When the Best Media Minds in the World are on Vacation

Israel’s other English language daily reports that, “the country’s National Information Directorate launched a social media campaign on Tuesday showing pictures of Gaza misery above quotes by Hamas heads admitting the value and importance of human shields.”

In launching the campaign, Israel’s best media minds must have either been called up to reserves, preparing for August vacations, or more likely, not asked for their advice.

How can it be that a nation with many of the world’s most sought after advertising professionals who are competent and creative when it comes to selling cell phones, cars, cottage cheese, politicians and political parties, aren’t locked in a room packaging the Israel we know and love?

As Israel’s precious sons and daughters are fighting to protect their loved ones and the home they cherish, it’s time for the country’s top media and advertising executives to get to work packaging and telling Israel’s story as well as they sell cottage cheese.

Imagine selling cottage cheese by promising, “Not likely to kill you.” Or lottery with the headline, “We don’t want all your money. Not yet anyway.” Or even politicians with the bold proclamation, “Any accusations of misconduct are a lie, and we we can prove it.”

Packaging Israel has to begin with telling Israel’s story.

When it comes to packaging Israel, an idea leading Israeli advertising executive Gil Samsonov has spent more than a decade considering, writing and lecturing about, starting with “it’s not our fault” is the wrong strategy for an increasingly wired planet in which those whose opinions matter most are tuned into 24/7 news from the sources they trust.

Packaging Israel has to begin with telling Israel’s story — how a nation of farmers, pioneers and refugees created one of the world’s most innovative and successful economies, a fiercely independent press, rigorous judicial system that doesn’t hesitate to hold even the most powerful accountable, democratic processes in which even the smallest minorities can, and are, elected to Parliament, and a quality of life that — despite decades of endless violence within and beyond the tiny nation’s borders — is among the best in the world.

Anyone who truly cares about the region’s future can look around the area in which eight million Jewish, Christian and Muslim Israelis live, study, work and serve to see a very different reality for hundreds of millions of its neighbors.

Poverty, squalor, massacres, political oppression, rigged elections; vast national resources hijacked by gangsters hiding out in five star hotels behind false masks of religious or moral values accountable to none of the people for the checks they write in the blood of their own children, families and those they claim to represent while brutally and publicly murdering those few courageous enough to challenge the party line that has sacrificed their people’s future to failed strategies for which their children have paid the highest price.

Yes, Israel must generously invest in telling it’s story to the world, especially younger generations born after 1948 who know little if anything about Israel’s miraculous victory in the War of Independence, ingenious triumph against overwhelming odds in the Six Day War of 1967, the surprise, massive losses, and eventual victory of the 1973 Yom Kippur war launched on the morning of our holiest day, and much more through which Israel has not only survived, but thrived.

Stories about the realities and horror of war will not win Israel any new friends, inspire aliyah, tourism, economic cooperation, or bring hopes for a future of peace any closer.

But Inspiring generations near and far will.

The story of Israel can not defined by the brutality of war, but what’s possible when people of all faiths, ethnicities, backgrounds and beliefs create a future of tolerance, respect and truly unleash human potential. That future remains blocked not by a nation created and committed to being a light unto the nations, but the very real, evil intentions and capabilities of murderous gangs financed by regimes void of compassion for their own people or those whose deaths they encourage and celebrate.

As Israel’s precious sons and daughters are fighting to protect their loved ones and the home they cherish, it’s time for the country’s top media and advertising executives to get to work packaging and telling Israel’s story as well as they sell cottage cheese.