I’m not so sure that they do, but I’m certainly no expert on the subject or the history.Aurele Tobelem writes at Quillette:
Horrible Hasbara: Israel’s Poor PR EffortsThere’s an old saying, often misattributed to Albert Einstein, that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In Israel, they don’t call this insanity. They call it hasbara.Israeli public diplomacy efforts are characterised by disorganisation. The employment of multiple lines of argument and incoherent or overly complex narratives, together with the fact that Israel possesses no single body responsible for PR—these factors stymie the country’s attempts at effective messaging. As Gil Hoffman, Executive Director of the media watchdog HonestReporting, wrote in June 2024:
When it comes to messaging, Israel has three separate audiences: domestic to make the public feel safe; its enemies to deter them; and the international community. The messaging that is effective for audiences one and two repels audience three, causing constant damage.
Historian Ron Schleifer traces the modern Israeli failure to effectively argue the country’s case to the Jewish diaspora experience: “One thousand and eight hundred years of submissive Jewish hasbara, which was not combined with any military operation or threat of one, has left its mark upon the Jews.” Zionist hasbara, Schleifer explains, was founded on the idea that collective Jewish self-determination must achieve international legitimacy. It has therefore adopted a moralistic narrative in which the Jewish right to statehood is justified on the basis of historical dispossession, diasporic suffering, and the monstrous evils perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The early Zionists, Schleifer writes, rather than showcase the everyday dangers they faced as a result of the intransigence of the Palestinian Arabs and the rejectionism of surrounding Arab nations, preferred to rely on what Schleifer calls the “underdog doctrine.”
But the idea of Israel as an underdog lost credibility in 1967, when the country acquired new territories in the Sinai, West Bank, and Golan Heights during the Six Day War. As Israeli historian Yoav Gelber has documented, Israel was transformed overnight from underdog to occupier in the eyes of global public opinion. As Gelber relates, within a week of Israel’s victory, Western media outlets were publishing sensationalised reports of Egyptian soldiers stranded in the Sinai desert, firebombings by the Israeli Air Force, and a growing Arab refugee crisis provoked by the war.
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