and cutting-edge culture’, as Gary Rosenblatt of
Jewish Week
put it. He summarised the blueprint for the next few years this way:

Think of Israel as a product undergoing an overhaul to make it more competitive in the marketplace. What’s called for are fewer stories explaining the rationale for the security fence, and more attention to scientists doing stem-cell research on the cutting edge or the young computer experts who gave the world Instant Messaging.
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It was not only American PR and branding wizards who were recruited. The government also asked for deeper involvement from the public. In a show of total mistrust in its professional diplomats, it recruited commercial Israeli television to seek alternative messengers for the new idea of Israel through a reality show called
The Ambassador
. The winner of a thirteen-week elimination contest won a job with a Zionist advocacy group called Israel At Heart to boost the diplomats with the best of Israel’s youth. One of Israel At Heart’s initiatives was to send Ethiopian Jews to speak in black churches in the United States. (Consider the idea of bringing African Americans from inner-city US ghettos to tell people in Brixton about the ‘American dream’, and you may grasp the absurdity of such a move.) High school student cadres later took over the mission.
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Moreover, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked every Israeli artist, acting troupe, and dance company to include a Brand Israel component in their shows. A typical example of such a tour was the one undertaken in 2012 in the US and UK by the dance company Batsheva; the tour was openly described by the ministry as part of the Brand Israel campaign and the dancers as ‘the best global ambassadors of Israel’.
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The Ministry of Tourism went a step further. It was not enough to present an image of the most relaxed, groovy, fun country in the world. In 2009 the state miraculously succeeded in getting rid of Palestine and the Palestinians, and received the Golan Heights as a gift from Syria. The ministry’s updated maps of a greater, border-free Israel, which were shown worldwide in ads and posters, including in London’s Underground, indicated no Golan Heights or Palestinian areas. Hundreds of protests caused the removal of the posters from the Underground.
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By 2010 the Israeli financial daily
Globes
reported that the foreign ministry had allocated a hundred million shekels (more than $26 million) to branding during the coming years. This money was mainly destined to help fight the delegitimisation that was becoming increasingly evident in social networks and cyberspace generally. The ministry was optimistic about the chances of such a campaign, since its research unit had determined that Web surfers relate well to content that interests them, regardless of the identity or political affiliation of the source.
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Another collaboration launched in 2010 was aimed at the gay community, emphasising Tel Aviv as a gay- and lesbian-friendly destination for European LGBTs. The collaborators included Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, the Tel Aviv Tourism Board, and Israel’s largest LGBT organisation, the Agudah, and their campaign was called Tel Aviv Gay Vibe. Critics called it a version of ‘pinkwashing’, comparing the use of women’s rights in the nineteenth century to justify colonisation with the use of gay rights as a tool to legitimise the continued oppression of the Palestinians.
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Re-Branding the Rebrand – New Plans and Visions

Despite all the activity, the reports of success did not even convince those who published them. A new actor was asked to join the crew to find out why success was still elusive and what else could be done. The Jewish Agency works with several think tanks; one such was the Reut Institute. The institute claimed in 2010 that the threat to the State of Israel in the areas of diplomacy and international relations was on the rise. It described the 2009 report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, as epitomising the delegitimisation campaign, its origins, logic and possible consequences.
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What became known as the Goldstone Report gently accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008. Later, under Zionist pressure, Goldstone, who is Jewish, partly retracted the mission’s findings. In
early 2010 the institute characterised the report as the centrepiece of efforts to subject Israel to ‘increasingly harsh criticism around the world’ and said that in certain places, ‘criticism ha[d] stretched beyond legitimate discourse regarding Israeli policy to a fundamental challenge to the country’s right to exist’. The institute’s own report,
The Delegitimisation Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall
, connects the Goldstone Report to the international condemnation directed at Israel after its second attack on Lebanon in 2006. That condemnation, according to Reut, is the product of a radical Islamist ideology emanating from Iran, assisted by Hezbollah and Hamas.

