I was sitting with an old college friend in a restaurant in New York City. Suddenly, she launched into an aggressive assault on Israel’s complete incompetence in the field of public relations. She could not understand how Israel, which is so technologically advanced, should be such an abysmal failure in getting its story out.
At first, as an Israeli, I was defensive, explaining that Israel could readily win the public relations competition if it employed the tactics of the Palestinians. But we choose not to show the gruesome pictures of what happens after a suicide bombing because we want to spare the Israeli populace the emotional trauma of viewing them on television.
Her response: “Bull—t! The only way you will gain the moral upper hand is if you come down off the moral high ground. In the world of Al-Jazeera, where a 30-second media bite determines public opinion, you cannot afford to pontificate about the need to maintain your emotional purity.” Her spicy language was a clear indication that the world of public relations is indeed a dirty game, and, if one wants to win it, one has to play media hardball.
First of all, she said that we had to replace the present “underwhelming” Israeli spokespeople in the United States with ones who can put a few coherent sentences together in decent English.
But most important, we have to monopolize the airwaves with visuals. We have to call in the CNNs, ABCs, NBCs and CBSs to view the 5-year-old Israeli child brutally shot in the head in her bed. Every close-up of Jenin must be met by photo-montages of severed arms and legs hanging from the walls and ceilings of the dining hall in Netanya. We have to open our hospitals so that the world sees in-depth pictures of the hundreds of people wounded in suicide bombings. We do not need to let corpses fester until the press can snap a picture of them (as the Palestinian Authority does), but we can show the photographs of the autopsy reports of the two teenagers who had their heads sliced off by Palestinian murderers. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Playing on the fears of Sept. 11, we should let the world see every public square that is named in honor of every Palestinian suicide bomber. Let the cameras roll so that the training camps for 5-year-old Palestinians, barely out of diapers, holding real guns, spewing their “Israel is Nazism” propaganda, can be beamed across the globe.
If the world wants to know why Israel won’t negotiate with the Palestinian Authority until it reforms itself, let it see the Palestinian form of justice, whereby suspected collaborators are hanged in Manara Square in Ramallah, within sight of Yasser Arafat’s office, and then dragged through the city streets, as thousands of cheering Palestinians kick their dead bodies. Let’s interview those Palestinian mothers and fathers giving suicide death belts to their daughters and sons.
Palestinian sob stories have to be matched by Israeli sob stories, but with a twist. The New Yorker magazine has to feature Carmit Ron on its cover, telling of the loss of her husband and both of her children in a suicide bombing at a cafe in Haifa.
The San Francisco Chronicle must tell the story of the single Russian Jewish immigrant mother who lost her only child, a high school student, in a cold-blooded suicide bombing at a discotheque in Tel Aviv. And the kidnapping murder of the teenage son of religious peace activist Yitzhak Frankenthal must be a front-page article in the Boston Globe.
What is the twist? All these bereaved parents decry calls for revenge, and they remain committed to bringing about a peaceful resolution to the conflict — unlike most of their bereaved Palestinian counterparts, whose commitment to death squads overrides their commitment to life, let alone peace. If in building ourselves up, we put a dent in the well-oiled Palestinian PR machine, well, that is what it is all about. Comparisons must be made.
We have to take the World Wide Web by storm, saturating it with daily updates of Palestinian outrages. We have to create seductive Web pages that present user-friendly information. Again it is subtlety and sophistication that must rule cyberspace.
We need to go on every American TV and radio talk show, from “Face the Nation” to “Good Morning, America,” from NPR to WCBS. We have to appear on entertainment talk shows from “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to the “Oprah Winfrey Show” to MTV, presenting attractive and alluring personalities, from Aviv Gefen to Amos Oz, from Dana International to Batya Gur — people with sophistication, humor and a reasoned approach to the Mideast conflict that will play as well in New York City as it will in Lincoln, Neb.
So far, we have produced a total public relations failure in the marketplace of technological ideas, initiatives and creativity. We need a complete overhaul. After all: It’s public relations, stupid!