by Ilan Pappe
To their credit, some artists expressed discomfort with governmental encouragement for Zionist art and culture. As they wrote to the minister of culture when the prize was issued in 2011, ‘This is a prize that encourages recruited art for the sake of political goals. We demand its abolition and would like to channel its funding to the depleted budget that is supposed to support free art in Israel.’8 The ministry rejected the protest, and its funding for 2013–14 increased.
Winning the prize was also the most effective way of absolving oneself from past allegations of post-Zionism. This is what happened to the pop band Habiluim. Named after one of the first Zionist settlers’ movements of the late nineteenth century, they were regarded as part of the ‘radical left’ in the 1990s. Not bothering to hide their desire to win the prize (unless this is a very sophisticated and subversive form of protest), they adapted their lyrics to its requirements by writing about the wish of the left in the past to make territorial concessions:
Maybe we should give the Arabs everything;
Maybe this is Zionism to leave a rotten place
and rebuild everything from the beginning9
Perhaps it is still a post-Zionist song nonetheless, thus explaining why they did not win the prize in 2013.
While official ministries were now openly encouraging Zionism as cultural production, it was left to less clearly identified bodies to spot the residues of post-Zionism in the local culture, academia and media. An organisation called NGO Monitor (their motto: Making NGOs Accountable) posts a highly detailed list – the NGO Index – of hundreds of groups that in some way address in a post-Zionist matters connected with Israel, in some cases including the precise amount of funds they have received from abroad. Ten groups are selected for special attention, but the index includes all the human and civil rights NGOs in Israel as well as the local branches of Amnesty International. These bodies have indeed been active, and I trust that history will judge them favourably for having kept alive a pacifist, humanist and socialist alternative to the way the idea of Israel has been implemented in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But for the time being, these critical NGOs number just a handful, and indeed, as some of the more acute observers of the scene have noted, the battle for the idea of Israel has moved abroad.10
Brand Israel: The International Version
In 2007 a poster of an almost naked Miss Israel, Gal Gadot, and a poster of four fit young men, equally barely dressed, were the faces of Israel in a campaign named Brand Israel, commissioned by the government and the Jewish Agency for Israel. The young woman (Miss Israel 2004 and a star in the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster Fast and Furious) was meant to attract the heterosexual young American to a rebranded Jewish State, while the young men became the faces advertising Tel Aviv as the gay capital of Israel. One wonders how Theodor Herzl or even David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin would have regarded this presentation of Zionism as a soft-porn wet dream. But policymakers had decided that anything and everything was appropriate in the struggle to fend off Israel’s negative image. The local team explained that such posters ‘allowed us to gear our message to the younger generation, especially males, and towards a demographic that did not see Israel as relevant or identify particularly with Israel’.11 But in fact the campaign targeted people in all walks of life with images and texts tailored to the inclinations and preferences of every group. If the idea of Israel became a prize at home, abroad it became a product.
The campaign began in the summer of 2005, when the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Israeli Ministry of Finance concluded three years of consultation with American marketing executives and launched Brand Israel: a campaign to recast and rebrand the country’s image so as to appear relevant and modern instead of militaristic and religious. Huge sums of money (the sums would be revealed some years later) were allocated for marketing the idea of Israel abroad in order to combat what the political and academic élite in Israel regarded as a global campaign to delegitimatise the Jewish state. It was to be a gigantic effort, and the team appointed to see it through was accordingly called BIG (the Brand Israel Group).12
The first unit of the regime thrust into this campaign was the foreign ministry and its diplomatic service. But it needed an academic team, especially in the areas of political science, international relations and history. Using lessons developed in the study of anti-Semitism, they provided a narrative of the origins of this new challenge to the idea of Israel, a challenge that called for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. The initial attempt to define the origins was more descriptive than analytical, but it did succeed in locating the moment of birth: the UN’s World Conference on Racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa, in early September 2001. According to the initial academic narrative, this meeting, with its obvious interest in Palestine, marked the launch of the delegitimisation campaign against Israel. The fact that it culminated on 8 September, three days before 9/11, did not escape the Brand Israel team, and thus the two events were directly linked as being two sides of the same assault against the free world.
This connection between 9/11 and the so-called delegitimisation campaign was made very openly by Benjamin Netanyahu on various occasions. In a speech given in the Knesset on 23 June 2011, for instance, he referred to an unholy alliance between radical Islam and the radical left in the West against the free democratic world, of which Israel was the ultimate symbol. He lumped together in addition to the UN meeting in Durban and 9/11, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruling against Israel’s apartheid wall in 2004 – and then, he added to that history for good measure, the famous case of the MV Mavi Marmara, an attempt by an international humanitarian-aid flotilla to reach besieged Gaza in the spring of 2010.
