First it would help if Israel were a bit more proactive with the P.R. There have been several very good Israeli spokespeople in the past (the best being Benjamin Netanyahu) including a woman colonel name Miri Eisen and another woman named Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich. However the videos that the IDF posted about the Gaza flotilla as well as the satirical “We Con the World” videos have been a huge help. The problem is that those who complain about bad Israeli responses to media biases are presupposing that much of the media and European opinion  are predisposed to even listening  to the Israeli point of view.

by Ted Belman

When Israel loses yet another PR battle, many of her friends complain that she is partly to blame because she is woefully inept when it comes to PR. I am not one of them.

Glenn Jasper, Ruder Finn Israel, recently suggested that Israel should have all its spokesmen deliver the same message. After all, that’s what the Palestinians do. That might be a good idea, except that Israel is a nation of presidents, and each president will deliver his or her own message. They can’t be disciplined.

Alex Fishman suggested that Israel should consider the PR battle as more important than the military battle and organize accordingly.

Hence, the manager of this war on our side should not be the army via the IDF spokesman, but rather, someone on the highest national level, with the best professionals, who would have the knowledge and ability to write the “scripts” for the war and enforce them on all our executive arms, including the army.

Good as these suggestions are, they don’t go to the heart of the matter.

To start with, there is a coalition of forces, including anti-Semites, leftists and Islamists, that is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. They couldn’t care less about truth and justice, so a better PR campaign would be irrelevant. Then there is the main stream media, which presents news to support their agenda rather than the truth. The fact that they suppressed the flotilla videos, which made Israel’s case better than a thousand words could have, is testimony to this fact. They have constructed a narrative in support of their agenda, and any facts not in keeping with it are ignored.

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Iran and Syria also learned this lesson. They could keep killing Americans in Iraq as long as they denied their complicity. The U.S. rarely called them on this because if she did, she would have to do something about it.

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This is not to say that Israel should cease its PR efforts. She shouldn’t. She should continue to provide her friends with the truth so that they maintain their friendship, lest they be infected as well. Notwithstanding all the demonization she is subjected to and the realpolitik, she has managed to keep the goodwill of the American people and others who value truth and justice. Ultimately, this is her trump card.