Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem
The Guardian,
Saturday October 11 2008
Article history
Israel has hired British public image consultants to give the conflict-battered nation a political facelift for its 60th birthday this year.
Acanchi, which has built its reputation on altering international perceptions of nations such as Lebanon and Bahrain, has been contracted to counter anti-Israel "mindsets". "Our research shows that Israel's brand is essentially the conflict," Ido Aharoni, head of the brand management unit within Israel's foreign ministry, told Israeli daily, Haaretz.
"Even those who recognise that Israel is in the right are not attracted to it, because they see it as a supplier of bad news. The conclusion is that it is more important for Israel to be attractive than to be right," he said.
Israel signed the contract with Acanchi six weeks ago but the idea to remake the nation's image was proposed by its New York consulate seven years ago.
In the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, pro-Israel lobbyists hoped the rest of the world would become more sympathetic to their conflict with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, which erupted soon after the birth of the Jewish nation in 1948.
But Aharoni told the Guardian that the contract with Acanchi "had nothing to do with public relations".
"Let's just confirm the fact that they are working for us and that's it," he said.
Within the pro-Israel lobby, debate has raged between those who advocate the old approach of managing perceptions of the conflict by promoting the Jewish nation's version of events and those who advocate distracting international attention by telling positive stories.
Even before Acanchi's chairwoman, Fiona Gilmore, visited Israel last week to talk to public figures, businessmen, academics and social activists, the nation had begun selling a slicker image to the rest of the world.
Last year Israel launched a page on MySpace and this year, as part of its 60th birthday celebrations, it lined New York's Fifth Avenue with banners of 60 Israeli faces. But its attempt to generate goodwill abroad backfired at home last year when Israeli politicians objected to a story about Israel's female soldiers who were photographed in their underwear at the behest of Israel's New York consulate.
Acanchi also declined to be interviewed about the project but its website says it aims to "discover and define the optimum brand strategy for a country, city or region". Gilmore says the new brand should be "rooted in the essence of a place". "This is always rooted in the reality and essence of the place," she says on the Acanchi website.
"If a brand is changed or built only on the surface and it's not supported by deeper changes and values within a country, city or region, it will not engage people."
Real Israel
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Debunking the myths of zionism
‘Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.’
Schlomo Sand, professor of history at Tel Aviv university and author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008) is writing in Le Monde Diplomatique: ‘Israel deliberately forgets its history’
‘(…)Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea.
But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture.’
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