The main task of Brand Israel was to depict the country as a heaven on earth, a dream come true. Israel would now be identified with beauty, fun and technological achievement. This was the new version of the idea of Israel, and the messengers were newly created front organisations. One of them was the David Project in North America, which became very active in articulating the campaign among college students. One of its many actions was to try to counter the view of Israel as one of the most hated states in the world, together with such countries as Iran and North Korea, and stress that it was among the top twenty-five states whose citizens were glad to be part of it.13 The project’s purpose was to convince everyone that Israel was one of the happiest places on earth because of its high-tech achievements.
The Brand Israel team felt that Israel’s history was another asset that would help sell the country in the twenty-first century:
In terms of heritage benchmarks, Israel is home to fundamental religious and historical landmarks, including the Western Wall, Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Baha’i Temple in Haifa. Israelis boast a high quality of life, and the country’s democratic values focus on inclusion and political representation of all its citizens, including women and religious and racial minorities.14
The David Project came up with its own explanation for the discrepancy between what the country had to offer and its negative global image:
We know misperceptions of Israel are rampant in the media; ordinary citizens across the globe see Israel cast as yet another violent nation in a region steeped in unrest and war. Conversations taking place in print, on television, and in the blogosphere often regard the Arab–Israeli conflict as both all-consuming and myopic; the diversity and excitement of Israeli society is often subsumed by twenty-second sound bites focusing on only one aspect of the Israeli story.15
And it pinpointed the mission for the Brand Israel team:
How do we change perceptions? How do we introduce nuance into global conversations surrounding Israel? How do we discuss the highlights and achievements of Israeli society, while also recognising its weaknesses and shortcomings? What needs to happen to remove Israel from the bright spotlight of a violent conflict?16
The answer to th
ese challenges appeared on the official website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rather than winning the argument with facts, information or moral viewpoints, the ministry proposed, it would be far more useful to brand Israel and market it like a product. Gideon Meir of Israel’s foreign ministry told Haaretz in 2007 that he would ‘rather have a Style section item on Israel than a front-page story’.17
What this meant in practice was that any PR campaign for Israel should avoid any association with the conflict or the Palestinian issue. This was the spirit of the guidelines given to yet another front organisation founded to help disseminate the new take on the young country. In 2001 a group in California, ISRAEL21C, began its work to ‘redefin[e] the conversation about Israel’ and ‘show how Israeli efforts have contributed incalculably to the advancement of healthcare, the environment, technology, culture, and global democratic values worldwide’. As in the famous episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, when the hotel owner is trying not to mention the Second World War to his German guests, so too this NGO was instructed not to mention the war or the Palestinians. The other side of the equation was elegantly articulated on America’s East Coast by a PR expert on the team, who advised his colleagues to give up the attempt to win the argument against the Palestinians, because, as his words were paraphrased in Jewish Week, ‘proving that Israel is right and the Palestinians are wrong may be emotionally satisfying for advocates, but not necessarily effective in changing people’s way of thinking about Israel’.18 This expert, the executive vice president of ISRAEL21C, also remarked that discussing Israel in terms of its conflict with the Palestinians was probably the wrong way to go about it: ‘You have a narrow bandwidth, where Israel can only win some of the argument. We are trying to broaden the bandwidth to include Israel’s accomplishments.’19
Soon after, the separate efforts of the various organisations and individuals were put under one management. This was an operational decision taken by the foreign ministry’s first-ever Brand Israel Conference, convened in Tel Aviv in 2005, which officially kicked off the campaign. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appointed Ido Aharoni to head the brand-management office and gave him a $4 million budget, in addition to the $3 million established annual budget for hasbara (propaganda) as well as the usual $11 million for the Ministry of Tourism’s promotional efforts in North America.20 Funding was also earmarked for work in Europe. It is noteworthy that the politicians in Israel decided to focus on the United States, where they sensed that delegitimisation had become particularly ripe and successful. One might have thought that the Israelis saw the US as a safe, long-time bastion of pro-Israeli bias, but apparently not. As we shall see towards the end of this chapter, the academics would try to convince politicians that the plague was rampant in the United Kingdom, which they saw as the preferred main target for the Brand Israel campaign.
