Israel's image crisis: Can anything be done? - opinion

It’s as old as the Bible, and lethal as a cobra’s kiss.

What began when the King of Moab asked a professional diviner to “put a curse upon this people for me, perhaps I can thus defeat them” (Numbers 22:6), was multiplied by the medieval church, which unleashed hordes of writers, preachers, sculptors, and painters who depicted the Jews as pigs, thieves, cheats, traitors, and murderers of God.

Israel’s foundation changed none of this. Theodor Herzl’s prediction in The Jewish State, that antisemitism would end once the Jews begin returning to their land, proved unfounded. The Jewish state not only failed to eradicate antisemitism, it became its excuse.

That is why now, with Israel facing the worst image crisis in its 77 years, many now say fatalistically that, like summer’s heat, the anti-Israeli onslaught is predestined, none of our fault, and impossible to defeat. They are wrong.

THE GLOBAL war on Israel is unprecedented in its scope, audacity, and impact. It is conducted in multiple arenas, from government, academia, and commerce to the media, the arts, and the street. The latest avalanche is in the diplomatic sphere.

Yes, Israel has known over the years major diplomatic setbacks, most memorably after the wars of 1967 and 1973, when the USSR and its satellites, as well as 26 African governments, severed diplomatic ties with Israel, and the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. But harsh though all that was, it did not affect Israel’s standing in the free world.

In the media, meanwhile, daily Palestinian accusations of genocide, starvation, and war crimes are parroted uncriticized. So are Hamas’s unreliable casualty figures, including its failure to separate combatants from civilians.

Coupled with what has been happening on American campuses over the past two years, the assault on Israel’s image is a war in its own right. Israel seems as if it is not even trying to fight back, let alone strive to win this war. Why is this, and what can be done?

THE FIRST problem is competence.

The agency in charge of Israel’s public diplomacy, the Foreign Ministry, has been systematically underfunded, humiliated, and abused throughout the Netanyahu era, while its duties were encroached by the Prime Minister’s Office, the ministries of Strategic Affairs and Diaspora Affairs, and the National Security Council.

Israeli diplomats are thus a demoralized lot. This is besides the fact that many of them are not telegenic, even when happy.

The solution to this would be to outsource public diplomacy to those who are competent, but that makes those who are incompetent, but in office, feel threatened.

That is what happened with the one effective spokesperson Israel did deploy back when the current war was young – Eylon Levy. Energetic, witty, and a charismatic interviewee with an Oxfordian English, Levy impressed millions worldwide, only to be shed for a petty excuse involving a single tweet.

The second problem is intelligence.

Much of what we face is clearly organized. Demonstrations in recent days against Israeli tourists, in various places in Greece, were neither spontaneous nor Greek. They were visibly dominated by foreigners. Someone is organizing them, and those organizers can be tracked down and derailed, if only defined for the Mossad as terrorists, which they surely are.

The countries where these propaganda-terrorists nest will cooperate, because such intruders violate their sovereignty, and in Greece’s case, also hurt its economy. Last year alone, 620,000 Israeli tourists visited Greece, leaving €419 million there. Whoever is trying to chase them away thus harms not only us, but also Greece’s traumatized economy.

The third problem is the message.

For instance, the anti-Israeli propaganda’s overarching slogan, “Free Palestine,” manipulatively suggests Gaza’s struggle is a war of liberation, like Italy’s against Austria. In fact, Gaza’s war is not about nationalism, but about fundamentalism, and it’s not about liberty, but about subjugation – of infidels, women, dissidents, and gays.

A proactive diplomacy would expose Hamas’s ongoing war on freedom and spotlight the bigotry of its heroes, like Yousef al Qardawi’s call on God to kill Jews and Zionists, “down to the very last one” (Middle East Media Research Institute Dispatch 2183.)

Similarly, Israeli spokespersons must repeatedly ask whoever decries Gaza’s suffering: What would you do? How would you fight an enemy that targets your children from behind its own children? Tell us and we might do it.

And most crucially, we must say what our European critics don’t want to discuss: Israel is for Islamism what the Jews were for Nazism: the warm-up act. If Islamism’s swordsmen ever get from the river to the sea, they won’t stop there. As they have said openly, they will march on to Rome.

Finally, there is the future.

No Israeli argument or eloquence will compensate for its current lack of a plan for accommodation with the Palestinian people. Yet, with zealots in this government’s midst, there is no way such a plan will even be discussed.

That, too, is why we are awoken every morning by another cobra’s kiss.