Where We Do Fail in Hasbara Public Diplomacy

My good friend Michael Freund at Pundicity deals with Hasbara (croos-posted at the Jerusalem Post), analyzes it well and makes a 'heretical' point:

...if the mainstream media is so profoundly against us, then why are we doing so well in the arena of American public opinion? If the image being conveyed of Israel is so consistently negative, then why do people there seem to like us so much?...the fact remains that we must be doing something right in how we explain ourselves if our public standing in America is so strong and resilient.
 

True.

However, the really injurious damage to Israel - its image, its standing, its security, its polices - that is done by the media is within that element of America's, as well as Europe's, population (and the problem in Spanish-speaking countries, whether Spain or South Anmerica is also bad) that more than any other are already in, or preparing to enter, the corridors of public service and the academic world, as well as to the media.

These are overwhelmingly liberal/progressive, still, and they refill the anti-Israel trenches.  They are not convinced by the turth for they have their personal, cultural and ideological issues with Israel, with Zionism and with Jews and Judaism.  They are naturally sympathetic to ther Arab/Islamic cause and, from my four-decades long experience, refuse to believe the truth, ignore the facts, extend no empathy to Israel and this group is not only strengthened but even emboldened by the media to rathc up the public diplomacy war against Israel.

And that is why any failings on our part is important to be corrected, sooner than later.

For the future.

^

Rebbe Nahman's Eretz-Yisrael Hasbara

Here is a quotation from a follower of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav (who died in 1810) which posits a core principle of modern Hasbara, that one needs to assert rights, even if only verbally, as a prerequisite to claim them later found in Likutei Halachot, Hoshen Mishpat:

Despite our land and inheritance being stolen by non-Jews

and we have not the power to remove it from their hands,

due to a fault of ours,

we pray and we shout out that

the Land of Israel is ours and is our patrimony

and that is our response to the Other Side,

the possession of non-Jews is not a valid possession

the Land of Israel is ours and in the end,

we will extract it from their hands.

With God's help.

I'll add now the full section from Likutei Halachot, Choshen Mispat, M'talt'lin

"And even though we have been shouting and begging for so many years to return to Israel and we are still far from there, yet no prayer and cry is lost, even that of the least of the least, because with every cry and prayer we conquer some part or point of Israel until the seventh day, when all the points we conquered in our prayers will be gathered together and we will return to Israel, as is the saying of the Rebbe, on the article of Rabbah: "He will gather you up, etc." (S. 2:31). And even if someone is very damaged and does not have the strength in his cry and prayer to conquer any point or part of Israel, yet his cry is very effective, because his cry that shouts and prays to return to our land is in essence a protest explained in the law of land possession, as long as he protestsץ"

^

Adler's Short Way to Negativism

On April 20, this letter by James Adler of Cambridge, Mass., was published at the New York Times/IHT website, entitled Israel and the Activists:-

Regarding “Israel blocks campaigners from visiting West Bank” (April 17):

Israel’s public relations and human rights problem is that the world’s attention is mainly drawn to three issues, namely the transgression of international borders and occupation of other people’s land; domestic human rights violations that are systematic, official, long-term, and ethnic or religious in nature; and genocide. Unfortunately, Israel’s policies happen to combine two of the three main attention-grabbing irritants: border transgressions and occupation, and systematic policies based on race and religion. This goes a long way to explaining Israel’s conflict with human rights activists.

He has published letter before, for example here.  And I have criticized him previously.

If anything is an irritant, it is Adler's method.  He doesn't say outright Israel is doing anything wrong and surely doesn't illustrate how Israel isn't doing anything that should merit such abusive treatment by "human rights activists" or such a negative press.  What he does do is write that Israel's policies "combine...attention-grabbing irritants".  They don't, really.  And by ignoring anything that happens on the other side, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, etc., he conveniently encourages such negative media coverage by permitting the real negative irritant to be hidden  and therefore, ignored.

He takes the short way to undermine Israel.