Aharoni recruited top people in the advertising world. It included the Saatchi brothers (reportedly they did the work for free) and PR experts such as David Saranga, the former consul for media and public affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York. Saranga told the industry’s major publication, PRWeek, that the two groups Israel was targeting were ‘liberals’ and sixteen- to thirty-year-olds (hence the posters of the minimally clad Miss Israel and the fit gay men in bathing suits). In 2005 Aharoni’s office hired TNS, a market research firm, to test new brand concepts for Israel in thirteen different countries, and also funded a billboard pilot program in Toronto.21
At the centre of the team were members of Brand Asset Valuator, or BAV, the world’s largest brand database, working alongside the best publicists and marketing people. BAV specialised in exposing the target community’s emotional attachments to brands. Fern Oppenheim, an advertising and marketing consultant and a member of the Brand Israel group, said that the BAV data would be part of a long-term strategy that would also include ongoing research and evaluation: ‘We want to be a resource everyone can benefit from, the way a corporate management team would manage a brand’.22
Another expert, David Sable, who was connected to Young & Rubicam, told the diplomats that Israel had not ranked among the well-liked countries because, at least in the United States, people ‘know a lot about Israel, just not the right things. They think of Israel as a grim, war-torn country, not one booming with high-tech and busy outdoor cafes’.23 So, in 2005 the orientation was to sell Israel as, in effect, a branch of American society. This task was handed to Young & Rubicam. David Sable again: ‘Americans don’t see Israel as being like the US’.24 Israel, as a brand, was already strong in America, but ‘it is better known than liked, and constrained by lack of relevance’. He went on to say that Americans ‘find Israel to be totally irrelevant to their lives, and they are tuning out, and that is particularly true for 18- to 34-year-old males, the most significant target’.25
Brand Israel intended to change this by selecting aspects of Israeli society to highlight, and then bringing Americans directly to them. They started off with a free trip for architectural writers, followed by one for food and wine writers. The goal of these efforts was to ‘show Americans that there was another Israel behind the gloomy headlines’ and convey an image of Israel as a ‘productive, vibrant, and cutting-edge culture’, as Gary Rosenblatt of Jewish Week put it. He summarised the blueprint for the next few years this way:
Think of Israel as a product undergoing an overhaul to make it more competitive in the marketplace. What’s called for are fewer stories explaining the rationale for the security fence, and more attention to scientists doing stem-cell research on the cutting edge or the young computer experts who gave the world Instant Messaging.26
It was not only American PR and branding wizards who were recruited. The government also asked for deeper involvement from the public. In a show of total mistrust in its professional diplomats, it recruited commercial Israeli television to seek alternative messengers for the new idea of Israel through a reality show called The Ambassador. The winner of a thirteen-week elimination contest won a job with a Zionist advocacy group called Israel At Heart to boost the diplomats with the best of Israel’s youth. One of Israel At Heart’s initiatives was to send Ethiopian Jews to speak in black churches in the United States. (Consider the idea of bringing African Americans from inner-city US ghettos to tell people in Brixton about the ‘American dream’, and you may grasp the absurdity of such a move.) High school student cadres later took over the mission.27
Moreover, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked every Israeli artist, acting troupe, and dance company to include a Brand Israel component in their shows. A typical example of such a tour was the one undertaken in 2012 in the US and UK by the dance company Batsheva; the tour was openly described by the ministry as part of the Brand Israel campaign and the dancers as ‘the best global ambassadors of Israel’.28
The Ministry of Tourism went a step further. It was not enough to present an image of the most relaxed, groovy, fun country in the world. In 2009 the state miraculously succeeded in getting rid of Palestine and the Palestinians, and received the Golan Heights as a gift from Syria. The ministry’s updated maps of a greater, border-free Israel, which were shown worldwide in ads and posters, including in London’s Underground, indicated no Golan Heights or Palestinian areas. Hundreds of protests caused the removal of the posters from the Underground.29
By 2010 the Israeli financial daily Globes reported that the foreign ministry had allocated a hundred million shekels (more than $26 million) to branding during the coming years. This money was mainly destined to help fight the delegitimisation that was becoming increasingly evident in social networks and cyberspace generally. The ministry was optimistic about the chances of such a campaign, since its research unit had determined that Web surfers relate well to content that interests them, regardless of the identity or political affiliation of the source.30
Another collaboration launched in 2010 was aimed at the gay community, emphasising Tel Aviv as a gay- and lesbian-friendly destination for Euro
pean LGBTs. The collaborators included Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, the Tel Aviv Tourism Board, and Israel’s largest LGBT organisation, the Agudah, and their campaign was called Tel Aviv Gay Vibe. Critics called it a version of ‘pinkwashing’, comparing the use of women’s rights in the nineteenth century to justify colonisation with the use of gay rights as a tool to legitimise the continued oppression of the Palestinians.31
Re-Branding the Rebrand – New Plans and Visions
Despite all the activity, the reports of success did not even convince those who published them. A new actor was asked to join the crew to find out why success was still elusive and what else could be done. The Jewish Agency works with several think tanks; one such was the Reut Institute. The institute claimed in 2010 that the threat to the State of Israel in the areas of diplomacy and international relations was on the rise. It described the 2009 report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, as epitomising the delegitimisation campaign, its origins, logic and possible consequences.32
What became known as the Goldstone Report gently accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008. Later, under Zionist pressure, Goldstone, who is Jewish, partly retracted the mission’s findings. In early 2010 the institute characterised the report as the centrepiece of efforts to subject Israel to ‘increasingly harsh criticism around the world’ and said that in certain places, ‘criticism ha[d] stretched beyond legitimate discourse regarding Israeli policy to a fundamental challenge to the country’s right to exist’. The institute’s own report, The Delegitimisation Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall, connects the Goldstone Report to the international condemnation directed at Israel after its second attack on Lebanon in 2006. That condemnation, according to Reut, is the product of a radical Islamist ideology emanating from Iran, assisted by Hezbollah and Hamas.