This is an Exclusive Four part series on Information and Hasbara:what to do and what not to do. Tsvi Bisk is an Educator, Lecturer, Futurist and Author.
By
Tsvi Bisk
Islamification of the West
Large scale Muslim immigration to the West coincided with the decline of Israeli Hasbara. In 1950, Western Europe had less than a quarter of a million Muslims and two million Jews. Today it has over 20 million Muslims and 1.5 million Jews. In 1950, North America had almost no Muslims. By 2001 Canada had more Muslims than Jews, while the estimated number of Muslims in the United States ranges from as little as 2 million to as many as 7 million – the larger number being the one claimed by the Muslim community itself.
These demographics alone explain a great deal regarding Israel’s position in the world. In fact it is a wonder that Europe is not even more anti-Israel than it is. We have the revolting behavior of many of Europe’s Muslims and consequent Islamphobia to thank for this. If they had been more civic-minded citizens of their adopted countries, the native citizens would be more inclined to side with their views on the Middle East. Politicians in democracies know how to count – they know how to count votes and contributions. Notwithstanding Harry Truman’s instinctive sympathies for the nascent Jewish state, he was after all a politician and thus countered State Department objections to recognizing Israel with “how many votes to the Arabs have?” Would he have made such a statement today? Would he have supported the establishment of Israel today – given the growing number of Muslim voters and the growing dependence of the United States on imported oil?
Following the 6 Day War, enormous numbers of Arab students, financed by oil money scholarships, poured onto western campuses. They were well schooled in focused, on-message propaganda slogans. Financed by their home countries, few had to work while studying. Their full time extra-curricular activity was pro-Arab and anti-Israel propaganda. It often seemed that the price of their scholarship was to become fulltime propagandists. Oil prices and western dependence on Muslim oil increased significantly during this period, further complicating the picture.
Europe was initially an easier market for Arab propagandists to penetrate than the United States. The post-colonial mindset of guilt ridden Europeans and their loss of moral self assurance (ironically to a large extent because of the Holocaust) made Europeans easy targets for Arab propagandists.
Unfortunately, Israel’s own behavior helped the Arabs. The Israeli occupation (and the early stages of “colonial” settlements) coincided with the beginning of the special relationship with the United States which was bogged down in Vietnam. This occurred during the height of the student revolutions of the late 60’s. The timing could not have been worse in molding the mindset of future leaders and opinion makers in Europe and left of center political opinion in the United States.
For politically correct public opinion, Israel had become a “militaristic colonial aggressor, an ally of anti-Third World neo-imperialist America”. The Arabs, especially the Palestinians, were an oppressed and exploited Third World people. It was self-evident what position “progressive” people would take.
The special relationship Israel had enjoyed with European progressives due to the achievements of Labor Zionism, began to wane. To be an academic with a “mature” view of world affairs, one had to disabuse oneself of naïve support for Israel. Sentimental sympathy with previously oppressed Jews was not mature. Now the Jews had become the oppressors. In any case, they argued, Zionism and Jewry are not one and the same. One could be an anti-Zionist without being anti-Jewish. There was no lack of Jewish “intellectuals” who, in order to be politically correct and transcend their own ethnic “provinciality”, gave credence to this distinction. American academia, looking over its shoulder at Europe in order to be “sophisticated”, followed suit.
Jewish and Israeli students were overwhelmed by this wave of sudden hostility, while the self-confident and somewhat arrogant post 6-Day-War Israeli establishment was dismissive of the threat and provided no leadership or coherent PR strategy. Campuses and the media were seen as marginal to the centers of real power, which “manly” Israeli politicians were cultivating. Intellectuals and political commentators who were disturbed by developments were treated with condescension and disdain. Their concern for what the goyim were thinking was dismissed as a lingering characteristic of the ghetto Jew. There was something effeminate and ‘old Jew’ about this kind of worrying. Manly ‘new Jews’ concerned themselves with real problems and real power, not the chattering slogans of intellectual airheads. They justified their realpolitik indifference to these developments by misinterpreting David Ben Gurion’s famous declaration: “It’s not important what the goyim think (or say); it’s important what the Jews do”.
Ironically, no Israeli leader had been more concerned with what the goyim thought than Ben Gurion. This was because the goyim sometimes acted on what they thought and what they did was important to the Jews. Ben Gurion never ignored or dismissed Gentile views. He always wanted to know what the goyim were thinking. But he also knew that no matter what they thought we still had the freedom to do something – something, not anything.
Geopolitical constraints were Ben Gurion’s forté and what made him a great leader. He was for the U.N. Partition Plan and fought for it against substantial Zionist opposition because he knew it was the best deal, given the political limitations of the time. He also knew it was a window of opportunity that would close as political reality began to work against us. He would never have uttered those infamous post 6-Day-War words “time is on our side”. For him, time was never on our side.
There was, therefore, no coherent, organized, ‘on-message’ Jewish response to the Arab propaganda machine. A hundred Arab spokesmen would use the same arguments and have the same responses to the standard journalistic questions. Fifty Jewish spokesmen would have fifty different responses. Israel’s previous public relations advantage had been unplanned. It had been realized inadvertently by Israel’s own achievements, by the corrupt state of the Arab world and by Hollywood.
Moreover, the occupation and the beginnings of the settlement project led Israeli political parties to splinter and reflect many shades of public opinion, from Herut’s ‘annex everything’ to Mapam’s ‘give everything back’ to Labor having a half a dozen positions within the same party. When public opinion is so conflicted, a democracy has difficulty in formulating and executing a coherent information campaign. What product were we selling? Israel the colonial power exploiting cheap Arab labor, or Israel the peace seeker and beacon of social justice? What policy were we explaining? Our historic rights to the land, our territorial requirements for security, our desire for peace, our need for cheap labor, or our inability to decide what we want?
Being the only democracy in the Middle East we could not design or control our message when it came to the occupation. Our message was as conflicted as our internal politics.
Part Three Focuses on Positive Hasbara
For link to : PART I
Tsvi Bisk is also the author of “The Optimistic Jew”
