...For many, both in Israel and abroad, the failure of Israeli diplomacy and public relations (Hasbara) is difficult to understand. After all, the Jewish State has many features that, prime facie, should bestow on it the unqualified support of Western democracies: Free fair (and frequent) elections, general gender equality, religious freedom, an open press, tolerance of sexual preferences and so on. Even if in everyday practice there are flaws and imperfections in some of these areas, they are certainly far closer to the desired ideal than in any of its Muslim adversaries and certainly more so than the areas under Palestinian rule (or misrule.)
...In assessing the motivation and resolve of an organization to achieve a certain goal, one of the most significant measures is the quantity of resources that it allocates for that purpose. In the case of Israeli Hasbara, the official budget ...is barely the equivalent of what a medium-to-large commercial corporation would allot for advertizing.
The reason for this excessive thrift cannot be attributed to lack of funds. After all, whenever the government of Israel wishes to implement some unbudgeted project, somehow it always manages to find the financial resources to do so. For example, when the decision was taken to construct the "security barrier", the billions of shekels required were made available without great difficulty. Likewise, when the "Disengagement" from Gaza was decided on, the billions of dollars needed for its implementation were not considered a significant impediment. Moreover, when the proposed "Convergence" from Judea and Samaria was being seriously considered, the fact that tens of billions of dollars would be necessary for its execution did in anyway not deter its enthusiastic proponents.
The regrettable, but unavoidable, conclusion must therefore be that for national policy makers, Israel's international image and the promotion of its case abroad is not an important priority on the national agenda – for if it was, far more resources would surely be devoted to this objective
...Why does the official Israeli establishment display such lethargy, such passivity, such impotency, such defeatism on the media front and in the battle for the hearts and minds in the of the public – both at home and abroad[?] The answer to this is rooted in the structure of Israeli society ... it turns out that in many - if not most aspects – the results of Knesset elections have little relevance.
For example, Ariel Sharon was elected on the explicit rejection of a policy of unilateral withdrawal, but after being elected was coerced into implementing measures he had previously dismissed as entirely unacceptable.
Likewise, Yitzhak Rabin was elected on the basis of ...
- No to negotiations with the PLO;
- No relinquishing the Jordan Valley;
- No to the division of Jerusalem
.... Yet, after his election he adopted an entirely different policy, which in essence meant transforming all these resolute ..."No's" into concessionary ..."Aye's" – in spite of the fact that precisely such policy had been proposed by [others] ...and had been rejected at the polls.
...the ability to understand the realities in Israel and how they are produced is contingent on the recognition that ...influential elites hold a common worldview... that it is the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria (and previously Gaza) that is the root of all evil in the region – if not the entire universe.This perception – accompanied by a vitriolic enmity towards the settlements across the 1967 Green Line, and settlers who reside in them ...prevents it[s] adherents and all those under their considerable influence from portraying the Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, in their true light. This reticence to drawing attention to the real nature of the Arab world – to the brutality and to the corruption, to the fanaticism and the backwardness; to the repression of women, the suppression of Christians, and oppression of homosexuals, to the hounding out of dissident journalists and the hunting down of political opponents - prevents Israel from persuasively presenting its case and the dire dangers that it faces in contending with such adversaries....
...if Arabs are portrayed in the negative light they so richly deserve, it makes an absolute mockery of any policy which in effect advocates:
1. creating a new international border for Israel only a few thousand meters from the national parliament and from virtually all the government ministries;
2. exposing the country's only international airport to attack from primitive weapons already being used from within territories that have been abandoned;
3. making its major rail and road links vulnerable to attack by little more than small arms fire, risking paralysis of the land transport system;
4. abandoning the control of crucial water sources (about one third of the total national supply) to Palestinian control;
5. bringing principal infrastructure installations such as the Hadera power station together with 80% of the civilian population and the economic activity of the country within the range of rockets and missiles presently being launched against Israel.
... This obsessive ... delusional and desperate quest for the one "last mythological concession," ...is the explanation for Israel's abysmal performance in the fight for public opinion....
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