The problem, the report suggested, was ‘a conceptual inferiority’ of the ideological forces within the Jewish state. Israel had failed to market itself as a peace-seeking Jewish and democratic state, hence the great success of the vicious delegitimisation campaign. If this campaign continued, warned the Reut Institute, Israel would become a pariah state and there would be no solution for the Palestinian question, bringing a one-state solution to the fore. When Zionist bodies warn against the danger of a one-state solution, what they mean is what Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned against in 2007: that Israel would necessarily end up as an apartheid state under such a scenario.
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‘A tipping point in this context would be a paradigm shift from the Two-State Solution to the One-State Solution as the consensual framework for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict’, states Reut. Even a comprehensive permanent status agreement would not be capable of putting an end to the delegitimisation campaign, because inherent in those efforts, contends Reut, is the negation of Israel’s right to exist.

So what is to be done? ‘It takes a network to fight a network’, concludes the Reut report. Israel’s diplomacy and foreign policy doctrine requires urgent overhaul: ‘Allocating appropriate resources will be essential, but it must be recognised that there is a “clash of brands” ’: ‘Israel’s re-branding is strategically important’, but ‘it is equally important to brand the other side’. Since Israel’s adversaries have succeeded in branding it as ‘a violent country that violates international law and human rights’, Israel must isolate the delegitimisers, work with NGOs, mobilise pro-Israel factions internationally, and
cultivate personal relationships with ‘political, financial, cultural, media, and security-related elites’.

In other words, at least according to the Reut Institute/Jewish Agency, all the money and experts in the world could not help rebrand Israel as a peaceful, fun country. One might have thought a less violent policy would help, but no. Instead, Reut wanted the government to seek ways of pressuring the Western élites to broadcast a different image of Israel and to hope that Jewish communities could deliver the goods.

Another group connected with the Jewish Agency for Israel (in fact, created by it in 2002) is the Jewish People Policy Institute, commissioned to face threats to Israel’s national security. Although a collection of demographers, historians, sociologists and propagandists, it is treated, in the context of the war against delegitimisation, as a military unit. Its master document on the topic, arising out of the 2010 Conference on the Future of the Jewish People, warned that the ‘delegitimisation has to be understood not only as a threat to Israel but to Jewish existence everywhere’.
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In a similar way, the 2010 ‘State of the Nation’ conference at the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzeliya called Israel’s marketing campaign a war, but not just a war – a matter of ‘asymmetric warfare … conducted on the battlefield of ideas’. Since Israel had not been defeated militarily or economically, its enemies were trying to destroy it with ideas. There was an imbalance because the enemy was ubiquitous and powerful.
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Three years earlier, this Jewish Agency think tank associated its previous worry – about the assimilation of US Jews in the Gentile community – with the unequal war. It concluded that younger Jewish Americans were ‘distancing themselves from Israel’. This was reaffirmed by a famous article by Peter Beinart in the
New York Review of Books
in 2010, but Beinart, like Norman Finkelstein, attributed this distancing to the wish not to be identified with the occupation and the criminal policies of the state.
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The Jewish Agency would have none of that. For them, the reason was that Reform Judaism, which was very popular in the United States, was not sufficiently respected in Israel and was not allowed to convert non-Jews on Israeli soil. Thus, while the Reut Institute was asking for more aggressive
lobbying, the Jewish People Policy Institute sought the façade of an Israel that would be more pluralist in Jewish matters.

Given that Brand Israel was not producing the desired results in 2010, local academics were also recruited. Until then, they had been busy struggling against the post-Zionists on the domestic front. First, it was Bar-Ilan University, the national religious institution, that led the way, but soon it was joined by Tel Aviv University. The academy’s main role was to explain why, in 2010, Israel was still delegitimised. The first to venture an answer were ex-generals and previous heads of security services working in academia or in semi-academic institutes that served both the universities and the intelligence community. Among the latter was the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center near Tel Aviv, which identified the same web of enemies that everyone before and after it had named: radical Islam working together with anti-Zionists and anti-Semites.