^

Outgoing Yesha Council Director's Opinion

Naftali Bennett published this at Ynet: Israel is our land

Israeli PR effort will fail as long as we don’t declare that land belongs to the Jews

He notes that there's a dominating

claim that the Judea and Samaria public relations effort, which is premised on our historical right in this land, is doomed for failure

that

we must not speak of the Bible and history, because it’s primitive; rather, we must only explain our security needs and point to the murderous behavior of the Palestinians

He insists

...there is no greater mistake...the Palestinians have been arguing for dozens of years now that this land is theirs, while we have been responding with “true, but we need security.”

...There is no wonder that the nations of the world would see us as robbers who pushed the Palestinian people out of their home. Regardless...we shall remain robbers.

And he further makes clear:

As long as we keep on utilizing practical arguments while leaving the arena of justice to the Palestinians, we shall lose. The time has come for the Israeli government to go back to the simple truth: The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.

So, What Went On Under the Big Tent?

The Jewish Chronicle report notes:-

Speaking just before the ambassador, MP Ivan Lewis praised the Big Tent's convenor, Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag, and noted that, "far too often, those who claim the mantle of leadership in our community would rather ignore some home truths. And the leaders who have the integrity to speak out in a very moderate and balanced way are sometimes vilified."

Mr Lewis said: "Let us respect our differences, free of some of the rancour and personal vitriol we have seen over the last few weeks."

...Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society told 200 delegates that as an "outside observer" of the Jewish community, he noted that "pro-Israel groups spend more time attacking each other than they do their mutual enemies. "It's like the scene in the Life of Brian when no one remembers who their enemy is," Mr Murray said. The sentiment was echoed in more serious terms by many of the conference's 40 or more speakers.

...The Big Tent, living up to its name, included speakers from a wide range of political positions. [except me] Hannah Weisfeld, director of the left-wing Israel advocacy organisation Yachad, strenuously defended the right of pro-Israel groups to criticise the Israeli government. "I challenge the notion and strongly refute [the belief] that you cannot engage with critics of Israel by admitting Israel's flaws," she said.

But Douglas Murray, who admitted a cross-political effort for Israel was needed, countered: "If this argument for Israel is going to be won - and, let's face it, it is being lost - we need a tool-box approach to doing that. That tool-box will include people who are hammers, and there will be some spanners in it."

...Jewish PR guru Shimon Cohen...told Lorna Fitzsimons he did not agree with a word she had said on positive PR efforts by the Israeli government..."Israel's PR sucks," and urged the audience to try to focus the media on positive Israel stories rather than countering the negative. He also attacked Jewish communal leadership. "When we started Shechita UK, I was told we didn't need it; our leaders would have a quiet word at the top. That is utter rubbish. People matter, opinions matter, voices matter. Thanks to the great Jewish public, a voice got across and we won," he said, urging that the same PR effort should now be made for Israel.

Now, that is refreshing.

^

Words of Wisdom on: The Never-Ending Arab-Israel Conflict

Melanie Phillips:

...the single most important reason for the never-ending nature of the Middle East impasse is that, uniquely, for more than nine decades the west has rewarded the Arab aggressors and punished their Jewish victims

^

At Last Night's YESHA Council Public Diplomacy Seminar

The first session of the YESHA Council public diplomacy "Ambassadors" seminar was held in Bayit VeGan and here is Nobel Prize awardee Prof. Israel "Robert" Aumann receiving an appreciation for his participation:

To his right are Dany Dayan, Council Chairman and at far left, Yigal Dilmoni, head of the Council's public diploamcy department.

^

The Dilemma of Israel's Anosognosic Hasbarah

Anosognosia.

Wow.

It means:

a condition in which a person who suffers disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. This may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments

I found it here and immediately realized that this prognosticates Israel's internal bureaucratic Hasbarah problems well.

Some extracts:-

...As [David] Dunning [a Cornell professor of social psychology] read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.[3]

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

and

DAVID DUNNING: ... I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent...when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.

