I founded one of the first crisis management firms in the country in the 1980s. Throughout my career, influential Jews have urgently approached me, convinced they had diagnosed Israel’s problem: Bad PR. They wanted to support efforts to improve its image.
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The news and social media are presently ablaze with cries for better pro-Israel PR. I just watched a podcast where a Mideast scholar I greatly admire called for such a campaign to reach the Palestinian “street.” Last month, at the Jerusalem Post Conference, philanthropist Ronald Lauder announced his desire to raise $1 billion to improve Israel’s global image. Lots of people sent me the news coverage, thrilled. I wasn’t.
This initiative will never happen. I’m going to tell you why because I’ve been down this road scores of times over 40 years.
In the early days of such approaches, I was earnest and offered recommendations for others to carry out (never billing for my services). However, I did not pursue sustained campaigns because significant challenges always derailed my intentions. Here are some of them.
Sympathy and Violent Maintenance
Israel only survives through the superior application of force. No force; no Israel. As French President Jacques Chirac told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Second Intifada, Israel will never convince anyone that the Palestinians are the aggressors because of the disparity in military capability.
Israel will never get big segments of the West to feel good about how it remains in existence because it involves violence, and few of us have experienced threats where we believe killing ever serves a moral purpose. Because we aren’t psychopaths, PR won’t change our abhorrence of violence because we understandably don’t want it to. Not for $1 billion, not for $10 billion.
The Book of Numbers
A few numbers for consideration as to why pro-Israel PR campaigns are dead on arrival. Jews and their forebears have been hated for 3,000 years. Antisemitism and its modern avatar, antizionism, are in the genes by now, the amygdala, and perhaps the soil. This is not abstract hatred; it is embraced as a rational response to the violence of a noxious people.
Antisemitism is the single prejudice people can feel virtuous about because there is an immunity shield: I have liberal friends who openly call Israelis Nazis, then, beaming, cite “Israeli policy” or invoke “Netanyahu” like children shouting “Psych!” on the playground. These are the people with COEXIST bumper stickers on their Subarus whose identities are rooted in righteousness but whose heart rates didn’t spike when they heard about the horrors of October 7.
I call them “Spahn Ranch Antisemites,” referring to Charles Manson’s killers who saw no contradiction in preaching peace, love, and environmental harmony while murdering and mutilating defenseless human beings (“piggies”) and calling for more. This psychosis cannot be cured with a Super Bowl advertisement featuring a cool biracial kid protecting a Jewish nebbish from bullies.
There are 2 billion Muslims in the world. Just under half of American Muslims believe Israel has no right to exist; that figure jumps to 80 percent in the Middle East and Africa. There are roughly 15 million Jews on the planet, only some of whom support Israel’s relentless defense. A few million fence-sitters litigating the “complexity” of the Palestinian question can’t compete with billions creating content about genocide on TikTok. Nor can you separate Israel from antisemitism, as much as it’s become fashionable to try, because most believe whatever Jews suffered on October 7, they either had it coming or “can take it,” including half the Jews I know.
As best as groups, including the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, can determine, at least tens of billions of dollars have been spent by Iran, Qatar, and other Islamist interests in recent years to demonize Israel. Other watchdogs put it in the hundreds of billions, or more than 1 trillion.
My best estimate, based on various sources, is that several hundred million dollars have funded programs to address Israel’s public image in the past decade. I’m not talking about Jewish philanthropy writ large; rather, resources directed toward Israel’s reputation. There is no comparison between what can be accomplished with tens of billions to reinforce ancient prejudices and what can be done with comparative nickels and dimes to reverse them.
Mindset
A typical meeting with Jewish philanthropists, including billionaires, begins with a soliloquy about how “no one understands all the good Israel and Jews do.” Alas, Israel just hasn’t hired the right guy! Cohen, however, has a guy. His guy is the best. Rosen has a guy, too. Rosen’s guy is also the best. Sometimes, I have been the guy.
Then the hondling begins.
Me: “You will need a huge amount of money to do something like this, right, non-stop, for many years.”
Cohen: “I agree. What can you do for $75,000?”
Me: “To address antisemitism? Israel? Nothing.”
Rosen: “What if we up it to $100,000?”
Me: “Still, nothing.”
Cohen: “If we could raise more, do you think you could make a dent in antisemitism and report back in three months? We need to know what we’re getting for our money.”
Me: “I can’t reverse 3,000 years of history by next quarter. And unless you can raise an enormous amount of money, you’re just going to get robbed by a Madison Avenue flack.”
Cohen: “Well, we’re going to call Goldman’s guy.”
Me (leaving): “You do that. I heard he’s the best.”
Rosen (shouting): “Look at all the good Israel and the Jews do!”
Me: “Yes, I know about the polio vaccine. That provokes resentment, not admiration.”
This short-term mentality and the notion that there is the same kind of “ROI” is the opposite of what the Islamists do: invest billions, over decades, to reinforce an existing belief system, knowing that the dividends of accelerated hatred will take time to pay off (they learned this from their Soviet sponsors decades ago). They know they won’t win militarily, but the PR war is a lock because the oil money keeps flowing.
Targeting the Choir
Implicit in the PR challenge is the assumption that communications are about the proper transmission of data. Facts don’t fight viruses; this is about existing biases rooted in brain chemistry. Curing antisemitism and getting mankind to love Israel isn’t the project here.
Getting too deeply into effective communications tactics here distracts from my jeremiad, but I will paint one with a broad brush. It comes down to moral authority for allies and risk for adversaries. Historically, propaganda has focused on rallying friends and confounding enemies, not on getting hostile parties to change their minds. As tragic as the Gaza war has been, military power has led much of the Arab world to fatalism: Israel is here to stay, and they should find a way to work together.
Israel’s “base” is teetering. The objective is to secure it. Every major movement is sustained by a core group that believes in a mission. This mission is Israel’s survival and prosperity and that of Western civilization. The Islamists have rapidly secured my kids’ generation, but some of them can be salvaged by truth. Others are stopped cold when confronted with their support of genocide and colonialism because central to their belief system is the conviction that hating Israel is synonymous with virtue.
Israel’s supporters must be assured they are on the winning side with the moral, economic, and military high ground. Utopians dismiss this as “preaching to the choir.” Realists understand that without a choir, there is no viable movement. When antisemites are publicly tagged as liars, it doesn’t educate the antisemites, but it does help those who believe in Israel’s survival to keep the faith.
Israel doesn’t have a PR problem; it has a Jew problem. Any effort at Jewish self-determination reads as aggression, whereas any violence against Jews reads as preemptive self-defense. Focus on bolstering like-minded audiences of multiple faiths united in a fear of terror, if nothing else, not begging for the affection of those who feel too pure in their hatred to abandon it.