Laughing at Israeli PR

Editorial

Many of us in the Diaspora have long observed that Israel does a bad job at its own PR. Of course, everyone’s a critic, as we were reminded when the bar for bad hasbara lowered a few rungs further recently in a campaign that was so bad it was funny.

Too bad you can’t see it. The Israeli government pulled the campaign after the Diaspora Jewish community – well, those in the United States, mostly – raised hackles.

One of the videos that some people got to see before it was deleted involved a transplanted Israeli family in America Skyping with grandparents in Israel. A chanukiyah behind the grandparents is cause for the child to exalt “Christmas!” when the topic turns to the holiday being celebrated. The ashamed parents look at each other, the judge-y grandparents look at each other, viewers cringe at the ham-handed propaganda film.

Another video has a young Israeli woman, presumably in America, at a sort of Diaspora laptop shrine, connecting to the homeland on Yom Hazikaron, with a Yahrzeit candle burning next to her computer. Entering the apartment, her (American) boyfriend sees the candlelight and misinterprets his girlfriend’s desire to stay in tonight as a sign that love is in the offing.

Both videos were meant to warn Israelis abroad that the longer they stay away from Israel, the more distant – Jewishly – they will become, surrounded, evidently, by loutish lovers with no sense of what a Yahrzeit candle means and with children who will inevitably expect Christmas trees and pictures on Santa’s knees.

The intention is fine enough. Israel wants its prodigal sons and daughters home. But the melodramatic campaign was insulting for a range of reasons.

The Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which produced the pieces, apologized, rightly, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered them yanked. The ministry, which by definition deals with people from different cultures, was forced to issue a statement saying it “clearly did not take into account American Jewish sensibilities.” Clearly. American Jews are doing double duty in a political context where Israel seems to be slipping down the list of the administration’s priorities and this is the thanks they get.

Jews, who have been living in North America for centuries, are fully capable of explaining to our children the difference between Chanukah and the holidays of the Christian majority among whom we live. The culprit in the “Christmas” video is not Israelis living abroad, but lackadaisical Jewish parenting. Either way, it’s not a convincing tableau.

The Yom Hazikaron piece is even more unintentionally amusing. The setup is a “teaching opportunity” if ever there was one. The sullen (well, it is Yom Hazikaron, after all) expatriate Israeli woman is emotionally attuned to the ceremonies at home, but not interested enough in her relationship, culture, identity or history to convey to her ignorant boyfriend the reason for her sombre mood. (Men are from Venus, women are from Israel, evidently.)

The ideal of getting Israelis to return home may be a worthwhile one for the government of Israel to pursue, but the message depicted in these two ads is that the Diaspora is a Jewish wasteland filled with oblivious lovers and dejudaized children. That’s more than insulting, and not only because of the money that flows Israel-ward from the Diaspora every year and Israel’s reliance on Diaspora Jews to do for Israel abroad what their own PR is so damnably incapable of doing.

Yet, the entire incident was so ill-handled that it was also just plain funny. We wonder if there was a Canadian version of the campaign in the works, warning that the dual bogeymen of hockey and Molsons would subvert the hearts and minds of the children of Israeli expats here. Perhaps the surfboarding expat Israelis Down Under need a reminder of the shark-infested waters in which they are frolicking.

The earnestness of the spots owed so much to the melodrama of the “moral hygiene” classics that, perhaps, the government should have gone all the way and updated the notorious 1950s anti-marijuana films of Reefer Madness to encourage the wandering post-military Israelis in Tibet and India to put down their hookahs and return home in order to satiate the munchies that can only be authentically relieved by Bissli and Bamba.

^TOP