...the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

...Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

and the writer, Errol Morris, goes one:

I found myself still puzzled by the unknown unknowns. Finally, I came up with an explanation. Using the expressions “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” is just a fancy — even pretentious — way of talking about questions and answers. A “known unknown” is a known question with an unknown answer. I can ask the question: what is the melting point of beryllium? I may not know the answer, but I can look it up. I can do some research. It may even be a question which no one knows the answer to. With an “unknown unknown,” I don’t even know what questions to ask, let alone how to answer those questions.

But there is the deeper question...Is an “unknown unknown” beyond anything I can imagine? Or am I confusing the “unknown unknowns” with the “unknowable unknowns?”...

..." We’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid.”...

...DAVID DUNNING: An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis...You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us.

This is stunning in its implications for the inadequacy, limitations and and lack of comprehension some, actually, most, in Israeli officialdom possess.

Can't wait for the article's continuation.


UPDATE

Here's Part 5.

The Way Israel's Enemies Would Like To See Her

The War We Lose, and Lose, and...

Hamas...won the most recent war against Israel, and certainly the public relations war, which is the sort of war that really matters in the Middle East, and which Israel almost never fails to lose.

Source

Ignoring Is Not A Tactical Option

Over here, is a piece on Israel's hasbara (public diplomacy) problems that someone sent me.

Called, "The anger, angst, anguish and frustrations of an Israel advocate: A novel technique for combating the vilification of Israel", a Israel Zwick makes some good observations.

Like this:

When I enter search terms [into Google] such as “war, ethnic conflict, liberation movements, refugees,” this is what I discover.
· There are about 5000 different ethnic groups living in 190 countries, some of which number in the millions and make up a large percentage of the host country. Many of these groups are suffering from oppression and denial of civil rights.
· There are a number of wars going on right now in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Most of these involve Muslims. The wars and conflicts are causing large numbers of deaths and injuries among civilian populations. Everyday innocent civilians are killed in conflicts, usually by Muslims. Children are dying from disease and starvation.
· There are scores of active liberation movements struggling for self-determination
· There are millions of refugees and internally displaced persons around the world living in deplorable conditions.

However, if I search Google News for the terms “war crimes, war atrocities, humanitarian crisis, and violation of human rights,” I get thousands of articles related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is what I read:

· Israel is an oppressive, racist, apartheid state that consistently violates Arab rights
· Israel is responsible for 60 years of suffering of the Palestinian people
· The Palestinians are struggling for liberation from the brutal, illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands
· Israel violates international law by establishing settlements on “occupied
Palestinian lands.” The established Jewish communities are “obstacles to peace.”
· Israel is guilty of vicious war crimes and atrocities against the Palestinian people
· Israel is committing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people
· Israeli military forces continuously commit brutal aggression against the suffering Palestinian people
· Israel is responsible for the horrid humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the West Bank
· Israelis grab precious natural resources for themselves while denying them to the Palestinians
· Israeli military occupation is responsible for the economic hardships in Gaza and the West Bank
· Israel is a gross violator of human rights
· Israel deserves to be boycotted commercially, militarily, culturally, and academically for its violations of human rights and international law.
· Israel’s illegal occupation of Arab lands is responsible for most of the strife in the Middle East

He also deals with responding to condemnations and writes:

So how should a frustrated advocate for Israel respond to all of these vile and vitriolic condemnations? The conventional wisdom is to refute and discredit them by presenting factual evidence...

...I worked as a school psychologist for about 17 years. One of the basic rules that a school psychologist learns is that if an intervention isn’t working, then it needs to be modified or replaced by a new intervention. So if responding to accusations only seems to invite more of them, then a different strategy is in order. Again we can take a clue from school psychology. A common intervention that is used for inappropriate attention-seeking behavior is “tactical ignoring.” This strategy is used when a child displays inappropriate behavior to gain a reaction, even if the response is a negative one, like causing the teacher to get angry. The child’s behavior may be rewarded by the extra attention that he is getting from the teacher or he may get satisfaction from seeing the teacher being annoyed. Similarly, the media will publish articles accusing Israel of unethical behaviors, precisely because they know that advocates for Israel are sensitive to these accusations and will respond to them, thereby prolonging the discussion and increasing the controversy. That suggests that a lack of response will reduce the incentive for publishing the vitriolic accusations.

