Why Israel now needs to come to the aid of the Diaspora
As a tender, vulnerable infant and even as a sturdier adolescent, the Jewish state was nurtured and supported by the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. Most Jews of a certain age will have fond memories of KKL “blue boxes;” of saving up to plant trees; and of stalwart Women Zionists organising lunches, coffee-mornings and bazaars for the nascent state. Many will recall setting aside their studies or putting their careers on hold to be volunteers in 1967 and/or ‘73 to help keep the Israeli economy going when virtually the entire adult population was needed to defend against Soviet-armed Arab nations seeking its extermination.
While plainly Israel still has implacable enemies and immense security challenges, it is now a mature nation with a decent-sized population, a strong economy and magnificent human resources. The diaspora on the other hand, is struggling. The terrifying rise in Jew-hate, has made life painful – even dangerous – for Jews. So now it is time for Israel to come to the aid of the diaspora (and also to help its own citizens who like to feel safe when travelling abroad).
Not with airlifts (yet) and certainly not with economic assistance. Instead Jews need Israel to use its wealth of creativity and those abundant human resources to engage fully in the PR War to reverse 30-plus years of disinformation and misinformation that have been ratcheted up to terrifying levels over the past two years.
Although Jew-hate is not attributable to Israel’s actions or activities, it is attributable – at least in part – to how Israel is perceived. And that, I fear, is the result of the attitude of successive Israeli governments to PR; perhaps to a belief that PR is “a luxury” – as one Israeli keyboard warrior described it in a gung-ho social media post a week or so ago.
Irritated at constantly hearing that Israel had “lost the PR war” the keyboard warrior pointed out, that two years ago, Israel had been “surrounded” by a “ring of fire” created over 40 years by the fanatical fundamentalists in Iran. While “genocide” had been “trending on Twitter for 700 days straight” and the UN had “passed more than 30 resolutions condemning Israel,” Israel had “dismantled Iran’s ring of fire, piece by piece.” Thus, he believed, PR was “a luxury.” Actions speak louder than words,” he declared.
And he’s right. Up to a point. Winning the PR war while Iranian proxy Hezbollah retains the capability to threaten the entire north of the country is profoundly undesirable. Winning the PR war while Hamas retains the capability to invade the south or fire rocket at will is profoundly undesirable. Winning in the PR stakes by failing to erect barrier walls or by reducing border searches that allows terrorists to enter Israel with bombs, is profoundly undesirable. Winning the PR war while letting Iran continue developing its nukes is even more profoundly undesirable.
But while actions indeed speak louder than words for the Jewish State, for Jews in the Diaspora, words are being heard loudly and are having highly undesirable, real-life consequences. Words have been shaping opinion for 20-plus years; words are echoed by media and social-media; words influence public perception; words ultimately influence policy; words inflame; words incite; words have been provoking fear in diaspora Jews for the past two years until words led to the horrific, deadly attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur.
Realistically, of course, PR has not been a “luxury” since at least the late 1980s when pro-Palestine activism began to be widely seen on campuses, in trade unions, and in local and national politics – and, of course, in media – as “factions” (the Iran-Moslem Brotherhood axis, using the Palestinian “cause” as the fig-leaf for their own geo- and theo-political ambitions) began leaning in to antisemitism to ramp up their campaign of disinformation to make Israel a “pariah”.
Perhaps if the Israeli government of the time had recognised that the PR War was part of that “Ring of fire,” it may have been more pro-active about engaging in serious PR. Perhaps if back then – before media bias became overwhelming, overt and endemic – Israel had undertaken a carefully thought-out campaign of information and education, instead of relying mainly on diaspora community “spokespeople” and severely under-resourced, local “public affairs” bodies to be the “front line”, the anti-Israelism may have been halted.
But they did not. And an increasingly well-organised, well-orchestrated, campaign of anti-Israel activism effortlessly demolished the Maginot Line of a new, better-resourced UK public affairs committee (BICOM) and the local “spokespeople” (I know, I was one). And by the early noughties, with the Soviet-fabricated Palestinian narrative fully established as “truth” among Liberal Arts students, inThe Church, in Trade Unions, among Councillors, and at the BBC, it was clear that the establishment had fallen.
There was a brief moment in the early noughtieswhen it appeared the PR War could still be won. After the BBC’s promotion of a Palestinian narrative became so overt that an enraged UK Jewish community nudged the Israeli government into making a formal complaint to the broadcaster alleging anti-Israel bias in the hope that the then Director-General would find it harder to dismiss a government than kvetching from “paranoid British Jews.”
The allegations led to the compilation of the Balen Report, but far from being a knock-out blow revealeing that the pro-Palestinian narrative was being disseminated across the BBC and around the world, the report was never published and has been kept under wraps for 20 years. During those 20 years, the promotion of a pro-Palestine perspective has become even more overt through, inter alia, the ignoring of context in a complex geo-political arena; relentlessly highlighting threat and harm to Palestinians and equally relentlessly minimising or ignoring entirely threat and harm to Israel. And then in 2023, the BBC – and to be fair, many other news outlets – capitulated totally to the campaign of virulent anti-Israelism funded by the Qatar-Iran Axis and became quite openly the mouthpiece of Jihadists, enthusiastically disseminating the anti-Israel libels, misinformation, and blatant fabrications.
So now, for the sake of the diaspora – and also for its own citizens – Israel needs to reclaim the ground it has lost in public perception. The good news is that, these days, success in the PR stakes and security are not mutually exclusive. Israel does not have to sacrifice its security to afford good PR. It is no longer one or the other, as it would have been for an early generation of Israeli leaders who would understandably have hesitated to use meagre resources on something so ostensibly “frivolous.”
One suggestion for reclaiming Israel’s shredded reputation comes from an Arab writer and political analyst with an unusually benevolent view of Israel. He believes Israel should “act like people who are smart act” and the way “the people of the book act.” Israel, he says, needs to “start telling its story again” in a way that “the whole world believes.”
Tough, but for a nation that is today an economic power-house and generously endowed with creative thinkers and magnificent human resources, it should be perfectly possible to “dismantle” the vile campaign piece by piece as effectively as Israel’s military dismantled the other components of Iran’s “Ring of Fire.”
