With so many Jews working in the best advertising agencies, the ineptitude of Israeli PR efforts in the Gaza campaign seems odd. There is a tremendous difference between commercial and political advertising: the first is based on attraction, the second on hate.
People buy products because they like them; people accept political views because they hate the alternatives. The contradiction is superficial: even complex products such as cars are easy for consumers to comprehend and evaluate, but policies are too complex for evaluation. Often, there’s no policy at all but an opposition to the opponent’s policy. Who can tell the practical difference between the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, especially when big money supports both of them? In the effort to gain the broadest support, programs are made vague and indistinguishable.
In wars, political aims are fuzzy if they exist at all, and propaganda further distorts them. Deciding which party is right in remote conflicts is impossible for the lack of first-hand experience and basic information. The Westerners who support a persecuted tribe in Darfur don’t know which tribe persecutes which, and are oblivious to important facts: the hostilities in the area have smoldered for centuries, and the now-persecuted tribe launched the current round of fighting.
Unlike consumer instincts, political instincts are very weak most of the time. People buy goods on their own, and only unite when an enemy threatens their consumer habits. The strongest feeling, hate, is needed to shore up the weakest instinct, the political one. Westerners marched against apartheid, not for the blacks.
The evolution taught people that goodness is the natural way of things. To restore goodness, one only needs to break down the accrued distortions. Good ends are achieved not by promoting goodness, but by hating and destroying the distortions of it—then the goodness would develop on its own.
Goodness is multi-faceted. Ask Westerners how best to help the Africans, and you get a thousand answers whose proponents cannot agree on a common ground. Hatred is targeted because the distortions are fewer than the ways of goodness. Every group has its own definition of good, but the traits of evil are fixed: war, crime, and taxation without representation. Hate is the common denominator among very different people.
For a strong action, human beings unite around hate rather than goodness. Not incidentally, the Hebrew word for “neighbor” is a cognate of “evil” or “deviation.” We deviate together with our neighbors from others’ ways, and mean evil to them.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Arabs bank on Jew-hatred. Demonstrators condemn Israel rather than support the Palestinians. The test is simple: hundreds of thousands participated in anti-Israeli demonstrations, but few of them gave even ten dollars to Palestinian causes. They don’t love Arabs; they hate Jews.
The photos of Gazan children dead in Israeli attacks cannot arouse sympathy for Palestinians because blood-soaked images are inherently disgusting, but they intensify hatred and channel it onto Jews.
Politically correct Jews are afraid to rely on hatred in their propaganda efforts. Israelis defend their military operations against Palestinians rather than accuse the Arabs, but it’s a long-established fact that defenders always lose, whether on the battlefield or in media. Israeli propagandists have to go on offensive against Arabs especially since the opportunities are numerous. Arabs are barbarous (female genital mutilations, honor killings), religious fundamentalists (incitement at Friday prayers), dangerous to the world (Islamic terrorism, the spread of Wahhabism, million-strong crowds at religious events), exploitative (the oil racket), primitive, lazy, and unruly.
The liberal approach of judging each person on his merits is propaganda’s dead end. It also runs contrary to Judaism, in which nations are judged as a whole: Jews suffer for the sins of idolaters, and the Amalek probably had some decent people among them. In the real world, good people have to leave the evil milieu, as Lot did. Generalization is an essential propaganda tool. Israelis are wrong to confuse foreigners with the “PLO good/Hamas bad” dichotomy, especially since both are terrorist groups. The Arabs of Palestine elected Hamas as their governing party, and are fully responsible for its actions.
Words matter: “Palestinians” have the right to Palestine, but the “Arabs of Palestine” just live here. “Palestinians” are in a league of their own, while “Arabs of Palestine” are the same Arabs who manned the 9/11 attacks and carried out the Madrid bombing.
Israeli propaganda should be structured from general to particular: Islam sanctions treacherousness in regard to infidels, thus we cannot rely on Palestinian promises of peace; Hamas broke the ceasefire in Gaza, and the PLO reneged on many agreements to curb terrorism. Islamic terrorists from Al Qaeda attacked the West, and similar Islamic terrorists perpetrate daily attacks against Israel. Jews must show the common Americans and Europeans that we have the same Muslim enemy.
And we have similar problems with Muslims. Europeans are fed up with Muslim throngs swarming their cities: show them that Israeli Arabs are also immigrants who did not live here a century ago. They are alien and disloyal, and sympathize with Arab terrorists.
Israel must vehemently accuse the Arabs. Don’t be ashamed to show the world photos of Jewish women and children dead and maimed in Arab attacks. Publicize the animal-like faces of Palestinian demonstrators twisted in hatred. Jews always shrank from that because we sensed that gentiles didn’t want to hear of our sufferings; even the death camps turned into Holocaust memorials are nice and clean. No, show them the grisly part of death. When Arab supporters throw in a photo or two of dead Palestinian children, we have an obligation to suppress our feelings and publish thousands of photos of Muslim terrorist acts in Israel, each dripping with blood and full of torn limbs. And we must relate to Americans, Europeans, and Russians that those are the same terrorists who bombed their cities. The power of fear cannot be overestimated, and everyone has a reason to fear Arabs, whether immigrants or terrorists.
Don’t be petty. The world doesn’t care about the pipes filled with ammonium being fired at the Israeli desert. Make gross accusations instead: terrible massacres of Jews, exterminatory rhetoric, Hamas connections with Iran, Al Qaeda presence in Gaza, Hezbollah influence in Bolivia, Hamas cells in America. It doesn’t matter that some of the accusations are unproven.
Propaganda is surprisingly similar to court advocacy. A good attorney doesn’t attempt to win his case with a silver bullet. Instead, he heaps discrediting evidence against his opponents. Though they might disprove many of the arguments or at least show them to be dubious, the heap itself has a power of persuasion.
A hundred arguments, each one percent credible, amount to a hundred-percent credibility. This effect is commonly known as the power of repetition: even the most stupid ad generates sales if shown often enough. But consider that Arabs, Jew-haters, and leftists have plenty of media outlets at their disposal while Israel lacks even a single 24/7 satellite channel on par with Al Jazeera. Selling a political point is no different from selling any product: develop a sales idea, create a slogan, produce an ad, and keep showing it to build customer loyalty.
Timing is critical. On one hand, Muslim electoral and economic influence in the West is rising. On other hand, anti-Muslim sentiment grows stronger in response. We don’t want a Christian-Muslim friendship to develop, which can only mean trouble for Jews.
Most foreigners don’t know much about the Jewish-Muslim conflict or care about it. They form their opinions based on each party’s zeal. Only by hateful, zealous propaganda can Jews turn the tide of public opinion against Arabs.