Tactical ignoring is not a quiescent response. It makes a strong statement to the accusers. It says, “Your accusations are based on ignorance, bias, or self-serving needs. They are malicious lies that don’t deserve my time and effort to respond.” This is a much stronger, more contemptuous response than a defensive response that cites contrary evidence. If the accusations “fall on deaf ears” then the incentive for repeated accusations is removed.

I’m sure that many readers are skeptical about utilizing this strategy...

I have a problem with this.

You see, with the constant repetition of their anti-Israel, anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish propaganda, the longer it goes on, the more different the numbers of people are exposed. There is a greater number of persons and target groups involved.

"Tactical ignoring" is a major strategic mistake. This isn't a tactical problem.

I tried leaving a comment at his article but it's closed.

I do, however, like his ending:

There is one indisputable fact that belies the vile condemnations against Israel. If Israel is such an “oppressive, racist, apartheid state,” then it would be logical to assume that the Arabs should be eagerly lining up to emigrate to any of the 21 nations of the Arab League where they would presumably have more freedoms and civil liberties. But they are not. The Arab populations in the Galil and Jerusalem are actually increasing. Their communities are expanding...

On Today's Public Diplomacy Conference

I attended today an International Conference on Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century: The Israeli Case which centered on a discussion of "The Neaman Document", a draft report of a joint research of Samuel Neaman Institute and Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The schedule is here.

Public diplomacy is as close as the academic world can get to the Israeli Hebrew term of "Hasbara", which has a meaning of "explaining" and "justifying" but less than "propaganda".

I only stayed for three sessions but learned that whereas the Foreign Ministry, besides is 'branding' effort of the last few years (at the Int'l Jewish Blogging Conference, we were shown a film clip about it), talks about the "other Israel", it needed an Austrian to suggest the "real Israel".

In some countries, it was reported, what drew the most interest about Israel was news about ancient Israel and archeology. Well, that's good news for those of us who want to retain Judea and Samaria. After all, this is the heartland of that.

David Witztum neglected in his remarks to pinpoint one of the worse sources for anti-Israel news: Israeli journalists.

I suggested to Prof. Dov Shinar that a book should be collected of episodes of the successes and failures of those who have worked, professionally or voluntarily, on Hasbara. That would be the best learning device.

Here's a description of the project:

The S. Neaman Institute, together with Israel Foreign Ministry, has initiated a project to develop a Public Diplomacy Plan (Hasbara) for the State of Israel. The project is based on the assumption that despite the ongoing exercise of public diplomacy by governmental entities and other authorities, there is a real need to periodically evaluate the contents and methods used, to redefine audiences and agents on the conceptual and strategic levels, and to check the actual level of activity. These checks and updates should be integrated into a comprehensive plan which will comply with the State of Israel and its needs, in accordance with the spirit of the times. The plan should also reflect recommendations based on past achievements and failures, approaches to dealing with controversial issues, the use of new technologies, and the need to create uniqueness and strength when introducing messages onto the media agenda.

Five work teams will carry out the project's objectives. Team 1 will conduct an historical survey and analyze its contents; Team 2 will develop content on key political issues; Team 3 will develop content on Israel's achievements in a variety of fields: Team 4 will explore ways and means to deliver messages; and Team 5 will identify target audiences in order to maximize message-delivery efficiency.

Pilots of the project will be conducted in two countries, one in East Asia (India) and one in Europe (Denmark). During the final stage of the project, a "Public Diplomacy Manual" draft will be distributed to participants at a professional conference. A final manual will be published after receiving professional input.