When a manufacturing company is confronted with the reality of a huge drop in product sales, the initial reaction on the part of the managers is to blame the marketing department and to demand that it come up with a new and more effective advertising campaign.  After all, the notion that their air-conditioning units are not actually working or that trying to sell them to Eskimos was a lousy idea would be a direct and very costly challenge to the power of the CEO and the management team and the business strategy they have been pursuing, and could force the company either to start investing in a new product or to go bankrupt.

A much less expansive plan, and one that does not raise questions about the ability of the company to survive under its current leadership and guiding business principles, would be to hire a few p.r. wizards who could help polish the company’s image and perhaps even redefine its “brand name.”  How about “A/C for Eskimos: A Preemptive Strike Against Global Warming”?

Similarly, it is not surprising that when political reality bites, like when one loses a presidential race, the tendency on the part of the loser is to blame his media strategist for his defeat and dismiss the suggestion that he was an awful candidate with a useless message.  And judging by the propensity of the current Israeli government to embrace global public relations as a principal diplomatic tool, the Jewish state’s leaders have concluded that their nation’s increasing international isolation has nothing to do with policies—like continuing to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and killing many civilians during the recent war against Hamas in Gaza—and that a 24/7 bombardment of news bites, television commercials, podcasts, and YouTube spots would transform Israel into a popular global player.

The obsessive preoccupation of Israeli policymakers and pundits with the need to launch an effective p.r. campaign to win the hearts and minds of the residents of the global village recalls the way Bush-administration officials and their neoconservative ideologues insisted that the United States was not losing on the Iraqi battlefields.  That America was becoming so unpopular in the Muslim world and elsewhere had nothing to do with the allegedly successful U.S. policies in the Middle East; they reflected the failure of Washington’s “media strategy.”  Victory comes only to those who are able to construct the “narrative” by producing captivating messages and deploying winning messengers to share them.

So when Israeli officials and pundits convened for the annual Herzliya Conference, a prestigious gathering of strategic thinkers from around the world, “Winning the Battle of the Narrative: Strategic Communication for Israel” was the title of one of the public sessions.  In fact, the Israeli government, including a newly formed “Information and Diaspora Affairs Ministry,” has been working with leading American and European p.r. companies, lobbying organizations, and various NGOs to combat what has been described as “The ‘Soft Warfare’ against Israel” (another session at the Herzliya Conference).

Indeed, according to a recent report, “The Delegitimization Challenge,” issued by the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, the main global threat facing Israel today is not Iranian military nuclear capability or Palestinian terrorism but the international campaign in the West, including on American campuses, aimed at boycotting Israel through divestment and sanctions.  The authors of the report compared this campaign against Israel with the one conducted against the apartheid regime of South Africa, which helped mobilize international support from Western publics and governments for the dramatic political changes in that country.  And they warned that Israel is now facing a similar threat of international “delegitimization” that could lead eventually to the erosion of support for the Jewish state among Americans and Europeans.

One way of trying to improve the Israeli image abroad was the launching of a “Brand Israel” initiative a few years ago, under which major American p.r. and advertising companies have been promoting Israel as a scientific, cultural, and tourism center, while downplaying political and religious issues, including the conflict with the Palestinians.  According to a March 16, 2008, report in the Jerusalem Post, the Brand Israel campaign identified cities like Toronto, Tokyo, London, Boston, and New York as locations for its initial programs, which could include “organizing film festivals, or food and wine festivals featuring Israel-made products.”

And now the Israeli government has begun a campaign to turn every Israeli into a traveling p.r. officer, with the Information and Diaspora Affairs Ministry issuing pamphlets to passengers on Israeli airlines, coaching them on how to counter the alleged anti-Israeli campaign across the globe: “Are you fed up with the way we are portrayed around the world?  You can change the picture.”

While some Israelis are convinced that their country is a victim of a campaign of “delegitimization” masterminded by anti-Israel activists, this effort does not go beyond a small circle of left-wing and Islamic groups who have close to zero impact on the public opinion and governments of Europe and North America.  In fact, the support for Israel in Washington and European capitals remains rock solid.  The Israeli p.r. campaign stems from “a genuine fear that Israel is misrepresented, sometimes in very vicious ways,” Prof. Shlo­mo Avineri from Hebrew University in Jerusalem told the New York Times.  “On this level it is understandable,” he said.  “But I think it is puerile.  Some of the information is ridiculous, and behind it I find a Bolshevik mentality—to make every citizen an unpaid civil servant for the policy of the government.  There is never any intimation that some of our problems have to do with actual policies.”