[Fegasderty]

The message should be "The Arabs were already handed 99% of the mideast, but they need more."

Plain and simple.

The biggest victory of the PLO was creating the idea of some Palestinian Ethnic group that seperated them from the rest of the Arab world.

There isn't any.

They are Arabs, plain and simple.

And THAT is what we have to get across.

everytime we speak about them, it should always be "the Palestinian ARABS", the ARABS in the West Bank and Gaza, (judea, Samarea and Gaza), etc. etc. etc.

And we need to take it to them. WHY do they deserve to have the West Bank and Gaza in addition to the rest of the Middle East. We need to force them to JUSTIFY their demands. They can't, not really. THAT is how we win the "idea war."

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

Israel is losing the war for the hearts and minds of the world. Face it, they are. Hasbara is failing. The goal of Hasbara is and has always been to enlighten, to educate and for whatever reason Hasbara has been pushed into a purely reactive mode to counter every PA inspired lie, spin and twist. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. Every response to a terror attack is called a 'retaliation' and every act of a soverign nation is labeled 'aparthied' and 'occupation.'

Someone way smarter than me (my wife) says point blank: "once you're arguing about what city Arafat was born in, you've lost." We trip up in the minutiae of patently trivial things and feel compelled to react while losing the big picture. But the big picture is very simple and the Palestinians have mastered the big simple picture. They have one message: "occupation". Everything flows from that. Everything is justified, rationalized, excused or ignored with that one big simple picture in mind. All of the tiny darts, insipid facts and dubious history is simply a deflection of our attention, not theirs. So here is a quick summary of the high level bullet points for a new Hasbara. A big simple picture that can be repeated endlessly, is easy to communicate, easy to understand and doesn't trip in the details few people know of or care about. We aren't in this to prove how smart we are, our goals are broader and the way we can meet those goals is to simplify our approach. It's not about dumbing it down, it's about making a coherently focused message.

There is no retaliation
News reports, even IDF briefings are described as 'retaliation'. They are not. They are the singular expression of a plan to combat terrorism. Every act be it military, political, legal or in the media must be seen as another exercize of a plan to combat terrorism. Nothing more nothing less. There is no piecemeal approach - all actions are part of the battle against terrorism. Plans can be complex but their goals are not.

Israel is a country Now
Israel is a nation with all of the rights and privileges of any soverign nation. Rights that include prosperity, security and the concepts that modern people have fought and died to preserve. There is no limbo state no 'almost a state'. It is meaningless to worry about how that state came to be as it is meaningless to worry about how France came to be. All issues must proceed from this single stance. There is no debate about the legitimacy of Israel on any basis. It is and that very fact alone is sufficient justification for it's future existence.

There's no there there
The second part of the point above is that religion and history are not sufficient rationales to either defend or debate the legitimacy of Israel because Israel is. There is no ultimate truth to be unearthed in history whether that history starts in 1929, 1880, 1674, 1189, 699, 240, 70, 168BCE, 500BCE, 1000BCE, the time of Joseph, the time of Abraham or any other.

Terrorism and Israeli relations are two different things
These two vitally important issues are in fact distinct. The battle against terrorism, from the PA or Hamas and all of the other terrorist organizations is an ongoing fight against criminals, terrorists and murderers. Their motives are unimportant - the only issue is how Israel combats that terrorism to keep its citizenry secure. Israeli relations, since that is what all of the other issues fall under is different from the problem of combatting terrorism. They cannot be confused with one another. They have different goals and different tools. Israeli relations, good or bad are an aspect of fireighn relations generally. Every country on earth from the most powerful to the most obscure has to deal with these relationships. We cannot let arab countries and their supporters cloud the issue by pretending that only Israel has poor relations with its neighbors or that its neighbors have powerful friends. Again, this is true for every country, good or bad. Foreign relations and the war on terrorism are different.

The Devil's in the Details
Minute details are a trap. A trap that forces Hasbarot into purely reactive tail chasing. It is absolutely irrelevant the number of refuseniks, the city of Arafat's birth or the number of people delayed per hour per checkpoint. Those are not issues. Those are dimensionless facts that are at best vaguely interesting, rarely meaningful, subject to great dispute. The big picture is lost when we descend into minutiae where that minutiae don't connect with the plan of Hasbara or any useful goal. It's confusing and diffuse. Stick with the simple message. Confront 'occupation' with these simple messages.

Well that's what I have for now. I'll be fleshing this out in the future. At the least, Hasbara needs a simple plan that touches on these points and only these points and hammers those touchpoints over and over and over and over and over and over. It may take two years, certainly the Palestinians have had two years to bang on the 'occupation' drum. We will need at least that.

They are better organized, better connected, probably better funded. They are very good at this and what makes them good at it is they don't have to reinvent themselves or their message as a reaction. They have a simple tune.

We can make progress against this if we're willing to take a fresh look at our goals and we take steps to shape our tactics accordingly. We can take the fight to them if we're willing to sublimate our own egos and stop attempting to prove how smart we are. Show how smart we are by winning!

[Ifroham4]

Any ideas on how to translate all of this into action?


Sure, we just have to flesh it out. Takes time and work though. Nu?

[radikal]

No, I don't want to talk about hasbara!
Help!
Originally posted by Mediocrates

But the big picture is very simple and the Palestinians have mastered the big simple picture. They have one message: "occupation". WRONG. The message is J-E-W-S.
and for whatever reason Hasbara has been pushed into a purely reactive mode to counter every PA inspired lie, spin and twist Don't overestimate the PA. In my part of the world (and, I strongly suspect, in yours too) Palestinians, whatever their exact affiliations may be, simply ride the waves of local passions, motto: "you ask for Jew-bashing - we deliver, at every level". They are not the real target, the locals are.

The reason for the current sorry state of the hasbara is that the people involved in it have absolutely no clue, no professional competences. Any kind of PR work starts with clear definitions of target audiences, with getting a picture of the emtional/psychological mechanisms involved.

The mostly, alas, ludicrous creatures that at this moment run the show miss some absolute basics:

- PR work has to be efficient as opposed to pleasant

- the efficiency of PR work is measured by its impact on the target audience

- hasbara does not equal support for Israel, at least not in its immediate effect

An example: European Jewish institutions organize an extremely costly demonstration in Brussels - to "show the world that we support Israel". Brussels happens to be the marching capital of Europe - "the world" wouldn't take note of a demonstration there unless the participators burn some shops and cars on the way. Consequently, the only media to report on it was the Israeli, the rest just yawned. Some claim that such demonstartions serve to boost spirits in Israel, I am a poor judge of this. As a PR/hasbara action it was a pure desaster.

- hasbara requires professionals in all fields of communication, not just poor little unemployed Moshe with too much time on his hands

- hasbara should set clear and realistic goals - what exactly is anyone trying to achieve with it? bring XZ% of the local non-Jews out in the streets shouting "Am Israeli chai"? or just shutting certain segments of the society up in favour of a more relaxed discourse on the subject?

- target audiences are not alike in various parts of the world, therefore the attempts to unify hasbara activities, but for a few basics, are counterproductive: my neighbors think in an entirely different way yours do


Last but not least, sorry if you find this remark nasty: we talk, talk, talk, talk .....

Any ideas on how to translate all of this into action?


I have a feeling that both on this forum and in real life many are trying to perpetuate their own neuroses, albeit acquired through very real trauma, rather than tackle the real issues at hand. We owe it to Israelis to do better.