A Hedgehog’s Hasbara

Last
week I attended the second day of a conference on “The Media
as a Theater of War, the Blogosphere, and the Global Battle for Civil Society”.
(Unfortunately, I missed the first day, which actually covered a lot of the
stuff I was most interested in. My immune system and assorted pathogens
disagreed with my plans – and the less said about the details of the dispute,
the better.) In the aftermath of the conference (and, indeed, during the
conference itself), a number of my fellow blogger-attendees reacted rather
negatively to much of the conference’s tone and content.

I’ve
waited to set out my own thoughts on the subject, although I’ve written a bunch
of long comments on Something
Something – Liza wrote a pretty scathing review of the conference there,
and some pointed debate (to put it mildly) followed between the liberal-blogger
set (of which I appear, somehow, to have become an honorary member) and the
rest. Foremost among the defenders of the conference is Richard Landes, who put the whole
thing together and, as far as I’m aware, was principally responsible for
selecting its panelists. Rather than repeat what Liza and Lisa and Yael wrote
about the conference itself, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s really going
on here: why is it that good and sincere people have such radical disagreements
about a topic that – at least at first glance – should be fairly simple?

*            *            *

There
is one thing that all of us (or at least all of us involved in this debate) agree
on: Israel’s image in the eyes of the rest of the world is abysmal. Our
response has been to attempt more effective hasbara – literally,
“explanation” but more accurately translated as “public diplomacy”, “public
relations”, or (less delicately) “propaganda”. The problem is that Israeli
public diplomacy has been monumentally unsuccessful of late: the plucky little
underdog of yore is now seen as the big bad wolf, oppressing and occupying the Palestinians,
offending Hezbollah (by existing, basically), insulting Iran by accusing
President Ahmadinejad of all kinds of horrible things, and feeling offensively
sorry for itself every time a walking bomb blows up a bus or café.

We
seem to have tremendous difficulty understanding why we are perceived so
negatively. Are we not a thriving democracy? Do we not mean well? Okay, we’ve
had to do some rather unpalatable stuff at times, but hey, we live in a rough
neighborhood, and it’s not like we enjoyed knocking all those houses
down! And our adversaries include some genuinely evil people: guys who think
blowing innocent women and children to bits is a good thing, as long as it
happens to us and not them.

The
hasbara establishment – consisting of certain individuals and agencies
of the Israeli government, along with a bunch of concerned individuals and
private organizations – has responded to the failures of Israeli image-making
by circling the wagons, closing ranks, girding their loins, going for the
jugular, and keeping their powder dry: or, in other words and without the
tortured metaphors, they’ve opted to do pretty much what they’ve been doing all
along, but louder and more forcefully.

Others
of us believe that a more nuanced, diverse, and proactive approach is called
for. For example, rather than simply reacting to events on the ground by trying
to explain or justify them – the approach that is implicit in the use of the
Hebrew word for “explanation” to describe public diplomacy – we believe that
public-relations concerns need to be a major input into policy-making:
Just as politicians get advice from security experts before making decisions
with security implications, they should get advice from people who understand
international journalism and public opinion before making decisions that will
affect how Israel is perceived overseas.

While
we “hasbara rebels” don’t have an official set of beliefs – we aren’t a
cohesive, organized group, although someone recently accused us of being a
“sorority” and I’ve always wanted to sneak my way into a sorority – a lot of us
seem to believe that current, traditional Israeli hasbara is not only
too reactive, but also too strident, too self-righteous, and too focused on the
evils of our adversaries. I’m not going to repeat all our arguments (and the
counter-arguments) here; go to the
thread at Something Something to see what I’m talking about. (At some point
I should collect everything I wrote there and edit the good parts into
something. Eventually.)

At
some point early in the debate, I began to realize that the people with whom I
was debating – while sincere, well-meaning, intelligent, and well informed –
nonetheless didn’t get it: No matter how my sorority sisters and I tried
to explain our position, they didn’t understand that we could be enthusiastic
Zionists, eager to see Israel positioned better in world opinion, cognizant of
the genuine problems out there (including some egregious bias in news
reporting, along with an awful lot of simple and not-so-simple cluelessness) –
and yet strongly disagree with their approach to hasbara.

I
don’t yet entirely understand why traditional hasbara practitioners have
such difficulty understanding the Sorority view – it’s not exactly rocket
science, after all. Since the debate began, I’ve had the refrain from a favorite
song of my youth constantly running
through my brain:

Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes,

But you never quite learned the song.

(from “The Hedgehog’s Song”
by the Incredible String Band)

It’s
rather sad, and very frustrating; I wish I could find some way to convince
people who know that their approach isn’t working to think
constructively about why it isn’t working and how it might be made to
work better.

On the other hand, the debate has had one happy consequence: I’ve ordered
CD’s of the first three albums of the Incredible String Band – the second of
which includes the old favorite that I’ve had running through my head for the
last week. After almost forty years, it’ll be nice to hear that music again.