This is why Israel fails at public diplomacy - opinion

There appears to be widespread agreement in Israel that we are experiencing a major public diplomacy/hasbara crisis. 

I have always understood hasbara to mean the dissemination of information to explain Israel’s policies and actions, especially abroad, which differs from propaganda, in that it professes to express the truth as we perceive it, or would like others to perceive it. In recent years, the term has been officially translated into “public diplomacy,” which I do not believe conveys the same connotation as hasbara. 

In March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed ministers and officials, whose proficiency in the English language leaves much to be desired, for Israel’s faulty hasbara efforts. Despite that there have been some highly embarrassing examples of ministers and officials struggling to express themselves in pigeon English, I don’t believe this is the core of our hasbara problem, though the content of some of these sayings is occasionally problematic.

Israel's fractured hasbara network

A more serious explanation is the absence of a single ministry or ministerial department in charge of the country’s hasbara.

In the past, Israel’s main official hasbara manager was a department in the Foreign Ministry. In recent years, separate hasbara bodies have existed in the form of separate ministries or as a unit in the Prime Minister’s Office.

In January 2023, a separate ministry was reestablished to provide MK Galit Distel Atbaryan (Likud) with a job. But the ministry was abolished at the end of October 2023 after Atbaryan resigned because she felt she was not given the tools to deal professionally with the issue. Some have said that she just wasn’t fit for the job.

TODAY, IT appears that the Prime Minister’s Office is the main governmental body in charge of Israel’s hasbara, via the National Public Diplomacy Directorate. Still, we do not know exactly how it operates, and who decides about Israel’s hasbara policy, tactics, and strategies.

The public became aware of the directorate when Israel’s most popular English-language spokesperson since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Eylon Levy, was removed from office at the end of March, allegedly because he published inaccurate information about Israel’s policy regarding humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip. However, it was rumored that his removal had to do with his participation in the demonstrations against the government’s judicial reform plan.

The following month, Noa Tishby, the Israeli actress and successful voluntary hasbara activist in the US, was also removed from her position because she had supported the demonstrations against the government’s judicial reform plan. (She had been officially enticed by the Foreign Ministry, during Yair Lapid’s government, to participate in its campaign against rising antisemitism and Israel’s delegitimization in the world.)

According to Haaretz and The New York Times, the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry has also engaged in clandestine “hasbara” activities to combat antisemitism. They based their reporting on information from Fake Reporter, an Israeli non-governmental outfit that calls out malicious activity on Internet networks. 

This activity, performed by non-governmental bodies that specialize in “influence campaigns,” focused on Black American congressmen and progressive youngsters in the US and Canada, inter alia using fake websites and forged accounts in various social media networks.

HOWEVER, IT would be a mistake to place all the blame for the poor state of Israel’s hasbara on the multiplicity of ministries engaged in both legitimate and illegitimate hasbara activities. The main problem is with the policies (or absence thereof) that Israel’s hasbara is called upon to address.

For example, there is almost complete consensus among Israeli Jews that the horrific crimes committed by Hamas on October 7 in Israel can neither be forgotten nor forgiven, and that they justify focusing Israeli hasbara efforts on them – especially on the thankless task of convincing skeptics around the world that Hamas’s crimes actually occurred. 

There is also almost full consensus that what occurred on October 7 justifies Israel’s goal of obliterating Hamas as both a military and governing factor in the Gaza Strip.

But there is little consensus on the question of whether one can fully justify the horrendous physical damage caused by Israel in most sections of the Gaza Strip, and the horrific suffering caused to Gazan civilians who lost their homes, and most of their possessions, while suffering from serious food shortages, as well as the absence of most basic services. 

In addition, there is no way one can justify the vast number of Palestinian children who have been killed, or who have survived as orphans.

Of course, Hamas tactics and strategies – which include sheltering terrorists among civilians, hiding weapons in their homes, and digging hundreds of kilometers of tunnels underneath the ground for a large variety of uses – have made it impossible to avoid much of the destruction and civilian fatalities. However, the fact that many Israeli Jews believe that there are no innocent civilians among Gazans makes the hasbara effort in this field extremely difficult.

The fact that Netanyahu has refused to talk about and plan what should happen in the Gaza Strip “on the day after,” and his refusal to consider any viable Palestinian alternative to Hamas, is also very difficult, if not impossible, to explain to the general public abroad, as it is to foreign governments.

Beyond the general situation in the Gaza Strip, which Israel is having difficulty justifying to the world, there is the issue of its refusal to consider anything that even resembles an eventual two-state solution; the de facto spreading of Jewish settlement activities in the West Bank with active state approval; and the intensification of unbridled violence by certain groups of Jewish settlers against random Palestinian civilians there – all issues that Israeli hasbara is unable to grapple with.

In the internal Israeli debate on these issues, a certain section of the Jewish population argues that all this is in accordance with God’s will. When he served as prime minister, Naftali Bennett once “reminded” Arab leaders that according to the Bible, God promised the whole of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. 

I don’t believe he convinced a single Arab leader, and I doubt whether Israeli hasbara can convince world public opinion (with the exception, perhaps, of the Evangelicals) that this should be the basis for a generally accepted reality.

None of this means that we should give up our hasbara efforts, especially when critics and opponents abroad speak and act out of ignorance, rather than out of sheer prejudice and hatred. 

However, our hasbara efforts should be systematic, targeted, and well thought out. As long as Israel still remains a liberal democracy, albeit a faulty one, fake sources and dodgy means should be avoided.

For this to happen, we need a well-functioning state with systematic decision-making. Unfortunately, that this is not what we have at the moment.

The writer worked in the Knesset for many years as a researcher and has published journalistic and academic articles on current affairs and Israeli politics. Her recent book, Israel’s Knesset Members – A Comparative Study of an Undefined Job, was published by Routledge.