Hasbara: Lights, Camera, Combat, by Haviv Rettig (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts;
Few complaints held against recent Israeli governments have so completely attained the lofty status of “conventional wisdom” as those directed at Israel’s image-makers and -explainers. The many critics of hasbara claim that, while the importance of “getting the message out” has become paramount (in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and low-intensity combat generally), the IDF and state bureaucracies have failed miserably in conveying a coherent and convincing message to the world.
A conference on the use of media as a factor in strategic decision-making and as a player in the theater of war and diplomacy, held this week outside Jerusalem, provided a glimpse into the chaos that pervades Israel’s official hasbara. At the closed-door academic conference, in which former generals, government spokesmen, experts, officials and a few of the country’s most senior past and current strategists could openly air their concerns, a recurring complaint among those in attendance centered on the lack of an agency that could coordinate the message being delivered by the state’s various spokesmen.
Commentary;
The BIGGEST failure of the Israeli government message is, and has been the failure to convey to the world a unified, consistent, coherent, compelling, historically and factually correct message which strings together a group of intelligent, grammatically correct English sentences. MB