Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In a 2018 op-ed in The Jerusalem Post, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren *84 *86 reflected upon a troubling development from his conversations with the American congressional delegation present in Jerusalem for the opening of the new US Embassy. While briefing prominent pro-Israel congressmen on the current state of Israeli defense policy, Oren was “shocked to discover that none knew that Israel, alone, maintained three border crossings into Gaza,” or that the terrorist organization Hamas burned tunnels linking Israel and the Gaza Strip in an effort to “create a humanitarian crisis that could be blamed on Israel.”
Oren’s anecdote provides a glimpse into the immense gravity of Israel’s public relations crisis. Lacking any mass armies or physical weapons, and almost entirely rhetorical in nature, today’s vast anti-Israel PR campaign threatens Israel’s standing on the world stage.
For decades, Israel’s adversaries in the Middle East and globally have utilized media proxies to convey an image of the nation wholly divorced from reality. In the midst of perpetual conflict, Israelis have been bombarded by volleys of missiles from the Gaza Strip, endured suicide bombings in major cities and popular venues, and witnessed kidnappings of innocent citizens at the hands of the terrorist organization Hamas, oftentimes resulting in prisoner swaps that have liberated Palestinean terrorists from prison. And yet, without interruption, Israel’s image has been tarnished by mouthpieces of the global left as one associated with colonialism and “apartheid” policy.
Primarily responsible for the rhetorical demonization, delegitimization, and imposition of double standards is the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sactions (BDS) movement. Founded in 2005 by Omar Barghoutti, an alumnus of one of Israel’s most prestigious universities, BDS devotes itself to the “simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.” In practice, BDS has not only engaged in rhetorical warfare against the legitimacy of the Jewish state, but in doing so has harmed the reputations of Israelis and Palestinians alike. In an infamous example of the organization’s disregard for regional stability, a BDS-led campaign to shut down a factory of Israeli-owned SodaStream located in the “occupied” area of Judea and Samaria resulted in the loss of hundreds of Palestinian jobs. BDS nonetheless heralded this effort as a “success, in line with our commitment to end Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights.”
Today, the potency of this anti-Israel PR campaign can easily be detected among American teenagers and young adults, demographics uniquely prone to the effects of misinformation concerning the Israel conflict. Amidst the flareup in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood this past May, several infographics circulated social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, intervening in the complex geopolitical issue with trite and misleading characterizations of the Jewish state. One, spurred by the Instagram accounts of actress Bella Hadid and fashion “watchdog group” Diet Prada, displayed two women in repose, drinking tea — one questioning the other, with the latter asserting that “Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed, and the situation is about anything but religion.” The post received nearly 350,000 likes. Another, from the “Jewish feminist” account @hey.alma, insisted that the violence incurred from that altercation stemmed from “Palestinians… fighting with Israeli police and crowds of far-right Jews.”
Concerningly, Israel’s PR woes have not waned since. Recently, The founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream have ceased sales of their product in Judea and Samaria, citing in a New York Times op-ed that the decision stems from their belief in “justice and human rights,” as well as a wholesale rejection of “Israeli policy, which perpetuates an illegal occupation that is a barrier to peace and violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people.” Just this past week, at the behest of their caucus’s most vociferous anti-Zionists, House Democrats stripped funding of Israel’s Iron Dome defense technology from a government funding bill.
How have America’s most outspoken Jewish advocacy groups responded to these events? Have they developed rhetorical solutions commensurate with the challenges placed before them? Sadly, rather than target the Palestinian PR campaign with laser-like precision, many of these organizations have chosen to cede ground, grant argumentative concessions, and remain committed to equivocation.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), chief among these groups, states on its website that it “recognizes that, like all other countries, Israel should not be exempt from criticism.” Seeking an pedagogy-based approach to the Middle East conflict, the ADL touts its “anti-bias training” committed to confronting “racism, anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry.” In response to this past May’s conflagrations and the subsequent anti-Israel rhetoric, the ADL decried “far-right Jewish nationalists” for “exacerbat[ing]” tensions in the region.
StandWithUs, another pro-Israel advocacy group, has proactively identified the need to target anti-Israel propaganda with force and tact. In addressing the same conflict, StandWithUs at once mobilized its “Situation Room” with the intention to “counter misinformation propagated by anti-Israel groups as well as mistakes in media reports,” according to co-founder Roz Rothstein. With 330,000 Instagram followers and a stated non-partisan mission, StandWithUs is nonetheless labeled by Wikipedia as a “right-wing pro-Israel advocacy organization” and has been discredited by The Forward, a widely read American-Jewish news publication, as “right wing.” These challenges to the efforts of StandWithUs, originating both outside and within the Jewish community, have hampered the organization’s ability to combat anti-Israel propaganda.
These responses of these interest groups have served to the detriment of the Israel cause: miring the American Jewish community in internal scandal while emboldening the destructive rhetoric of the global anti-Israel constituency. Propagandists of the global anti-Israel cause have profited greatly from our proponents’ lack of rhetorical cohesion in stamping out Palestinian falsehoods.
Israel’s rhetorical foibles will only be resolved through a collective and multigenerational effort. At this moment, we must refrain from Pyrrhic attempts to counter the barrage of anti-Israel propaganda on social media platforms, and must instead make further investments into the institutions that nourish the Israel cause in perpetuity. Organizations which sponsor complementary trips to Israel for young Jewish people, such as Birthright and Nativ, expose young Jews to the realities of Israeli life in a manner that circumvents the dangers of social media. Furthermore, pro-Israel advocacy at the local, statewide, or national level has the potential to create meaningful and lasting legislative change against anti-Israel PR efforts — variations of anti-BDS legislation have been passed in red and blue states alike, and the state of Arizona recently severed financial ties with Ben & Jerry’s on account of the organization’s anti-Israel maneuver.
Any tactic our cause chooses to employ must match the rhetorical ferocity of our most vocal opponents. Ideally, it should supply not only a logical rebuke of the other side’s defamatory claims, but furthermore a moral imperative and legislative legacy that champions the existence of the Jewish state. Otherwise, our efforts to defend the state of Israel, no matter how noble, will prove futile in the end.
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